#1
Yo ho ho and a chaw full of khat
Fifteen men on a jihadi's skiff
Yo ho ho and a chaw full of khat
Koran and a djinn had done for the rest
Yo ho ho and a chaw full of khat
The mate was fixed by the Taber's brass
The bosun brained with the 630's flash
And Khaleem's throat was marked belike
It had been groped by fingers ten
And there they lay all jihadi men
Like break of day at Mikeeal's den
Yo ho ho and a chaw full of khat
In an attempt to dial down expectations for his administration, President-elect Barack Obama's supporters have dropped much of the "messiah" talk.
No more talk of him being The One (Oprah), or a Jedi Knight (George Lucas), or a "Lightworker" (the San Francisco Chronicle), or a "quantum leap in American consciousness" (Deepak Chopra). Instead we have more humble and circumspect conversation about the man. Now he's merely Abraham Lincoln and FDR and Martin Luther King, combined.
It's a step down from divine redeemer, but you have to start somewhere. . . .
What I find fascinating, however, is not so much the Obama hagiography, but the burning desire for another FDR or Lincoln that underlies it. . . .
I think Lincoln was just about the greatest president in American history, but I sure don't want to need another Lincoln. Six hundred thousand Americans died at the hands of other Americans during Lincoln's presidency. Lincoln unified the country at gunpoint and curtailed civil liberties in a way that makes President Bush look like an ACLU zealot. The partisan success of the GOP in the aftermath of the war Obama thinks so highly of was forged in blood.
Likewise with FDR. Listening to liberals gush over a "new New Deal" and Obama's call for us to emulate the "Greatest Generation," you'd think they want another Great Depression and World War.
Indeed, liberals have long idolized the 1930s as a decade of great unity. It wasn't. The 1930s was a miserable decade of poverty, domestic unrest, labor strife, violations of civil liberties and widespread fear. If liberals really loved peace, prosperity and national cohesion, they'd remember the 1920s or 1950s more fondly. And yet they don't. Why? Because liberals didn't get to impose their schemes and dreams on the country in those decades. Behind all the talk of unity and bipartisanship and shared sacrifice lies an uglier ambition: power. The audacity of hope behind all this Lincoln-FDR-Obama blather is the dream of riding roughshod over the opposition, of having their way, of total victory.
The Chinese curse and cliche "may you live in interesting times" is on point. Liberals (and a few conservatives as well, alas) seem desperate to live in interesting times. Not me. You know what I hope? I hope Obama is another Coolidge or Eisenhower. But I'm not holding my breath.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/21/2008 09:50 ||
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#1
The One will shoot lightning bolts from his arse and stike-down this Jonah Goldberg person.
Now that we've succeeded in royally messing this one up, I suspect the question that needs a bit of resolution is...what about the next conflict? Large or small, short-term or long, what are we planning do with the 'opposition forces' that are captured or simply surrender?
#4
Congress and a Plan?????!!! Surely one jests. The last plan Congress made cost the US almost $1 tril with money we did not have. Congress could not come up with a workable plan to get our of a wet paper bag.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
11/21/2008 18:35 Comments ||
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#2
Believing everything a computer spits out is a recipe for disaster - witness gerbil worming and it's apostles...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
11/21/2008 11:44 Comments ||
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#3
GIGO - garbage in, garbage out
So, those garbage global warming models didn't give you pause or were you just using them to push your little scheme to extort fleece the gullible as well?
#7
Humans choose to use 'blackboxes' over common sense. If the 'blackboxes' didn't exist, they would find another excuse, but they would seek one out none the less.
#8
This is a copout. Computers don't generate models. Humans do. Computers don't make decisions. Humans do.
Nobody can generate valid (reality describing/predicting) numerical models in economics. That Zhang, because parameters of such a model are continuous random variables rather than constants.
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.
In an attempt to dial down expectations for his administration, President-elect Barack Obama's supporters have dropped much of the "messiah" talk.
