If only Barack Obama had been elected and old John McCain hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have a clueless radical demagogue in the White House whose only talent is giving a speech to fire up the rubes.
If only we had listened to the media.
Oh wait ….
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Hi Neighbor!
Iowahawk does it again!
Read the whole thing.
Special Guest Commentary
by the Sarah Palin Homunculus that Lives Inside Liberals' Heads
Knockity knock!
Oh hi there! I was out shooting caribou on the Arctic Cat and saw your synapse lights on, and so I said to myself, "now, gosh darn it, Sarah, you've been living inside this nice person's cerebral cortex for, what is it, almost two years now? By golly, it's about time you dropped in at their frontal lobe with a plate of your famous homemade Alaska welcome wagon cookies and introduced yourself." So anyhoo, I sure hope you like 'em. Don't want to give out a family recipe, but the secret ingredient is baby seal. I clubbed 'em fresh this morning!
Oh my goodness... you look kind of confused. I get that a lot! You were probably thinking, "hey, I only wanted to move next door to Sarah Palin -- now what in the goshdarned heck is she doing inside my brain?" Well ya see, the deal is I'm not Sarah, but boy I gotta tell ya, we sure do get mistaken all the time! No, I'm just a plain ol' homunculus Sarah Palin that your own id created to sublimate your deep-seated psychosexual neuroses. Or so those egghead books say, anyway. But if you ask me that sure sounds like a lot of elite Anti-America liberal professor gobbledegook! By the way, your id says hi.
Read the whole thing.
What Our Media Taught Me
Victor Davis Hanson:
Read the whole thing.Perspective and distance are sometime valuable. I used to think, given the enormous size of the bureaucracy and the tragic nature of the human condition, that from time to time disasters would overwhelm us — and there would be not much the president of the United States could do about them. But after Katrina, the media taught me that neither the mayor nor the governor nor the Army Corps of Engineers nor the people of New Orleans were at fault for either the vulnerability to the chance of a catastrophic Katrina or the response after its arrival. No, you see, the commander in chief is the ultimate arbiter of successful or unsuccessful reactions to all such disasters. OK, so be it.
So while I am not inclined to blame Barack Obama for the scandalous federal laxity in the now polluted Gulf, the media long ago taught me that I most certainly should.
I don’t play golf. Never have swung a club. But in the spirit of live and let live, I also never cared much for deconstructing the game in terms of culture and sociology. The media, however, in 2002, taught met that I should in the case of George Bush — that his swing and even his use of a golf cart reflected a certain class disdain for us, or at least a frat-boy frivolity at a time of two ongoing wars. So while I would like to give our present president a pass on his obsession with playing golf at a frequency far in excess to poor George Bush’s, I cannot. I am conditioned now to grasp that Obama’s golf craze is a sort of self-indulgence reflective of a disturbing narcissist who entertains a shocking indifference toward the rest of us.
The Asher doctrine applied
Powerline:
"Simply put, while McClatchy's motto is 'Truth to Power,' Asher relies on the assumption that congressmen always tell the truth. So, in the spirit of understanding what this means to McClatchy, a few other stories Asher can publish and upon which he can stake the reputation of McClatchy reporters." Rubin offers these stories:
1. "Guam is sinking." Rep. Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) said it, that's good enough for me.
2. "Aliens visit earth, stalk Denis Kucinich." After all, Rep. Denis Kucinich (D., Ohio) says it's true.
3. "Robert Mugabe is blameless in Zimbabwe's collapse." Nothing to see here: Forget the famine, forget the thuggery, forget the hyperinflation. Mugabe was just righting wrongs. After all, Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D., Ga.) said so.
4. "Television broadcasts began years earlier than we realized." After all, Joe Biden said Franklin D. Roosevelt got on TV to explain the stock market crash in 1929, even though commercial broadcasts only began the next decade.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Peggy Noonan: "He Was Supposed to Be Competent ." He was? By Whom?
Peggy Noonan wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill with the risible headline “He was supposed to be competent.” Leading to the inevitable question: by whom?
I would expect that the Mr. “thrill runs up my leg” Matthews would, so would Michael Moore; he considers Fidel Castro competent. So does Woody Allen who would like to see Obama as dictator for a few years, ditto for Thomas Friedman who has a not-so-sneaking admiration of the Chinese Communist government and its ability to direct its people. To the hosts who voted for Obama because he was not George Bush, to those who voted for him because he was a “clean, articulate” black man I’m not sure whether the question of competence even raised its head.
What’s baffling is that lots of people in the Center/Right, people like Peggy Noonan herself, people like law professor and blogger Ann Althouse who now regrets that vote. People like Chris Buckley who even now is making his father spin in his grave. Why were they invested in the Obama fantasy of competence or ability? Was it respect for an academic pedigree, despite the complete absence of any transcripts? Was it Harvard? Or was it the same thing that motivated the unthinking: vote against Bush and vote for the affirmative action candidate to make you feel good?
Powerline has this to add:
What is curious is that quite a few people did think that Obama would be an especially competent president. Why? What evidence was there that Obama would be a skillful administrator? Before becoming president, he had never in his life run anything more substantial than a Senate staff. His executive experience was closer to zero than that of any president in memory.
Being a good executive requires great skill. Moreover, it is not the sort of skill that anyone is born with. It takes experience to learn how to run things, to administer things, to manage things. And people. Obama has no such experience, and is therefore learning on the job. Before becoming president, he was best known for giving speeches that were often disconnected from reality. Why would anyone interpret this skill as the sign of a competent administrator?
Palin's Douchebag Stalker Suddenly Concerned About His Privacy
Joe McGinniss response to reporter coming to his door: "Get off, you're trespassing. I dont want to have to call the Wasilla Police. Get off my property. Now. I'm going to put in the call."
People who live nearby thing that McGinnis' actions are "creepy."
From JammieWearingFool:
People who live nearby thing that McGinnis' actions are "creepy."
From JammieWearingFool:
You can't make this stuff up. A deranged stalker is now so worried about his own privacy he threatens to call the police on a reporter.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Good Luck Louisiana, I'm Going on Vacation...
A little excitable, but actually a good idea. How about if Obama and his family and his retinue spend their holiday on the Gulf Coast cleaning up beaches? Spending some money where, heaven knows, people need it.
The Sestak Problem
The story coordinated by the Obama White House is so implausible as to defy belief, but it’s the best they can do in view of the situation. So how did they get here?
The problem started with Sestak who, in an effort to show his independence and differentiate himself from Specter, revealed that he had been offered a job in exchange for dropping out of the Democrat primary. Keep in mind that Sestak is not a lawyer. He’s a retired Navy Admiral. I’m convinced that he had no idea that he was accusing the Obama administration of committing a crime. The law appears to be a surprise to most of the reporters and commentators who have written about this story. It was first and primarily reported, not as a crime, but as a mild bit of sleaze.
However, since it is a criminal offense, it became a problem for the Obama Administration. Sestak continued to be blissfully unaware of the problem, stuck to his story. In fact, he could not plausibly retract it. One day someone told the media that offering a job was more than unsavory business-as-usual and now both Sestak and the Obama Administration had a problem. Sestak could not retract his story but luckily for him and Team Obama he never offered any details. Now Team Obama had a blank canvas to fill in. And Sestak, if he wanted a political future, had to cooperate, back up whatever the White House said, and make it go away.
So this is the story they came up with: “We offered Sestak an unpaid position on an obscure board (the equivalent of a White House internship) if he would give up his run for the Senate." This story is weak, unbelievable and an insult to anyone with an IQ above that of a rutabaga. It remains to be seen if the vegetables in the MFM will deep-throat this in their professional way or if this makes even them gag.
Obama Revises History
I was in my car listening to Rush Limbaugh when Obama began his press conference. Rush "gipped" the opening remarks Obama made. These remarks were so self-serving, so pathetically dishonest, so self aggrandizing that they could be played as a parody. In these remarks he blamed everyone else for whatever went wrong, took credit to himself for whatever was going right. It was a remarkable, and telling performance.
Obama's principal revisionism lay in his account of how his administration responded to the Deepwater Horizon explosion. To hear him tell it, the administration anticipated the worst from the beginning and reacted accordingly:...
This is pure revisionist history. A month ago, the administration's spokesmen explained that their response was graduated as understanding of the magnitude of the spill increased over time. We told the story here and here. To sum up, we can't do better than to quote the New York Times:
The federal government also had opportunities to move more quickly, but did not do so while it waited for a resolution to the spreading spill from BP....
The Department of Homeland Security waited until Thursday to declare that the incident was "a spill of national significance," and then set up a second command center in Mobile. The actions came only after the estimate of the size of the spill was increased fivefold to 5,000 barrels a day.
Read the whole thing.
Do Liberals believe that Israel should commit suicide to meet their standards?
Many observers are beginning to believe this is so. Late to the party and bringing only leftovers is a take-down of this phenomenon.
Felonies at the White House? Say it Ain't So!
David Harsanyi tells us that the Sestak bribe may be part of a pattern. He joins me and Charles Krauthammer in at first believing that the offer of a government job in return for a political act was not a crime ... in fact it was politics as usual.
Political payoffs are so commonplace in Washington that I was initially unable to muster an appropriate level of outrage at hearing that Rep. Joe Sestak had accused the Obama administration of offering him a job in exchange for his withdrawal from the Pennsylvania Democratic senatorial primary.
But it turns out not to be the case.
After reading the law in question (you see the entire thing online by searching for: "US Code -- Section 600: Promise of employment or other benefit for political activity"), it is clear that any offer of a job "directly or indirectly ... to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity ... in connection with any general or special election to any political office,or in connection with any primary election" is an illegal act.
And in case you thought that this reading of the law is partisan, here is proof that it's not ...
President Barack Obama's senior advisor David Axelrod explain to CNN's John King that though there was "no evidence" (hey, if the administration's senior advisor claims there is no evidence we should move along) if such an offer were made, it would constitute "a serious breach of the law."
Which brings us to the question: who's lying, Sestak or Obama? Let's see if there's a pattern:
If the Democratic Party's choice for the Senate in Pennsylvania is a fabulist -- as Axelrod is effectively saying -- why does Sestak's story sound so familiar to one in the Democratic Senate primary in Colorado?
In a September 2009 article headlined "D.C. job alleged as attempt to deter Romanoff," the Denver Post's Michael Riley reported that Andrew Romanoff, former speaker of the Colorado House, then still contemplating a run again against the governor-installed administration-sanctioned foot solider Michael Bennet, received an "unexpected communication" from a renowned kingmaker in Washington.
"Jim Messina, President Barack Obama's deputy chief of staff and a storied fixer in the White House political shop," wrote Riley at the time, "suggested a place for Romanoff might be found in the administration and offered specific suggestions, according to several sources who described the communication to The Denver Post."
It's beginning to be clear that Team Obama wanted to clear the decks for its candidates. Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, more than that is a pattern. My bet is that Sestak's telling the truth. I wonder if anyone will be frog marched out of the West Wing?
Silly me, Holder the Fixer is Attorney General. The Fix is in.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Tracking the President
From Rasmussen:
Obama continues to slide in the polls. That's the good news, or as Rush Limbaugh says "I hope he fails." More and more people agree. They equate Obama winning to America losing, and why not? Has he not sided with our enemies and spurned our friends?
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 23% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-five percent (45%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -22. That’s the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for this president
The MFM is still on his side, but even that may be sliding:
The Rasmussen Reports Media Meter shows that media coverage of the President has been 51% positive over the past week.
This friend of American terrorists and parishioner of America damning, racist, anti-Semites may be wondering why his policies are turning the American people against him. I happen to believe he's turning into Liberalism and Socialism's worst nightmare. This is not how it was supposed to go. Having turned the political pot up to "boil" he's not only discrediting Liberalism and Socialism to most Americans who never gave either much thought, he's going to make it more difficult for African American politicians to gain the trust of white America. After what we are experiencing with smooth talking, "clean and articulate" Obama, the next mountebank the Democrats nominate will not get the affirmative action vote.
On the other hand, Obama may have created a ready market for Black Republicans like this one: Les Phillips from Alabama. The anti-Obama. “And they’re not going to call me a racist.”
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Death of the Postmodernist Dream
For what seems to be forever, Liberals and Progressives have been telling us what a caring society should look like. It should provide generous benefits from the public treasury to the people who fail on the path of life. It should provide health care to all, paid for from that same public treasury. It should provide for a comfortable retirement at ever earlier ages, paid for in full or in part from that same public treasury. If people fall behind in their mortgage payments the public treasury should make their payments for them. If they need a new car, the treasury should provide part of the payment. If they need a new house the treasury should provide a payment. If they need new appliances the treasury should provide a payment. If they need an abortion, the treasury should pay the bill. As schools get worse and children graduate not being able to read their diplomas the public treasury should increase its school funding.
I could go on but the list of things that the government should do is, to the Liberal mind, literally limitless.
So as we head into the last 6 months before the fall elections, we finally have the answer to what happens when Liberals run things long enough. Eventually they run our of other people’s money. I was speaking to a client the other day and told him that I was hopeful despite the collapsing global economy. Because this election will be about Greece. Greece represents a nation that has implemented the policies that the Obama administration – in its wholehearted amorous embrace of the entire Liberal enchilada – lead to: national bankruptcy. And bankruptcy for a nation is not a trip to the lawyer’s office. It means rioting in the streets, people having their pay cut and streets not being repaired, broken windows staying that way. And if we go that way, there will be no Uncle Sugar to bail us out.
Victor Davis Hanson has a great essay in NRO (excerpts)
In just a few months the brave new dream world as we knew it has died — but with a whimper, not a bang.
There will be no more lectures on soft power and a Baltic-to-Mediterranean postmodern culture. Suddenly European Union expansion is dead in its tracks. The question of Turkish membership, after a decade-long controversy, has been settled without so much as a demonstration. The Europeans don’t want another Greece in their midst; the Turks don’t want German bankers running their sagging finances. A soaring Euro was supposed to reflect the sobriety of socialism; instead, it hid its profligacy, but only for a while.
So the welfare state is discredited. In the past, we used to be warned that static population growth, vast public-sector employment, early and generous retirement benefits, and high taxes were not sustainable. In recent years, those lectures were caricatured as partisan or hypothetical. No longer. The Greek meltdown — with Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain on the brink — has shown that European socialism does not work. Bankruptcy, not politics, is the final arbiter: Individuals, firms, and nations either buy particular bonds or they don’t. And a nation like Greece, in turn, either pays what it has borrowed or it doesn’t. All the op-eds in the New York Times cannot change that fact.
And that bold experiment in "Smart Diplomacy?"
I do not think the word “reset” will be used much longer to characterize American foreign policy. Reset from what to what? After all, is Iran closer to getting a bomb or further away than it was a year and a half ago? Are terrorists more or less likely to attack and kill inside the United States? Is Syria now a more or a less helpful player in the Middle East? Is Israel safer or less safe, more or less a U.S. ally? Are Putin and Chávez now more helpful players on the world scene, in appreciation of Obama’s olive branches? Does a North Korea or an Iran feel more or less emboldened to run risks in testing the status quo?
The new world order as envisioned by Obama in January 2009 was, I think, supposed to look something like the following: A social-democratic America would come to emulate the successful welfare states in the European Union. These twin Western communitarian powers would together usher in a new world order in which no one nation was to be seen as preeminent. All the old nasty ideas of the 20th century — military alliances, sovereign borders, independent international finance, religious and cultural chauvinism — would fall by the wayside, as the West was reinvented as part of the solution rather the problem it had been in its days of colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation. A new green transnationalism would assume the place of that bad old order, a transnationalism run by elite, highly educated, and socially conscious technocrats — albeit themselves Western — supported by a progressive press more interested in effecting social change than in merely reporting the tawdry news.
Most experiments in the soft sciences are hard or impossible, but Greece volunteered to be the test tube of Liberalism and Progressivism. It's what Hope N' Change looks like after a few decades. How does that look to you?
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