Some Asian-American Democrats have decided to throw a snit over a Rush Limbaugh imitation of China’s Hu Jintao.

During a Jan. 19 radio program, Limbaugh said there was no translation of the Chinese president’s speech during a visit to the White House.

“He was speaking and they weren’t translating,” Limbaugh said. “They normally translate every couple of words. Hu Jintao was just going ching chong, ching chong cha.”

He then launched into a 20-second-long imitation of the Chinese leader’s dialect.

The next day, Limbaugh said he “did a remarkable job” of imitating China’s president for someone who doesn’t know a language spoken by more than 1 billion people.

“Back in the old days, Sid Caesar, for those of you old enough to remember, was called a comic genius for impersonating foreign languages that he couldn’t speak,” Limbaugh said. “But today the left says that was racism; it was bigotry; it was insulting. And it wasn’t. It was a service.”

…Yee has been joined by Asian-American state and federal lawmakers who say Limbaugh’s comments are inciting hate and intolerance amid a polarized atmosphere. A number of civil rights groups, including Chinese for Affirmative Action, Japanese American Citizens League and the California National Organization for Women, have joined Yee in calling on sponsors to pull advertisements from Limbaugh’s program.

An online petition has been created on Yee’s website.

“I want an apology at the very least,” said New York Assemblywoman Grace Meng, a Queens Democrat. “Making fun of any country’s leader is just very disrespectful for someone who says he is a proud American.”

Hmm. Does that include North Korea’s squirt of a dictator? How about the clowns running Iran and and Venezuela. Or Zimbabwe?

, mercilessly mocked in the

Noel Sheppard:

…Totenberg said the electorate is not serious about trimming the budget. She later commented that the cuts being discussed are trivial because discretionary spending is a small part of the budget, and no one wants to talk about reducing entitlements.

We’ve been hearing this a lot lately from liberal media members. Now that the Republicans control the House, folks that came out en masse against any plans to reform Social Security in 2005 are now teasing this subject again.

As such, it is really the press that want entitlement cuts generically but are going to balk and balk loudly at the specifics. This is important because what we saw in 2005 is how powerful the media can be in impacting public opinion and preventing legislation.

George W. Bush was re-elected with a strong mandate having been the first President since Roosevelt in 1936 to win back the White House while expanding his Party’s majority in both chambers of Congress.

The public was ready for significant Social Security reform, but the media wasn’t having any of it. Instead, so-called journalists – led by minority leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid – went on a full-court press to shamefully convince the American people the program was fiscally sound for decades to come, and Bush was lying about its imminent insolvency to scare the public into supporting his agenda much as he did with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Now, six years later, these same folks are mocking any attempts to cut spending by ridiculing Republicans for not going after Social Security and Medicare.

It makes you wonder not only how they sleep at night, but also how they so effectively manage their hypocrisy instinctively knowing which side of an argument they need to be on when it fits the prevailing template.

Gotta hand it to ‘em – this takes talent.

Elliott Abrams:

For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their “freedom deficit” signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies. In November 2003, President George W. Bush laid out this question:

“Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?”

The massive and violent demonstrations underway in Egypt, the smaller ones in Jordan and Yemen, and the recent revolt in Tunisia that inspired those events, have affirmed that the answer is no and are exploding, once and for all, the myth of Arab exceptionalism. Arab nations, too, yearn to throw off the secret police, to read a newspaper that the Ministry of Information has not censored and to vote in free elections. The Arab world may not be swept with a broad wave of revolts now, but neither will it soon forget this moment.

So a new set of questions becomes critical. What lesson will Arab regimes learn? Will they undertake the steady reforms that may bring peaceful change, or will they conclude that exiled Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali erred only by failing to shoot and club enough demonstrators? And will our own government learn that dictatorships are never truly stable? For beneath the calm surface enforced by myriad security forces, the pressure for change only grows – and it may grow in extreme and violent forms when real debate and political competition are denied.

The regimes of Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak proffered the same line to Washington: It’s us or the Islamists. For Tunisia, a largely secular nation with a literacy rate of 75 percent and per capita GDP of $9,500, this claim was never defensible. In fact, Ben Ali jailed moderates, human rights advocates, editors – anyone who represented what might be called “hope and change.”

Mubarak took the same tack for three decades. Ruling under an endless emergency law, he has crushed the moderate opposition while the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood has thrived underground and in the mosques. Mubarak in effect created a two-party system – his ruling National Democratic Party and the Brotherhood – and then defended the lack of democracy by saying a free election would bring the Islamists to power…

by Burt Prelutsky

The worst thing about Obama’s being a black man is that when you take him to task for his leftist agenda, it’s so easy for those who endorse his policies to accuse you of being a bigot.

It’s fascinating how that works. If you happen to disagree with Henry Waxman or Charles Schumer, you’re not automatically called an anti-Semite. If you take exception to Nancy Pelosi, you’re not immediately dismissed as a misogynist. In most quarters, you can even dismiss the lunacies of Barney Frank without necessarily being labeled a gay-basher.

What is it about being black, 150 years after the end of slavery and nearly half a century after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, that gives them this special status? Whatever it is — and I suspect it’s nothing more than the non-stop, self-serving blather by the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the assorted jackasses who comprise the Congressional Black Caucus — it’s high time we stopped giving them the license to whine. In fact, it’s long past time that we told them to put a cork in it.

I know a great many people who think that Obama is the worst president we’ve had in a very long time — and they are not overlooking Jimmy Carter — and not one of them gives a hoot about his race. Their reasons have everything to do with his politics and his policies and nothing to do with his pigmentation. If it were otherwise, wouldn’t these same people dislike Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Star Parker, all of whom are 50% blacker than the president?

Obama got off on the wrong foot when we discovered he was a friend of Bill Ayers and that he regarded Jeremiah Wright as his spiritual advisor. It didn’t help when we heard him say that the problem with the Constitution and the Civil Rights movement was that they failed to deal with the redistribution of wealth.

Things then went from bad to worse when, after being elected, he went off on a world tour where he bashed our allies, kowtowed to our enemies, and competed with Michael Moore, Hugo Chavez and Mahmud Ahmadinejad, in trashing America.

Not satisfied with all that, he went on to lie about the great contribution the Muslims made in the creation of this country, forcing some of us to wonder if he knew something about the Barbary pirates that Thomas Jefferson didn’t.

Perhaps his endless gaffes and apparent contempt for American symbols wouldn’t be quite so offensive if so many people, on the right as well as the left, didn’t, in spite of his almost comical reliance on Teleprompters, keep reminding us how doggone brilliant the guy is.

A while back, His Brilliance said, “America has its roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi.” Now, I’m grateful that for a change he complimented one of America’s few allies in the world, but why is it so impossible for this lunkhead to give credit where it’s due? Would it kill him to praise the Founding Fathers? I mean, I know they were a bunch of white guys, but they couldn’t help it.

Suggesting that Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948, provided the roots for the United States, 1776-????, is comparable to the schlemiel who recently said it was our dropping the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that compelled Japan to attack Pearl Harbor.

I think I’m beginning to understand why Obama is so secretive about his academic records.