As Rush Limbaugh said -- soon after the last U.S. election, and not without some attendant controversy -- we should hope for President Obama to fail. The Republican party establishment were more appalled than the Democrats. The latter were actually gloating. The new Obama administration decided that the mouthy and obstreperous Limbaugh would make an ideal sparring partner, and the new president's outriders slung a few choice epithets his way, to help Rush with his ratings. Grateful and generous, Limbaugh slung a few back. It was all good theatre.
At some point, it seems, Obama's brain trust realized it wasn't exactly wise to be giving the bird to Limbaugh's vast and accumulating audience. After a couple of cursory digs of his own, the president himself also turned his attention. He began to assimilate the first lesson of high office: let sleeping dogs lie.
So far, all political fun and games, but of course, people get hurt playing them. In their eagerness to accuse their fellow Republican, the fat, vulgar, and extremely articulate Rush Limbaugh, of being "divisive" and scoring an own-goal, the respectables of the Republican establishment -- the people with proper table manners who know how to sound their vowels -- did themselves a serious injury. They created a division within the Republican party that now only people like Limbaugh can heal. And people like Limbaugh will only be doing that on their own terms.
Out of an understandable aesthetic revulsion for the speaker (I love Rush myself, and laugh with rather than at him, but then I have no taste), the respectables entirely missed his point. Limbaugh made clear, to those whose ears were working, exactly why he wanted Obama to fail. His argument was that everything the new president had promised -- everything he had campaigned for, and everything his cronies represented -- was against America's best interests. Republicans should hardly want someone who is acting against America's best interests to succeed.
I grant, that argument is a little subtle, and Limbaugh does not always slow himself down to the glacial intellectual pace of sound bites in the mainstream media. By not listening, one could easily misunderstand. Perhaps an example would be useful.
The stock markets soared in the middle of this week, immediately after Barack Obama turned in a rather dismal performance in a press conference aimed at rallying the troops behind his socialized medical scheme. As Lawrence Auster, and several other rude conservative commentators on the Internet asked, why would it do so?
They also answered their question: Wall Street rallied because investors began to think Obama-care will fail. The president will not be able to get that revolution through Congress. He looks as if he is beginning to realize this himself. Enough cosmetic measures may pass through to do some permanent damage, both economic and moral; but at the end of the day, it will be nothing on the scale that was feared.
There are innumerable other Obama failures for which one might wish devoutly: that he will fail to get out of Iraq, and Afghanistan; fail to pressure Israel into abandoning her frontiers; fail to negotiate with the mullahs in Iran; fail to make a missile deal with Putin's Russia; fail to reach an international climate accord, while failing to fully cap, tax, and cripple the U.S. energy industry. Likewise, one might reasonably hope that he will fail to stack the Supreme Court with "culture of death" aficionadi, and fall "tragically" short of delivering any number of other domestic horrors.
My reader may not wish Obama to fail; but by now he should grasp why I would, along with all those horrid jingo Middle Americans in the "flyover country." If, as the Economist suggested on a recent cover, the choice is between going the way of California, and going the way of Texas -- and it is -- they will choose prosperity and the American way, over bankruptcy and existential angst. It's that simple, and the good of America requires Obama to fail, miserably.
From this view, the Republican role in Congress is to help him fail. On the hustings, it is to play as dramatically as possible on what was wrong with Obama's agenda from the start. The mission is to wipe out the Democrat congressional majorities in the midterms of 2010, in the same way Newt Gingrich and company wiped out the Democrats in 1994, thereby gelding Bill Clinton.
"Nice" will not accomplish this. "Candour" is how it's done.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/26/2009 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[10 views]
Top|| File under:
#5
things continue in their current trend, he won't get a second term
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/26/2009 14:25 Comments ||
Top||
#6
I am quite happy to go after Obama in exactly the same way the left went about President Bush. The difference being Bush is a man of great personal integrity, compassion and accomplishment while Obama deserves every calumny we can deliver.
Is Kashmir's conscience dead? The answer, most definitely, seems yes. Recently, J&K CM Omar Abdullah hit the nail on its head when he lashed out at the separatists for their silence on the killing of a three-year-old by terrorists.
Why separatists alone, the whole of Kashmir should answer this question. Really, where are the protests now? Where is the Valley's anger so visible, at the drop of a hat, all these years? Why, all of a sudden, has Kashmir forgotten to take to the streets -- stones in hands and tears in eyes? The same Kashmir, which burned with rage over the rape-cum-murder of two women in Shopian, has its eyes closed when the perpetrators of the crime are terrorists.
Don't get me wrong, no one is condoning the brutality in Shopian. Anyone who outrages the modesty of women should be punished. But what about these double standards? How about a little anger against the terrorists from across the border who have killed anywhere between 65,000 to 1,00,000 people since 1989? All in the name of freedom?
In an indirect attack on the separatists at a function in Srinagar, Omar said: "They prominently organize marches and give chalo calls' to highlight violation of human rights...These elements resort to politics of hypocrisy." Fairness, morality and respect for human rights demand these elements should raise same voice whenever terrorists kill civilians, he said.
Bang on, Mr Abdullah. Or do human rights apply to terrorists alone? Maybe. The Shopian incident has resulted in prolonged protests. At the same time, the killings by terrorists have continued unabated. They, of course, go unnoticed. Why this anger against security forces and cops only? Against those same security men who, away from their families, are risking their lives to protect Kashmir? Why no thought before damaging public property, before attacking the people who are there to protect them?
The suffering doesn't seem to end. Repeated terror attacks have happened in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. No point mentioning which country these attacks are coming from. And all in the name of Kashmir. It's time the same Kashmir lent the country a hand. It's time the same Kashmir raised its voice as loud and clear as it raises it against the security forces.
Quite aptly, Omar's comments came on a day when SC questioned the Jammu & Kashmir High Court's order to arrest police officers for their alleged involvement in Shopian rape-cum-murder. The court also rapped the high court for its direction that the bail plea of the accused cops be filed only before it. The SC Bench said: Anybody can be arrested. Anybody who has nothing to do with this case can be arrested. What material was there for arrest? Even now, they (state) have been unable to produce the material."
With power comes responsibility. If some jawans and policemen were involved in a heinous crime, they shouldn't go unpunished. But in no civilised society should action be guided by agitation and protests. And in the meantime, it's time for Kashmir as well to show some responsibility. And for our politicians to shed some hypocrisy.
Posted by: john frum ||
07/26/2009 09:40 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Or do human rights apply to terrorists alone?
Silly man. Of course they do. Haven't you read the latest HRW release?
Posted by: john frum ||
07/26/2009 10:11 Comments ||
Top||
#2
WMF > WORLD WAR OVER SOUTHERN TIBET AS NEITHER CHINA NOR INDIA REFUSES TO COMPROMISE!?
ION SAME > YONAGUNI:JAPAN SELF DEFENSE FORCE ACCELERATES CONSTRUX OF "SOUTHWEST LINE OF DEFENSE" TO DEAL WITH CHINA.
* Mil cover TAIWAN agz PLA Attack?
* "Strategic Denial" = Obstruction of easy PLAN access/transit into NORPAC.
Once the lure of communism seduced the idealistic. Todays environmental ideologues risk becoming just as dangerous.
Britain is, thankfully, an ideologically barren land. The split between Right and Left is no longer ideological, but tribal. Are you a nice social liberal who believes in markets, or a nasty social liberal who believes in markets? Anthony Blunts memoirs, published this week, reveal a different age, one in which fascism and communism were locked in a seemingly definitive battle for souls.
Blunt talks of the religious quality of the enthusiasm for the Left among the students of Cambridge. There is only one ideology in todays developed world that exercises a similar grip. If Blunt were young today, he would not be red; he would be green.
His band of angry young men would find Gore where once they found Marx. Blunt evokes a febrile atmosphere in which each student felt his own decision had the power to shape the future. Where once they raged about the fleecing of the proletariat and quaked at the march of fascism, Blunt and his circle, transposed to todays college bar, would rage about the fleecing of the planet and quake at its imminent destruction. If you squint, red and green look disarmingly similar.
...We are at the early stage of the green movement. A time akin to pre-Bolshevik socialism, when all believed in the destruction of the capitalist system, but were still relatively moderate about the means of getting there. We are at the stage of naive dreamers and fantasists. Russia was home to the late 19th-century Narodnik movement, in which rich sons of the aristocracy headed into the countryside to tell the peasants it was their moral imperative to become a revolutionary class. They retreated, baffled, to their riches when the patronised peasants didnt want to revolt. Zac Goldsmith and Prince Charles look like modern Narodniks, talking glib green from the safety of their gilded lives.
Indulge me in some historical determinism. We, the peasants, are failing to rise up and embrace the need to change. We will not choose to give up modern life, with all its polluting seductions. Our intransigent refusal to choose green will be met by a new militancy from those who believe we must be saved from ourselves. Ultra-green states cannot arise without some form of forced switch to autocracy; the dictatorship of the environmentalists
#1
The problem with the analysis is that today's Greens are about as Marxist as Groucho, Harpo and Chico.
If you want to transform a society into a communist society it takes big brass ones, being able to not only forment violence against capitalists, but to take part in it as well.
I know it makes today's crazier conservatives feel good to point out that liberals such as Obama are Marxist and will turn the country into some sort of Marxist state, but the reality is that Obama, his Obamettes and the Obamanation have neither the political will, nor the intent to transform society into a communist or socialist society.
The talk the talk, but they just can't take the steps needed.
That said, what the Obamanation is doing is playing a very, very deadly dangerous game which can easily fly out of control with racial politics and with the flaunting of existing law, such as the armed robberies more formerly known as the Chrysler and GM bankruptcies.
The idea that Greens and liberals can transform anything more complicated that an iced latte is absurd.
#2
The greens are collectivists, and statists -- they want to treat humanity as a subservient collective that does teh will of the "enlightened" (the "intellectuals" at the core of the movement) and demolish the things that can stop them: individualism and capitalism. They intend to develop and use a massive state as the mechanism to achieve thier rule.
Whether it's the far left or the far right, they always end up wanting to control our every thought and choice. The label doesn't matter. The intent to destroy human dignity and freedom does.
#5
They intend to develop and usehave already used a massive state as the mechanism to achieve thier rule.
We've been on this track for a century now but for the most part it has happened so slowly that most folks don't understand just how far away from the Founding Father's ideas we really are today. And, sadly, a huge swath of the people wouldn't care if they did know having been indoctrinated into the cult of "why should I care what a bunch of dead white males think?"
At this stage of our history the process is likely irreversible. Even the great Ronald Reagan could do no more than temporarily slow the rate of growth of a federal government that has become oppressive via its sheer bulk and despite its good or bad intentions.
#6
The problem with the analysis is that today's Greens are about as Marxist as Groucho, Harpo and Chico.
If you want to transform a society into a communist society it takes big brass ones, being able to not only forment violence against capitalists, but to take part in it as well.
They don't have to. They can set up their tax farming scheme where Goldman Sachs and George Soros can sell the right to engage in industrial activity and us peons can buy it, but then later on we'll be stuck defending the 'capitalist' system they implement now, OR of course, as an alternative, we could nationalize Goldman Sachs and whatever Soros does.
Their system isn't designed to implement communism, it's to make us choose between their chickenshit crony capitalism and whatever crony capitalism or communism we will eventually adopt of our own.
Take health care, for example.
FDR was one of the main drivers of health-insurance-as-a-benefit; LBJ was a main driver for medicaire and medicaid. What did this result in? A broken system. What are the alternatives we're presented with? "The Dirty Republican" system, which is basically described as this awful mess (done by those filthy idiot capitalist rethuglicans FDR and LBJ) OR we can go with the glorious socialist system proposed by that wonderful Democrat President Zero.
Isn't it funny how we're all to blame for the mess the previous Democrat presidents invented but the only answer is giving a Democrat president more power?
#7
The ratchet doesn't need to turn all the way every year or every administration, as long as it only tightens in one direction and goes 'clickclickclick' when you try to go the other way.
#8
And when the ratchet has turned sufficiently far enough the lure of near-absolute power, or at least the perceived impossibility of rolling it back, will lead politicians of all stripes to simply wield said power rather than railing against it. The problem isn't (and for a very long time hasn't been) the particular political bent of those working the levers of power in our federal government but the fact that those levers have become all-encompassing and there's no path back from whence we came.
#12
LOTP - That's a nice thought and I do concur but how, precisely, do you propose that happen? In practical terms: which politician on the national stage could be elected President in 2012 to lead the drive to dismantle leviathan? In a similar vein: aside from Reagan has any other President in the past century made any significant attempt to reduce the size, scope & reach of our federal government?
For example: during my last stint in grad school I ran across a summation of the regulatory state that concluded that each year the federal government issues 10,000 - 15,000 new laws, rules & regulations governing all aspects of small business and its interaction with everything it might touch and concern. If that pace was maintained (it actually accelerated greatly under W and has exploded under Obama but I'm citing the old and almost certainly lower number here) there would today, a decade later, be 100,000 - 150,000 new laws, rules & regulations at the *federal* level with which any new small business must comply or face a barrage of regulatory actions & litigation (since many laws include private rights of action). Layer those upon two hundred years of accumulated federal bureaucratic bloat and the various & sundry state and local laws & regulations and I submit that it is no longer possible for a person involved in a small business to comply with the law because it has become impossible to determine what the law actually is.
Drilling down one more level (to really belabor my point): as a sometime small business owner I know that there are 52 working weeks per year each of which offers around 100 possible working hours. At the midline level of the annual federal regulatory barrage, 12,500 new problems for the small business owner annually, I could work 100 hours per week with zero days off and that would leave me approximately 25 minutes to examine, comprehend, research & comply with each new federal law, rule & regulation issued in *that year*. Obviously I'd have to hire some competent helpers if I intended to comply with the pre-existing body of federal regulation. And probably one or two others to perform compliance duties imposed under state & local law (and God forbid we do business across state lines & trip multiple state regulatory schemes). With my half-dozen or so regulatory compliance people in place I could then consider hiring someone to actually produce a good or service.
Any politicians out there addressing those issues? If not there's absolutely no hope of breaking the levers of power, hitting the "reset" button or our country coming to its collective (no pun intended) senses.
I'll believe there's a slight chance of our pulling back from the abyss when I see serious advocates for things like: exempting small businesses completely from federal regulation; implementing a voluntary opt-out provision whereby consumers & businesses might interact completely outside our tort law constructs; a Constitutional Amendment requiring that no citizen pay more than a net effective cumulative (federal, state & local; income / sales / cap gains / embedded taxes in goods & services / etc.) tax of (pick your number: 10%, 15%, 20%) of his or her gross income from all sources per year; a Constitutional Amendment requiring federal spending below (pick your number: 10%, 12%, 15%) of the previous year's private sector GDP; a Constitutional Amendment requiring that regulatory costs (imposed actions, compliance, related litigation, etc.) not exceed (pick you number: 3%, 5%, 7%) of the annual private sector GDP with costs only counted and alleged savings not considered; a restructuring of federal regulatory agencies such that all regulations are stayed pending litigation over unintended consequences (defined as other than consequences discussed & acknowledged ahead of time by Congress or the agency in question) and all regulations found to have unintended consequences automatically rendered unenforceable; etc.
My point isn't to suggest that I've all the answeres (I'm sure most of the regulars here could offer far more sane & workeable suggestions than I) but merely to suggest what some of the possible answers might look like. Is there any serious person near the top of either major political party offering anything that remotely resembles a real rollback of government? If that persons exists today I'm unaware of them.
#1
Inkwell, the Gates charity is designed to help blacks trace their genealogy through their DNA. The stated purpose for Gates' trip to China which preceded this incident was to study Yoyo Ma's genealogy.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm. When did Yoyo Ma discover he was black?
I guess its true - You do eventually become the thing you hate.
Gates started out hating racism and the 'white man' just like his mother. His whole life seems to be about hating the white man and about advancing the 'black man' - not so much with ending racism as reversing the 'roles'.
And he ends up being very much a racist and much like the 'white man' he hated so much.
#5
Hmmmmmmmmmmm. When did Yoyo Ma discover he was black?
Posted by: tu3031 2009-07-26 00:32
It's not that Yo Yo Ma is black; it matters ONLY that he is NOT white.
#6
I read once that Pres Truman had remarked that when formerly oppressed peoples take hold of the reigns of power they often become just as cruel & iron handed as their former oppressors.
#7
they often become just as cruel & iron handed as their former oppressors.
But also greedier and stupider, too. Uglier also thrown inas a bonus...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
07/26/2009 12:31 Comments ||
Top||
#8
To bad Sgt. Crowley didn't roll up on him when this was going down. He probably would've wet his pants laughing and all of this could've been avoided...
I spend every July and August in my house near Oak Bluffs. I love bicycling, and because of a hip replacement I had a couple of years ago, I had a 24-speed tricycle made by hand in Germany. Every day I write in the morning, then ride eight miles from my house to South Beach. I get off, look at the ocean, then get back on and ride home. My tricycle has a bell that sounds like the Good Humor man, and I ring it when I pass people. Everybody waves and says, 'There goes that Henry Louis Gates Jr.!'
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
