Forever and Ever

No nation, group, or sane individual would ever want to suffer constant warfare, but thanks to the weakness of Jimmy Carter who allowed the specter of Khomeinism to be released, that fate is what the US has been consigned to endure. The genie of jihad had been more or less dormant on the international scene with some manifestations of secular pan-Arabism as was manifested in Nasser, some Marxist leaning extremism in Yemen, and the theatrical but dangerous rise of Qaddafi in Libya, but until Carter promoted the downfall of the Shah, tolerated the return of Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran, and countenanced the seizure of the US embassy there and the detention of fifty-two US hostages for 444 days, the threat of Islamic extremism could have been contained. Now and for the foreseeable future, the West will face violent, expansionist political Islam because the US showed herself to be a toothless tigress when a better leader would have demonstrated just how hard we could bite. Now we have eternal terror threat, modified lifestyles, and relinquished freedoms because Carter had no metal. Just think what one committed felon did, murdering four armed police in Washington state and amplify that thousands of times over with American Muslims returning from the Hajj who may take a side trip to Pakistan to learn and train hard in the ways of war. But a wiser man than I long ago said "eternal vigilance is the price of freedom".

Double Down Barack

Barack Hussein Obama will speak to the world on Tuesday to announce his intentions for the US in Afghanistan. Obama is determined to prevail on several fronts, unfortunately the Afghan front is not amongst them. Obama is still determined to sign the US onto firm emissions reduction targets when he visits Copenhagen to battle the chimera of man-caused global warming despite the emerging scientific fraud scandal involving the founding tenets of the false church of anthropogenic power to influence the environment all that drastically. In fact, the President should be doing the opposite and doing everything possible to find and harness cheap energy to restart the engine of our prosperity. President Obama is equally determined to push health care forward, and pass whatever higher taxes are necessary to start to fund it. This is of course at a time when Obama pretends an interest in job creation, going so far as to have an upcoming job summit. The best way to create jobs in the private sector of course would be to lower the marginal tax rates, giving the entrepreneurs who do the hiring more capital to expand and move the nation forward again. But Obama does not have the slightest interest in doing this. His are the natural inclinations of the Marxist. On the shooting war front, Obama has already announced a timetable for capitulation (withdrawal from) Iraq and his troop commitment of 34,000 to be sent to Afghanistan to be announced Tuesday is doing war on the cheap, under the number of forces requested by commanders in the field, and selling us short as a nation by not even attempting to win- only trying to "wind down" what Obama himself had termed our "war of necessity". I agree the war was and is necessary and in any endeavor with such high table stakes, victory must absolutely be the goal, even if it means spending trillions and reimposing selective service (the military draft). The alternative of craven retreat with the Taliban coming back into power is simply unthinkable. Imagine a victory parade through the streets of Kabul with Mullah Omar hand in hand with Osama bin Laden himself. This the American people could never countenance. So on matters that harm our prospect for recovery, cripple prosperity, and sap initiative, President Obama is all in- from strictures on carbon emissions based on a false premise and fraud with proof to the contrary becoming readily apparent to those willing to look, to freedom-robbing "hell care" schemes to ration our medical access and tell us how we must live, Obama is dead serious, but on a war we could, should, and must win, Obama is temporizing.

Scuttle the Ship

Is it possible that a supposedly wealthy Arab enclave might default on a substantial amount of dollars in loans as a means of waging economic warfare against the West? Just as some contended that OPEC nations (including Venezuela) raised the barrel price of oil so substantially at the end of the the last term of the last President Bush that their actions became the straw that broke the camel's back and made recession inevitable with four dollar plus per gallon gasoline and that this served as a concerted assault against our economies, Dubai was biding her time to default just when it would hurt the West the most and crush any chance of creating or sustaining real economic recovery. Is it possible that our adversaries just manipulate the market, use their cartel status as a weapon, and even time the release of bad news to wage war by other means against the capitalist and the infidel?

Fudge the Numbers

A cataclysm is brewing, but the dinosaur media is playing ostrich and doing everything it can to ignore what by rights should be a monumental story- in fact the story of moment- focusing on the climategate scandal, rather than a pair of celebrity wannabe gatecrashers. Science has always been predicated on questioning hypothesis and heretofore the obligation of science was to attempt to disprove itself. This premise of skepticism has been abandoned when it comes to man-made climate change, generally advanced as man-caused global warming with the outriders who question man's role and his ability to have huge influence on the earth's atmosphere being termed "deniers" in the same sense as Holocaust deniers. But now the dam has burst with the leak of material related to manipulation of data at East Anglia University in Great Britain, either by a hacker (hackers) or a whistle blower within the program itself. Scientific fraud and gross manipulation seem to have taken place on an international scale to promote the global warming myth. It seems in the words of Damon Runyon that "the fix was in". Of course, governments have been known to massage data to accentuate the positive and bury the negative as we may now be seeing with the Obama administration feeding us a non-existent rosy recovery and artificially keeping unemployment numbers already grim but under what they actually are to make Obama's performance seem outstanding when in the estimation of many, we have not even emerged from recession or are facing a second dip into recession scenario. But what has been done in the realm of global warming turns scientific integrity on its head. We have long faced political correctness on the college campus but this climate orthodoxy has been subject to political correctness run amok and now seems to have been bolstered by statistical tricks, lies, and contrived fraud. A worldwide industry has been spawned and the world seems ready to sacrifice more productivity and prosperity at the coming climate summit in Copenhagen based not on man-made climate change but made-up fiction.

Obama Is Disarming

Barack Hussein Obama is a dynamic speaker from a prepared text. While I and others find him distant or even cold in the manner he relates to humanity, some might consider his charisma enough to disarm in the word's traditional sense. I and the world leaders Obama has encountered who have left him in the lurch do not consider him "disarming" in this way. But Obama seems hellbent to disarm in literal ways- from his time as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama has been against the private ownership of guns as seems to be a right clearly conferred by the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, and more important, part of the natural right- indeed, God-given obligation of self-defence. Obama has been an advocate of nuclear disarmament- the first US President so convicted of the notion to take substantive more or less unilateral actions to reduce our nuclear stockpiles. Now Obama, seeks to further gut force protection by signing the US onto the anti-personnel landmine ban treaty as was advanced in her lifetime by the somewhat vacuous Princess Diana. Obama is nothing more than a pie-in -the-sky fantasist, knee jerk liberal who believes guns=bad, nukes=bad, landmines=bad without any consideration of the great number of innocent deaths these tools have prevented. Projecting weakness only invites attacks.

Friends at Technorati

For linking purposes, this post is a departure from my usual cogent, pithy, and sometimes even witty offerings to my loyal readers. Claim code:ZWX7HSJNE6DV

Attitude and Gratitude

Barack Hussein Obama is virtually certain to issue the obligatory Thanksgiving proclamation that previous Presidents have found de rigueur at this time of year. Obama's predecessors have genuinely felt the gratitude and have not found it necessary to try to undo the country and start over, but our current President has promised to be transformative and is certainly delivering change. Obama is expanding Federal scope and reach beyond anything seen before, enhancing Washington's intrusiveness and power right down to looking over your family doctor's shoulder during your physical. Barack Obama has traveled the world over apologizing for the nation as America existed prior to his ascendancy and groveled to Saudi, Japanese, and as shown today on Drudge, China's leader. Obama is pathetic, but his objectives, if fulfilled, will ruin us. If public option health care passes, a bureaucracy as large as the entire Federal government itself as it exists today will have to be created to service it as the medical sector is over fifteen percent of the nation's economy. Ad to this the dependency class Obama seems to be deliberately growing and one sees the danger of rapidly losing the beacon of freedom and prosperity the United States heretofore was. Count your blessings this year and number among them that Obama's plan to transform America into a socialist country has not fully succeeded yet.

The Buck Passer

Has anyone else noticed that for a man in charge of such weighty issues Barack Obama seems to have mighty narrow shoulders? When America was attacked on September 11, 2001, George W. Bush accepted all blame for any security breech which advanced the attacks (too much responsibility for some who wanted to see those in the ranks of the nation's security services purged of those who dropped the ball and failed to connect the dots of a number of Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons simultaneously with no interest in learning to take-off or land their planes, right down to security screeners who saw men of similar backgrounds in Boston boarding planes with box cutters and mace and did nothing to thwart the plot). When any controversy is generated by the Obama administration, the President finds a handy target to deflect criticism elsewhere. Nearly a year into office, our economic problems remain the last President Bush's fault. Terrorists who bragged of planning the 9/11 outrage are brought to trial in New York City, talk to Attorney General Holder, as if the President did not know and could not influence or alter the decision to remove them from Gitmo. You are a Hollywood leftist type, a prominent Democratic contributor from Manhattan, or an American of East Indian heritage who has accomplished greatness but you failed to receive an invitation to the President's first official state dinner in the midst of many other unofficial bacchanals and feel slighted, do not blame President Obama, the First Lady, his wife Michelle Obama makes all the final decisions on the guest list, our duck and run President will not even stand-up and face the music on party guest lists. Does it not sadden to have such an evident weak sister on decisions great and small in office? Does it surprise anyone that Obama refused and refuses to seek victory in Afghanistan- now on an issue of national prestige, even maintaining credibility as a nation, Obama will announce not a plan to win but an "exit strategy". Weaklings who do not feel comfortable with the very "idea of victory" inevitably secure defeat in their own self-proclaimed wars of necessity.

Deny, Delay, Denounce

Iran has launched a five day war game aimed at protecting the nuclear program that that nation initially denied having, reluctantly admitted later only after said program became impossible to hide, still claimed various facilities for atomic production did not exist, and only recently complied with international inspection of one long-denied facility, only after Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency had provided the Iranians with sufficient time to hide weapons development evidence at the site near the holy city of Qom. Much of the world has ignored the threat a nuclear weapon in the hands of religious fanatics would pose believing that the primary and probably sole target of any Iranian WMD attack would be Israel, but countries in the region are increasingly worried with Iranian proxy Shias already launching a brush fire war from Yemen against the Sunni regime in neighboring Saudi Arabia. The Iranians have succeeded in delaying imposition of more serious sanctions, playing the international community for the suckers they are and are near if not passed the point of weapons production. Consternation has long been felt in Israel, which state the Iranian leader consistently disparages and which Ahmadinejad has ominously promised will be erased from the globe. The Iranian regime is ever closer to fulfilling that pledge.

End of Exceptionalism

The US Senate moved one step closer to terminating the greatest experiment in liberty the world has ever known with last night's health care vote. The unique nature of the cradle of liberty and her role in spreading freedom is lost on supporters of health care reform, who assail our foundational values, our risk for reward ethos, our very heritage and noble patrimony to re-make Amerika in the mold of a European nanny state. At best we will be a fiscally broken shadow of our former self as a nation should public option pass, at worst and I fear the worst as I have never known of any truly benevolent dictators, the US could descend into a totalitarian nightmare of care lines like Great Depression era breadlines and citizens having to beg bureaucrats to spare their or their relatives' lives. This is not the country we have known but eerily similar to what many of our progenitors fled from- do not believe it can not happen here.

The Last Straw

If the two thousand page freedom-stealing behemoth of health care reform passes, put paid to the country we have loved. I am less than sanguine that any Democrat will stand to thwart the legislation by joining a Republican filibuster. The jubilation may be short-lived as the triumph will engender so much bitterness among voters that if any fair election is held, Democrat office-holders will lose in droves. Do not give the left even a Pyrrhic victory though- it has too much of a cost, too much intrusiveness into the most personal aspects of our lives, and too much of a chance to ruin US.

Convention Center Madness

Controversy has once again fallen on Nashville, Tennessee's planned convention center, this time over the city government using eminent domain to obtain five acres of unimproved property (at the moment a parking lot but where the current owner Tower Properties intended to construct a hotel complex of their own using private funds) for more than fourteen million dollars. I am not concerned at the particular details of this beyond my innate preference for private rather than public projects- those that make economic sense without the need for taxpayer subsidy and whose expense is borne by developers who spend their own and their investors' money on an effort they believe makes economic sense and avoid raiding the public coffers. What concerns me greatly though is the construction of a new billion or so dollar convention center at a time when convention business is drying up nationwide. Las Vegas with every conceivable tourist facility and amenity available is suffering the largest drop in convention business that city has ever experienced. Hotel and casino construction there has largely been put on hold, with massive planned projects postponed or canceled. Our President, Barack Hussein Obama has himself warned of the possibility of a double dip recession which may be overly optimistic as we may be on the precipice of economic depression if we have not already entered said catastrophic downturn. Why continue a massive unnecessary expenditure of public funds (read money confiscated from taxpayers), when there appears to be no prospect whatsoever of robust convention business in the US in the foreseeable future? Why squander so much on a project of choice when so many other needs from funding the schools to repairing potholes already and always exist? Why spend so much now for a short-term boost in construction jobs, many of which will likely be filled with undocumented workers (read criminal aliens) when all you are creating is a continued expense for the community of Nashville to maintain with property owners ultimately burdened with higher property taxes when the tourism and convention business city leaders, the politicians who are pushing the project forward, never see the hotel tax revenue they are expecting to fund the project materialize and leave the general fund exposed with bond obligations to pay for, by necessity producing a rise in every tax and fee the city can muster to pay for the mistake of building now in the teeth of what is at least a recession? Why not use prudence and delay the new convention center until the economy improves?

More Government Efficiency

A computer glitch, initially reported to have happened in Atlanta, has thrown the air traffic control system on the East Coast into disarray. Only about 40% of flights are running near schedule with air traffic controllers having to maintain a twenty minute window between flights rather than the usual eight. Some analysts expect the system to still be recovering from the lag until Thanksgiving. Why would you want to give the government gang that can not shoot straight on something as simple as maintaining the air corridors control over your life and death decisions when it come to health care?

Rates A Four?

Sarah Palin was asked to give her opinion of Barack Obama's performance while on the national media leg of her junket for Going Rogue. She is generously rating the President on a scale of one to ten at four. At best, I would give him a two, only because he has not fulfilled his promises to his peacenik and radical base and is still fighting the terrorists in Iraq rather than the retreat to defeat he campaigned on, and he also enjoys small kudos because he has not haphazardly closed Gitmo and in fact, has extended his time frame to do so in a more open-ended way than his leftist base would like. So the only aspects of his service so far commendable are continuations of Bush policy he had pledged to change while he was running for the highest office. On the plus side, Obama has not managed to give Taiwan to the mainland Reds or inadvertently through his justly perceived weakness managed to start a shooting war on the Korean peninsula. All in all, with the economy continuing to tank, unemployment cresting at depression levels, casualties mounting in Afghanistan, the failure to engage in the war on Islamic radicalism or even call jihad for what it is, I think a rating of two out of ten is plenty.

An American Thatcher

Could Sarah Palin be America's Iron Lady? Sarah Palin is gaining vast national exposure while promoting her autobiography Going Rogue which is being released nationwide. Palin will tour to promote the book, visiting smaller towns not often graced by a national figure turned author. She is folksy, as was a Will Rogers, projecting a down-to-earth image of caring and common sense. A caller to yesterday's Rush Limbaugh show said she had a Reagan-type optimism, which surely she does, but which Obama himself projects with his pretense of "hope". The difference is Palin like Reagan is firmly committed to the principles of the free market which will move the nation forward, while Obama, for all his rhetoric, is shrouding the US in the vale of socialism which will strangle recovery and prevent real sustained prosperity from ever returning. Palin also has the substantive experience of governing the largest state and dealing with complex issues from environment to energy to the shared border with Russia. Mock her all you want liberals- Sarah Palin certainly could not be doing any worse than your President.

Support the Troops

Barack Hussein Obama proclaimed his desire to "end" the war in Afghanistan before his term of Presidency expires, so as not to leave a problem in the hands of his successor. On the same day a poll said only 44% of Americans think the effort there is worthwhile while 52% now oppose the Afghan war. The President himself is largely responsible for the flagging support for the war at home. Obama has lacked leadership, shown indecision, refused to voice a vision for victory, even said he was "uncomfortable with the idea of victory" there. How could American support for the Afghanistan enterprise not slip when a President who campaigned that it would be our war of necessity can not even decide strategy, tactics, or fulfill the military's request for more boots on the ground there? Obama is failing the Commander-in Chief's primary mission- he is letting the troops down, creating more and unnecessary US casualties, and denying the servicemen and women the tools they need on the ground in Afghanistan to prevail. Of course, the public opposition will grow to a war if it simply becomes a bloodbath of attrition with no end and more important no "win" in sight.

Seems Vaguely Familiar

Jimmy Carter deflected blame for his failure in the Iran hostage crisis in a story from Thailand that was linked on Drudge. The former President Carter said he held-off on an attack because he feared twenty thousand Iranians would have been killed. So out of his concern for the welfare of the hostage-takers, Carter unleashed hell. Jimmy Carter let the genie of Islamic fundamentalism out of the bottle. So Carter's inaction has ultimately led to thousands of US deaths in the many subsequent terror attacks that have been inflicted on Americans all over the world and ironically many more innocent Iranians have lost their lives- Baha'i, minority Sunnis, some of Iran's repressed Jews who were disappeared, members of the tiny Iranian Christian community, Iranians of Arab rather than the dominant Persian background, the recently murdered protesters of the election stolen by Ahmadinejad, Iran's beleaguered homosexuals who have been publicly hanged, half a million or more killed in the war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq which might not have happened if Carter had reversed the Islamic Revolution which the US had the military capacity, but not the will, to do. Now we have a similarly weak leader, unwilling to confront evil and growing menace. I wonder where this craven failure of the will leads and how many thousands or millions more innocent will pay with their lives for the current administration's indecision and cowardice.

A Credit Primer

In my last post, I lampooned the presence of self-congratulatory signs emblazoned with the names or readily identifiable symbols associated with certain self-serving politicians who advance their acclaim while squandering our future. If Democrat leaders such as Nashville's former mayor Bill Purcell expect plaudits when they build a park complex, then their successors should accept blame when they close parks and public golf courses as a current Mayor Karl Dean claims due to budgetary constraints, he is now forced to do. If you spend like a drunken sailor, and grab all the gusto for your effort, when the bill comes due as inevitably it must, stand up and pay the piper- accept the responsibility with broad shoulders as readily as you took credit you never deserved. Ex-Mayor Purcell did not invent parks, green ways, or bridges, and we were not relying on ferries, before Bill Purcell (a Democrat) enlightened us. Now his Democrat successor Dean can not simply shrug his shoulders and say we have a lousy economy or my predecessor over-extended us when he closes what was such a pressing necessity for the public good when Purcell was mayor. On a national scale, Obama can print all the devalued currency in the world to pay for his excesses, but what you end up with when the Treasury's presses overheat is Wiemar wheelbarrows and Zimbabwe millionaires. Let's see how the leftist try and claim credit for that.

More Monumental Blunders

I happened upon a public project today, one that predated Obama's massive New Deal, WPA-style make-work projects. It was a mammoth pedestrian bridge spanning both sides of Nashville's Cumberland River to connect two green ways. One may debate the public good served by such projects as the most efficient use of scarce resources, but what is beyond debate is the audacity of politicians who reach into your wallet to fund such expenditures and then demand brownie points from you for their self-aggrandizing arrogance. A large, impressive bronze placard appeared at the gateway to the span. On it, in bold relief was "This project was made possible by the inspiration and vision of Mayor Bill Purcell". This is audacity at its finest, the chutzpah to tax us to death and expect garlands and kisses. President Obama has spread similar projects across the country, no doubt expecting gratitude and lifelong voter loyalty as FDR attained with the CCC, TVA, and the rest of this nation's early embrace of socialism. The symbol of Obama's so-called recovery-inducing stimulus spending is popping up all over, virtually ubiquitous, but such projects ultimately prolong misery, with the taxes necessary to fund them squeezing private enterprise into submission. We are paying for the monumental hubris of our leaders and only those possessed of monumental stupidity or beholden to these politicians for their jobs would keep voting them in. Obama's few make-work jobs are forcing the private sector engine of prosperity out of existence. Command and control economies with their bureaus of central planning do not ease but cause misery.

A National Disgrace

If a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a few seconds of video can be priceless. Early in his administration, Obama bowed before the king of Saudi Arabia, which action, his spokesman, the hapless Robert Gibbs, subsequently denied. I am sure Gibbs will again concoct some hollow excuse as a denunciation of what we all clearly saw, the President of the US once again demeaning himself at the feet of the Emperor of Japan and his bride. Perhaps Obama lost his contact lens, both contact lenses, or the same contact twice. Perhaps his invisible pince-nez fell off- twice. Our Founding Fathers, particularly Adams and Franklin bridled at the idea that any man was better by status of birth and rejected the Divine Right of kings. Now, we have an insouciant dunce bowing before an Emperor who has re-instituted the Shinto belief that he is a living god which the Japanese were forced to relinquish for over a generation in the wake of their defeat in World War II. Think of what the living heroes of the Pacific campaign must feel to see their President at the feet of the leader of a nation that led the merciless war of aggression, attempting the phony Asian Co-prosperity that the US was forced to resist after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. I can only imagine what the few remaining American survivors of the Bataan Death March must feel to see our country subservient, subjugated, and apologizing for their sacrifice and the loss of their comrades from a US leader who will not even acknowledge the justice and innocent-life saving aspects of our A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This Obama must sicken our Greatest Generation that fought so we would not have to bow to foreign tyrants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5kHykbu5w

The Pacific Presidency

On his current Asia excursion, Barack Hussein Obama has proclaimed his is the first "Pacific Presidency", citing his youth spent in Indonesia. Notice, Obama did not emphasize his birth which has been alleged to have occurred in the fiftieth state, nor did he focus on his high school years that clearly were spent in Hawaii. Obama highlighted his life in the world's most populous Muslim nation as the source of his Pacific affinity. Does anyone else not find this curious? This may ad fuel to the fire on the right of those questioning Obama's very eligibility to serve. Why did the President not say his was the first Pacific Presidency simply because of his Hawaiian place of birth, what he did say only fans the doubts amongst what till now was considered a fringe "birther" crowd. Maybe Obama delights in yanking his most strident critics chains.

Obama's Pocket Judges

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi was asked this week about the constitutionality of the public-option health care plan that passed narrowly in the House and is now in the hands of the Senate. The Speaker looked at the reporter with the temerity to ask what should be an obvious question with utter contempt, saying in her expression "the Constitution is whatever we say it is. We bend it to our will". Pelosi is right, the activist judges facilitate the rise of radicalism with their Constitution as living document philosophy. Conservatives believe in the natural rights of man which gave rise to natural law that became the basis of our founding documents. Starting with the bizarre Roe v Wade ruling with a majority opinion based on "penumbras and emanations" to a right to privacy nowhere delineated in the Constitution to McCain-Feingold restricting free speech, the life's blood of democracy, the left has its politicians and judges working hand in hand to gut our rights. From rejecting the plain language of the Second Amendment to destroying property rights with eminent domain and an expansive consideration of environmental regulation, the courts are the handmaidens of those who grow government the most. There is a natural inclination of any organization or bureaucracy to consolidate power, advance its own fiat, and do everything it can to perpetuate itself. It was no surprise to see the courts declare military tribunals for Gitmo detainees deemed illegal, the courts wanted that purview for themselves and now Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will receive a trip to the scene of the monstrous crime he has openly bragged of planning, the September 11 attacks, at our expense he will be tried in New York City. This trial will cause chaos, increase danger, and does nothing to advance our national security. This is just the way Pelosi, a radical Representative from radical San Francisco, and Obama whose own Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, notoriously uttered "You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste", want things to go. If tension is simmering everywhere with violence, that seems to have been preventable, boiling over at Fort Hood and unemployment nearing Great Depression levels, people will be too distracted to see their rights are diminishing, disappearing, being stolen by the internationalists, the elite, the cadre of leftist politicians, and their anti-Constitutional rights-robbing robed bandits, the very judges who we have entrusted to safeguard our God-given liberty.

None Too Discerning

I never (to my knowledge) met a terrorist. Barack Hussein Obama began his political career in a terrorist's home (Bill Ayers- one of the founders of the Weathermen who exploded bombs that left several people dead in the 1960s). I do not know any racketeers and certainly never had a Tony Rezko arrange a sweetheart deal to buy a primary home as Obama did in Chicago. I never thought the regime of the mullahs in Iran could be talked down from their A-bomb aspirations or that they would not use the three hapless US students who allegedly wandered across the poorly-demarcated border from Iraqi Kurdistan as pawns as this is the same fanatic brand of tyrant who violated every international norm to hold fifty-two members of our embassy staff in Tehran for 444 days, but Obama is convinced he can use his charisma to charm Iran back into the family of nations. Beyond poor initial instincts, Obama with his hasty comments on the Cambridge Gates affair, with his policies which are evidently not working, and with his radical agenda, is either in well-over his head or deliberately dismantling the underpinnings of the country as his past associations with scofflaws and America-hating terrorists would suggest. I do not fault some of Obama's voters for their lack of discernment because the old-line media assiduously avoided digging into Obama's unusual background and almost never revealed much of what was known to implicate Obama that was only circulating in the small universe of the right-wing press. Many who voted for Obama, as clean as a whistle as he was portrayed, now are clearer on his character, but it is way to late to change their ballots to favor McCain.

Stench of Weakness

Iran rejects Western-offered compromise over their nuclear program, yet the world's lone superpower, the United States, says give Iran more time to reconsider, and sanctions which might have some suasion, are not ratcheted up but deferred to give Ahmadinejad and the mullahs more time to build a weapon and attach said weapon to a viable delivery system. This is appeasement of the worst kind and comes after we betrayed the Czech Republic and Poland by withdrawing the missile shield we had promised in what must be seen as an act of capitulation to angry Russia which gave us nothing in return for our servile gesture. So much of the former Eastern Bloc, the Warsaw Pact members which have embraced the West and sent their sons to die along side ours in Iraq and Afghanistan, have simply been sold out by the Obama administration which does not want to rock the boat with an ever-strengthening resurgent Russia which is reasserting military dominance as we cut our defense budgets and which is like the bad old days, interfering in Latin America- this time making common cause with Latin America's new Castro, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Even yesterday's North Korean incursion into South Korean territorial waters must be viewed in the light of the meeting US diplomats are about to have with North Korea, as we come crawling to resume talks over that last Stalinist state's atomic threat. The US could obliterate the pygmy pretend power in moments, but stands quaking at a tiny dictator who can not even pose as well as Mussolini. Even proposing talks with so-called "moderate Taliban" invites aggression as our enemies smell blood. They know their roadside bombs and suicide attacks are having an effect, or we would not be seeking talks. Obama's dovish outreach does the opposite of what the President intends. Domestically, the President's deliberate mischaracterization of the Fort Hood attack as anything other than jihad-inspired terrorism reeks with political correctness and is another symptom of a weakening resolve. Obama sells out friends and leaves Israel in Iran's crosshairs, as we learn yet again, the lesson of the schoolyard, weakness invites aggression. Obama has only emboldened the enemies of peace.

Boxes and Bags

Some volunteered, some were conscripted/ Some strode off, knowing they could beat the world/ Some were filled with trepidation from that fateful premonition/ Some were great patriots who embraced the founding ideal/ Some were fresh off the boat and had no idea what we were fighting for/ But they went anyway/ Think of what they could have done and seen/ Had they been allowed to play out the string/ Their future generations that never were/ The achievements becoming great accomplishments never made/ How they would have loved to live past Armistice Day/ In trenches, in forests, in fields, in oceans- lost to the sea/ In jungles and mountains and deserts of later struggles/ They fell in ones, and tens, and stacked like cord wood/ Did they pine for home as the were dying?/ Their love and loss that left us crying/ All those unrealized dreams/ Never tarnish their legacy and defend that spark of liberty that burned in their breasts and impelled them forward into the jaws of eternity.

Really Not Clever

Barack Hussein Obama has been called our most brilliant President by his acolytes. Obama has incredibly poor initial instincts for so supposedly smart a person. When Henry Louis Gates was arrested following a confrontation the professor fueled in Cambridge, Obama rushed to Gates' defense, essentially slandering American law enforcement with the broad-brush charge of racism. Obama was precipitous, uninformed, and ultimately wrong. In the Fort Hood atrocity, Obama listened to his advisors and hurried a Presidential statement, delivered on live TV by Obama himself. Obama followed advice and came out to speak but then spent two minutes on a shout-out on a completely unrelated matter while he monopolized network coverage, diminishing the impact of the meat of the statement he was making. He deliberately undercut the horror of the Fort Hood event, deflecting the terroristic intentions of the shooter, with some tangent about native Americans and Indian affairs involving a medal-recipient that had absolutely nothing to do with Fort Hood, but the cameras were there, were on, and Obama could betray his own misunderstandings, lack of comprehension of the attack, apprehension that real evil exists with fatal intentions toward the innocent, and Obama used the podium and chance he enjoyed to cloud the issue for the rest of us. A wiser statement would have been, "An act of terrorism has been perpetrated today against innocents on American soil. We will get to the bottom of the attack, capture the guilty, prosecute them to the full extent of the law, and do everything possible to assist the victims' families, the wounded, and the survivors, while doing all we can to never permit such an act in the future."

Stop the Presses

When the last President Bush was in office, the press was shouting "spider, spider", suggesting Bush was drawing us ever deeper into a web of lies. Bush was supposed to be a self-indulgent, bumpkin of a frat boy, who relied on the first President Bush and Dick Cheney to make his decisions for him, yet, George the Second was so practiced a liar that he could manipulate intelligence services around the world, the press, and the public, to initiate an unnecessary war with Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction. My take is that George W. Bush was honorable and that the Iraqi government firing at US patrol aircraft in the no-fly zones was sufficient reason to resume hostilities, but some on the fringe of politics both right and left have even convinced themselves that Bush had a secret hand in the September 11 attacks to justify rewarding Halliburton cronies and in so doing, initiate worldwide carnage. The press has even granted airtime to the most bizarre conspiracy theorists who insist the fall of Tower Seven at the World Trade Center proves an inside job. Now, with Barack Hussein Obama in office, the dinosaur press gladly helps construct a web of lies, not daring expose even the most ludicrous Obama exaggerations (doctors enriching themselves by unnecessarily lopping off diabetic limbs for instance- which no physician could ever become wealthy by doing because reimbursement for said procedure is so low). The old-line press is actively complicit, doing all it can to advance the Obama agenda because they agree with Obama on his goals and where he is taking the nation. So, Obama's inauthentic moments are ignored, when he is insincere or contrived, the old-line media spins to his favor. If a Republican were doing or saying the same things, the main stream media would hammer him for it.

Black and Red

President Barack Hussein Obama sat in the pews of the church of one Reverend Jeremiah Wright for more than twenty years, yet somehow, Obama contends he missed the black liberation theology message, which is both separatist and Marxist, that pervades that South side of Chicago church. The contention that Obama managed to absent himself from services every time controversy was broached, defies imagination. To Obama, Wright was a father-figure but Obama supposedly only knew the church as any other black church, a Gospel-preaching bedrock of the black family and community. Recently, Reverend Wright, who had gone to ground to deflect his association with Obama while Obama was running, reemerged to speak, and Wright was captured on video as saying the atheist theory of Marxism and his view of Jesus were not incompatible. In fact, the Reverend Wright saw the social justice and redistributionist Red stream as essential missions for his church to promote, but somehow in all his years of faithful attendance, President Obama never heard an inkling of this.

Tone Deaf Democrats

Democrats in the US House of Representatives heralded victory as they trumpeted the triumph of socialism over good sense and against the interests and wishes of wide swathes of their own constituencies. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House from uber-liberal San Francisco where her radical voters might actually embrace socialized medicine, joined President Obama in shilling the public health option, holding up the endorsements of the AARP, which is acting against the wishes of many of its own now terrified members rationally worried about the coming certain Medicare cuts and realizing that even if there are not official "death panels", the bill through forced rationing nonetheless produces the same effect of denying not just choice but ultimately care to the most vulnerable (i.e. no cancer treatment, just palliative care for people suffering with dementia), and the AMA, whose membership comprises only seventeen percent of physicians and was divided in any event over the House-passed plan. Middle America, so-called flyover country, does not want public-option "hell care". Seniors, contrary to the position of the AARP, are in the forefront against Obama care. Doctors, who want the freedom to treat patients without a bureaucrat in the way are against the plan. The Democrats who pushed the bill through ignored all that, feeling that they are in secure districts, that their reelections will be reassured through vote fraud and manipulation, or perhaps because they have been told that due to some Reichstag fire-type pretext, they are secure in their jobs for life because they will never have to stand for another election. The tea party protests are an organic movement, not astro-turfing, but stem from genuine outrage, mostly directed at liberal tax and spend politicians. If the people are given the chance to vote, many of the bums who have assailed our patrimony and spent our grandchildrens' legacy will be thrown out of office. This vote on Obama care has sealed their fate.

More Deliberate Sophistry

Lester Holt on this morning's Today Show on NBC at least twice said the perpetrator of the Fort Hood attack did not leave a note, so no one knows his motive. Now, the media guesses it could be that the major was upset about a pending deployment or abuse that the major alleged he suffered because of his Middle Eastern background from fellow service members. You don't suppose that the motive behind the attack is obvious and the dinosaur media is too craven to report it- the attack was an act of religious fervor. Obfuscation, distortion, and lies have become the stock and trade of old-line US media and this spewing of political correctness has killed and can kill still more.

Real Snow Job

Barack Hussein Obama has played up the so-called recovery and his bootlicks in the old-line media hardly question this lie. The propagandists have heralded millions of jobs saved or created, parroting the administration line. The other shoe fell yesterday with a stunning and unanticipated(at least by Obama's flacks) increase in the nation's level of unemployment to an announced figure of 10.2%. Obama promised if his formula for economic success was followed unemployment would not rise over 8%, but his plans and promises could not contain the dislocation his socialist agenda is exacerbating. True unemployment factoring in discouraged workers who have given up looking for the non-existent jobs Obama claims to be creating and adding those who sought full-time employment but could only find part-time jobs is thought to be at least 17.5%. The only job Obama is interested in saving is his own, and no nation already suffering such economic destruction can afford to cripple her own industry with cap and trade and public-option gateway to socialized medicine health care that will only further erode jobs. If you were trying to assail American prosperity and finish off American exceptionalism, you would be hard-pressed to do a better job than Obama and his Democrats are doing.

Old Corrupt Media

ABC News was doing everything it could to tap dance around the obvious motive for the Fort Hood attack. They even suggested post-traumatic stress disorder although the army doctor had never been forward-deployed or even deployed abroad. They reeled out some who shot John about the major being harassed in the service because of his Islamic background. ABC even reported that the psychiatrist had been called a "camel-jockey". Any insult to the major based on religion coming from an enlisted man in today's politically-correct military would have been a court martial offense, and I hardly believe fellow officers would have insulted a Muslim colleague in the hyper-sensitive post-Tailhook scandal military, yet the dinosaur media churns out rationalizations and justification to absolve or excuse some of the religious fanatic's guilt. The moribund press covers for a murderer and attempts to cover-up the glaring, obvious religious inspiration behind the massacre.

Jihad's Hidden Warriors

Osama bin Laden does not need to hatch a scheme. The Hizbollah bombers of Beirut need not craft a battle plan. Whether Wahhab-inspired Sunni fanatics or committed Shia extremists, no one need formulate a plot for one inspired by like thinking to take shape. It could be a lone gunman or a small cadre of acquaintances who never received instruction from abroad or foreign training, all that is necessary is the jihadi mindset of nihilistic political Islam that for decent Muslims is an abomination and perversion of their own religion, but for those who wage war in Islam's name, it is the highest expression of their faith. Those in the West who have welcomed an alien creed into our midst must be ever vigilant that those who have entered share our love of freedom and are not merely using our own freedom of religion against us. The free exercise of their faith must not include seeking martyrdom at our expense.

Acts of Treachery

Brothers in arms do not sacrifice solely for nation or ideology but often give their own lives to protect the lives of their comrades. Yesterday in Afghanistan, five British troops were killed when they disarmed and took off body armor to show their trust in their Afghan police colleagues over tea. Their faith was betrayed by a policeman whose first loyalty was to the Taliban. Today a greater treason befell US troops at Fort Hood in Texas as an army doctor betrayed his Hippocratic oath, his comrades in uniform, and the nation in whose military he had volunteered to serve. In spite of preliminary reports that multiple gunmen staged the Fort Hood attacks, it only stood to reason that the perpetrator was a jihadist, motivated by Islamic fanaticism. Some have termed our adversaries cowardly, which I would never do- they are neither yellow nor prompted to act by lack of education or privation. The murderer at Fort Hood was like Mohamed Atta, well-educated, he held the rank of major and practiced psychiatry. Our opponents are dedicated, devoted, even courageous with ready willingness to lay down their lives. We must be equally prepared to do what it takes to defeat them.

No Real Difference

Are there any distinctions between the policies of a Republican governor like Arnold Schwarzenegger, a doppelganger mayor like Mike Bloomberg who has shifted from Democrat to Republican, to independent, and the President of the USA, Barack Hussein Obama himself? There are differences in scope of power as only Obama can print money, but the goals of these nanny state ninny, control freak socialists is essentially the same. They all aim for equal outcomes, using redistributionist tools, and in so doing, ration freedom, curtailing our liberties as we have heretofore known them and distorting the markets with supposedly benevolent intervention. Even the whole US Senate has signed on as an arm of the socialist Republic, voting to warp the real estate market still further by extending the first-time home buyers federal income tax credit but reducing it from $8000 to $6500 while enlarging the eligibility to those who have not owned a home in the last three years, and voting unanimously to extend unemployment benefits for fourteen additional weeks which I do not begrudge the jobless but which perversely crowds out capital flowing to the private sector, forestalling the job creation that would free many from unemployment and delaying any prospect of real recovery which in every past economic crisis has been borne by free enterprise and only held back by government tinkering according to all but die-hard Keynesian economists. We are a nation drowning in help from our own government.

One Worlders' Triumph

Yesterday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed a joint session of the US Congress. The so-called conservative leader pitched compulsory US limits on carbon emissions to combat global warming, which is itself a scheme that has enriched its vested-interest promoters like Al Gore, according to the New York Times, turning the former US Vice President into a billionaire even as more evidence comes to light that dispels man-caused global warming's very existence. The Democrats at the speech warmly accepted Merkel's climate message to much applause, ready to ignore the voices of their constituents, and cripple US utilities and industry with cap and trade legislation that they are not concerned will put the flailing US economy at an even greater competitive disadvantage to other industrial nations such as Germany along with developing economy India and manufacturing giant China which will not handicap herself by complying with comparable restrictions on her own industry. Also yesterday, the internationalist agenda advanced as the Czech Republic's leader Vaclav Klaus, the last resistor, gave in and signed onto the Lisbon Treaty, subjecting Europe to continental conglomeration, eliminating national distinctions and essentially national borders to the diktats of the bureaucrats of Brussels, largely unanswerable and more than happy to assume increasing control. Many in the political class in the US from grand socialist Democrats to New World Order Republicans are willing to abandon national sovereignty and push for US entry into similar multilateral governance although American conservatives are skeptical of more overreach by all-encroaching power. They rightly fear the sort of intrusion into national affairs by bodies like the European Court which also yesterday banned crucifixes in the classrooms of Italy. The world crept closer to the internationalists' dream yesterday, but keen observers of the American street know our citizens will never permit themselves to be subjects under it.

Prepared to Lead

Ronald Reagan had run a labor union, the Screen Actors Guild, and had the executive experience of being governor of the most populace American state of California when he sought the US presidency. John McCain had been a combat veteran, a high-ranking military officer, decorated for bravery, a prisoner of war, and Arizona's multi-term US Senator when he declared for the highest office. There would have been little question that he was job-ready on day one of the presidency had his campaign succeeded. Barack Hussein Obama had brief experience in the Illinois House of Representatives where he had a pattern of missing or merely voting present on controversial issues with the glaring exception of voting to deny care to babies who had survived attempted abortions. Obama felt himself well-prepared and fully-equipped to lead after little more than one hundred and fifty days serving in the US Senate and offered himself for the White House. Some who opposed Obama thought with a multi-front war and the threat of terror, that the stakes were simply too high to trust a novice who might need on the job training, but the old-line media hardly questioned Obama's experience or readiness to serve and enough of the voting public was unconcerned, that in the election, doubts were cast aside sufficiently for Obama to prevail. In almost three hundred days in office, when it comes to the tough call, not taking out Somali pirates holding a US captain that any President would have done, but conducting the war in Afghanistan toward victory, Obama seems unable to act, suffering from the paralysis of analysis (and this is a generous assessment- some might say gross incompetence, gross negligence toward our troops and their families, or the cowardice of a lack of backbone in leadership). Whatever the case may be, clearly Obama was not fully prepared to lead from day one.

Children at Play

The Pretender in Chief at the White House dressed as a "Ward Cleaver" proto-Dad" while his bride appeared in cat costume for Halloween. Not to let a small thing like two wars including the deadliest month for American forces in Afghanistan under the indecisive one's restrictive rules of engagement, increased mission tempo, and wider areas where Obama decided to contest Taliban control, spoil a good party, the White House was turned spooky orange under kettle lights. No 249.85 drop in the market, the largest one day decline since April, could stop the planned celebration for the Obama children (and I do not refer to Sasha and Malia- I mean all four of them). Unemployment at ten percent (probably in reality over fifteen) could not slow down the All Hallows' Eve fete. The preview of public option care we are seeing with long-lines waiting for government-rationed H1N1 vaccine in a simple manufacture and distribution scheme that the Obama administration can not even get right did not deter in any way the production that had to be perfect for the kids first Halloween in the White House- we well remember how essential stagecraft is to this false front crowd that brought Greek columns to the Denver acceptance speech. When all you have to offer is smoke and mirrors, you had better dazzle with the "show". So the young usurper had a fantastic evening with the Nero fiddle, the grand feast, and probably some candy which will be a forbidden item subject to a government "sin tax" under the new public care regime. No matter the chaos and degeneration the President is presiding over, Obama seems determined to party on and have a hell of a time in office. My, would it not be nice to see some adults back in the White House?

How Government Kills

On the morning the government disrupts the circadian rhythms of millions with the daylight savings' debacle, I read that the Obama administration is lifting a twenty year ban on AIDS patients entering the USA. Just as importing Gitmo terrorists jeopardizes our safety, a swarm of visitors might come to take advantage of our new public health care regime, knowing or learning that while non-citizens are nominally excluded, that no one is permitted to ask for residency or citizenship documents when someone is seeking medical assistance. Couple this with the fact that some of those entering may be none too careful, nonchalant in safer sex practices, or even a few who might maliciously attempt to infect Americans, this is one more Obama mistake, that is both costly and dangerous. Governments do not have to use the blunt instrument of execution or overtly practice political intimidation by way of systematic murder to threaten their own citizens. They may simply use political correctness or bending to an interest group to steal as they kill through negligence and stupidity. Importing patients with dire prognosis, the need for expensive treatment, and the potential to deliberately or accidentally expose others to the same illness does nothing to balance our budgets or enhance America's safety. Obama placates a few activists by causing expense and unnecessary risk for the rest of us. 

The Maestro Speaks

Rush Hudson Limbaugh illuminated the Sunday morning wonk show universe by sharing his vision, wisdom, and insight and in so doing, doubtless boosted the ratings for Chris Wallace to new heights. Rush has earned his position as behemoth of the right, gaining audience, changing minds of those who are willing to listen and not invincibly ignorant, and igniting the scorn of the left as a lightning rod because the internationalist elites recognize that they can not counter Limbaugh's impeccable logic. Rush is the embodiment of Middle American common sense, wit, good humor, resilience in the face of adversity, and personal determination even in the face of character assassination and slander. Rush is the logical inheritor of Buckley, and carries on the legacy of Reagan more than anyone in the public eye. Limbaugh's brilliance is his ability to say what he believes and believe what he says. He is absolute down-home authentic in the way Will Rogers and Mark Twain were portrayed. Rush is innately intellectual, but unlike some who can not see past their own phalanx of advanced degrees and have to see nuance in all issues, managing to find gray areas where there are none, Rush presents the conservative view of the world in black and white, and the left can not manufacture a personality to eat away at Limbaugh's massive and growing audience.