December 26, 2025

HMMMM: We Should Cheer for Bari Weiss to Fail in Her Effort to Rehabilitate CBS’ Reputation.

There is a civil war being fought at CBS News. The battle is being played out between Bari Weiss, its new left-of-center editor-in-chief, and the left-of-Trotsky journalists she inherited at the laughingstock news operation.

There are many conservatives cheering Ms. Weiss on in her battle against her hyper-partisan corps of journalists. I’m not one of them. In fact, I’m cheering for the insurgent “journalists” to prevail, and to maintain CBS News’ well-earned reputation for being unethical, dishonest, and openly hostile to impartial political coverage.

In fact, my worst fear is that Ms. Weiss might succeed in restoring CBS News to a level of respectability such that it might able to reassert its liberal influence on politics as it once did.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

FROM BAUHAUS TO BARRY’S HOUSE: The Obama Library Is Ugly for a Reason.

Like everything having to do with Obama, it started at one price — $500 million — but then the cost of it ballooned. Now it’s at $830 million. Sounds like the Affordable Care Act that was never affordable.

As I noted, it has to be one of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of the dismal gray buildings of the Soviet Union or some dystopian prison. Some compared it to the “Death Star” of Star Wars.

But now the Obama team is explaining why it looks the way it does.

The odd design of former President Barack Obama’s new presidential center is supposed to evoke unity and not Darth Vader, according to an Obama Foundation official, who explained the bizarre look of the austere building.

The $830 million monolith — slated to open in Chicago next year — has drawn comparisons to the “Death Star” on social media, and some locals have described it as a “concrete tomb” and a “monstrosity.”

“The shape of the building was actually meant to mimic four hands coming together to show the importance of our collective action,” Obama Foundation Deputy Director Kim Patterson told CBS Chicago.

So I have a question. Is there anything in that building that comes close to looking like four hands? It just looks like a gray blob.

You mean it’s supposed to convey some esoteric greater meaning that no one is getting? Well, that’s certainly emblematic of Barack Obama.

Brutalism as a style made some sense in postwar France, where steel was scarce, but concrete wasn’t. But of course, for Le Corbusier, the real fun was plopping down a box that would look hideous unless you learned the code behind it. (Of course, for all but Corbu’s true believers, that style still looks hideous even when you do know the mindset behind it. Perhaps even more so.)

In his 2002 review of C.P. Snow’s 1959 book, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Orrin Judd of the Brothers Judd blog wrote:

As Snow notes, as late as say the 1850s, any reasonably well-educated, well-read, inquisitive man could speak knowledgeably about both science and the arts.  Man knew little enough that it was still possible for one to know nearly everything that was known and to have been exposed to all the religion, art, history–culture in general–that mattered.  But then with the pure science revolution of which Snow spoke–in biology and chemistry, but most of all in physics–suddenly a great deal of specialized training and education was necessary before one could be knowledgeable in each field.  Like priests of some ancient cult, scientists were separated out from the mass of men, elevated above them by their access to secret knowledge.  Even more annoying was the fact that even though they had moved beyond what the rest of us could readily understand, they could still listen to Bach or read Shakespeare and discuss it intelligently.  The reaction of their peers in the arts, or those who had been their peers, was to make their own fields of expertise as obscure as possible.  If Picasso couldn’t understand particle physics, he sure as hell wasn’t going to paint anything comprehensible, and if Joyce couldn’t pick up a scientific journal and read it, then no one was going to be able to read his books either.  And so grew the two cultures, the one real, the other manufactured, but both with elaborate and often counterintuitive theories, requiring years of study.

And thus we we end up with the formulation of Tom Wolfe’s 1975 book, The Painted Word, where modern art exists almost solely to justify the theory behind it, and as Wolfe wrote, “In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.”

Or a building. I’m sure the Obama Library looks wonderful to its architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and presumably to Barry and Michelle, but to the rest of us, it still looks like a flak tower on the Death Star.

Posted at 6:19 pm by Ed Driscoll

VDH: Pseudo-Recessions.

The Cold War ended in a U.S. victory.

Germany was reunified in October 1990.

In December 1989, Bush successfully removed the narco-dictator Manuel Noriega of Panama, who threatened the viability of the Panama Canal.

The Gulf War was won brilliantly by February 1991.

The nuclear START treaty was signed with the Soviet Union in July 1991, just before the USSR itself collapsed in December.

By any normal reckoning, Bush should have been a shoo-in: spectacular foreign policy successes and a rebounding economy after a brief recession that had ended 15 months before the November 1992 election.

Instead, the pseudo-recession of 1992 dominated the campaign. Indeed, Bush’s many achievements overseas were cleverly distorted by Clinton as proof that the globe-trotting president was more interested in the world abroad than “putting people first” at home.

As in Bush’s prior 1988 campaign, Lee Atwater would have torn the Clinton campaign apart as inexperienced and disingenuous. Atwater would have ordered Bush to talk nonstop about virtually no inflation, robust four percent economic growth, and declining unemployment.

Instead, the lackluster Bush campaign team never caught on and was crushed by Clinton, with help from the economic populist Ross Perot.

The pseudo-recession of 1992 should remind the Trump people not to repeat the same mistake in the 2026 midterms.

In 1988, Atwater was able to sell Bush as Reagan’s third term, and voters, delighted by the turnaround from the Jimmy Carter’s malaise-filled late 1970s to Reagan’s go-go 1980s economy and his sunny optimism made Bush a shoe-in. But with Atwater having passed away from brain cancer in 1991, the following year, Bush looked utterly exhausted on the campaign trail, in sharp contrast to Clinton’s rockstar energy and charisma. While Rush Limbaugh was on the scene by 1992, there was no Fox News, no original era Drudge Report, no Blogosphere, and the DNC-MSM could still shape reality uncontested for millions of voters: The Real History of the Liberal Media and George H. W. Bush.

One of my favorites was the DNC-MSM, in lockstep with their candidate Bill Clinton, pummeling Bush in the run-up to the 1992 election over a minor recession that Clinton described as “the worst economy in 50 years,” only to turn around and reveal that, as the Charlotte Business Journal wrote in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity. And we learned in hindsight that recession had actually already ended when the [September 1992 Time magazine] article was printed.” Time described it in December of that year as “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”

Related: Ross Perot was the populist who betrayed populism.

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SHOCKER:

UPDATE: Another split.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GREAT MOMENTS IN MULTICULTURALISM: MN Lt. Governor Flanagan puts on hijab, declares Somalis built Minnesota.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

BUREAUCRAT GAMES AT VA, FEHBP: Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) used “novel” interpretations of law and regulation to get around long-standing bars on government funding of abortions.

It’s one thing for a President to countermand decisions percolating up from deep within the bureaucracy, but that’s a short-term solution to a problem that cries out for a long-term resolution. As it happens, Trump is actively countermanding, but, as I explain in a lengthy news analysis on The Washington Stand, he’s also pushing a permanent reform for which future chief executives will thank him.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Mark Tapscott

BORAT’S GUIDE TO THE UNITED NATIONS:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll