baldilocks

The Herding, Part Three: Cold Tribal War Going Hot? (UPDATED)

Dedicated to the memory of the fearless Andrew Breitbart.

Note: I began composing this essay some months before the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman shooting, but, in its wake, I felt that it was time to finish it and post it.

Usually I’m reading several books at once and using Kindle for Blackberry iPhone has exacerbated this low level of ADD.

One of the opened books on my device is Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West. The subject matter is obvious; however, in the preface and the first few chapters, Harris barely mentions Islam at all. Instead, he does two very valuable things: he defines his terms and lays the ideological foundation for those terms as they relate to his subject. The two sets of players in the scenarios that Harris describes are: rational actors and tribal actors or fanatics. All of the following excerpts are taken from the book’s preface.

Throughout most of human history, men have not behaved like rational actors but like tribal actors; and in many cultures of the world today, they continue to behave that way. They have no choice. When everyone around you is a member of a tribe, you must either belong to a tribe or be an outcast. Whereas the rational actor asks himself, “What is best for me,” the tribal actor must ask himself,” What is best for us?”

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[W]hat limits [the tribal actor’s] freedom is not so much the pressure of the tribal mind applied externally, but rather the fact that the tribal actor thinks with the tribal mind, and so cannot even imagine doing things differently from the way they are done by his tribe.

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The rational actor has the luxury of appealing to his conscience in order to condemn the behavior of his own community.

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The tribal actor, on the other hand, cannot take a moral stance outside the perspective of his tribe. For the tribal actor, the highest ethical idea is: “My tribe, right or wrong.” The mere idea that his tribe could be wrong is unthinkable for the tribal actor, since he defines as right whatever the tribe deems right, and wrong as whatever the tribe deems wrong.

So let’s see how these observable truths relate to black Americans.

We have seen black Americans like former presidential candidate Herman Cain (R-GA), Rep. Allen West (R-FL), and Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC)--people who are obviously black and of African descent, using the eyeball test and known heritage--be deemed "not really black.” ⁱ  Men like the foregoing are those who are not Democrats, who oppose the policies supported by the Democrat Party and who do not politically support Democrats of any race or color, not even the present President of the United States of America. But how can black Americans who are not Democrats or Liberals or Leftists become not themselves? And what gives Democrats—even white ones—the authority to determine who is black and who is not?

The following videos have a common theme.

 

 

 

The pride/shame dynamic is what is on display here. This feature is used rein in members of a tribe who step outside of pre-defined tribal boundaries.

Black Americans are, for the most part, a tribe. Some will take offense to that opinion, but if we look into the specifics of our existence as Americans since the practice of enslaving imported Africans became widespread, we see that there is nothing else that we can be called.

Remember, our ancestors, of various West African tribes, were bought here, sold, and forcibly stripped of their various names, languages, cultures, and religions. That conditioning created a new tribe: the Negro. And even after the abolition of slavery, Americans of African descent were confined to a certain level of society. A few managed to break the barrier, but the vast majority remained in the legal, economic, educational social and tribal space into which the US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson allowed state and local governments to pen them.

But along came the Civil Rights Era, really beginning in the 1940s and reaching its apex in the 1970s. The Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts heralded the end of our status as a tribe within a nation and they harkened to the objective ideals on which this nation was founded.

These landmarks of legislation stated that we belonged to the American “tribe” all along. But, concurrently, another idea—an ideology--was on the ascent as well: Black Pride.

Pride. When we hear the word, we interpret it in two ways.

So-called benign pride is represented in the following example: we are proud of ourselves when we achieve hard-won goals-- educational, personal, etc.; we are proud of cherished relatives and friends who do the same.

The not-so-good type of pride is that which the Bible warns against--"the high look," “the up-tilt of the chin.”

Recall that in the days before the Civil Rights Era, being a black American was a matter of shame and degradation, but the idea of “Black Pride" served to counter that. The concept of Black Pride, while initially a good thing, has, however, brought black Americans from one extreme mindset and deposited us into another. It took us away from the shame of being black to a place in which no one may criticize a black person who is deemed to be in good standing with the “tribe.” Many (most?) black Americans believe that blackness is a way of thinking and a political position and, stemming from these ideas, that any black person who deviates from the “black” mindset and political position—a black conservative--isn't really black. This idea stems further from the Left co-opting "black pride" and using it to keep anger and grievances alive long past their dates of pertinence. The purpose of this tactic is to keep the wedge open between black and white Americans, drive it wider, and produce violence. We've seen it happen many times. The ultimate purpose, taken together with many other tactics, is to destroy America.

Pride is what is always has been: inordinate high opinion of one's superiority and goodness; the preening to appear better than on-lookers. (My great-aunt calls it “floor-showing.") That we had to use pride--a sin--to “rid” ourselves of the mindset of shame and degradation is the problem. We went too far in the other direction, so far in that direction that the things which are destroying us--the things which we should be ashamed of--we have deemed inherent to blackness and called them good. We call the chains of the New Slavery--bastardy, illiteracy, mis-education, self-genocide, etc.—our due, our rights. And we believe that any of our number who breaks free ideologically and tries to tell their brethren how to be free is a traitor to the tribe. (Harriett Tubman would understand.) Shame is no longer an option, except as a cudgel for those who point this out. ⁱⁱ

In addition, we deem the New Slavers--the modern-day Democrat Party--to be our friends even though their forebears were always the perpetrators of overt black American slavery and oppression and they have lured all too many of us into contemporary bondage. This sort of tribal pride blocks the ability to see what's right in front of one’s face and the ability to accurately map out the future. It blocks reality.

Herman Cain was dead on when he called it brainwashing and it has been a decades-long process, coinciding with the Left's agenda to hollow out the institutions of this country.

Here’s the thing: I think that certain types of tribalism are beneficial to those within and even without some sets of tribal boundaries. Some years back, Bill Whittle famously expounded on the tribe of Sheepdogs, those rough men—and, sometimes, women--who make it their business to protect sheep from the wolves of this world. “You choose your tribe,” said Bill, and allowing oneself that choice is the province of rational actors. This isn’t to say that one should separate self from one’s racial, ethnic, national, or ideological tribe. However, it is to say that blindly following each one of the presumed norms of the tribe into which one was born is folly and it is the province of tribal actors. That is the place where into which all too many of my fellow black Americans find ourselves locked, mentally and emotionally.

Through this mindset, black Americans have become the organized Left's shock troops in latter’s war against America and all too many of us have become the Left's overseers, tasked to force the "deserters" back into formation using the tools of ridicule and shame. I almost said that the Left was at war with black people, but the Left doesn't esteem blacks enough to deem us as their enemies. We are merely tools to be used for the task at hand—to foment violent racial discord which will have to be put down using infinitely stronger government violence--and to be discarded when the task is completed, assuming that there will be any of us left after the New Civil War.  And we let ourselves be used for one reason: tribal vengeance; for slavery and for oppression.

I submit that the Obama Administration, representing black Americans and no others, declared a tribal war against white Americans when Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party after the latter's blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Department of Justice’s inaction sent a message mirroring that of the US Supreme Court Dred Scott decision (1857): that the white man has no rights which the black man is bound to respect. Leftist ideology has been inculcated into black Americans for quite some time now and one of the strategies of this process has been to keep alive racial anger and the desire for tribal vengeance for past oppression.  The Obama Administration's inaction in the above matter was merely a formal declaration, but the anger has long been simmering and, all too often, it boils over. Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. And I think that many Americans have gotten the message.

Assuming that the above is true, let’s leave aside morality and conscience for a bit and look at this declaration strictly from a strategic point of view. Leaderless families and the resultant black-on-black killings are prevalent among black Americans and directly attributable to the lure of LBJ’s New Slavery Great Society programs. (I contend that these two features are merely the aforementioned ‘shame and degradation of being black’ re-packaged and internalized. If the leaders of a people—men—don’t love their progeny enough to marry the women who bear their children and/or remain in the lives of those children long enough to bring them into functioning adulthood, why would those children love themselves or those who look like them? And abortion is merely the black female method of black-on-black killing.)

So we black Americans murder ourselves within in womb and without, assert the former as our right, and ignore the latter. These methods of self-genocide have greatly thinned the “troops.” Taking this into account, one logically concludes that starting a war with a “tribe” that outnumbers us 12-1 and outguns us is pure folly.

It will bring the tribal suicide which we’ve been slowly committing, to a quick and devastating conclusion.

Turning back to conscience and morality, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reserves vengeance to Himself, and instructs Jewish and Christian believers to forego it. But even if one does not believe in Him, it’s easy to see the chaos which is nearly always brought about by the unending cycle of human vengeance. You murder/enslave/oppress mine, then I take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress yours. Then you take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress more of mine. Then I…

Is this what you want, Americans? I do not.

Harris points out that rational actors can only live as rational actors if those around him—those in his society—continue to behave as rational actors as well. He also says that, when a rational actor finds himself surrounded by tribal actors—fanatics—it becomes rational for a rational actor to revert to being a tribal actor. The alternative is to perish. 

We all tend to forget that all human beings are only a few steps away from reverting to the Law of the Jungle. Twentieth-century Europe demonstrated and the Muslim world still demonstrates the truth of this. Will we Americans—all of us--continue in the way of most of humanity? Everyday, I pray not.

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[i] It’s interesting that Liberals think that black people have a certain way of thinking embedded in the DNA. White supremacists think this as well.

[ii] Until recently, I found it puzzling that some black Liberals hurl all manner of racial epithets at black Conservatives; but now I realize that it’s the pride/shame mindset. Those who use this tactic, however, don’t realize that it’s ineffectual on persons who recognize it for what it is.

(Re-edited.)

UPDATE: Lloyd Marcus: Democrats Responsible for Black Culture of Anger. More precisely, Leftists are.  Read the comments, tremble for your country and, most importantly, pray to The Living God for mercy and deliverence.

UPDATE: King Shamus at The Conservatory: Black Leadership, Tribalism and America.

PREVIOUSLY:

The Herding, Part One

The Herding, Part Two

The Supreme Court, ObamaCare and the Desperation Of The Left (KingShamus)

Jeff Goldstein, kickin' it on the satirical tip over at Protein Wisdom, gives us a sneak peak into the likely liberal reaction if ObamaCare gets overturned.

See? There’s that far-right extremist conservatism again, insisting that laws must be followed to the letter, and not simply be ignored to accommodate the spirit of “social justice”.

They fetishize a document, and yet they care not for 26-year-old children forced (by choice) to live without health insurance! It’s an abomination. And I think it is the kind of decision, should this be the Court’s final ruling, that, like Citizens United before it, suggests that the Court can no longer be trusted to act compassionately, and can therefore be ignored.

For the greater good.

After all: the ruling is just words. And the only power they have, really, resides in our willingness to accept them and/or enforce them. But who says we have to do that…?

That's just crazy, right?  Would a President really just ignore the Supreme Court, a coequal branch of the federal government, just to get his way?

President Andrew Jackson dismissed the Supreme Court's decision in the Worcester v. Georgia case. This paved the way for the removal of the Cherokee Indian tribe to Oklahoma.  Jackson basically told Chief Justice John Marshall and the rest of the Supremes to blow it out their collective ass.

Besides the Jacksonian precedent, it's easy to forget all that would be lost for the Left if ObamaCare gets annihilated.  How long has the progressive movement wanted a nationalized health care system?  Harry Truman called for it back in 1945.  ObamaCare represents a liberal dream come true nearly seventy years in the making. 

Besides that, what did it cost the Democrats to get their health care plan passed?  The Louisiana Purchase and Cornhusker Kickback revealed the level of corruption the Democrat Party was willing to stoop to in order get their way.  The political drubbing the party took in the 2010 midterms displayed the Party's willingness to endure a brutal self-flagellation in service to the cause of socialized medicine.

Seen in that context, who thinks the President and the rest of the Stalinists are going to lay down and accept the Supreme Court striking down ObamaCare?

It could be a 5-4 decision.  It could go 6-3.  Hell, it could be a 9-0 decision to vaporize the bill.  It doesn't matter. 

The Left won't allow some silly old enumerated powers shit get in the way of getting their way. 

This is going to require a Republican Congress and a Republican president and probably another originalist Supreme Court justice to finally kill ObamaCare--and that still might not be enough.

Awesome News-Leader of The Free World Emo Over News Network's Coverage (KingShamus)

Just remember:  Everybody knows the GOP field of presidential candidates is a pack of weak sisters compared to that rara avis Barack "Scary Smart Exceptional Temperament" Obama.

President Barack Obama blamed Fox News for his political woes in a private meeting with labor leaders in 2010, saying he was “losing white males” who tune into the cable outlet and “hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7,” according to journalist David Corn’s new book, “Showdown.”

...Corn writes that after the midterm elections, Obama told labor leaders in December 2010 that he held Fox partly responsible for him “losing white males.”

“…Fed by Fox News, they hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7, and it begins to seep in…The Republicans have been at this for 40 years. They have new resources, but the strategy is old,” Corn recounted Obama as saying.

You remember how George W. Bush constantly whined how MSNBC hurt him among the douchedrinker neo-hippie voting bloc, right?

Then again, why is anybody surprised when the crybaby-in-chief loses his shit over conservative criticism of his record?  Other people write his books, yet he gets all the credit.  He skated through his 15 minute US Senate career by voting 'present' and showing up late to hearings.  The American media coverage of Obama's presidency has run the gamut from fawning to tongue-bath.  

Everywhere this spoiled brat of a man has gone in his political career St. Barry has been somebody's pretty silky pony.  From the Chicago Left to national progressive organizations, Obama always had to be sheltered from the tough-minded critiques of his policies.  His achievement-free self-esteem couldn't handle the shock of real sustained dissent.

Obama thinks that Fox News caused his party to lose the white male vote in 2010.  It couldn't be that white males honestly disagree with the President's administration.  Nope.  Of course its racism and Fox News that pushed the caucasian persuasion dude caucus to vote with the Republican Party.  That explains everything.  [sarc/]

I snagged this link from Iowahawk's twitter feed.  Thank you, sir.

Carroll LeFon aka Neptunus Lex

One of the cool things about blogging is communicating with people like Neptunus Lex, someone I probably would have never talked to in real life, what with him being a Navy captain and me being an Air Force NCO. (We're both retired.)

One of the bad things about blogging, people still die, and so it is with Neptunus Lex.

A civilian pilot flying for Airborne Tactical Advantage Co., was killed Tuesday morning when his F-21 Kfir jet crashed near the west gate of Naval Air Station Fallon, six miles east of the city limits.

Say 'hi' to God for me, Lex, and I'll see you later.

(Thanks to Ace Of Spades HQ)

UPDATE: More about Lex at Blackfive.

Andrew Breitbart--RIP (KingShamus)

Horrible horrible horrible news.

With a terrible feeling of pain and loss we announce the passing of Andrew Breitbart.

Andrew passed away unexpectedly from natural causes shortly after midnight this morning in Los Angeles.

We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior.

Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.

Say a prayer for Mr. Breitbart's wife and four children. Undoubtedly, they are in terrible pain and grief. We can only hope that in the midst of their mourning they can find some solace in the bosom of their faith and their extended family.

I first read the news over at The Conservatory. After my initial shock--Wait? What? Only 43 years old? How?--I started to look around and see what his friends and allies had to say.

Stacy McCain:

He may have been the greatest genius I’ve ever met, with a keen, intuitive mind. Although he had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder — he had a freewheeling quality about him, and his schedule was quite improvisational – Breitbart was also capable of a laser-like focus on whatever subject captured his interest. There were times you’d be talking to him and, if that spark of passionate interest hit, his luminous blue eyes would glow with an intensity that was almost frightening.

Andrew Malcolm:

You can read elsewhere all about Andrew's remarkable impact on public communications in this country, helping found Huffington Post and the Drudge Report and then his own developing online empire of Big sites. He was often controversial because his opponents often couldn't answer his stories online, so they went after the messenger.

Andrew loved it. He was one of the few people you encounter in life who bite at every experience, good and bad. Where does that energy come from? You'd get a late-night call with Andrew excitedly talking up a whole package he was about to post. Might as well listen because you weren't going to get a word in.

In person he'd get so excited in an argument that he'd be shouting inches away. You'd raise a hand as if 'OK, Andrew, I'm right here.' He'd laugh at himself and lower the volume. Andrew couldn't stand hypocrisy and lying and hiding.

He also couldn't stand passivity. Friends would describe some awful thing happening and instead of a hug he'd shake them out of wallowing with, "So?" And you'd stop and think, 'Yeh, right. So what am I going to do about it to take control back?'

Greg Gutfeld

He was the spiritual leader of the modern conservative, libertarian cause. He was immersed in pop culture and wished to drag the right into the modern world - knowing this is how America speaks to the world. He was the heart of the matter. The fighter. Losing him is like a fiery planet going dark.

Bob Belvedere:

Few people are indispensable to a cause, but Andrew Breitbart was. There is no one else like him around. A good number of commentators have been saying that we should honor him by carrying on his fight using the methods he developed, and they are correct: we must not let his life’s work be in vain because his life’s work was to defeat the malignant forces of the Left and see America restored to the ways of The Founders. However, we have some mighty big shoes to fill, so it will not be easy.

At this crucial juncture in our history, we have been deprived of one of best generals. The long slog just got tougher.

Iowahawk:

He was an unapologetic conservative, but one who defied the media's template; pro-civil rights, pro-drug legalization, pro-gay rights, to the point of boycotting CPAC when it barred the gay conservative group GOProud. Other than his mainstream pro-life views (he was, after all, adopted) you would be hard pressed to characterize him as a right winger on social issues...

Plenty will be written about Andrew Breitbart in the next few days, some flattering, some not. As for me, I will drink two beers in his honor tonight, and remember him the way he was last December in Venice - a big, lovable, random, generous, fearless, patriotic grinning goofball surrounded by his family, basking in the coolness of it all.

Ace of Spades:

What was truly charismatic about Breitbart was his never-ending enthusiasm and energy. He spoke fast because he thought fast. He changed topics quickly because he had six or seven plans in mind at any one time.

He actually did things. He was instinctual. Athletes cannot afford the deliberation of thought. They move by instinct and training and muscle memory. They act.

Why did Breitbart sign a lease for a pricey townhouse in DC? Because, he said, "it feels mischievous." It felt mischievous to establish an Embassy of citizen empowerment in the capital of statist overreach.

He had ten plans a month. He accomplished five of them a month. He acted.

He took over the Weiner press conference because it felt like something he ought to do.

He was brazen. He was bold. The right had no more enthusiastic champion and the left had no more implacable foe.

The Coaltion Of The Swilling:

...I was privileged to sit a mere five rows back from Andrew when he addressed the delegates at Presidency 5 this September. He was mesmerizing from the moment he gamboled out to the podium. What a treat that was and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world in normal circumstances. Who could ever have imagined this day six months later, when dealing with a force of nature like Breitbart?

I can’t. I still can’t.

Sissy Willis:

Like the conspiratorial "dog whistle" of our statist adversaries' nightmares, Breitbart's passing was a call-to-arms for the freedom fighters to ratchet up our defense of the Shining City.

Dan Riehl:

What Andrew understood and embraced as a conservative media activist was that, when his name was in the headlines, it was because he was battling for what he most believed in. He also knew that his enemies, the headline writers in many ways, were engaged - and he was fighting. Andrew, like so many of us, lived for that fight. He understood how necessary it was for the right to engage it.

It's significant that Andrew picked his battlefields as a brave and fearless man. When you are fighting what many conservatives believe to be a biased media in their headlines, you are fighting them on their turf, not retreating, surrendering, or simply musing off in your own little protected, right-leaning corner of the media world.

Andrew Breitbart gave his opponents every advantage by engaging them as he did. And he often beat them.

Amen to all of that.

Read the rest of every one of those pieces. You'll become angry, you'll get sad, you'll laugh and be inspired all at once.

Beyond the shock of Andrew Breitbart's passing, one of the most overwhelming things I take away is the flattening finality of it. I was a fan of his 'Big' websites. "Righteous Indignation" is one of the best political memoirs of the 21st century. His twitter-feed was a long hilarious practical joke on the American socialist movement. Breitbart was like a rolling partisan kegger where the Right could rock out and the Left could buzz off. It seemed like nothing could stop him or his merry-making ways.

Maybe its the suddenness of it that makes this so tough to take. Breitbart wasn't supposed to go this way. He was supposed to be our gleeful prankster for decades to come. The roastmaster general wasn't supposed to be taken seemingly in the blink of an eye.

Breitbart's time in the spotlight might've been tragically cut short but it was certainly not poorly spent. In a way, his career trajectory is reminiscent of a Hall of Fame baseball star. The Major Leagues typically elect two kinds of players into their most hallowed pantheon. The first type is the guy who play for many years. He may not be an overwhelming presence in the sport, but he does well enough and last long enough to have fairly large statistics by the time he retires. The second type is the man who doesn't play for very long, but makes up for it by his sheer overwhelming dominance. Andrew Breitbart has become the Right's supernova, their short-lived hot-burning star.

Gaze in wonder at the innumerable enemies that Breitbart cultivated over the years. In life, they couldn't stop giving him ammunition. In death, he has given the Left a glorious opportunity to beclown themselves. Breitbart probably would've had a great laugh over the irony.

For every liberal who commented on Breitbart's passing with dignity, there were many many more who took the low road. Matt Taibbi, Matt Yglesias and a vast horde of internet lefties all happily danced on Breitbart's casket. While it's hard to read so much bile, the hate on the progressive side is a reminder that their constant calls for ratcheting down political rhetoric is just a cheap ploy to censor their ideological foes on the Right.

The fact that Andrew Breitbart made such strident classless enemies is amazing. What is even more astounding is how Breitbart used the hate thrown at him as fuel for his fights. Many people will tell you that they enjoy being targeted by the Progressive Church of Latter-Day Stalinists. Often, that brave sentiment will melt in the face of a full-frontal assault from liberal media. Not since William F. Buckley have we seen a man who not only sought out spectacular clashes with the Left, but who did it with such joy. All he did was laugh at the multitudes of angry liberals and their constant raaaaacist!/sexist!/homophobe! bleats, then turn the hate back on them.

Which is what we on the Right should always do. For too long, many conservatives played the media's game by their rules. This meant a lot of mewling when a liberal accused them of bigotry or greed or some other doubleplusungood thoughtcrime. Breitbart thought that kind of defensiveness was absurd and would always lead to defeat. Instead, he realized that conservatives had to take back the culture before the Right would ever achieve lasting political victories.

That is the greatest lesson we can learn from Andrew Breitbart's boisterous inspiring life. Breitbart was a warrior in the best sense of the term. His patriotic fervor and unabashed love of the great American experiment was something to behold.  The best way we can honor his memory is to remain focused on changing our culture back to one that respects individual liberty in general and the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in particular.  It was his life's work and it should be ours as well.   

RIP Andrew Breitbart.

Gone far too soon.

Barack Obama--Algae Is, Like, The Next Great Energy Source (KingShamus)

Captain Science McGreenJobs to the rescue!

 

Or maybe Bunkerville is right and this is Barry's version of a faith-based initiative.

Let's cut the President some slack. He thinks he can cool the planet and make the oceans recede. Turning the slime in your under-maintained backyard swimming pool into automotive fuel is small beer for Barry the Miracle Worker. What's another half-billion dollars in taxpayer-funded loans or subsidies or just plain-old handouts?

To be fair, research and development is a tricky thing. At one time, petroleum was probably considered a risky source of energy to use for anything, much less base a whole economy around. Figuring out how to turn the black crap that came out of the ground into something useful was an arduous process that a lot of people likely thought wasn't going to pan out. Obama might be right to think that algae is the wave of the future. But his track record on energy policy shouldn't fill you with loads of confidence.

Even though it's likely that algae will be yet another Solyndra-sized government boondoggle, I kinda want Obama to pursue this wacky project. If it works, great. If it doesn't, then we can all get a laugh as Juan Williams accuses Newt Gingrich of being a racist when the former Speaker calls Barack Obama the 'pond-scum President'.

Barack Obama: I Totally Have A Plan To Stop This Runaway Spending (KingShamus)

The details? Oh sure, here you go.

But wait--there's more!

Testifying before the House Budget Committee today, U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told Chairman Paul Ryan the following: “We’re not coming before you to say we
have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

Actually, President Obama sort of did have a definitive solution. He created a debt commission, which devised a long-term debt reduction plan. Which the president rejected. And instead, we get this new budget proposal, which makes no effort to deal with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—the long-term drivers of U.S. federal debt. The debt curve never gets bent, as the above White House (!) chart shows. (Yes,the chart comes from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.) It just goes up and up and up—until the heat death of the universe or the economy is struck by a Greek-style debt crisis.

Read the rest, as James Pethokoukis basically slaughters the argument that this administration has any inkling or desire to reign in spending.

Turbo Tax Timmy is a funny dude. The guy who couldn't figure out how to pay his own taxes is annoyed by Paul Ryan's long term debt reduction plan. Meanwhile, somewhere Dane Cook is seething over Daniel Tosh's latest comedy routine.

As hilarious as Geithner can be, he's just a reflection of his feckless incompetent boss. Back in 2008, Obama promised to cut the deficit in half. See, Barry can make with the yuks too.

Question: Could Romney, Santorum or Gingrich be any worse on the federal budget than Obama?

That's what this election is really about. Not Mitt Romney's feelings about his tax rate. Not Rick Santorum's position on jimmy hats. Not Newt Gingrich's expansive views on serial divorce.

None of that stuff is vitally important to continued existence of this Republic.

Don't get it twisted. All of those other debates--and all the secondary discussions that spring from them--have a great deal of merit in certain contexts. Free societies should have many ongoing discussions about numerous topics if they are to survive in a complex and ever-changing world.

I'll even grant that if it was twenty or thirty years ago, those kinds of issues would've been featured more prominently in an election season. Relatively good times give folks the luxury to drill down on a lot of stuff. When the entire lawn is perfectly mowed down to putting green length, the single blade of
two foot tall crabgrass looks far bigger than it really is.

The problem is that the US can no longer afford to look solely on ancillary issues and make political decisions. Why? Because, as the chart suggests, pretty soon America won't be able to afford shit.

Baldi is right: America is at a crossroads and there is no back tracking out of it. Naturally, Barack Obama doesn't want you to recognize this reality. He is the smiling ignorant face of a man running at full speed directly into the blades of a corn combine. His budget represents the bankrupting hope and the backbreaking change inherent in the assumptions of the statist status quo.

Obama desperately wants you to focus on the flaws of the GOP candidates. His record cannot withstand a cursory glance, much less a thoughtful critique. So yeah, lets all really pick through the records of Romney, Gingrich and Santorum.

With a fine-toothed comb.

For the 80th time.

This week.

Yeah, that'll be awesome.

Or lets not do that. We know what the GOP guys are all about. Their various quirks and personality traits have been thoroughly examined. More importantly, their positions are all very much known quantities. If Republican voters don't know what the candidates stand for by now, they're not really paying attention.

No, the focus has to shift back to the Arrogant Incompetent Affirmative Action Hire-In-Chief. Obama's budget should be all the impetus any conservative needs to put their eyes back on Barack Obama. His spending plan is practically designed to get right-wingers furious at the President all over again.

I say we give Obamster what he wants. Our president deserves to be the center of Republican attention. Lets make him and his leadership the only important issue in this campaign.

CPAC 2012

I'm here in the blogger room with the usual: conservative blogging luminaries, crappy wi-fi and the occasional celebrity-like visit from the featured speakers.

Did an old-fashioned interview with Bruce McQuain of Q and O.  The topic? The GOP front-runners, such as they are.

If this post and my posting seem perfunctory and uninspired, it's because they are.  As I told Bruce, I think we've reach a point of no return with this country's economy.  It matters little now who the GOP nominee is or even if that person wins.  We are on a collision course with some hard life-choices.

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In a blogger meeting as Andrew Breitbart, Lee Stranahan and others talk about the exposure of the Occupy Movement. Follow Citizens United on Twitter and Facebook.

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(February 16, 2012): Well, my blogging laziness prevailed.  But I made it back home safely, so there's that.

Presidential Election Doomwatch--Placing The Blame For Mitt Romney's Ascendency (KingShamus)

It's only February, and it feels like a lot of the wind has gone out of the sails of the conservative base. The culprit? With just four states checked off the 2012 primary season, the results simply aren't very encouraging. Ron Paul continues to fight the good fight against fiat currency, the last 50 years of American foreign policy and chemtrails. Rick Santorum cannot seem to gain any traction as a viable center-right alternative candidate. Meanwhile, Captain Ahab Gingrich and the Romneytron 2012 Self-Guided Political Action Figure have turned each state into a clash of personalities rather than a fight over ideas.

Why did it come to this? RightHandMan has some harsh--but fair--words.

In 1976, the Republicans watched Reagan lose to Ford and then saw the repercussions of that loss in Carter’s four years. Thing is, Reagan didn’t want to run for President – but did. Know why? Because the people demanded it.

In 1976, the American Conservative Union pushed Reagan to run against the establishment supported and Presidential incumbent Gerald Ford. The establishment supported the wrong guy (the moderate), told us that a conservative like Reagan could never win in the general election, and went on to fail in the race against Carter anyway. The establishment strikes again in 2012 but…No Reagans.

Shame on the conservatives who sat on the sidelines instead of running. Shame on the citizens for not demanding better.

It's our own damn fault. This whole godforsaken clusterf--k of a Republican primary dogpile is our fault.

I understand when people talk about how the Establishment 'wants' Romney to win. I get how they can feel cheated by a process that seems designed to hand Mittens the nomination. At the end of the day though, it still comes down to people supporting, or withdrawing their support from, certain candidates. The conservatives and Republicans who did not want Mitt Romney to be the party's nominee simply didn't do enough to make sure that didn't happen.

But it isn't just the vast right-wing conspiracy that dropped the ball. While we're in the spirit of circular firing squads, let me take aim right back at myself. I jumped on the Herman Cain train with my heart, but I should've given it a little more thought than I did. While I had my doubts about the man being completely ready for prime time, I truly believed that he was a star that would shine brighter as time went on. That simply was not the case.

I still think Herman Cain is an impressive guy. He has a deft grasp of economics, he's a successful businessman who has beaten the odds to rise to the top of profession and he is a forceful public speaker who can connect to audiences. These are all tremendous assets that should not be discounted simply because he didn't do well during the course of a presidential campaign. There is a future for Herman Cain somewhere in the political world, even if we can't quite see it yet.

At the same time, Herman Cain and all his wonderful qualities were not able to get the job done. Presidential politics requires an absurdly varied skill-set. Just having visionary ideas isn't enough. Simply being a good orator won't cut it. Merely carrying around a huge warchest won't work either.

Very few people in the world possess the vast talents necessary to play at Commander-in-Chief Level Boss status; even fewer have the desire or stomach for it. Ever wonder why the GOP cannot seem to create another Ronald Reagan? It's not just that the Republican Party tends to dislike movement conservative candidates, although that's certainly part of the problem. It's because Reagan's combination of temperament, knowledge, endurance and skills are so exceedingly rare that finding another giant world-changing figure like him is damn near impossible.

Conservatives--myself included--should recognize that fact. They should also recognize the limitations of the candidates in the field. Most politicians are not going to be awesome right out of the box. Reagan's iconic status is in part a product of the passage of time. In the 1980's, most of the Left and more than a few on the Right thought Ultra Ronaldus Magnus was a bird-brained failed actor who was intent on nuking the world. Even those in the conservative movement who voted for and agreed with the President still criticized him. It's only been relatively recently that Reagan has become respected--if not loved--across the political spectrum.

As time has passed, I think I saw more in Herman Cain than was actually there. I thought that he had the potential to be a transformational politician. It turns out that Mr. Cain is merely an incredibly impressive man. For what its worth, I'm sorry I didn't recognize his limitations as a candidate. Had I been a bit more skeptical a little sooner, I probably would've moved faster to find a more viable Not-Romney.

2012 has been full of lessons. Sometimes those learning moments have been delivered with a bit of a sting attached. Rather than cry over it, it's best to learn the lesson quickly, move forward and be wiser in the future.

Hot Air Debate? I Vote Aye! (KingShamus)

Did anybody watch last night’s GOP presidential candidate debate on NBC? Apparently, 7.5 million people sat through it. One wonders how many people managed to keep their eyes open past the first hour.

To be fair, I was catching up on the zany antics of everyone’s favorite misanthrope doctor on "House” (Spoiler Alert: Crotchety title character says rude things to people) so I missed the first hour of the debate. Once I got around to Brian Williams & Co.’s turgid after-school detention session cleverly masquerading itself as a debate, within a minute it was clear something was up. Turns out that NBC made applause verboten within the auditorium. What should’ve been ‘Newt v. Mitt-Thunderdome’ morphed into a Lunesta-enhanced quaalude-soaked Ambien-fortified paint-drying observation session. With socialists as the hosts. By the time Mitt or Newt or Santorum or whoever started talking about self-deportation–I was starting to get drowsy, so the memory is hazy–I was wishing I could self-deport myself to a time when I didn’t know NBC was holding their shitty debate.

I saw no questions about Solyndra, Fast-n-Furious or the looming collapse of the Eurozone. So of course the candidates had to answer a question about Terri Schiavo. Apparently America has so few pressing problems that we have to go back seven years to find trouble.

Naturally, I did a fair amount of pissing and moaning about this on Twitter. Because whining about stuff always helps, right? Leave it up to the professionals at Hot Air to actually try to do something about it.

Last night, my friend Peter Ingemi expressed his dissatisfaction with the NBC
debate — and the presidential debates in general — by proposing that Hot Air run
a Republican primary debate, moderated by yours truly. Peter says he’s “dead
serious” about this:

Just watched yet another GOP debate and was totally unamazed by the lack of questions on fast and furious and BS questions such as: “Why did the Bush Tax Cuts fail?”. I think political types are sick of questions from people who want the GOP to fail.

I have a solution:I suggest Hotair send an invitation to each candidate for a 2 hour debate moderated by Ed Morrissey.

This got quite a response on Twitter last night and this morning. It even has
its own hashtag, #hotairdebate, and it’s been endorsed by the Boss Emeritus,
Senate primary candidate Jamie Radtke, and a number of bloggers. It even got an
Instapundit endorsement, who said the proposal “sounds like a winner.”

Sounds like a winner to me too.

For those of you who have teh Twitterz, I say we all tweet Mitt, Newt, Santorum and Paul’s Twitter accounts asking them–politely–if they could take part in a Hot Air debate. Hashtag the message with #hotairdebate. Lather, rinse, repeat for a good long while until somebody responds.

If they say yes, fine. If they say no, ask for an explanation. I mean, why would the GOP nominees allow themselves to be hammered by the raft of CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC lefty hack reporters, yet not take part in a debate at Hot Air?

Every single one of these candidates professes his fidelity to American conservatism. They seek the nomination of a party that advertises itself as a right-leaning caucus. All four of these men should jump at the chance to defend their records, define their ideas and make the case for their campaigns in front
of a Hot Air audience.

Conservatives are rightfully annoyed by the debates. They’ve been run by liberals and for liberals. A Hot Air debate would do much to rectify the MSM bias in this primary season.

Portlandia-Is This Something? (KingShamus)

I don't get IFC channel, but because I read Sitting On The Edge of The Sandbox, Biting My Tongue and her great blog I don't have to. She's a fan of "Portlandia", a show on IFC. Check out her take.

The real white people are not in New Hampshire, and certainly not in Iowa or South Carolina. The real white people are in the Pacific North-West, and they are California transplants.

We started watching Portlandia on a Big Hollywood tip, and I can’t believe nobody told us about it last year. Like Stuff White People Like, a blog I proudly feature on my blogroll under humor, Portlandia ridicules mores and tastes of white upper middle class liberals.

...Liberals making fun of themselves, quite maliciously so at times, is nothing new. What’s surprising is that self-mockery is coming from Carrie Brownstein of a super-earnest grrrl band Sleater-Kinny and Fred Armisen who sabotages Obama skits on SNL. I suspect Brownstein and Armisen feel liberated to be funny on Portlandia only when they are performing for an elite audience of like-minded white liberals.

Read the rest.

All I know is that this is the funniest Fred Armisen has ever been in his entire half-assed comedy career.

Watch him in this Saturday Night Live opening skit. Get your pillow and blankie for when you doze off 25 seconds in.

Granted, the writers gave Armisen a whole 2.3 jokes to fill a three minute bit. It's hard to be funny there isn't anything remotely resembling humor anywhere in the material. That doesn't excuse Fragile Fred for his ponderous performance. Armisen doesn't deliver a punchline so much as wrestle it to the ground, tear it open, light it on fire, stuff it into your mailbox, then look at you with pleading eyes desperately craving your approval.

One gets the sense that Armisen--and SNL in general--can't really go after Obama all that hard. They don't want to hammer the President because he's their guy. SNL, along with the rest of the court jester/palace guard media, will not humiliate the politician that most reflects their values. So they pull their punches at every opportunity, which not only makes them kool-aid drinkers but incredibly boring as well.

But the shackles come off when slightly famous liberals can make fun of average everyday liberals on a cable TV show. Watch the Portlandia clip.

Oh well. We'll call that progress.

Funny, timely and just a little self-deprecating to boot. Wow. It's amazing what one can do when you're not shooting jokes in the balls so they don't hurt your side of the political spectrum.

What's really cool is how "Portlandia" is pretty much the proggy version of Larry The Cable Guy. I know liberals--especially bitter old hacks like David Cross-- hate Larry The Cable Guy. What the lefties can't get is that Larry isn't glorifying the hillbilly peckerwood lifestyle, he's satirizing it. His material pokes fun at the silliness of the South. He's a conservative Southerner laughing with--and at--other Southerners.

It's easier to take jokes from your own people, rather than take them from an outsider. Irishmen can call their fellow Emerald Islanders drunk bog-trotting micks and it's all good. If Germans were actually capable of generating humor, they'd start by calling themselves humorless krauts and then they'd politely giggle about it under their breath.

Same thing with Southerners. They know Cable Guy is having a laugh at their expense. But they can take it from him because a) he's one of theirs and b) they know Larry's bits are based in the reality of Southern life.

"Portlandia" is the comforting laugh that lefties can have on themselves. Conveniently, it's also the laugh conservatives can have on liberalism too. That's always nice.

Thoughts On The Passing Of Christopher Hitchens (KingShamus)

A few rather tardy reflections on the loss of a great public figure.

First, here is Vanity Fair’s memoriam.

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22 and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were
anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction
about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

I was reading Ace’s remembrance of Hitch. Like Andrew Breitbart, I peruse Ace’s comments section almost as much as I read the posts themselves. Most commenters were respectful and more than a few were quite mournful of the loss of Mr. Hitchens. As the comments piled up, another train of thought developed, which could be characterized as the ‘Hooray, The Mouthy Atheist Gets His Comeuppance Sack Dance’. Several commenters, who identified themselves as Christians, seemed to revel in the fact that Hitchens would be damned for his atheism.

Tacky? Definitely.

An un-Christian response to the death of a human being? Surely.

But then again, what was the grand project of Christopher Hitchens’ life over the last decade? For many people–especially those not familiar with his stance on Islamic radicalism, his disgust for President Bill Clinton or his slow drift away from the political left–Hitch was best known as the public face of atheism. And it’s not like he was particularly gentle about his dislike for religious faith. No, he was a loud-n-proud attack dog for the anti-God side.

It isn’t all that shocking to find that many Christians grew tired of Hitchens’ snarling barely contained disdain for them. Believers are instructed to turn the other cheek and pray for their enemies, but believers are still human after all. Even the most patient Christian will chafe at having his beliefs trampled on over and over again. This is especially true when the trampler in question never bothers to wipe off his boots before stepping on his intended target. Hitchens’ brand of atheism was pointed, angry and more often than not insulting. When he railed against the Church or other religious institutions, it seemed as if his aim was not to change minds but to injure people he perceived as enemies.

In America and the West, Christians have endured decades of writers, entertainers, artists, intellectuals and other taste-makers who attempted to shame believers out of their faith. For many, Hitchens was simply the latest in a long line of pompous know-it-alls trying to make them feel stupid for taking the words of the Bible to heart. Seen in that light, it’s more surprising just how few Christians have piled on in the wake of Hitchens’ passing.

Beyond the question of religion, Christopher Hitchens was a writer that reveled in the act of making ideological allies uncomfortable. Since the time of Clinton’s impeachment, Hitchens was seen by many on the Left as a traitor to the cause. For the audacity of going against American liberalism’s champion, Hitch was vilified by the kind of people who had spent decades using him as an ideological buttress to hold up their arguments.

For many progressives, the final straw was Hitchens’ continuous defense of the Iraq War. The idea of Hitch making friends with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush was simply too much for many committed leftists to tolerate. The excommunication of Hitchens from the socialist project was all but complete by 2004.

Even as the intellectual Left was ejecting a former comrade from their midst, Hitchens simply wouldn’t or couldn’t play nice in the sandbox with the Right either. Besides his utter hatred for organized religion he made sure to slam other facets of the broad traditionalist caucus. Sarah Palin got no love from Hitch. Neither did the Tea Party; Hitch accused the movement of racial bigotry whenever asked about it. Ronald Reagan, one of conservatism’s great political heroes, was worse than useless in the writer’s judgment.

How much of Hitchens’ argumentative rhetoric came from honest disagreement? How much of it was mere posturing? Sometimes it was hard to tell. The joy Hitchens seemed to take in making people squirm suggests that a good deal of his personality was a well-rehearsed form of contrarianism. This isn’t always so bad; there are far worse sins for a writer than being against the prevailing attitudes of his time.

Still, watch the clip and note how Hitchens goes after Reagan. From our vantage point in the Age of Trillion Dollar Obama, 90’s-era lefty critiques of Reagan’s budget deficits seem ridiculously quaint. More absurd is the sight of a man who at the time still considered himself a member of the socialist movement using national debt as a focus for his attack on the 40^th president. For a polemicist who launched into countless tirades denouncing the hypocrisy of his various hate-figures, the grasping for this particular club to bash this particular target is just the sort of cynical opportunism Hitchens made a career out of railing against.

But what a career. To say Christopher Hitchens had a gift for writing is like saying that Lady Gaga has a passing interest in publicity. Even when you found yourself disagreeing with him, he was still far more interesting than most political writers are on their best days. Hitchens was a master of fusing his thunderous moralism to a seemingly effortless ability to create provocative imagery. For this alone, he will be missed by writers and readers across the globe.

But it wasn’t just his writing that made him great. His public persona, an improbable amalgamation of a priapic boozed-up British university student and a joyfully overfed bookworm, made him a joy to watch in a public debate. It was also that improbable mixture that was so surprising. A nicotine-fueled drunk nattering on in a cartoonish plummy Oxbridge accent about Cold War-era Eastern European leftists or some other historical obscurity should not be compelling, yet somehow Hitchens made it work. It’s possible that only he could’ve done pulled off that feat.

For this conservative, it was most enjoyable seeing Hitchens crack on his former leftist pals. Watch and laugh as Hitch eviscerates knee-jerk liberal Eric Alterman’s anti-Iraq War arguments. What comes across most clearly from the clip is the sense that Alterman could not—even at such a late hour--relinquish his lingering hurt over Hitchens’ defection from the liberal sphere. Even as Hitchens piles injury upon injury, Alterman still pines for Hitch to come back to liberal side of the aisle. The barely concealed passive aggression from Alterman gives the game away.

Sometimes a man is defined by his enemies. In many ways, Hitchens was defined by the old comrades he had pissed off over the course of his meandering exit from the progressive movement. The resentment still remains, even after a decade. Repellent lefty shrew Katha Pollitt took the occasion of Hitch’s passing to settle some bitter old scores with her former colleague. Kevin Drum damned himself by damning Hitchens with faint insult. Dave Zirin spun a chance barroom dust-up with Hitch into a comically melodramatic confrontation, complete with a bizarre slapdash amateur psychoanalysis of Hitchens to boot.

Again and again, one is faced with a rather startling revelation: The Left needed Christopher Hitchens far more than he ever needed them. They craved his stylish prose, his combativeness and his intellectual curiosity. More importantly, liberals desperately wanted to be able to claim Hitchens as theirs alone. When Hitch started palling around with liberalism’s enemies, it devastated the
socialists--as it does still today.

Was Christopher Hitchens a right-winger, as his many progressive critics accused him of being? Surely not. William F. Buckley once said that an atheist could be a conservative, but a God-hater could not. Hitchens’ disgust for organized religion alone will probably always deny him entry into the conservative caucus. His various other heterodoxies from traditionalism make considering him a man of the Right impossible.

However, measuring Hitchens by this yardstick is unfair. The man loved his eccentricities more than being a rigid partisan. It was his sort of scattered unpredictable politics, the kind that infuriated both friends and enemies alike, that made him interesting. To complain about Hitchens’ lack of ideological
‘correctness’ misses the point. Hitch forced everyone who read him to question their own assumptions, even for just a moment. During a career that spanned several periods of ideological inflexibility, Hitchens' ability to break through convention is the greatest gift he could give to his readers.

Hitch would agree with the sentiment that the world is a far better place with people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden dead. Conversely, the world is a far better place for having Christopher Hitchens live in it for sixty-two years.

RIP

Irony Burrito

Soul Food:  it’s yummy stuff. The origins of what is known a Soul Food, however, are often forgotten. For very pertinent reasons, it can legitimately be called ‘Black Food.’

Foods such as rice, sorghum (known by Europeans as "guinea corn"), and okra — all common elements of West African cuisine — were introduced to the Americas as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Yams and watermelon are other examples.

Eventually, such fare became known as Southern Food. These days, Soul Food is considered a delicacy. (Personal note: I like the stuff very much, with the following exceptions. Yams and chitlins have crossed the threshold of my lips only once, respectively.) But, back in the bad old days, masters fed their slaves the type of food considered crap, and saved the choice meats, grains, and vegetables for themselves. Much of the fare called Soul Food consists of plantation throwaways.

European enslavers fed their captive workers as cheaply as possible, often with leftover/waste foods from the plantation, forcing slaves to make do with the ingredients at hand. In slave households, 'vegetables' consisted of the tops of turnips, beets, and dandelions. Soon, African-American slaves were cooking with new types of "greens": collards, kale, cress, mustard, and pokeweed. They also developed recipes which used lard, cornmeal, and offal; discarded cuts of meat such as pigs' feet, oxtail, ham hocks, chitterlings/"chitlins" (i.e., pigs' small intestines), pig ears, hog jowls, tripe, and skin.

So what’s my point? It’s this.

The Occupy Wall Street volunteer kitchen staff launched a “counter” revolution yesterday -- because they’re angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for “professional homeless” people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters.

For three days beginning tomorrow, the cooks will serve only brown rice and other spartan grub instead of the usual menu of organic chicken and vegetables, spaghetti bolognese, and roasted beet and sheep’s-milk-cheese salad.

They will also provide directions to local soup kitchens for the vagrants, criminals and other freeloaders who have been descending on Zuccotti Park in increasing numbers every day.

(All bolding mine.)

Rice and other Spartan grub. Hmmm.

One wonders how the OWS cooks know that the “freeloaders” are vagrants and criminals. After all, aren’t both the “professional homeless” and the “amateur homeless” (the OWS protesters) squatting on land that does not belong to them? I bet I know how they know: most of the amateurs are white and most of professionals are black.  And both groups are freeloaders. After all it isn’t as if the OWS protesters bought the food.

I wonder why the OWS cooks don’t want to cook for the “professional homeless” aka “freeloaders.” And what are the “non-freeloaders” doing to help the cooks? Delivering the goods? Chopping the vegetables? Washing the dishes? Disposing of litter? Not according to reports.  But, of course, the “non-freeloaders” are speaking “truth to power,” so, one assumes that counts.

But, oh wait! Some designated persons labored to prepare the food and want it to go to the hungry and downtrodden!  Except not the actual hungry and downtrodden. 

But, oh wait! The “freeloaders” are vagrant and criminals! But according to the Left, vagrants and criminals do what they do only because the rich won’t help them. So the OWS want to help them! Except they don’t.

But, oh wait! OWS cooks will still feed the “professional homeless”—just not the good stuff.  Only the slave food.

But, oh wait! There are soup kitchens where the “vagrants, criminals, and freeloaders” can eat. Wonder who funds those places. No matter. The “vagrants, criminals, and freeloaders” have the soup kitchens--equal but separate facilities in which to chow down. They can “freeload” on someone else’s dime and time.

So, in one ill-considered decision, the Occupy Wall Street sorts manage to epitomize hundreds of years of slavery and government oppression against black Americans and, on top of that, managed to promote one of the principles in the Bible—that those who do not work, should not eat.  In one fell swoop, they have become everything they say they are against.

Chew on that.

(Thanks to Ace of Spades HQ)

Moamar Khadafi--Dead (KingShamus)

 

Operation Soaring Donkey Punch has reached it's bloody end.

Libyans rejoiced and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief Thursday at news of the death of ousted leader Muammar Qaddafi, but details of his capture and killing remained in dispute.

His convoy was hit by NATO airstrikes but not destroyed. And he later was captured alive in his hometown of Sirte. However, numerous reports -- often contradictory -- continue to surface about how he was captured and how he ended up dead, apparently from a bullet.

A U.S. Predator drone was involved in the airstrike on Muammar Qaddafi's convoy Thursday in the moments before his death, as he tried to escape Sirte, a U.S. defense official told Fox News.

The official said the drone, along with a French fighter jet, fired on the "large convoy." A French defense official earlier said about 80 vehicles were in the convoy -- the official said the strike did not destroy the convoy but that fighters on the ground afterward intercepted the vehicle carrying Qaddafi. He was later killed, reportedly in the crossfire between Qaddafi supporters and opponents as he was being transferred.

Arab broadcasters showed graphic images of the balding, goateed Gadhafi -- wounded, with a bloodied face and shirt -- but alive, as he was pushed around by a crowd of revolutionaries. Later video showed fighters rolling Qaddafi's lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head.

Much as I'd like to think this is an unalloyed good, the horrifying undignified death (Warning-It's graphic gory video of a dead dictator) of Khadafi probably generates more questions than it answers.

First, Barack Obama brought us to this war against the Libyan psycho-regime. What exactly did our President's Maghreb adventurism get us? The Coalition of the Swilling's Tree Hugging Sister makes a disturbing point.

What I am appalled by is an American President who can tout “American Leadership” in a statement patting himself on the back for what was basically the assassination cream-on-top of a patently illegal operation to begin with. Leadership would have BEEN calling out to Iranians on rooftops desperate for encouragement.

Obama couldn’t lead himself to the men’s room.

So, is that what our proud military’s for? To flush out the easy-target dirtbag of choice, who can then (eventually) can be pulled out of a pipe by a random hodgepodge of “Freedom Fighters”, beaten to a pulp and summarily executed there on the shoulder of the highway, all the while we can claim no boots on the ground and no blood on lily white hands?

Read the rest.

Remember how President Nobel Laureate painstakingly worked to get Congressional approval for the Libyan War? How about all those trips to the United Nations to discuss why Khadafi had to be removed from power? Do recall how many agonizing months we delayed our military operations in North Africa just to make sure we had all of our legal and Constitutional ducks in a row?

Yeah, me neither.

But you gotta give it up to the Obama Administration--at least they're not spiking the football.

"We came, we saw, he died."

Hey American progressives, I give you your glorious avatar: A corpulent hack lawyer/former junior US Senator/former First Lady waddling her overfed frame into a fawning media appearance so she can giggle about killing the leader of another country.

Speaking of idiots, The Daily Kos is in full-on hopeful puppy dog mode.

The world will soon move on to other matters, forgetting Libya ever existed. But as trite an observation as it might be, getting rid of Gaddafi is likely to be the easy part in Libya's hopeful transition to a better, more democratic future.

Amazing. This is the same guy who spent most of the Dubya years in high dudgeon over 'illegal wars' and the 'imperial presidency'. How Kos--and the rest of the progressive movement--used to righteously thunder on and on and on about the alleged abuses of power from the evil American Warlord Premier Bush. Naturally, when Barack Obama refuses to get Congressional authorization to use force and then subsequently pushes through some half-assed quickie UN Security Council resolution against Khadafi, it's all good in the hood.

Granted, Kos is a little concerned over how the post-Khadafi transition will look. He frets about the hard part still to come. But basically, summarizing his and the broader left-wing's position on Libya is simple: "Mission Accomplished".

The dissonance between liberalism's anti-war rhetoric during the Bush Administration and the left's more recent fawning accolades for their Glorious Warrior President should put a massive dent in their neo-pacifist credibility for a generation. No more can progressives claim the moral high ground. By hitching their wagon to the newly butched-up Democrat Party, they have demolished the notion of a viable American anti-war movement. It should now be clear that the Dubya era crying over Iraq was not done out of principle, but instead out of a vulgar partisan hate for Bush.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh on our progressive colleagues. On second thought, lets let bygones be bygones and give the Left a warm welcome to the Paul Wolfowitz/Donald Rumsfeld/Darth Cheney Axis of Neoconservatism. You libs are a little late to the shin-dig, but whatevs. Be sure to give William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer a shout-out at the beer pong tournament.

(BTW--I'm not linking to Kos' site. You can find it for yourself.)

Swinging back over into the real world, there are going to be actual-factual consequences that America will have to deal with in the wake of Khadafi's death.

Qaddafi was not America’s friend, but the vision of U.S. troops pulling Saddam Hussein from a spider hole in Iraq did persuade him that having America as an enemy was not smart. So he gave up his drive to develop nuclear weapons and coughed up useful intelligence on how that project had been organized. He stopped financing terrorism — as far as we’re aware. He did continue oppressing his own people. Both the Bush and the Obama administrations pretty much gave him a pass on that.

If the Great Arab Revolt — “Arab Spring” is a hopeful, not descriptive term — ends up only removing Qaddafi and, from neighboring Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, a despot who was, nonetheless, a reasonably pliant client of the U.S., and if Iran’s theocrats remain in power and manage to save the Assad dynasty in Syria while continuing to use Hezbollah to control Lebanon and sponsoring Hamas in Gaza, the lesson will be clear: It is more dangerous to be America’s ally than its enemy.

Such a lesson will carry long-term strategic consequences. If there are strategic planners in the current administration, now would be a good time for them to start worrying.

Egypt has been allowed to drift into a Muslim Brotherhood/military coalition government. Turkey has become more and more Islamist over the last decade. Now Libya will get the chance to replace their brutal dictator with...what, exactly? The chances of finding Jeffersonian democrats, Madisonian constitutionalists or even FDR-ite liberals amongst the Libyan freedom fighters are negligible.

Instead, it is very likely that Libya will be allowed to fall into the hands of al-Qaeda sympathizers and other hardline Sunni Muslim theocrats. That's great if you're a Islamist radical; not so great if you're an Egyptian Copt, a Libyan Jew, an American anything...or pretty much anybody else.

But according to President Obama's logic, America simply had to help throw out Khadafi, even though our short and long term interests would've been better served by keeping him around. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad still hasn't taken a laser-guided thermobaric curbstomp. The Iranian mullahs, who somehow managed to keep power even after the 2009 Persian uprising should've shown America just how brittle the Tehran theocracy really is, have yet to be shown the business end of a J-Dam.

It would be a far better and much more stable world if our real enemies were punished for their actions. But then again, is stability really what Obama is seeking to create in the world? His actions in Libya suggest he has some other goal in mind.

In any case, Moamar Khadafi has been put to death at the hands of the people he brutally oppressed for decades. There is a certain ironic justice to the mad Colonel's inglorious termination. Even though there are many troubling ambiguities, his execution rids the world of a mass murderer and large-scale terrorist sponsor. He has the blood of countless people on his hands, both in Libya and across the globe. Pan Am Flight 103 was simply the most direct assault on US citizens that Khadafi ordered against America.

The planet is a far better place with Khadafi roasting on a spit in Satan's special nuclear fire dictator barbeque pit. Regardless of America's domestic political situation, the death of the crazy Colonel is still a day to be celebrated. What happens next is a mystery, what happened this week should at least give some relief to the people who were impacted by Khadafi's evil.

Unpopularity, Obama and the Liberal/Conservative Divide (KingShamus)

Has the sheen finally worn off the Obama presidency?

Let us count the polls.

Gallup:

Rasmussen:

Overall, 45% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president's performance. Fifty-five percent (55%) at least somewhat disapprove.

Ouch.

But then it gets interesting.

Allahpundit notes that some Democrats are emo about the Bamster.

“Given all that, it’s no surprise that many Democrats are running away from Obama. But here’s the problem: He did what Democrats wanted him to do. Health care, stimulus, taxes, you name it — Obama did what his party wanted. Not what the public at large wanted, but what many Democrats wanted. And now, as the negative electoral consequences of their own priorities stare them in the face, those Democrats are blaming the president…

“‘It’s ingratitude,’ says a Democratic strategist who asked to remain anonymous. ‘People are saying to [Obama], ‘You didn’t do everything you told me you were going to do.’ If you’re a member of a union, you didn’t get everything you wanted. If you’re an environmentalist, you didn’t get everything you wanted.But the left wants to go beyond what’s possible.’…

“This is a serious question: If you’re a Democrat, what’s not to like? What kind of unreasonable standard would make a Democrat unhappy with a president who accomplished those things?And yet many Democrats are beside themselves with frustration and anxiety.”

But then how to explain this?

al-Reuters:

See, I dunno if Democrats are the problem here.

They're still stoked for the Barry agenda to the tune of 77%.

Republicans never loved President GreenJobs McPassThisBill, so that 13% approval rating isn't surprising (in fact, it's more shocking that Obama's GOP approval numbers are so high).

So if rank and file DonkeyPunchers still basically dig St. Bambi and Republicans continue to dislike the pResident, why is the Duffer-in-Chief in trouble? A few things are happening here. First, Obama is underwater amongst moderates. These folks are basically low-information voters and people disengaged with American politics. They're basically going with their gut impression of the President's performance. They have found him wanting.

The other reason why Obama is tanking now has to do with his base. Over three quarters of Democrats think Obama is doing a good job. That sounds rad, but is it really so impressive? 21% of Americans identify as liberals, compared with 41% who think of themselves as conservative and 36% who call themselves moderates. What this means is that Obama--and liberals in general--have a much tougher fight to maintain approval from the American electorate. Seventy seven percent of 21 isn't as good as
fifty percent of 41.

In other words, a liberal can have his base on lock-down and still be toast if the right has totally tuned him out and the middle is repulsed.

Don't get me wrong. I think a lot of Democrats are getting annoyed with their Messiah figure. They're not mad because Obama has gone too far to the left. They're anxious because they feel like all the statist gains the socialists have made over the last few years--Dodd-Frank, Cap-n-Tax, ObamaCare, the promise of endless stimuli/union prop-ups, are going to end or be reversed due to Obama's inability to rally a winning electoral coalition to the Democrat flag anymore. Most of all, they're pissed because Obama hasn't been able to go to the left and maintained his popularity at the same time.

In other words, the American Left once again finds itself angrily stamping their feet against a reality they just can't accept. This is a position they find themselves in quite often. You'd think they'd be used to it by now.

September 11th, 2001--A Decade of Greiving and War Intertwined (KingShamus)

On September 11th 2001, ordinary Americans were caught in the horror of al-Qaeda's monstrous sadism.  The victims of the 9/11 attacks were a more or less random sampling of people from a broad spectrum of life in the States.  While none of them could've known that they would be murdered by pure human evil that day, many men and women rose up and became America's first heroes in the war against radical Islam.

One of them was Betty Ong.

The 45-year-old flight attendant was on American Airline Flight 11, the first of two that crashed into the World Trade Center. During the hijacking, Ong hid in the back galley, picked up a crew phone and bravely called the airline reservation desk.

"The cockpit is not answering their phone," Ong said during the hijacking. "There's somebody stabbed in business class and we can't breathe...somebody's got mace or something."

The call lasted 23 minutes. Ong spoke calmly, giving important details of the chaotic last moments.

The 9/11 Commission declared Ong a hero.

Indeed.

Here is the phone call she placed--in the midst of the hijacking, with murder surrounding her and in danger of being killed by terrorists--telling authorities what was happening on her flight.

 

And then this valiant woman was gone.

What did the 9/11 attacks cost us?  We can talk about the trillion dollars that simply evaporated from the American economy in a single morning.  The destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was meant to be a symbolic demolition of the United States' economic and military dominance.  But as important as these things are, they pale in comparison to the human price America paid on that day. 

Think about the hopes and dreams of the three thousand people who died on that day.  What did Betty Ong want for her life?  Was she saving for a house or new car?  Did she want to get married?  Were children in her plans?  Did she have career aspirations? These are questions that seem so banal, at least for the living.  Tragically, they cannot be answered when it comes to Ms. Ong--or anyone else who died because of Osama bin Laden's perverse ideology. 

Three thousand people are no longer with us, which means three thousand sets of families and friends were victimized on September 11th.  Those people who had a connection to the 9/11 victims not only had a part of their lives ripped away from them, but they had a part of their future destroyed as well; the weddings that didn't happen, the children that won't be born, the birthdays that have become a time of mourning.  When seen from that perspective, the 9/11 attacks take on an almost unthinkably barbaric and inhuman dimension.

It was Osama bin Laden and his followers who decided to make war against us in this fashion.  It was bin Laden, one of the most extreme adherents of a religion that has trouble reconciling itself to democracy, human rights, free market economics and the rest of modern civilization, that elected to use large scale terrorism on the United States.  America did not seek out this fight.  The fight was brought right into our home.  We had no choice but to bring war upon bin Laden and all those that would stand with him.  We have no choice but to continue to fight against all who follow in al-Qaeda's path. 

On this day, we should mourn.  We should mourn for those who had loved ones taken from them.  We should mourn for our country and all that it lost on that day.  But we should also celebrate the men and women that gave their lives in order to save us.  We almost never think of our neighbors and coworkers as potential heroes.  As it turns out, the 9/11 attacks showed us that America is full of people who will rise in the face of unimaginable danger to help others. 

At one of the darkest moments in this country's history, there were many like Betty Ong who put themselves in harm's way in order to do the right thing.  During the worst attack on America's soil, there were citizens that sacrificed their own lives in order to save the lives of others.  These folks were not sports icons, blowhard politicians or members of the celebrity class.  Our fallen 9/11 heroes were in fact ordinary Americans who were placed into unspeakable situations and performed extraordinary feats of selfless bravery.

On this day of sadness and pain, we should leave some room in our hearts for wonder.  Hopefully we never stop marvelling at the feats of our fallen champions from September 11th.  The valorous dead deserves our remembrance and our reverence.  We owe them far more than we can ever repay.

Update I:  Robert Stacy McCain shares his rememberences of 9/11.  He also knows who the real enemy is. 

Update II:  Manhattan Infidel posts a poignant piece about his 9/11.  The Infidel speaks a hard but necessary truth:

What happened that day makes me angry. It still makes me angry. To call Islam Medieval is an insult to the middle ages. Islam is pre-medieval. It is stone age. It is barbaric.

Read the whole thing.

Update III:  Karen Howes of the terrific Eastern Right has this to say:

May we always continue to be Americans.

Amen, Karen.  Amen.

Update IV:  Matt of the Conservative Hideout has some thoughts about American unity. 

Update V:  Chris Wysocki of WyBlog reminds us that we still need patriots.

Update VI:  Edge of the Sandbox is annoyed at Muslim imams getting invited to places they don't really belong.  Preach on, sister.

Update VII:  The Crack Emcee gives us the enduring strength of George W. Bush.  He kept us safe and we ended up hating him for it.

Update VIII:  David Wong of Cracked.com tells the story of how "Loose Change" poisoned the 9/11 tragedy.

Update IX:  Right Hand Man of the superb Sentry Journal talks about heart.

Update X:  Angel of Woman Honor Thyself honors those taken from us on 9/11 with a heart-wrenching piece.

Update XI:  CG Hill takes a look at his September 13th 2001 reaction and fisks it.

Book Review - "After America" by Mark Steyn (KingShamus)

Let's face facts. Dystopian non-fiction can be a total buzzkill. People generally like happy endings in their summer reading. Most pessimistic interpretations of tomorrow don't have the kind of emotionally uplifting finale the paying customers are used to. In tales of the disasters to come, the reader doesn't often get the relief of a grand reversal of civilizational decline. The story's third act usually doesn't include a great reawakening where the citizenry regain their bearings and right the ship of state just in the nick of time. Instead, it's all pandemic death counts, epic societal collapse and lurid Thunderdome scenarios.

If one is going to travel deep into the territories of pessimism about the future, it helps if the tour guide is quick with the jokes as you pass by the scenic civilizational wreckage. In "After America", prominent conservative writer Mark Steyn employs his masterful satiric wit and playful use of language to craft the most laugh-out-loud funny postapocalyptic nightmare since his last piece of doom "America Alone".

In many ways "After America" is the logical extension of Steyn's older work. "Alone" was the author's reaction to the 9/11 attacks, the depopulation of Europe and the ascension of Islam in the West. It's main theme was that the demographic collapse of native Europeans was not going to occur in a vacuum, that the rise of Eurabia was going to have serious consequences on America's future. "After America", on the other hand, discusses a USA that doesn't have a future, at least not a future most Americans would want for their country.

What will be the cause of Old Glory's demise? Conservatives are familiar with many of the reasons: smothering bureaucracy, insane federal spending, the overwhelming arrogance of elected officials, the rise of the dependency state. What Steyn does so well is wrap his worrisome statistics and downward spiral trend lines in jaunty wit. If a little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down, a healthy shovelful of high fructose corn syrup makes the cure seem like laughing gas, even as the book goes from bleak to bleaker.

What is most bleak isn't the list of horribles Steyn recites. These are mere symptoms of the fatal disease. What really ails America? It's not all about the money or the dopey leaders we elect. It's the cultural rot that's killing us. Ponder this passage:

Incidentally, over half the illegal population supposedly came into America after September 11, 2001. That's to say, they broke into a country on Code Orange alert. Odd that. Even under the panoptic surveillance of the "security state", certain identity groups seem to be indulged by Big Government. In California one notices that the same regulatory leviathan that thinks nothing of sending in the heavies if a hardware store is offering complimentary coffee to its customers seems somewhat shyer of enforcing its bazillions of building code/food prep/environmental/health and safety rules against ad hoc mobile kitchens serving piping hot Mexican dishes up and down the highway...

This multicultural squeamishness is most instructive. Illegal immigrants are providing a model for survival in an impoverished statist America, and on the whole the state is
happy to let them do so.

On the surface, the issues wrapped up in illegal immigration involve hard tangible things like borders, fences and security architecture. Dig deeper and one sees the schizoid nature of a government too eager to punish the rule-abiders and too ready to ignore the rule-breakers. At the bottom however, it's about a society that's so confused it has trouble determining why it has laws or what it would mean to reform them.

Along the way, "After America" doesn't just point out the ideological incoherence of American life, it names names. The feckless Barack Obama and the smug incompetent Mike Bloomberg take much deserved lumps but appropriately for a book about culture, the author doesn't just stick it to our elected leaders. The whiny liberal thumbsucker Joe Klein and The New York Time's resident ChiCom fluffer Thomas Friedman--among others in the pantheon of American fail--take their hits in utterly enjoyable ways. It's one thing to take the bark off knee-jerk statist tools. It's quite another to break down the preening vanity of the cultural vanguard while having a hearty laugh at their expense.

Ultimately, Mark Steyn's "After America" hasn't just posited a future we must do everything in our power to avoid. Although it is a far different book in tone and subject matter, "After America" is just as critical as Mark Levin's "Liberty and Tyranny" if one seeks to understand the current trajectory of the Untied States. Most importantly, it gives readers an idea of how to pull away from the brink of disaster and retake their nation.

The Education of Chad Ochocinco

New England Patriots wide receiver Chad Ochocinco got schooled recently but not on the football field.

Football star Chad Ochocinco recently got into a bit of Twitter heat for tweeting that he was reading conservative blogger Glenn Beck’s book “Broke.”

He tweeted the following:

“Gotten through 3 chapters in @glennbeck book and so far everything he’s said is either common or his opinion based off research.”

“I don’t agree with a lot of this s— but nonetheless its interesting reading the views n opinions from what I’d like to call the other side.”

(...)

Therefore upon sending out the tweets, Ochocinco was heavily criticized by followers—some even un-followed him.

One follower responded: “unfollowing [you] after two years because you’re a Beck fan. Disgraceful and disappointing.”

(...)

Since when did [black people] put a limitation on whose book we could read, or what types of books we are entitled to read? It is a very sad day in modern America when a Black man is ostracized for reading a book. Seems very reminiscent to the days of slavery when Blacks privately read (for purposes of knowledge) in hopes that the slave master wouldn’t catch them, or worse.

Right.  In the days of American slavery, it was often legally forbidden to teach a slave to read and those who did so were punished with jail time or worse--along with their students.  Refusing to follow the Twitter feed of an athlete who reads certain books is a response clearly not in the league of the legal proscriptions of the Bad Old Days. However, the mentality is identical. The person displaying either response has one goal in mind: control. 

"Do what I want or I'll kill you."

"Do what I want or I'll ostracize you."

One wonders how many black people are no longer fans of Mr. Ochocinco due to his reading material.  I'm sure that the number would blow the lid off the irony caldron. 

Side note: I'm just happy to see a pro-athlete reading anything.  I might send him a copy of my book; a little football, a little love--I'm sure he'd love it. :)

Why The August 2nd Deadline Is Meaningless (KingShamus)

Just a few reminders of just how ridiculous this entire debt ceiling/budget/FoodFight/WWE-Fake-Wrestling-Match nonsense really is.

First, The Classical Liberal.

So, what exactly is the debt ceiling? Put simply, it's an arbitrary limit set by Congress on the amount of money the U.S. government can borrow. The theory behind the debt ceiling, which was enacted during WWI, was that it would limit government borrowing and keep it from growing out of control.

Well, um, that sure didn't happen, did it? Each and every time the debt burden got close to the ceiling, Congress simply voted themselves some wiggle room (since 1962, Congress has voted to raise the ceiling 74 times without a single reduction).

Rush Limbaugh:

CALLER: I was wondering, Mr. Limbaugh, what do you think if Washington and the government doesn't come up with a budget, is there a good chance that I will not be getting my Social Security check next month?

RUSH: Totally up to Obama.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: I'm gonna give you some numbers on this. Your Social Security check should be made with ease. There is money. In fact, one of the ways that it happens is that Treasury bonds, by law, will be sold and redeemed and the money used to fund Social Security payments.

CALLER: Hmm.

RUSH: That is a matter of law. It's certainly a matter of choice. It has nothing to do with running out of money.

Blue State Failure Blog:

Politicians will argue that when the US Treasury loses this ability then the US will default. This is however, technically incorrect. The US Treasury will be able to pay all of its $30 billion dollars in bondholding due the month of August at the expense of other programs from direct funds received from taxation. This would stop the US from going into a technical default and buy the Congress time to get its act together.

Jim DeMint, quoted by Joe Weisenthal:

"The fact is we will pay our debts if it’s the last dollar we have. There are enough assets in Social Security and Medicare to pay the benefits of those programs for several years. Other programs can be funded from tax revenue. There certainly will be disruption...But this is not a deadline we should rush and make a bad deal and do something that cuts benefits from seniors without giving them better choices."

Teh Roxxor Robert Stacy McCain:

You know why the markets aren’t in complete panic over Obama’s reckless debt-ceiling brinksmanship? Because they don’t take it any more seriously than I do. It’s so transparently a phony political kabuki dance — a show-bizzy publicity stunt whereby Obama depicts himself as the Only Adult in the Room — that investors simply can’t believe anyone could be that stupid.

Finally, Mark Steyn, via the terrific Bob Belvedere.

But “political reality” operates to different rules from humdrum real reality. Thus, the “debt ceiling” debate is regarded by most Democrats and a fair few Republicans as some sort of ghastly social faux pas by boorish conservatives: Why, everyone knows ye olde debt-limit vote is merely a bit of traditional ceremonial, like the Lord Chancellor walking backwards with the Cap of Maintenance and Black Rod shouting “Hats off, strangers!” at Britain’s Opening of Parliament. You hit the debt ceiling, you jack it up a couple trillion, and life goes on — or so it did until these GOP yahoos came along and decided to treat the vote as if it actually meant something.

And that's it, kids.

We are officially in a Democrat-managed fantasy land. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had a grand plan in the aftermath of the 2008 presidential election. The scheme entailed giving our money, our kids' money, our grandkids' money and our great-grandkid's money to a narrow collection of favored union hacks, crony capitalist suck-ups, racial grievance specialists and the bureaucrat class. When in the 2010 midterm elections the American public expressed it's deep-seated nervousness with the Donkey-Puncher Party's Mark McGwire on steroids spending, St. Barry of the Sacred Pantscrease decided he would simply ignore the public and continue as if the GOP House majority didn't exist.

That's why this is occurring. The President can yakkety-yak about protecting seniors or getting corporate jet owners to pay their fair share. Dude can go on prime time TV and make his lame-ass campaign sloganeering disguised as an actual policy speech. None of that matters.

The President has caused this fake as hell media-driven crisis. He wanted this to occur. Most of all, he wants enough Americans in full-on panic mode over this so he can paint the Republicans as wild-eyed maniacs and beat them in 2012.

It's always been about politics for Barack Obama. It's never been about making the nation stronger, getting the economy moving, putting people back into the workforce or even just keeping Social Security as is. With this man, the modus operandi is always getting as many people as possible to be dependent on government so he can than use those folks as a bought and paid for voting bloc for his reelection. Spending, deficits and debt don't even kinda enter into Obama's calculations.

Meanwhile, America is quickly coming to the point where her debt is going to be 100% of our GDP. That spells doom for...well...everything.

But whatever. Let's keep pissing our pants over Obama's manufactured crisis. That doesn't totally play into his hands and help his flagging political fortunes or anything.

Obama's Gameplan and Republican Options (KingShamus)

Remember when President Obama said this?

The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.

But Obama showed that in an ideological debate, he’s not averse to using a jab.

Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”

As a statement of fact, the Bamster was of course correct. He did win the 2008 presidential election in very handy fashion. John McCain was a lousy candidate, but that doesn't change the fact that 52% of the public pulled the HopeyChangey lever.

As it relates to the contemporary fight over the debt ceiling, Obama's 2009 triumphalism represents just how badly the President misread the circumstances that swept him into power. Candidate Barry ran as an aspirational post-partisan Lightbringer. He was going to change the country's imperial posture on the world stage and reverse the damage done to the US's reputation by the American warlord Premier Bush. International intellectual elites, formerly hostile governments, hardcore terrorists; all would fall for Barack Obama's apologies for past American misbehavior and his sophisticated charisma.

On the home front, an Obama presidency was advertised as an even-keeled moderate administration that would stand athwart the ideological poles of American politics cooing, "Let's Be Nice." President Pantscrease (thanks again, David Brooks!) wasn't going to give in to the extremes of the Republican Party hacks of course, but he also wasn't going to let Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi define his political agenda either. Sure, there would be some new spending, but nothing crazy. Yes, there were going to be some tax hikes, but only on the really rich people.

A conciliatory anti-Dubya abroad and a pragmatic centrist in the domestic sphere: this is the Barack Obama many Americans voted for in 2008.

In 2011 we find ourselves sifting through the wreckage of Obama's presidency. All the ridiculous spending with absolutely nothing to show for it, all the bloated Leviathan government programs passed against the public's will, all the ludicrous domestic decisions that have damn near annihilated the private sector, all the random wars started with little public explanation and even fewer plans for victory; all of these things and more were borne out of Barack Obama's self-delusion. This arrogant ideologically-blinkered talentless achievement-free hack of a man, with decades of politically correct college campus leftism crammed into his thick Ivy League skull, actually thought that just because he snookered some folks into believing his factless self-description he could govern like the Marxoid rabble-rouser he actually is.

Better still, Barack Obama wants John Boehner and the rest of the GOP--you know, the folks who won last November--to make the exact same mistake he did back in 2009. In the budget ceiling battle going on, the President needs Speaker Boehner far more than he probably ever thought he would. In fact, Obama's chances for pulling a victory out of this (and saving his re-election bacon) rest on John Boehner's forgetting the reason why people voted for the GOP in the midterm elections.

Related: Let's look at the grand agreement that Obama wants and needs Boehner to approve. The Democrats get the Republicans to stop hammering them about profligate spending. In exchange for that, the GOP gets what exactly?

...the president and his allies are playing a familiar card. It’s not that they are against entitlement “reform,” they say, it’s just that they want to protect the beneficiaries from any financial sacrifice. And so we learn in recent days (see here and here) that Democrats are willing to put sizeable Medicare and Medicaid “cuts” on the table. Among the changes that are reportedly under consideration are further reductions in what providers of services and products are paid, trims in Medicare’s support of hospital-based physician-training programs, and importation of Medicaid’s pharmaceutical-rebate scheme into the Medicare
prescription-drug benefit for the so-called “dually eligible” (that is, the elderly who are enrolled in both programs). And apparently some Republicans are willing to play along.

These kinds of changes in Medicare and Medicaid are nothing new. Various versions of them have been included in every budget deal going back 30 years, and most especially in the bipartisan deals of 1990 and 1997. They do not constitute genuine entitlement reform. They will not fix Medicare and Medicaid. And they will not solve the nation’s budget problem.

Yes, on paper, the Congressional Budget Office will say they save money, perhaps even a lot of money. But CBO has said that every time a budget deal in the past has included similar provisions. As the years go by, the savings always vanish in the regulatory complexity of the programs, and entitlement spending continues to rise just as it always has. Moreover, arbitrary across-the-board payment cuts are actually damaging to the efficient operation of the health system. They lead to cost shifting, and they drive willing suppliers of services out of the marketplace. In the end, price controls do nothing to change the underlying reasons for cost growth.

So...the Republicans would get nothing. And a whole lot of it.

Excuse my Frogtalk, but why the frack should the GOP cave in on this? Because some jack-ass grandees over at the Washington Post are crying about it? Newsflash: The mainstream media hates Republicans and conservatives the way Roman Polanski hates statutory rape laws. They lie and lie and lie some more, all in the hopes of convincing enough people of the progressive-approved narratives.

More than a few people got their knickers in a twist when Rush Limbaugh said he hoped Barack Obama would fail. Very few people, even those on the Right, ever mention the countless magazine articles, newspaper op-eds and television pieces the MSM produces every goddamn day that practically begs the Lord for the Republicans to fall down a sinkhole and vanish from the political scene.

What about the Mitch McConnell horrible train wreck compromise, you ask? 'Demoralizing' would be a grotesque understatement. Imagine if in World War II the Allies spent months planning the D-Day invasion of Normandy, executed the landing, suffered horrendous casualties and successfully secured a beachhead in France...then turned around and went back to England on June 7th. That's the kind of insanity Senator McConnell is proposing here.

The Republicans have gone too far to stop now. If they do some sort of preemptive surrender where they end up with no real spending cuts while giving their imprimatur to Obama's liberalism, the GOP will all but guarantee the formation of a third party. That in turn will probably mean an Obama win in 2012. The stakes are that high.

Living And Fighting With The Left (KingShamus)

Bob Belvedere, a blogger you need to read, takes this view of the modern liberal mindset.

Leftism is incompatible with American Values. It despises custom, morality,and Right Reason. It rejects the importance of tradition and, in fact, scorns and spits on it. Leftists seek not to learn from the wisdom of those who have come before them. They disdain the hard-won knowledge that politics is the art of the possible. They seek to remake the world in their image, to be as gods.

How can you deal with such people?

You can’t because they believe they have found The Answer — that secret knowledge that the man of the Right believes can only be known to God. The Left believes mankind can be perfected, whereas those on the Right know that Human Beings are, well, human, in the purest sense of the that word — they err and will always err, they are flawed and will always fail.

Thus, the Right seeks to craft governments and institutions that put checks on the damage erring men can do. The Left, on the other hand, believing that people can be perfected, sees no reason for such restraints. Their faith in the idea that the Eschaton can be Immanentized, leads them to brook no opposition because, well, how can you oppose the Illuminated Wisdom they have discovered unless you’re an idiot or a fool? It is a torturous logic they follow and it leads, inevitably, given the frustrations they will experience imposing it on their flawed fellow Human Beings, to them torturing their fellow Human Beings. And it has in every single place it has been tried.

Read the whole thing. It's that good. I'll be here when you come back.

People have been saying this for a while, but Mr. Belvedere's post is a strong reminder of a fundamental truth: The progressive movement has engaged in a slow-motion just-slightly-under-the-radar civil war on traditional America for at least the last 50 years. The roots of this conflict lie in several places. Early utopian dreamers like Hebert Croly and John Dewey, frustrated by 18th century classical liberalism, laid the intellectual framework for several generations of liberal activists. Woodrow Wilson's Constitution-bashing administration is a key component. FDR's 'let no crisis go to waste' opportunism enshrined many unconstitutional assumptions into the fabric of American politics. All of these factors and more led to the rise of the 60's-era New Left radicals such as Bernadine Dohrn, Tom Hayden and Noam Chomsky. This driving force in US politics has scored many victories in the last five decades.

A skeptical reader might ask how the last fifty years in American political life can be seen a 'war.' After all, it can be argued that the Constitution creates the conditions for gridlock, narrow-issue voting blocs and partisan rancor. One could make the case that the modern wrangling we see over the national debt, abortion and our various wars is nothing more than business as usual. To some extent, the people who take this position are not completely wrong.

However, consider the following scenario: a state supreme court threatens to create a right to gay marriage if the state legislature doesn't do it on their own. The earliest American thinkers--even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall himself--couldn't have imagined a scenario where the legislature would be told by the judiciary to make a law. It goes against what most citizens in the modern era think of when they consider the roles of elected officials and the courts.

Think the situation laid out above is crazy? If you do, well, you're wrong. That's just the kind of insanity New York just went through in the push to legalize gay marriage.

The strategy used by the American Left, in which they use their ideological companions in the courts to force a result that progressives demand, is 'democratic' in roughly the same way that Josef Stalin's show trials were 'legal'. They both have the patina of the rule of law, but, in reality, they're both shams. In both instances, a large force bullies another party in order to come to a pre-determined outcome. Most importantly for our purposes, by going so far outside the bounds of constitutional law and tradition, progressives have all but abandoned previous understandings of how America governs itself. This amounts to nothing less than an act of war by the Left against groups of citizens it regards as not just political opponents, but as outright enemies.

It helps if one thinks about American politics like a football game. Imagine that the Washington Redskins are playing the New England Patriots. For three quarters, both sides play by the standard rules of the league. There are lead changes and penalties and back-and-forth action, but the teams play within
the framework of NFL regulations; i.e. a touchdown is six points, pass interference is illegal, etc. Then, at the start of the fourth quarter, Washington announces that it will play the rest of the game with 12 players on offense and defense, as opposed to the customary 11. A few minutes later, the 'Skins proclaim that their team will play with a round soccer ball (as opposed to the regulation football) and that they can merely kick it anywhere into the end zone to score a touchdown. Moments later, Washington announces that it will arm its players with hockey sticks which their team can use in any way they please. Finally, the Redskins bribe the officials to allow the Washington club to do whatever the hell it wants.

In this admittedly fanciful situation, it should be clear that while the New England Patriots were busy following the previously understood rules of the NFL game, the Washington Redskins had abandoned playing football altogether. The Washington squad was playing an entirely different game in order to beat New England. They didn't just cheat in order to get a blatantly unfair advantage over their opponent. By going so far outside the regulations, they had in effect declared war on the Patriots.

The same is true of American liberals over the last several decades. They have used anonymous bureaucrats, the judicial branch, moronic Republicans, the mainstream media and any other useful club to expand the size of government and ravage the old Constitutional order. Rarely do liberals score major victories through legislation alone. When they do, it is usually done over the strenuous objections of the citizenry.

This is war. It's not a war fought with bullets or bombs (except when Bill Ayers is really worked up). Instead, it's a war fought with statist regulations, legislation from the bench, Arlen Specter and Learjet liberal Hollywood propaganda. But just because there aren't battlefields and graveyards doesn't mean there isn't a serious conflict going on in America between liberals and conservatives. Whoever wins that fight will determine not just the fate of America, but the world economic and political order created by the US's influence.

Book Review- "The Wrong War" by Bing West (KingShamus)

 

The Afghan War has been a constant part of America's political and cultural landscape for almost ten years. Like catching sand in a sieve, victory has been incredibly hard to grasp. The war has bedeviled two presidents, two Secretaries of Defense (soon to be three) and numerous top commanders. Unlike Iraq, where American perceptions have shifted to see it as a victory for the US military, Afghanistan is seen as a confusing morass where winning just might be impossible.

Into this muddled situation comes "The Wrong War" by Bing West. The author, a former Marine, lays out the details on the ground in stark terms. By putting himself directly into battles alongside the American and Afghan troops, West gives the reader a view of the fighting from the eye of the soldiers themselves. West focuses on two areas, the Konar Province in the northeast and the Helmand province in the southwest. Each has it's own tribal tensions, linguistic diversity, economic issues, geographical challenges and political difficulties.

Reading "The Wrong War" makes it clear just how foolish our nation-building efforts have been in Afghanistan. The country--and calling Afghanistan a 'country' is almost comical-- is spectacularly unsuited for the kind of Western political reforms we've been trying to graft onto it. West details several ways that Hamid Karzai, our hand-picked 'democrat', has undercut much of what we are trying to accomplish. The battle of Barge Mattal, where Americans fought and bled not to secure a military objective but to secure votes for Karzai's reelection, is an especially infuriating portion of the book.

In 2009, Karzai put pressure on the American commander General Stanley McCrystal to retake Barge Mattal. The town, deep in the Nuristan Province and close to the wide-open Pakistan border, served as an optimal location for insurgents to jump between the two countries and conduct operations. However, Karzai didn't really care about the military importance of Barge Mattal so much as the political expediency of taking back the town to look tough and get votes.

This put heavy constraints on what the Americans could and could not do to achieve the mission. Worse, there was no counterinsurgency goal to be had there. Instead, the US was forced to land Batallion 1-32 into the middle of Barge Mattal's 'punchbowl' location, surrounded by high cliffs from which the enemy could shoot from the high ground onto the American forces. Predictably, this resulted in the needless deaths of American troops.

West offers Barge Mattal up as an example of the incompetence and corruption of Hamid Karzai's cronyed-up leadership. But it's not just the Afghan elite that is suspect. The rules of engagement that the Western forces labor under are constructed so poorly that the enemy uses them to their own advantage. In a stunning passage, West finds himself in a firefight alongside American, British and Afghan security forces against an insurgent group.

"I see one over here, ' Cpl. Gareth Robson yelled from a side wall. Le ran over and peered through his M4 scope at a man dressed in black who was running bent over to the west end of the building, presenting an easy target.

"Should I shoot him?" Le [Ed.-Pfc. Khanh Le] asked me.

"I'm just a writer," I said. "It's your call."

A few meters away, Roxy [Ed.-Sgt. Scott Roxborough, a British soldier] pursed his lips to emit a farting sound, amplified by jeers from the two Marines and several Brits.

"Okay, okay, " I relented. "In Vietnam, I'd light him up. Now, what's your ROE?"

"I don't see a weapon," Le said.

"Our rule," Roxy shouted, "is that you have to testify at your hearing that the shooting was justified."

The absurdity of that conversation is mind-boggling. "The Wrong War" is littered with the frustration, lost opportunities and senseless American deaths brought about due to horrible ROEs. Not only do we send our troops into harms way, we readily tie their hands while gleefully patting ourselves on the back for our humanitarianism. War is already insane; how we have forced our troops to conduct themselves in Afghanistan borders on the suicidal.

When the American armed forces are not busy looking through the Yellow Pages for lawyers to defend them at the court-martial they could be subject to for accidentally farting on an insurgent's pet goat/next meal/best friend with benefits, the Afghan civilians often do their best to kill our troops as well.

 

 

Picture credit: Bing West

The picture above shows Afghan teenagers strewing rocks into the path of the 1-32 during an ambush at the village of Ganjigal. They did this in order to hem the Americans into a narrow area so that insurgents could have a better chance of killing US forces. Remember that these are the people the US taxpayer has invested billions of dollars in order to turn them into democrats. Worse, these are the people the US citizen has sacrificed its sons and daughters in order to turn Afghanistan away from international terrorism.

Why has Afghanistan gone so horribly wrong? In West's estimation, it's because America has tried to run a counterinsurgency operation that focuses on protecting the civilian population rather than killing the enemy. This brings into question what the American civilian leadership and the generals believe the US military is meant to do. The fact that there are people in positions of power who see our military as just a heavily armed Peace Corps is an indictment on the American military command, the civilian leadership and the American voter who puts up with monumentally incompetent leaders talking massively wrong-headed strategies.

"The Wrong War" is not just a scathing indictment of the current debacle in Afghanistan. West offers up stories that highlight the tremendous professionalism, deadly skill and selfless courage that are critical assets of our military men and women. The ambush at Ganjigal might've been an unmitigated American tragedy. Instead, the courageous actions of Corporal Dakotah Meyer--which West documents here--are nothing short of breathtaking. For every tale of misery in "The Wrong War", there are incidences of American heroism and resolve that should be part of our national mythos.

Moreover, West offers his solutions for an exit strategy. The final chapter should be required reading for anybody even remotely connected to the decision-making process in Afghanistan. His ideas help the American troops maintain their reputation for being the most deadly fighting force on the planet. Better still, they remove the American military from being pawns of Hamid Karzai and the scumfuck Afghan elite's tribal machinations.

In light of Barack Obama's unrealistic dewy-eyed dreamer's speech last week, "The Wrong War" becomes only that much more vital. Bing West's book is a cold honest assessment that counter-balances the President's partisan political agenda with facts, insight and real workable solutions. For anybody that cares about the global war on terror, the American military and our national security, "The Wrong War" is vital to understanding where we are now and where we should be in the future.

Sarah Palin Pwns The Media--Again (KingShamus)

The Crack Emcee brings us a CNN anchor dude getting emo.

You’ve got to love this. They went after her – again – and they got nothing! All they’ve exposed is the media’s craven nature and it’s willingness to act as the go-to guy for the Democratic Party. Watch the clip. At one point the reporter looks *stunned* because he’s got to admit the person he’s “investigating” is somebody good who he clearly admires. It’s like he was given the job of killing a kid and he,..just,..can’t,…do it.

Da Emcee nails it...again.

How about we call the former governor by her rightful title. Sarah Palin: The Most Vetted Non-Presidential Candidate Ever.

Did anybody go through Barack Obama's e-mails as US Senator when he announced his run for the Presidency? If the media did, you never heard about it. Ya gotta think that if the lamestreamers did find anything in an Obama email nit-pick expedition, some producer or editor at one of the big media dogs would dutifully toss it down the memory hole. Wouldn't want the general public to get an unfoavorable impression of the Left's Chocolate Jesus sacred worship figure.

Numerous news outlets have decided to crowdsource the Palin e-mails. Did these same media organs go with this tactic when ObamaCare was being debated? How about Cap-n-Trade? What about the Porkulus? Nope. None of that got our Fourth Estate a-rolling like Palin's e-mails.

Amazing.

I'm a Herman Cain supporter. I hope he is the GOP nominee in 2012 because I think he's got the best shot at beating Obama. Having said that, here's an argument for a Sarah Palin presidential run: Nobody can touch the chick. They can't lay a glove on her. Her detractors couldn't hit her with an RPG if she
was the broad side of a barn and they were standing ten feet away.

The Left throws everything at her. They have fired every salvo they possibly can. They've had squirrelly weirdo reporters move next door to her house. They engage in bizarre conspiracy theories about the 'true' mother of Trig Palin. They blow her verbal 'gaffes' into week-long exposes, then get cranky when it turns out that she was right.

The progressives almost always come out looking worse than she does whenever they get into a food fight with Palin. She makes them look ridiculous. Better still, because the left cannot stand to get humiliated, they forget the first rule of holes: when you've put yourself at the bottom of one, the first thing you should do is stop digging. Instead, they continue to take shots at her, hoping that just once they'll get lucky and put an end to her career in public life.

Chances are that the media has found every possible trouble spot Sarah Palin might have in her background. Barring something completely out of the blue, there are no scandals lurking in Palin's history. If there was, you can be sure the MSM would've reported it by now.

You can argue against Palin on stylistic grounds. You might think her snowbillyisms and folksy demeanor won't translate into a winning formula in a national election. You can even question some of her policy emphases.

The one big advantage Sarah Palin has over everyone else in the 2012 presidential field is that there will be no surprises. Every rock has been turned over. If she runs for the White House, you can be sure the media will keep digging into her past. You can also be sure that Palin will beat them more often than not. In a race that is certainly going to be a media-driven death march against whoever the GOP nominates, being a proven MSM slayer is no small thing.

Anthony Weiner and Mutually Assured Partisan Destruction (KingShamus)

Ace of Spades, in a post that puts a nice neat bow on Phase I of Weinergate, had this to say about how the political class treats its sex scandals.

The other thing that I thought, frequently, when I asked myself, "Why push this?," is: Because this is what we do.

Is that a good system? I don't know, but it is the system.

And I know I got very angry indeed when champion dickweed Howard Kurtz sneeringly informed me that in this one case, it would not be the system.

Unacceptable, Kurtz. We shall not have a regime of hard, punitive rules for conservatives and soft, forgiving rules for liberals.

I was thinking that this is like the Prisoner's Dilemma.

I believe both parties, and most people in the public eye, would agree, if they could make an agreement which could be enforced and relied upon, that "We shall not beat up each other over this stuff."

That would accrue to everyone's interest in the political/media class. Note I speak only of this class. I am not saying that this agreement would serve anyone else's interests. But it would serve politicians' and media-types' interests.

You don't screw with me, I don't screw with you. For this class, such an agreement would be mostly upside.

But the problem is, of course, the same one as is the whole point of the Prisoner's Dilemma: You can't trust your opponents to go soft on you.

So what do you do? Concede the field, in which case only your own allies get pummeled like this, but you sweetly avoid pummeling their guys in the hopes that they will honor their side of the bargain?

They won't. They never do.

Read the entire piece. It's full of win.

Both American political parties, from the show horses on down to the foot soldiers, simply cannot maintain the kind of reciprocal understanding Ace describes. He's absolutely correct when he says that the political class would benefit enormously from a mutual agreement to shut the hell up about it's sex scandals. For a lot of reasons, politicos can't resist the attack dog urge. Interestingly, it wasn't always this way.

In the 60's, when John Kennedy had hot and cold running girls installed at the White House, the Republicans knew about JFK's peccadilloes and decided to keep their powder dry. Whether it was out of a desire to keep their own shenanigans private or just out of a sense of deference to the presidency, the GOP were tight-lipped about President Kennedy's numerous extramarital excursions. Congressman Weiner's misadventures in web-based hook-ups make it clear that the old early sixties circumspect attitude is not just gone, but probably can't come back.

This inability on the part of the Democrats and Republicans to hold their fire is a big reason why Mitch Daniels' idea of a truce on social issues is so monumentally wrong-headed. Who polices that agreement? Nobody could; even if every Washington DC politician said yes to it, no single person or organization would be trusted by either side to act as a fair mediator/enforcer.

Another problem with Daniel's truce is that even if the politicians went along with the deal, the mainstream media most certainly would not. The most knee-jerk attack dog partisans in American politics are the editors, producers and reporters that make up the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the lamestream Democrat Party rah-rah chorus. If they have access to information that helps Democrats or damages Republicans, they will run it. This will force Breitbart and his allies to do the same thing when they get information damaging to the Dems. The truce would be over almost before it started.

In fact, given how cuddly the MSM is with the Democrat party, a truce on social issues could only hurt Republicans. With the exception of Fox News and several big-name rightish blogs/websites, the conservative argument against abortion, gay rights and other lifestyle debates is almost never given a fair treatment by the big news outfits. Under the Daniels scenario, Democrats could truthfully say they weren't scoring points while their allies in the press and Hollywood kept pushing the progressive agenda. Republicans would have few options. They couldn't expect the MSM to help them out. Worse, the Republican's sorta allies on the Right blogs--the ones that might be able to pump up a conservative social agenda--just don't yet have the same kind of reach that the lamestreamers have in the media universe.

Finally, just how far down the political totem pole would the truce go? Would it only affect the Beltway folks? If that's the case, the social issues gag order would unravel as soon as a state legislature votes to approve gay marriage, put limits on abortion, allow prayer in school or mandate that teachers instruct students on condom use. Just because DC pols swear off social issues legislation doesn't mean the states have to. As soon as a controversial social issue flared up at the state level, national Republicans and Democrats would almost have to weigh in. That would put enormous pressure on the truce's architecture; once one politician says something, others are going to want to discuss it too.

Weiner's train wreck is a reminder of just how impossible a voluntary censorship of any kind is in modern politics. Political figures cannot be bound by informal gag orders. Mutually assured partisan destruction won't hold anybody back from using damn near any club to beat their opponents over the head. The price is too low and the payoffs are too high.

Herman Cain, Southern Whites And The Race Issue (KingShamus)

Allahpundit over at HotAir.com makes an astute observation about the rising political fortunes of Herman Cain.

By the way, note his choice of hat here and the country/western soundtrack. Like I said after Frank Luntz’s focus group went nuts for him in South Carolina, he may very well emerge as the “southern candidate” in the field. How the media’s going to square that with their deathless assumptions about southern conservative racism, I have no idea — but it’ll be amazing to watch.

Read the rest, I’d say.

What does it mean to be from the South? If you listen to the scions of popular culture, all you have to do to find a racist sexist homophobe proto-fascist is talk to a denizen of old Dixie for five seconds. It’s such a lazy intellectually dishonest position, but many people have internalized that sentiment. For some, merely hearing a Southern accent means the speaker is thinly-disguised uber bigot. The truth is far more nuanced, and much kinder to Southern folk, than tired shopworn stereotypes.

Does racism exist in the South? Of course it does. Flawed human beings, not choirs of angels, live in the South. The real issue is just how much race plays in electoral politics. The 2008 presidential election gives us an indication of the race factor. It seems like the answer is 'Not nearly as much as you might think'. Barack Obama beat up on John McCain in North Carolina and Virginia, two key members of the old Confederacy. Obama's victories would suggest that caucasian persuasion racial animus wasn't enough to stop voters in these states from pulling the Donkey Lever.

Since the South isn't a bastion of knee-jerk race hate, here's an interesting question--What happens when 60% of Southern whites vote for Herman Cain in the 2012 general election? How does pop culture, with all of its built-in lefty prejudices, react to that?

There are two probable outcomes to that hypothetical scenario. One is that Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment universe will pull an Officer Barbrady and act like that Cain's snagging the cracker vote is no big deal. The South is still racist, but those stupid hillbilly wingnuts are so thick that they can't help but vote Republican even though the GOP nominee is a black man. Lord knows the media loves to ignore things that mess with their preferred narratives. The old head-firmly-buried-in-ones-own-ass approach has served the entertainment biz quite well over the years, so this is quite likely to happen once again.

The other possibility is that pop culture figures acknowledge that southern whiteys voted for a black man, but will argue that Herman Cain doesn't count as a true brother because he's conservative. As strange as that sounds, it's well within the bounds of cultural Left's playbook. According to Jesse Jackson Jr., if you're black and you don't vote for health care reform, you're not really black. According to the weird feminist sisters, Sarah Palin's right-of-center leanings means she's not really a woman.

Both of the above predictions/probabilities make the Left look incredibly stupid. Which is all the more reason why Herman Cain should be the Republican nominee for President in 2012. Make Cain the GOP standard-bearer, then watch how Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey and Chris Rock struggle to explain that Herman Cain's victory doesn't count as racial tolerance. Failing that, put Cain at the top of the ticket, then get a good hearty laugh when doucherocket cultural critics like Michael Eric Dyson and Cornell West try to explain to average Americans that Herman Cain really is not black.

Culture, Islam And The Sting Of Failure (KingShamus)

In the post 9/11 age, Westerners have tried to explain why Islam has taken such a violent turn. From full-throated terrorist apologias to more sober hard-eyed analyses, America and her civilizational cousins have examined the reasons for violent jihad. Great debates have been had over the last ten years. September 11th was a wake-up call for many Westerners. While many of us are still asleep, the US conservative movement has at long last decided to examine the deeper motivations and passions that drive Islamic fundamentalism.

While this process of examination has been beneficial, sometimes it is necessary to listen to Muslim dissidents themselves. They will often tell you far more of the story than you'd likely get from other sources. That's why Raymond Ibrahim's translation of a Khaled Montaser piece is pretty important.

We Muslims have an inferiority complex and are terribly sensitive to the world, feeling that our Islamic religion needs constant, practically daily, confirmation by way of Europeans and Americans converting to Islam. What rapturous joy takes us when a European or American announces [their conversion to] Islam—proof that we are in a constant state of fear, alarm, and chronic anticipation for Western validation or American confirmation that our religion is "okay." We are hostages of this anticipation, as if our victory hinges on it—forgetting that true victory is for us to create or to accomplish something, such as those [civilizations] that these converts to our faith abandon.

And we pound our drums and blow our horns [in triumph] and drag the convert to our backwardness, so that he may stand with us at the back of the world's line of laziness, [in the Muslim world] wherein no new scientific inventions have appeared in the last 500 years. Sometimes those who convert relocate to our countries—only to get on a small boat and escape on the high seas back to their own countries.

There's a lot of truth to digest there.

First, it is important to note that there are Muslim scientists and thinkers doing important work. They study and invent and innovate not in Damascus, Jakarta or Tehran but in London, Frankfurt and Chicago. This indicates that there is no genetic or racial basis for the lack of 'Islamic inventions'. It is
the culture of Muslim-majority nations that is stifling.

The West in general, and America in particular, is the only place where a Muslim can safely use his mind to create something other than yet another jihadist ideology or violent terrorist organization. If you're a clever Muslim who wants to invent something in the United States, chances are that the fast-thinking Farouk will be rewarded for his hard work and labor should his innovation actually perform. The same cannot be said for the vast swath of kleptocracies that riddle the Middle East. The man with a plan in the Islamic sphere will most likely see his good idea stolen by the thieves that man the important government posts or ignored by religious fundamentalists. There's really no reason for the intelligent person to even bother trying, so he doesn't.

That five hundred year failure rate has to gall many hard-core Muslims. While the mongrelized infidels in America and Europe have dominated the world with rapidly changing technology, vibrant expansionist pop culture and wild commercial success, Muslims live off the fruits of Western intellectualism but cannot hope to emulate it in their own homelands. According to the Koran, it is Muslims that have the truth--and more importantly, God--on their side. For Islamic supremacists, having God in their corner should've meant that they would be blessed with inventions and innovations. They should've been the winners of progress, not the debauched kaffir West.

Consider another irony. Even many of the Islamic sphere's bad ideas come from us. The Ba'ath party that dominated Iraq and continues to oppress Syria is merely an Arab facelift for a German socialism. Bashar al-Assad is basically Erich Honeker with a much funnier name and a slightly more brutal secret police organization.

More to the point of Montaser's article, Islam's constant seeking of Western validation--specifically through the conversion of Westerners to Islam--speaks to the inherent weakness of the faith. We in the West sometimes think that Muslim expansionism is a sign that the Western world or that Judeo-Christian values are in decline. But what does it say about Islam when the only way they can feel good about themselves is if some Eurotrash brainfart or American half-wit starts praying to Mecca five times a day?

When you always have to have the approval of others, you are doomed. The same is likely true for the supremacist version of Islam. While non-Muslims cannot do much to make that collapse happen, we can encourage those voices who criticize the backwardness of modern Islam.

I snagged the link from Kathy Shaidle's Five Feet Of Fury, who directed me to Jihad Watch, which got me to Raymond Inrahim's post. Thanks to all.

Mitt Romney's Health Care Speech Settles Some Issues (KingShamus)

The main issue that it solves? The possibility of Mitt Romney being elected president in 2012.

I can't get the video to embed, so here's a link.

Summary: "I'm not apologizing for RomneyCare. I thought it was cool, so whatevs. Also, I'm not changing anything from my 2008 health care plan because that would look like I was flip-flopping and I sorta have an image problem about being a slippery political weasel."

No really, watch the clip. Then come back and tell me that's not pretty much what homeboy said.

Meanwhile, Allahpundit does his counter-intuitive reaction thing to Romney's speech.

No one would have believed him had he apologized so there was no sense in doing it. On the contrary, if I were advising him, I’d tell him to go on the attack and make his opponents be as specific as possible in what they’d do differently. The more he can discredit their plans as unworkable, the more he can reframe RomneyCare as the best choice from a very bad set of health-care policy options. In fact, if he’s feeling extra cheeky, he could use the public’s ruinous love affair with Medicare to his advantage. Under RomneyCare, the state forces you to buy a product from a third party; under Medicare, the state forces
you to buy the same product from the state. It simply calls it a tax instead of a mandate, and instead of granting you coverage immediately, it shafts you until you’re 65. Do Pawlenty, Gingrich, et al. also oppose the “mandated” premiums known as FICA? I’m not sure Romney wants to go the Mediscare route since it’ll make fiscal cons even angrier at him than they are now, but if he gets desperate enough, look out.

If Mitt has any chance of getting the GOP nomination, Republican primary voters will first have to get over their lingering reservations about Romney's past social liberalism and his more recent changes of political heart. Importantly, the party rank-n-file will have to get over it's virulent hatred for ObamaCare. If the President's government medicine scheme is no longer seen as a huge threat, RomneyCare will not seem like such a big deal. That means that Mitt won't have to keep defending his Massachusetts health plan. Most of all, issues like foreign policy or terrorism, will have to come to the forefront of GOPers concerns.

The rub for Romney is that his doubling-down strategery can only be successful if a bunch of things break his way. The irony here is that super-achiever alpha dog Mitt finds himself in a position akin to a middling baseball team just before the regular season begins. What do the managers of these kind of clubs always say? 'If our ace starting pitcher stays healthy, we'll win a pile of games.' 'We can be successful if the third baseman can repeat his slugging stats from last year.' 'The team is gonna do real well if a few of our rookies pan out and live up to their potential.'

Ball clubs like that almost never succeed. Why? Because there are simply too many factors that have to go right. Let's say the stud hurler keeps himself from getting hurt for the entire year. That doesn't mean those year one noobs are going to pan out. The third baseman who hammered fifty home runs last
season? He just tested positive for cattle steroids and will be lucky to plink out fifteen dingers after his fifty game suspension and his lack of chemically-enhanced power.

Romney is in the same position. Because of his problematic voting record and his insistence on defending his health care plan, Mitt has to rely on a heaping helping of good fortune. All politicians require a large infusion of luck to get elected. In Romney's case, his chances ride on a set of circumstances that isn't likely to fall into place. By making this speech, Romney has decided that he's most likely not going to be president.

Hamas Don't Like It

Predictably, Hamas fumes at the killing rocking of Osama bin Laden's casbah.

"We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood," Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip, told reporters.

Though he noted doctrinal differences between bin Laden's al Qaeda and Hamas, Haniyeh said: "We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs."

Wait a minute!  I thought that it was the goal of every Muslim to kill a bunch of infidels in life and be taken down by them in death.  Why doesn't Hamas realize that the United States military did Osama a favor, according to their own beliefs?

You'd think they'd be thanking us.

(Thanks to Jihad Watch)

Osama bin Laden Finds Out Who's in Charge

The villain of September 11, 2001 has gone to his reward—courtesy of the United States military, specifically US Navy SEALS—while he sat in a Pakistani mansion rather that in an Afghani cave.  Of course, there are reports of it everywhere.

President Obama’s announcement regarding the demise of bin Laden had its usual allotment of first-person singular references, but, for a change, it struck the right tone.  Former President Bush responded as well.

Early this morning, there was celebration outside of the White House gates, reminiscent of the celebration that occurred in the Palestinian Territories in response to 9/11.  One of my Facebook friends compared the celebrations, noting that we two peoples are not that different after all.  Well, he’s right.  All people fall short of the glory of God.

But there is this:  Osama bin Laden continuously attacked US entities outside of the physical country and twice inside of it.  His most successful attacks, in terms of body count, were the synchronized attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the attack for which United Airlines Flight 93 was meant.  He planned them and carried them out because of the god he believed in and served.

Our military had no such motive.  All we wanted to do was to neutralize a threat to our country, personalized in the man who declared war on it in the 1990s in the name of Islam.  And while I question the appropriateness (and the spontaneity) of the mass celebration of our sworn enemy’s demise, it cannot be said that Osama bin Laden was killed in the name of the God of Jews and Christians—not that this will matter to bin Laden’s like-minded co-religionists.

Speaking of them, one wonders how this victory—and it is a victory—will play out in the Muslim world.

Anyway, congratulations to Presidents Obama and Bush, and, most importantly, congratulations to the men of our United States Armed Forces.

UPDATE:  This was inevitable.

Obama's Birth Certificate and 2012

Donald Trump has been making President Obama's failure to release his long-form birth certificate a huge public issue for several weeks now, though it has been much discussed in Internet political circles for the last three years. But now that the president has finally made the birth certificate public, I have a few thoughts about it.

The timing of the release is a strategic blunder two-fer.

Trump has said that he would run as an independent in the 2012 presidential race if he didn't get the GOP nomination. Such a race would ensure President Obama's reelection. However, since the president released the certificate today, he has effectively deflated a Trump spoiler candidacy and neutralized a potential weapon against the GOP candidate  (it would have been far more damaging to the GOP candidate had the president released the certificate, say, in September 2012).

I don't think that was what the president intended to do.  But, thanks anyway, Mr. President!

(Thanks to Ace of Spades HQ)

Why Does Ezra Klein Hate Himself? (KingShamus)

I ask because that's the only reason I can figure why he pwns himself, then doubles down on stupid via his Twitter stream.

In a recent post at the Washington Post's site, juicebox mafia capo Klein thinks he's figured out who Barack Obama really is.

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.

It's important to note just who is making this wack-job statement.  As noted by my new blog homie Proof, Ezra Klein was the founder of the junior high mutual zit-squeezing club Journolist.  The four hundred reporters, academics, professional liberals and assorted mouth breathers in the listserv were basically a wing of the Obama presidential campaign in 2008, with future Obambi Cabinet members to boot.  Needless to say, Klein has a serious intellectual interest in rehabilitating his teeny bopper fan boi crush's political fortunes.

Now, let's look at the 90's era Republican's 'best ideas'.  The individual mandate that some Republicans championed back in the day was...and more importantly, is...unconstitutional.  I know Klein thinks the Constitution is just some old impossible to understand scrap of parchment, but when something is plainly unconstitutional that pretty much makes it a stupid idea, not a good one.

As for cap-n-trade, I don't know if paid Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein has been keeping up with current events, but anthropogenic climate change has been revealed to be a fraud.  C&T was a policy cooked up in response to fears of global warming caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions.  Why would Republicans keep advocating a policy that supposedly solves a problem that does not in fact exist?

Finally, we get to Klein lauding President George HW Bush for raising taxes.  Ezra pats Pappy on the back for 'getting the job done' on the 1990 budget deal in his original piece.  Funny thing is that Klein never really specifies how these tax hikes were successful, either as policy or politics.  He just sorta says they are and moves on.

When confronted about the shakiness of his 'Republican raises taxes = epic win' theory, Klein has a ready retort:

This is the part when you realize that debating Ezra Klein is like having  a discussion with Barry Bonds about the dangers of performance enhancing drugs.  No, it's even worse than that.  It's like debating a pre-med student on specific techniques and methods involved in neurosurgery.  The dude is simply in way over his head. 

How did Bush the Elder get wacked for raising taxes?  For one thing, Bill Clinton hammered him for it in campaign ads.

 

That ad was a staple of Clinton's 1992 campaign.  What makes the spot so effective--and what Ezra Klein simply cannot grasp--is that HW Bush's raising taxes gave Clinton ammunition that didn't just wound the President, but also damaged the Republican brand on a critical everyday checkbook issue.  Why does Klein think people vote for the GOP anyway if not because of tax policy?  It must be for the Republican's famous snappy fashion sense and party-hearty attitude [sarc/].

The best part of Klein's journey into fail is when he is again confronted with his stunning lack of understanding, he resorts to the lamest of rhetorical evasions and promptly moves the goalposts.  But hey, far be it from me to point out how badly his argument is falling apart.  Let's let Klein's own source, that he dutifully pointed out, do it for us.

If politicians are not rewarded at the polls for the choices they make, don't expect other politicians to make similar choices. 

What exactly are we dealing with here?  Klein brings up a political period from the recent past.  It's not like it's a hundred years ago, when the issues and characters involved are far removed from our current context.  Nor are we talking about particularly deep or convoluted political theory.  No, this stuff is pretty easy to understand.

Which makes me believe that Ezra Klein is not just another overpaid undersmart liberal.  By producing such an elementary amateurish piece--and then digging further down into the proverbial hole--it's clear Klein is a masochist.

Wanna Demoralize The Left? Start With Denormalizing Them (KingShamus)

Ace had a great post the other day that I meant to talk about, but I didn't get to it.  Well, I'm getting to it now.

Here's the money chunk.

...And at universities, in the pseudo-sciences, they are constantly attempting to "explain" conservative thinking as a type of cognitive dysfunction. Not willing to give into the faddish and ephemeral? Ah, well, a part of your brain is too small and won't let you sample "new experiences."

Note the normative assumption always packed into these claims: That the conservative brain is "too small" as compared to the liberal brain, defined as normative; the conservative measure represents a deviation away from the assumed norm while the liberal trait is privileged as the norm, or if not the norm, then the ideal.

No pseudo-scientist every finds that liberals have a bigger amygdala (or whatever) and are therefore "too open to new experiences" (a.k.a. too trendy, too faddish, too ephemeral in one's sense of self). None of these guys ever says the liberal trait represents a deviation from the norm or ideal -- no, they're always the norm or idea. It's always the conservative's traits that need to be "explained" as a psychological defect or an actual defect with their physical brain structure.

Yeah, you should definitely read the whole thing.

The thing is, that denormalizing process of conservatives and conservatism Ace talked about has been going on for a long time.  To pick just one example, think about guns.  For most of America's history, gun ownership wasn't really debated all that much.  It was only relatively recently that the Left got the bright idea to limit gun ownership amongst law-abiding citizens. 

A key part of the anti-gun strategy was to denormalize the idea of firearms.  Guns weren't just supposed to be severely curtailed in the general population.  They were weirdo objects for strange people.  Whether it was geographic arguments ("Southerners are all gun nuts, of course") or class justifications ("The uneducated are the only ones people who still have guns") the goal was the same.  In fact, lefties were so hell bent on making guns abnormal they faked at least one scholar-researched book to make it look like America didn't have widespread gun ownership in it's history.

In general, the Left has had some success in making conservatism seem strange.  At the very least, they've reinforced amongst themselves the 'Right=Alien' arguments they always make.  For committed progressives, conservatives are not just political rivals anymore.  They're the Other.

Truth be told, the hard Left doesn't make up a majority of American citizens.  Break it down on a state-by-state basis.  Even where they make up the largest percentage of voters, they don't make up a majority.  From those perspectives, it's pretty easy to see just how marginal the liberal ideology is in America.

Conservatives should take this vulnerability on the Left--specifically, their lack of numbers-- and use it against them.  More importantly, how about we examine and highlight their own behavior.  For your viewing pleasure, courtesy of No One Of Any Import, are some lefty protestors barking at a recent Tea Party rally.

 

 

Blinkered, moronic and as charming as athlete's foot ?  Where's the sign-up sheet for that?

Lefties insist that they are the sane, logical and normal ones.  

Yeah, that dude is totally playing with a full deck.

Before we get too cocky, liberals have a few advantages.  They still control the MSM and they can still get some progged-up professors to create 'science' to prove their ideological biases.  These are no small things.  They can dupe a lot of the politically uncommitted folks out there.

However, conservatives have distinct advantages of our own. As stated before, the voter identification numbers are on our side.  Best of all, any time the Left goes out in public, they behave like the complete oddballs that they really are.  It shouldn't be too hard to make liberals seem strange--because they are strange.  

Seriously, you have a group of people that are cool with one of their own shouting that he wipes his ass with the American flag every night.  Now that's definitely a little bit of hyperbole on his part, but the fact remains that homeboy's peers were copacetic with his sentiment that the American flag should be disrespected early and often.  Just a reminder:  THIS IS NOT NORMAL.

The Right can score legislative victories.  They can win elections.  But in order to really make inroads they have to start beating back progressive culture.  That means pointing out just how alien their ideology is when compared with the mainstream of American political thought.

ALSO:  Here's the great RS McCain with a story about another Lefty weirdo.  How weird are we talking about here?  How's about possible jail time sound? 

Seriously, click the link.

Who Gets Political Donations? (KingShamus)

One thing is for certain:  From 1989 to 2010, it sure as shit wasn't the Republican Party.

I snagged this from Open Secrets via the cool Bunkerville blog.  Money quote.

Looks like the Unions are flush with cash. Too bad they don’t spend it on their members.

Haha.

Let's suppose you're a UAW member.  You do your job.  You toss in your dues.  Then you notice that your union has given $29 million dollars to Democrat Party candidates.  Now your leadership might be hunky-dory with pro-gun control pro-abortion eco-nut tax-hiker gay friendly candidates, but how cool are you with all that?

Maybe the UAW isn't such a good example.  President Obama just gave them a car company.  Maybe the guy on the line is willing to put up with the vast variety of lefty crap if he thinks he got a good deal out of hijacking Government Motors.

Lets try a different group.  What about the rank-n-file Teamsters?  Thirty million dollars were sent from that union's coffers to political candidates, with 93% of that going to Donkey Punchers.  The Unicorn-in-Chief's energy policies ("Drill Nowhere, Drill Never, Double Eco-Boner Rainbow All The Way!") have pushed diesel prices up past four dollars a gallon.  That's gotta be putting a serious hurt on the wallet of most truckers.

The leadership of unions no doubt enjoys having a cozy relationship with Democrat Party power brokers.  Rubbing elbows with the well-connected Donks and getting them to push the union big-wig's agenda is huge.  The problem is that the average union member might not think their interests are being represented very well if all their dues money is going to Democrat candidates.

Mothers, Feminists and The Creation Of Culture (KingShamus)

Blogger pal Chris Wysocki of the great Wyblog notes that we're entering a very special season.

Yes, it's that time of the year again. Time for the feminuts to whinge about Lilly Ledbetter and having to work for slave wages just because they don't have a penis.

Except it's not true. None of it. There is no male-female wage gap.

Carrie Lukas debunks the 77% distraction:

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.

I want a raise.

Haha, you and me both homie.

First of all, you should be reading Wyblog because he rules, so get to it.

The popping of the male/female pay differential myth is a needed reality check for the ultra orthodox feminist left.  As necessary as this story is, it's just as important to recognize that the Feministing/GloriaSteinem cohort absolutely will not budge from their militantly wrong assertion that men get paid more then women.  It's a foundational doctrine of feminism; going against that sacred text would be like asking David Brooks to stop writing hand-wringing mush-mouthed columns for the New York Times.

The thing is, the popular understanding of feminism (as opposed to the far-left campus version) got a few things right.  Women should be paid the same as men for the same kind of work.  That's just fair.

However, the further down the reading list you go on the Sisterhood of The Snarling Harridans' syllabus, the more incorrect stuff you find.  From the role of men to the bizarre confused ideas about abortion, lefty feminists can't create paradigms that even sorta resemble reality.  

The worst mistake that feminists have made in the last 40 years is their relentless denigration of motherhood.  Remember when Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman described becoming a mother as "...the most important role of my life"?  For many people, this was a charming sentiment.  For at least a few feminists, this was simply not kosher.  Check out Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams' reaction to Ms. Portman's announcement (quoted from The Other McCain):

Why, at the pinnacle of one’s professional career, would a person feel the need to undercut it by announcing that there’s something else even more important? Even if you feel that way, why downplay your achievement? Why compare the two, as if a grueling acting role and being a parent were somehow in competition? And remind me — when was the last time a male star gave an acceptance speech calling fatherhood his biggest role?

For now, forget the tin-eared insensitivity.  That's a feature--not a bug--when it comes to feminist writing.  More importantly, Ms. Williams' sentiment is a symptom of fundamental misreading of the importance of being a mother.

The Left in general, and feminism in particular, has spent a great deal of time, effort and money infiltrating the commanding heights of the culture.  From the universities to the federal bureaucracy, feminists have carved out a sphere of influence from which they can push their ideas.  In the course of a few decades, radicalized women (and not a few indoctrinated men) have become a sizable part of the national discussion on any number of issues.

The problem is that even with all the influence feminists currently wield, it pales in comparison to the power that mothers have in shaping the future.  If feminists really wanted to create a society where, in the words of Gloria Steinem we raised girls like boys and boys like girls, feminists would be squeezing out children by the cart-load and raising the kids from the nanosecond they're born.  Mothers have the kind of 24/7/365 access to a child's mind that a feminist ideologue can only dream about in her fevered fantasies.

Imagine if feminism hadn't drifted into BettyFriedan/BarbaraEhrenreich employment-centrism in the early 1970's, but instead had focused on actually changing American culture at its roots.  The results would be stark.  In fact, if that had occurred, the US would be hardly recognizable. 

Conservatives and traditionalists often become angry when feminists demean the vital importance of motherhood.  It's an understandable reaction; nurturing matriarchs are central to the emotional life of almost everyone and it's hard to hear it when some campus theorist makes it seem like mothers aren't important. Instead of being angry when feminists dismiss motherhood, we should just politely nod and move on, rather than give these leftist maniacs any bright ideas.

If You Get an Email From my Baldilocks Account,,,

Don't click on the link! Some jackhole hacked my account.

Tale of the Tigers: Second Edition

It's almost ready.  Wait until you see the new front cover!

Because my publisher is a POD publisher, there will be some fees for the re-edit and from the distributor for the revision, around $500. So I'm selling the original version of Tale of the Tigers at the low price of $12.99 at my book site only.  Get it now and help me get the new one going!  If you buy the old version, I'll throw in the new one for free with proof of purchase from today, March 30, or later.

Or you can donate to my revision fund!

What else do I have in the works? A new novel (what's a little dystopia between friends?) And a book of short stories. It's amazing what one can come up with using the assistance of memory and imagination.

Bill Ayers: "I Wrote 'Dreams From My Father'" (KingShamus)

The great Jerome Corsi documents yet another shrapnel fragment flying off the continuing Obama train wreck. 

 

Bill Ayers: One more, one more (question)

Question:Thank you sir, thank you, thank you. Time magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote that President Obama's book, "Dreams from My Father," quote: "may be the best written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

Ayers: I agree with that.

Question:What is your opinion of Barack Obama's style as a writer and uh …

Ayers: I think the book is very good, the second book ("The Audacity of Hope") is more of a political hack book, but uh, the first book is quite good.

Question: Also, you just mentioned the Pentagon and Tomahawk …

Ayers: Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?

Question: What's that?

Ayers: I wrote that book.

Several audience members: Yeah, we know that.

Question: You wrote that?

Ayers: Yeah, yeah. And if you help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much.

Oooooof.

WND contributor Jack Cashill seems to thinkthis is a shot across Barack Obama's bow.  In his opinion, the very anti-war Bill Ayers is angry at Obama for the President's Libyan war kinetic military action.  I think that's a pretty good assessment.

I don't believe that's the entire story here though.  I think Bill Ayers is suffering from a classic case of 'Tire Tracks From Under Obama's Bus' Syndrome.  Peace Prize Barry basically used Ayers like a kleenex.  Instead of Ayers catching at least a little credit for penning Dreams--something like 'By Barack Obama and William Ayers'--homeboy got a whole lot of nothing.   

It might have been easier on Ayers to get no props for Dreamswhen Obambi was a hack community rabble-rouser or a benchwarming Illinois state Senator.  When the former Weatherman watched Obama become a Democrat Party show-horse and media-created President, without ever acknowledging Bill Ayers' full contribution to the St. Bambi mythos, that was probably incredibly grating.  Obama's North African adventurism may have been simply the last straw.

More importantly than Bill Ayers needing to recover from his skinned knee and bruised ego, this episode is just one more nail in the coffin for the Barack Obama 2008 campaign narrative.  Dreams From My Fatherwas a big piece of Obama's intellectual curriculum vitae.  As opposed to the supposedly illiterate Dubya or the crusty old warrior John McCain, Candidate Lightbringer was a serious author who had written not one, but two books.  Dreams and The Audacity of Hope were meant to display Barry's intellectual firepower.  While the junior Senator from Illinois had almost no legislative accomplishments, his alleged mastery of the written word was supposed to assure nervous voters that they were supporting a true Renaissance man.

And now we see the myth of Obama's intellectualism crumbling.  All it took was one of the key enablers in Bamster's web of lies to get pissed off at his former protegé.  Barry's chickens are finally coming home to roost.

But really, one can't be completely shocked when a politician as weaselly as Barack Obama is found out to have inflated his resume.  To paraphrase Winston Churchill's comments about Clement Atlee, Senator HopeyChangey's barely-there congressional record had much to be humble about.  No empty-suit candidate with a similar doughnut hole in his history could do anything else.  Obama is clearly no exception to this fibbing phenomenon.

The blame for Obama being able to pull off this sham rests not with the president, but with the American mainstream press.  The New York Times/MSNBC/Washington Post Axis of Fail constantly pats itself on the crotch for brave truth-telling.  Instead of digging into Obama's shady past, they did everything they could to bury damaging details about their preferred candidate and attacked his opposition.

Better still, this MSM willful blindness also reveals just how badly they suck at the one job in which they're supposed to be experts.  They're the ones who were supposed to figure out just how much Bill Ayers figured into Barack Obama's narrative.  The lamestream press allowed the illusion of Barack Obama's superior intelligence--a major component of his appeal to voters--to flourish without a question.  By doing that, they set themselves up to be punked by bloggers who have shown more initiative in the last two years than Big Media has shown in the last two decades.

UPDATE: Now a big ole' Memeorandum thread too. Time to pile on while the piling on is good, I say.

UPDATE II:  Allahpundit offers a dissenting view:

Via the American Thinker. I think John Hawkins is spot on in detecting the sarcasm here, but if you’re inclined to believe that Ayers is The One’s ghostwriter, you’re bound to detect a “deeper truth” in his tone.

... I think he enjoys mocking people who push this idea and enjoys it doubly when they can’t detect the mockery. In fact, I’d bet that this is his stock response anytime the book is mentioned in his presence — insisting that he wrote it to see if the listener laughs and then toying with them if they seem credulous. But as I say, your mileage may vary.

Yeah, this doesn't exactly work for me.  AP's analysis blithely discounts Jack Cashill's work that pretty much proves that Bill Ayers wrote "Dreams".  Cashill lays out the bones of his argument here.

To credit Dreamsto Obama alone, one has to posit any number of near miraculous variables: he somehow found the time; he somewhere mastered nautical jargon and postmodern jabberwocky; he in some sudden, inexplicable way developed the technique and the talent to transform himself from stumbling amateur to literary superstar without any stops in between.

If anything, the last few years should make Cashill's thesis even more believable.  The Duffer-in-Chief is not exactly breaking his back as President.  Dude works harder on his NCAA basketball brackets than on seemingly anything else.   The guy requires a teleprompter for both formal and informal occasions.  It seems highly unlikely that Barack Obama would put in the work necessary to become a strong writer.       

Moreover, why can't two things be true at once?  Why can't Bill Ayers be sarcastic and be telling the truth at the same time?  I mean, it's sorta weird, but it's not such a strange thing.  Ayers is a squirrelly lib hack.  It makes weird sense that he'd do something so goofy and underhanded.  Homeboy probably gets a little thrill thinking how clever he is laying out this secret in plain view.

Anthony Weiner: TeaBagger (KingShamus)

It's just wonderful that even a thumb sucking lib like Congressman Weiner can admit he thinks BarryMed stinks on ice.  Go ahead, homie.  Chug down that sweet refreshing Haterade.

Rep. Anthony Weiner said Wednesday he was looking into how a health law waiver might work for New York City.

Weiner, who is likely to run for mayor of New York, said that because of the city’s special health care infrastructure, his office was looking into alternatives that might make more sense. Weiner is one of the health care law’s biggest supporters; during the debate leading up to reform, he was one of the last holdouts in Congress for the public option.

Why is this happening, Weiner?

“The president said, ‘If you have better ideas that can accomplish the same thing, go for it,’” said Weiner. “I’m in the process now of trying to see if we can take [President Barack Obama] up on it in the city of New York, … and I’m taking a look at all of the money we spend in Medicaid and Medicare and maybe New York City can come up with a better plan.”

Here's a plan for Weiner and the rest of the Democrats:  How about we scrap the entire thing and call it a wash?  Y'all can make lame sorority girl-style excuses for why you voted for ObamaCare--"I was really drunk," "My ride took off without me," "He said we were cool"--and we'll completely understand.  I swear, everybody on the Right will stop laughing at you after a couple of weeks.  A month, tops.    

It's neat how the people who screamed the loudest about passing this monstrosity--the unions, the media and the progosphere sycophants--are the ones who most desperately want a note from Papa Barry to get out of ObamaCare. What's even better is that the Republicans in Congress are still dawdling along wondering if they should completely defund ObamaCare. 

Ummm, here's a clue.  If everybody--even Anthony "Brainless Knee-Jerk Statist" Weiner, for God's sake--is begging the government trying to get out of nationalized medicine, that means it's a dog's lunch that can be scrapped with little political risk.

I snagged this story link from Jonah Goldberg's twitter feed.

Emperor Still Has No Clothes Alert (KingShamus)

Baldilocks wondered when President Obambya was gonna get around to asking Congress for authority to...you know...go to war.

I too have a question--Does SuperGenius Hussein McSmartyPants have a plan or is he just making it up as he goes along?

“Our military action is in support of an international mandate from the [United Nations]Security Council that specifically focuses on the humanitarian threat posed by Colonel Qadhafi to his people,” the American president said. “Not only was he carrying out murders of civilians, but he threatened more.”

Okee-dokee, St. Barry.  So you're just doing your Euro-hip Nobel Prize winning humanitarian act.  Right.  Got it.

“I also have stated that it is U.S. policy that Qadhafi needs to go,” Obama said, noting that a United Nations resolution last week authorizing force against Libya is based on humanitarian concerns, not regime change. “When it comes to our military action…we are going to make sure that we stick to that mandate.”

Wait...what?

I hate to get pushy about this, but which one is it Bamster?  Are we enforcing a no-fly zone, or are we trying to stick a fork into Mad Moammar? 

Maybe we should ask newly butched-up warlord Nicholas Sarkozy what the hell is going on here.  He might have a clue.  Obama clearly does not.  Even better than the President's feckless display of spectacular obliviousness is the fact that he's created a foreign policy scenario where a sawed-off twerpy French Prime Minister probably has the best handle on the situation.      

Besides Obama delivering the change we can all be horrified by, it's important to consult history.  Erwin Rommel famously remarked, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Very true, but the Field Marshall never told us what would happen to the plan when we finally made contact with our allies.  In case you've gotten confused, we're supposed to be protecting Libyan rebels from the predations of Colonel Qadaffi.  Nobody really knows who the hell these people are, who they're friends with or what kind of government they want to create in the place of the current.  Armed with that lack of information, of course we should throw our support behind the Libyan rebel forces.

Just to be clear:  Obama has just gotten us into a war where we're not really calling the shots while we're somehow doing most of the fighting with no clear idea what victory would look like for people who probably despise us with a thousand year old Kaaba-sized chip on their shoulders and who will most likely plot against us once we're done doing the wet work for them.

Anybody else ready for 2012?

War Powers Resolution of 1973

Pretty straight-forward.

PURPOSE AND POLICY

SEC. 2. (a) It is the purpose of this joint resolution to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgement of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicate by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations.

(b) Under article I, section 8, of the Constitution, it is specifically provided that the Congress shall have the power to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution, not only its own powers but also all other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

(c) The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations  where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the  circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2)  specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by  attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed  forces.

Pray tell, which of the emphasized circumstances exists?  Which of these gives President Obama license to order the intervention in Libya?

Help me out, here.

Consistency

...among the leftmost wing of the House Democrats.  Good to see it.

Reps. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), Donna Edwards (Md.), Mike Capuano (Mass.), Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), Maxine Waters (Calif.), Rob Andrews (N.J.), Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas), Barbara Lee (Calif.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.) “all strongly raised objections to the constitutionality of the president’s actions [in Libya]” during that call, said two Democratic lawmakers who took part.

Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) even asked why President Obama's actions aren't impeachable.  And from an unnamed Democrat lawmaker:

“They consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress...They’re creating wreckage, and they can’t obviate that by saying there are no boots on the ground. … There aren’t boots on the ground; there are Tomahawks in the air.”

In my previous post, a guest tries to float (verb usage intentional) the idea that there was no congressional authorization for either of the Iraq Wars, among other actions in which the United States Military has been ordered to engage.  Of course the assertion about the two Iraq conflicts was easily disputed.  I haven't bothered to look up the others, most of which were conducted by Democrat presidential administrations.

I do hope the Left wing of the congressional Democrats stands firm.  We will see.

(Thanks to Hot Air)

There's Something Missing (UPDATED)

I can't figure out what it is.

BENGHAZI, Libya — President Barack Obama authorized limited military action against Libya Saturday, saying Moammar Gadhafi's continued assault on his own people left the U.S. and its international partners with no other choice. The Pentagon said it fired 110 cruise missiles at 20 targets along the Libyan coast.

Let me see...what's missing here?  Oh yes!  It's this: the US Congress hasn't authorized this military action aka war.

Surely we will soon be seeing the antiwar crowd out and about, blocking traffic and asserting that the president is waging an illegal war, a war-for-oil, etc.

I'm sure we will see this soon.

UPDATE:  President Obama is in Brazil.  He announced this strike against Gadhafi from the Brazilian capital. It appears that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is running things from Paris.

UPDATE: I knew we could count on the antiwar activists!

"Anti-war protesters arrested near White House"

The protesters, some shouting anti-war slogans and singing "We Shall Not Be Moved," were arrested after ignoring orders to move away from the gates of the White House. The demonstrators cheered loudly as Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon's secret history of the Vietnam War that was later published in major newspapers, was arrested and led away by police.

And there were protests all around the country! New York, Chicago, San Francisco...

There's only one problem.  The protesters were there to mark the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War, to call for complete withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan (told ya so) and to support Bradley Manning, the Army private who leaked classified documents to Wikileaks.

It has only been one day, however. I'm sure they'll get around to protesting the US intervention in Libya.  I have faith!

 

Of Japan and New Orleans: Honor, Shame and Identity

A great deal of commentary and comments has been generated which compares the horrendous situation in Japan to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  Observers note that while New Orleans residents—and even police officers—took disaster’s opportunity to loot businesses and homes, the Japanese survivors of the 9.0 earthquake and the resultant tsunami have absolutely abstained from such behavior.  People who know far more about Japan than I have concluded that the absence of such behavior is due to Japan’s singular, nearly undiluted culture—a thousand-year long tradition in which honor is the only thing one has and the loss of which is the greatest loss imaginable.

This makes sense.  After all, most material things that are lost can be accrued again relatively quickly while one is still living.  Lost honor, however, is very tough to regain and is, sometimes, gone forever.

Some of the comments have bordered on the racialist—that the Japanese don’t loot because it’s not in their racial make-up and that others—namely blacks—do so because it is part of our racial make-up.  Leaving aside the insult, I think the difference goes deeper than that, even deeper than the concept of lost honor.  There’s something that the Japanese understand which all too many black and other Americans used to understand but now do not: that what one does in public and how one treats his/her neighbor(s) affects not only the individuals involved but also the entire community.  This concept applies to local communities and to the larger community; the nation.  Not understanding that is the downside of individualism.  (Of course, honor-shame cultures have their downsides as well; Japan has a very high rate of suicide.)

I submit that Katrina’s New Orleans was a manifestation of a people—namely black people—who have voluntarily given up their honor and their sense of shame.  They have abandoned themselves.

Black Americans—specifically, the descendants of American slavery--are the most American of Americans; I said this before and I’m certainly not the first to make this observation.  Unlike all other immigrants to America, our ancestors were forcibly cut off from all of the totems of their various West African tribes: names, languages, family structures, belief systems.  These things have buoyed all other ethnic groups—including recent African immigrants—in their sojourn to this country and all of them had the choice to hold onto the elements of their cultures that fit into the American ideal and discard those which were incompatible.  American slaves were granted no such luxury.  Our ancestors were emptied of their identities and re-created in the image of what America had for them.  And, up until roughly fifty years ago, much of that image was molded by oppression and scorn. 

However, most black Americans held on tightly to the universal totems of personal and communal honor: love of God, family, love of community, industriousness, self-reliance--all of which also flow and follow from America’s founding document.  (That America strayed away from those principles with respect to black Americans isn’t the point, that those principles even existed is. And, with those concrete principles in hand, black Americans were able to point to them and say to other Americans, “live up to your—to our-- principles.”)  

We may stem from Africa, but we are not of Africa—not even me.  Our character and (sub)culture are wholly American and, largely, our American ancestors fashioned these for themselves--appropriating most of the good things which America had to offer and which largely insulated them from the bad.  That is the inheritance which all too many of us have repudiated.

What we saw in New Orleans after Katrina was a microcosm of the character disintegration of this most American of Americans.  It wasn’t born of DNA nor of the historical effects of slavery; it was born of the wholesale abandonment of a character tried and refined by fire and of the principles which held black Americans together in prior times of adversity. 

If mother and father don’t love child enough to at least try to create the most tried and true environment for the nurturing of that child, it follows that neither mother, nor father, nor child will love and respect neighbors or community.  We declined en masse the prescriptions and proscriptions of God regarding the family and allowed government to usurp the place of the head of the family--the husband/father/leader/protector. We abandoned the identity which our forebears shaped for us and put chaos in its place.  And when disaster strikes, it’s every man and woman for self.  Multiply that times a few million.

 In short, the average Japanese person loves his (Japanese) neighbor and does not covet that which belongs to that neighbor.  It’s part of their culture—their belief system.  And they’ve held to that system without Judaism or Christianity being a significant part of their society.  They know who they are and from whence they’ve come. 

When are we going to remember who we are?

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Lisa Murkowski: The RINO Proves Her Uselessness (KingShamus)

The RINO, aka a Republican In Name Only, is a species of political animal that loves self-congratulation.  Specifically, if you listen to a RINO, he'll mention platitudes like, "socially moderate, but fiscally conservative'.  The RINO will boast about how they don't get bogged down in morality or overly religious debates.  A RINO is just concerned about keeping America's fiscal house in order.

All of it is a lie.

The most recent example is Lisa Murkowski, the Senator from Alaska who pitched a fit when she was denied the GOP nomination in the Republican primary, then used a write-in campaign to get her spoiled brat way.  That was pretty awful, but there was a razor-thin hope that she would at least be of some utility in this congressional term.  Supporters of hers argued that at least she would be decent on economic and budgetary issues. 

Eh, not so much.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has come out in opposition to the House’s attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, making her the first Republican senator to specifically support the beleaguered organization.

“I believe Planned Parenthood provides vital services to those in need and disagree with their funding cuts in the bill,”Murkowski wrote in a letter to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Vice Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Miss.). “I ask you to consider these programs going forward to determine if there is room for allowing continued funding.”

Planned Parenthood provides vital services?  What would those vital services be, Lisa?  I guess an organization that gleefully provides legal coverfor pimps trying to get abortions for underage girls is now considered an un-cuttable budget item.

Forget Murkowski's blithe brainless notion of what Planned Parenthood really is.  She's a classic Ruling Class idiot with a splash of over-entitled nepotism thrown in for good measure.  There is no changing that sad fact.

Instead, focus on the description fake-conservative Republicans apply to themselves.  They constantly crow about their desire to balance budgets and cut deficits.  Yet the minute they come across Planned Parenthood--a corrupt criminal enterprise masquerading as a women's health business--here comes the supposed penny-pinching Lisa Murkowski to the rescue.  Instead of advocating for government to stop funding PP, she's tripping over herself trying to give them more taxpayer dollars.

This is exactly why you cannot trust a RINO.  All their talk of fiscal conservatism is a line of talk to fool the rubes.  If anything is unnecessary for the government to fund, it's abortion clinics.  They make plenty of money.  They do not need federal support at all.   

When it comes down to it, RINOs are creatures of electoral necessity.  Seen from that perspective, a fiscal conservative/social moderate is painted into a very difficult corner.  They almost have to spend government funds on liberal agenda items. 

How else can a RINO declare themselves socially moderate on abortion?  Roe v. Wadeis still in place, so a liberal Republican can't do much there.  The abortion issue is settled for pro-choicers.  Besides being all for late-term abortions, the RINO has very few partisan moves to convince voters that he's pro-choice.  The only thing he can do is defend government funding of abortion providers.

The nature of a liberal Republican's partisan stance and the tone of modern politics short-circuits the supposed balance that RINOs believe they've achieved between budgetary stinginess and social issues moderation.  They can never be the cost-cutting deficit hawks they advertise themselves to be.  Their liberal supporters have to be placated or they won't show up to support lefty GOPers.

Now if rank-n-file republicans can see this, why can't the Beltway GOP?

...how do Washington Republicans respond to this betrayal by Murkowski, who lost the primary, vilified a patriot like Joe Miller, and lied about wanting to use taxpayer funds for abortion? They promote Murkowski as spokeswoman for the Republican Party, of course.

Naturally.

Ya know, maybe I was wrong.  Maybe it isn't the RINOs that are useless.  Maybe it's the entire ridiculous mind-numbingly incompetent wndow-licking Republican Party leadership that needs to ride on the short bus.

Baby Boomer Blues (KingShamus)

Matt over at the Conservative Hideout has some thoughts on the so-called 'Worst Generation'.

My parent’s generation spent the wealth that was so painfully earned by their parents.  Then, they created failed program after failed program, all paid for with trillions of borrowed dollars.  And when the programs were clearly failures, and, in fact, made things worse, they plodded on.  The kept following the leftist narrative, and never-ever cut their own benefits, no matter how unsustainable they were.  They also rejected the spirit of their parents, who had endured the great depression, and survived WW II.  Their parents had sacrificed, but the boomers wanted what they wanted, and they wanted it immediately.

Read the whole piece, ya'all.

While I agree with much of Matt's sentiments, I think the Baby Boomers sometimes get a bad rap.  After all, they didn't come up with Social Security.  That was second-gen progressive Franklin Roosevelt's idea.  The Great Society programs--Medicare, Aid To Families With Dependent Children--were dreamed up by Lyndon Johnson.

No, the Boomers didn't create a lot of the now-crumbling social spending architecture that threatens to destroy America.  What many folks in the post WWII generation did was assume that the nationalized Ponzi schemes and subsidization of personal failure they inherited from older generations were going to continue without consequence.  With that monumentally absurd analysis in place, the New Left movements that arose in the Baby Boom generation set about creating ideologies and rationalizations that reinforced their flawed assumptions.

Look at one example.  Conservatives assert that welfare is destroying the American family.  Baby Boom feminists (and their intellectual progeny) argue that the traditional family is outdated and sexist.  The nuclear familial arrangement, with its coercion and fundamental unfairness towards women, is not worth being concerned about.  The dissolution of that unfair institution is not only necessary, it should be welcomed.  Welfare might be hurting marriage and the old family arrangements, but it's just doing the needed work to get society to the post-traditonal family that feminists crave.

While some elements of the Boomer left were busy cementing themselves into soft socialism and cultural Marxism, many others entered into the media.  Take a gander at who sets the agenda in much of the MSM.  Arthur 'Pinch' Sulzberger, the head of the New York Times, was born in 1951.  Steve Capus, president of NBC News, was born in 1963.  The editor of the Washington Post is Marcus Brauchli, who was born in 1961.   

These folks--and many others in the legacy media--are all part of the post-war Baby Boom.  How many times have you watched some gauzy nostalgia-laden montage of 60's and 70's era protests/concerts/hippie love-ins/Timothy Leary yammerings?  The reason why these dreadful creations are so ubiquitous is because the Boomers who look back at that time so fondly are the ones who make up the majority of American news organizations.  Further, most of the contemporary coverage of the baby boom social movements are almost always positive.  The excesses of dudes like Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman or Bill Ayers are generally airbrushed away.  Even better?  The self-congratulation to actual accomplishment ratio is usually quite skewed.  "Hooray for us, we stopped the Vietnam War and stuff.  Also, we listened to the Velvet Underground, so yeah..."  Yikes.

Because Baby Boomers--especially lefty boomers--dominate the media, they paint a distorted picture of 60's/70's youth.  If you just watched CNN or read Time Magazine, you'd think every teenager in America from 1966 to 1978 was an idealistic acid-gobbling Vietnam War protester who lived on commune in Southern California with her Native American spirit guide, seven sex partners and five children named after various wildflowers while David Crosby constructed ever more elaborate water bongs and Gloria Steinem ritualistically burned her bra.  The reality is that boomers during their formative years inhabited a broad continuum, from stern straight-laced traditionalists to wild-eyed liberal doucherockets, and that many of these neat categorizations we're fed just don't add up.

What is the worst sin of the Baby Boomers?  The knee-jerk leftism to which some of them continue to bitterly cling is annoying as hell.  The unreal self-descriptions and constant back-patting is tiresome.  The thing is that none of them would be particularly fatal.  They'd just be aggravating.

The most egregious error committed by the Boomers isn't any of that crap.  According to Stanley Kurtz, via the great Pundette, the issue for the 'Worst Generation' is the fact that they didn't make babies.

In 2005, I reviewed some of the first books on the subject and concluded that a demographically induced economic crisis could spark a revival of religious traditionalism, a far more radical decomposition of the family, or both.

At the time, it looked as if a possible demographically-induced economic crisis was at least a couple of decades away. We seem to be running ahead of schedule. To a large extent, the economic troubles here and in Europe already factor in the unsustainable entitlements of the future.

Although an economic crisis is imminent, and the underlying cause demographic, I haven’t noticed many calls for increased child-bearing. That is in striking contrast to the world-wide movement in response to the less proximate and more theoretical global warming crisis. It’s a measure of how unthinkable changes in our post-sixties life-styles still are. Yet it doesn’t mean change won’t happen, if and when a demographic-economic crisis truly strikes.

It probably doesn't matter all that much that a lot of Boomer peeps smoked a gazillion pounds of OG Kush looking for a cheap buzz or a spiritual experience or whatever.  The tendency for elf-esteem boosting hagiography of 60's and 70's accomplishments doesn't explain our present difficulties.  The leftist leaning of many in that generation by itself doesn't damn the post-war generation.

The fact that they couldn't be bothered to squeeze out a few more kids here and there is the lasting destructive legacy of the baby boom demographic.  In many cases, it wasn't purposeful.  Their intentions were often noble, or at least not totally self-serving anyway.  Often there were perfectly rational rationalizations for their reproductive decisions.  Career moves, financial choices, a concern for the environment, bad relationships, high divorce rates; all those things tend to slow down the baby-making.  More, all of these factors could've happened to any generation. 

I really don't think baby boomers sat down as an entire generational cohort and decided to stop making kids as much as their parents did.  I also don't think they all planned a demographic collapse that would threaten the entire economic future of the America.  There were definitely more than a few Boomers who were worried about overpopulation, but for the most part it was a host of decisions and life events that slowed the Boomer breeding.

The problem here is, like so many other good (or at least not-evil) intentions, America has managed to pave a road right into the abyss with miles of supposedly good plans and allegedly smart ideas.  The Boom generation didn't mean for this to happen.  Nonetheless, we find ourselves in dire circumstances due to some very misguided decisions.   

Huckabee (Probably) Isn't Running In 2012 [KingShamus]

One Republican--likely--down for the count before the fight begins.

“In order to run for president last time, I cashed in my life insurance, my annuities, I pretty much went through everything that I ever had as an asset that I thought I might someday live on. One thing I committed to myself, to my wife and God, was that if I do this I’m hopefully going to be in a position that I’m not so completely destitute at the end of it, that I have no idea what to do if I get sick.”

Can I get two cheers for inflation?

Cubachi thinks this signals Huckabee's lack of seriousness about 2012.  I think she's right.  But then again, has Huckabee ever been a serious candidate in the next presidential election?  The only reason anybody paid him any attention in 2008 was because the GOP field was so weak. 

Besides that, what's his campaign narrative supposed to be in 2012?  I really don't think America--and the GOP in particular--will be in the market for spend-happy compassionate conservative. 

Don't get it twisted.  I think Huckabee's heart is in the right place on a lot of issues.  So was George W. Bush's.  Dubya was right about guns, abortion and--broadly--terrorism.  But his lack of discipline about spending (and his poor performance in 2004-2006 Iraq) soiled the GOP brand and helped usher in President Obama.  In similar ways, Huckabee's compassionate conservatism very well could be just the thing to help re-elect St. Barry of the Sacred Union Payoff.

Wisconsin-The Reverberations Will be Huge (KingShamus)

Fake doctors' notes for real Wisconsin teachers?

Wow.

The crappiness is strong with these clowns.

 

Bunkerville, take it away.

This is the test of our democracy. Ms Piven must be delighted.

'Delighted?'  That repellent old socialist windbag is panting for more of the same as we speak.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where all but the most blinkered left-wing ideologues actually live, Herman Cain throws down a marker.

 

Big ups to RS McCain for posting this vid.  Read the rest of his piece as he makes some good points and includes a smidge of Breitbart magic as well.

As for Herman Cain, he declares, "Wisconsin in ground zero for the rest of America"

Listen to this man.  He speaks the God's honest truth here.

As I said in an earlier post, Obama has sent his troops into this fight.  Organizing For America pretty much sat on its hands during the 2010 election season.  Unlike in November, the President has decided to enter this battle with both barrels blazing.  He is gambling that with OFA assistance, rent-a-goon union tactics and good old fashioned media bias, he can get Wisconsin Republicans to back down. 

Obama must not be allowed to win this fight.

Ponder this scenario:  The GOP in Wisconsin is broken.  They give in to Democrat demands and business as usual reconvenes.  The consequences from that loss would be dramatic and immediate.  First, this will embolden the Obama political hack groups to pull this kind of stuff anytime a fiscally conservative statehouse gets too uppity.  If the Cloward/Piven/Alinsky tactic works in CheeseHeadLand, the Left will naturally seek to use these same political moves everywhere else.  Obama will send out OFA to infiltrate, disrupt and disarm any state's attempts to slow the growth of government. 

Governors from states that are in similarly dire budgetary straits--like all 50 of them--will look at this hypothetical conservative failure in Wisconsin with great interest.  They will learn that there is no political gain to be had from trying to evade the budgetary dilemmas they face.  Runaway entitlements, public-sector union issues, basic fiscal discipline...all those concerns will go by the wayside.  Politicians will instead recalibrate their messages to voters; the big fight in the next election cycle will be which party can best deliver the gubmint cheeeeeeeez to state-dependent voters. 

Just a reminder:  Even after the compassionate conservatism of the Bush years, Republicans will never--EVER--win that argument.  If faced with the prospect of  Republicans offering an efficient well-organized welfare state or Democrats promising a generous fluffy relaxing social safety hammock, voters will choose the Donkey Punchers every time.  When a little kid cries for a Snickers bar, he really doesn't care how much money Mommy saved when she bought the thing.  No, the child only cares that the chocolate goody gets to him as soon as possible and that there is more where that came from.  Same thing with is true with the electorate if faced with that kind of 'choice.'

What Obama and the Dems are trying to do is nothing less than the repeal of the 2010 midterms. 

Wisconsin might not be America's political Ragnarok.  Perhaps I'm misreading just how big this thing is.  However, the fact that Barack Obama has decided to expend such effort and has unleashed his rabble-rousers tells me that this is a massive deal.

The West's Reaction To Islam (KingShamus)

Daniel Pipes ponders the notion of an Islam compatible with democracy.

Just as Christianity became part of the democratic process, so can Islam. This transformation will surely be wrenching and require time. The evolution of the Catholic Church from a reactionary force in the medieval period into a democratic one today, an evolution not entirely over, has been taking place for 700 years. When an institution based in Rome took so long, why should a religion from Mecca, replete with its uniquely problematic scriptures, move faster or with less contention?

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.  Pipes breaks down some of the massive hurdles Islam has to leap over in order to embrace democratic ideals.

A point Pipes doesn't touch on is how the modern Western world has treated the various Islamist movements it has run into over the last 50 years.  Since Sayyid Qutb gave birth to the modern jihadist movement, elements of the West have been bombarded by various facets of Islamic violence.  Whether it has come in the form of stateless entities like al-Qaeda, belligerent theocratic governments or a combination of the two is beside the point. 

So how have the elites in America reacted to the decades-long aggression of expansionist Islam?  Accomodation, moral equivalence and feckless dhimmitude.  Among other pathetic reactions.  Then we wonder why Islam continues to pick on us. 

Non-Muslims can't do much to reform to Islam.  As Pipes notes, that kind of wrenching cultural shift takes a long time.  Democratization is not something the West will be capable of accelerating very much. 

But that doesn't mean the West has to lay down and accept terrorist Islam's deranged premises about the separation of church and state, the role of women, property rights or religious pluralism.  Nor does it have to tolerate the violent acts of murder and mayhem the Qutbist keep throwing at us.  Instead of that, the West could decide to tell Islam--through words and deeds--that certain things won't be tolerated.  Like honor killings, imposition of sharia, the crushing of religious minorities or female circumsicion.

Would that turn Islam into a religion that welcomes democratic reform?  Probably not.  But it would probably be better than the subtle message of approval some in the West insist on sending to Islam. 

Planned Parenthood-Partners in Crime (KingShamus)

You want to know why Planned Parenthood is lower than whale scat?

Watch this.

  

Ummm...wow.

Amy Woodruff just sorta gave the entire game away, didn't she?

So much of the pro-choice side's intellectual argument rests on the utterly vacuous legality defense.  Roe v. Wade supposedly brought the process of terminating unwanted pregnancies from the filthy unsafe back allies into the respectable clinical sterile environment of the modern operating room.  Remember, according to the pro-abortion crowd, terminating a pregnancy has to be legal or women will be put at risk and denied their constitutional rights.

First, a question for the audience:  At what point does the giggling moronic Planned Parenthood hack in the video consider the legality of what she is doing?  After all, Amy Woodruff doesn't know she's being set up.  As best she can tell this is a real pimp with a real ho who is peddling 14 year old minors for sex.  In fact, she is doing everything in her power to help a pimp--a degenerate sex trafficker who is selling children--stay out of trouble with the law.      

Human imagination would be sorely tested trying to dream up an ideologically blinkered moral idiot such as Ms. Woodruff.  It seems impossible that a person would allow herself to get so confused that she turns a blind eye towards this kind of extreme child endangerment and exploitation.  Unfortunately, reality is far more inventive than our darkest nightmares.  

Make no mistake-Ms. Woodruff is engaging in criminal behavior.  Moreover, it's a crime involving the central justification of Planned Parenthood.  That organization breaks its arm patting itself on the back for protecting women from abuse.  Yet here we see a gatekeeper of Planned Parenthood making sure that underage girls are kept in sexual bondage.  If the situation in the clip isn't exploitation of women, what the hell is?

Speaking of rights, what about the right of fourteen year old girls not to be turned into sex slaves?  I mean, I know it's not like the right to abort a child that is so obviously spelled out in the US Constitution [sarc/] but still.  I'm not a civil rights expert, but I'm pretty sure that if someone is pimping out minors for sex, that is going to adversely affect that whole 'Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness" equation.  I guess the right of Planned Parenthood to make money off of terminating pregnancies trumps the rights of teenagers to not get used like a box of Kleenex.     

Instead of preventing abuse, the legality of abortion has created the conditions for ever-uglier forms of anti-female assaults.  Better still, the group that considers itself the primary guardian of women's rights is right there giving aid and comfort to the most vile abusers out there.   Why, if I didn't know better, I'd think Planned Parenthood was just paying lip service to protecting women while they simultaneously set ladies up for a particularly nasty fall or something.      

Prediction: There will be about a hundred times more outrage from the pro-abortion feminist sob sisters about how this video was obtained rather than the fact that Planned Parenthood put itself in the position of helping out a pedophile-enabling pimp.

I snagged the original link at Instapundit.  Muchas gracias.

Cross-posted at BDKS.  Thank you very much, Juliette.  You rule.

Bogus Christianists

Yes, I have paid attention to the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), the murder of six other people, and the attempted political assassination by the Leftist media of Former Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) in these past few days.

Yes, I'm up to my ears in taking care of my great-aunt--an invalid since her accident on September 24th of last year.  Yes, I am grateful to the awesome King Shamus for keeping my blog alive from that time until now.

But what I want to know is this: why is no one on the Left nor the militant atheists saying anything about the fact that, during the memorial services for the Tucson Massacre victims, both Eric Holder--Attorney General of the United States--and Janet Napolitano--Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security--put forth no words other than the Word of God, from Testaments both Old and New?

Where is all the screeching about separation of Church and State, Leftists?  Is the dearth of outrage because you suspect that the two were just putting up a front?

Well, hey, if that's what you suspect, I suspect the same--Left and Right in agreement for a change.

(Thanks to my American Dad)

UPDATE: Have I judged the state of Holder's and Napolitano's hearts? Yes, so maybe I should back off.  But as for most of the Left, I still want to know why they have said nothing about the Bible quotes from the governmental agents at the Tucson Massacre Memorial Service.