It seemed a little odd last week when the Securities and Exchange Commission settled its lawsuit against Goldman Sachs within two hours of Senate passage of the Democrats' Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. After all, who could ask for a more perfect backdrop than a successful prosecution of the investment colossus of Wall Street and a prime mover in the economic crisis of 2008? But this one looks stranger still considering that the SEC action was announced on April 15 of this year, only a week before the legislation was brought before the Senate, thus neatly bookending debate on the proposal. And it gets even stranger. On the same April 15, President Obama's campaign organization, Organizing for America, purchased a Google ad directing people who Googled "Goldman Sachs SEC" to donate money at my.barackobama.com .
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wonders about all this and more, and so has asked the SEC for documentation of commission officials' communication with the executive branch. The announcement of the Goldman settlement, Issa wrote, "less than two hours after the U.S. Senate passed controversial financial reform legislation raises questions about whether politics influenced the announcement." The SEC is prohibited from using its resources to influence the passage of legislation, but its chairman, Mary Schapiro, was already on record in support of the bill, having released a statement in late June praising its expansion of the commission's authority and for "improving the SEC's funding process."
Consider, too, that the SEC's settlement with Goldman is carefully phrased to avoid forcing the firm to admit the most damning fraud charges: "Goldman acknowledges that the marketing materials ... contained incomplete information. In particular, it was a mistake" to sell particular products "without disclosing" the role of parties whose interests were adverse to the investors. "Goldman regrets that the marketing materials did not contain that disclosure." Such language obscures the firm's ethically challenged actions behind a fog of rationalization. That might explain why the fine was only $550 million, an amount equal to just two weeks of Goldman's profit, not the $1 billion or more expected by veteran journalists covering the market.
To hear SEC officials tell it, however, you might think Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein was placed in stocks on the White House lawn after a perp walk from Congress down Pennsylvania Avenue. To put this in perspective, recall that the SEC has been most often seen in recent years as a failure, most notably because it failed to detect or stop Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. More recently, there was an inspector general's report detailing widespread porn-surfing among SEC employees. All of which suggests that SEC officials should stop bragging about the Goldman settlement and start answering Issa's questions.
Horrific bombings in the Ugandan capital seemed to mark the arrival of a new player in global jihad. But the world shouldnt overreact: the killings are also a sign of splits within the Somali militant community.
Just picture the scene as a soldier returns from hunting an arch-enemy. Commanding officer: 'Did you get him?' Soldier: 'Yes, sir.' Commanding officer: 'Are you sure?' Soldier: 'Yes, sir.' Soldier reaches into rucksack and places severed head on table.
Commanding officer: ' ****!' If it happened in a Hollywood movie, the audience would either laugh or applaud. But there was no laughter the other day when this happened for real in Babaji, Afghanistan, current posting for the 1st Battalion, Royal Gurkha Rifles.
The precise circumstances will not be determined until an official report has been completed, but reliable military sources have confirmed that a Gurkha patrol was sent out with orders to track down a Taliban warlord described as a 'high-value target'.
Having identified their target, a fierce battle ensued during which the warlord was killed. To prove that they had got their man, the Gurkhas attempted to remove the body for identification. Further enemy fire necessitated a fast exit minus corpse. So, an unnamed soldier drew his kukri - the standard-issue Gurkha knife - removed the man's head and legged it.
Ten out of ten for initiative. Nought out of ten for diplomacy.
Nato forces are supposed to be winning 'hearts and minds' and bolstering the fledgling Afghan National Army. This incident, however, has apparently appalled Afghans on all sides, not least because it offends the Muslim tradition of burying the dead with all body parts, attached or unattached.
It transpires that the Gurkha soldier has been removed from operations and sent back to his barracks in Kent pending further investigations. Ministry of Defence sources have been quick to emphasise that the British Army is appalled by what has happened. According to one: 'There is no sense of glory involved, more a sense of shame. He should not have done what he did.'
I can already hear Ministers, diplomats and top brass echoing similar pieties. It is, of course, a gruesome business. All societies have taboos about desecrating the dead. It's even in the Geneva Convention.
But the Army had better be careful before attempting to demonise this unnamed Gurkha in order to polish its own halo. If the man was trophy-hunting or disobeying orders, then that is one thing. If, however, he was simply following them too assiduously for liberal tastes, that is a different matter.
And away from Whitehall, among the broader Gurkha family, the general response which I encountered yesterday could be summed up as follows: 'What's all the fuss about?'
As one put it to me: 'This man was only doing what his grandfather and father would have done before him.'
'The Gurkhas are the ultimate professional soldiers,' says Major Gordon Corrigan, military historian and a Gurkha officer for 29 years. 'They are not brutal or bloodthirsty. They treat prisoners honourably. But if their CO says, "That is the enemy. Go and attack him", they will not flinch. And do not be surprised if their weapon of choice is the kukri. It is their sidearm. But they kill in hot blood - not cold.'
Having seen his former comrades decapitating cattle, goats and buffalos at a single stroke, he has no doubt that the Babaji episode would have been a swift and clinical affair.
At Winchester's Gurkha Museum, curator Major Gerald Davies points out that Gurkhas were positively encouraged to bring back evidence of enemy kills during World War II.
'The intelligence officers would want to see proof,' says the veteran of 33 years with the Gurkhas. 'The men started coming back with Japanese heads, but when that became unwieldy, they took to cutting off ears. It might sound appalling to society today, but that's what war was like in the jungle.'
Major Corrigan says the Gurkhas followed a similar policy during the Malayan Emergency. 'They were told to bring back terrorists' bodies for identification, but you could hardly carry one of those through heavy jungle so they would come back with heads,' he explains.
'Finally, someone had the bright idea of issuing them with cameras, although I'm not sure the results were up to much.'
The Gurkhas have had a formidable reputation in the West ever since the Anglo-Nepal War of 1814-16. Having failed to conquer them - which is why Nepal has never been part of either the British Empire or the Commonwealth - the British did the next best thing, which was to sign them up. Since then, they have proved exemplary comrades for two centuries.
Their conduct is, perhaps, best summed up by Rifleman Lachhiman Gurung, who found himself under repeated Japanese attack in Burma in 1945. With his comrades badly injured, he fought off 200 enemy troops single-handed - literally - having lost an arm and eye.
When a relief force found him the next morning, his position was littered with 31 Japanese corpses. The 169 survivors had run away. Rifleman Gurung - who now lives in Middlesex - became one of the 26 members of the Brigade of Gurkhas to win the Victoria Cross (there would, undoubtedly, have been more but the VC was not extended to Gurkhas until 1911).
Their success is, in part, down to sheer guts. But it also derives from their reputation. As they found - to their disappointment - in the Falklands War, their fame precedes them.
'By the time they arrived on Mount Tumbledown, the Argentinians had seen pictures of Gurkhas sharpening their kukris and read all these stories about them eating their prisoners,' says Major Corrigan. 'So when the Gurkhas actually appeared, all they found were empty trenches.'
Our national respect and affection for them runs deep - as amply demonstrated by Joanna Lumley's campaign to secure a better pension and passport deal for retired Gurkhas.
Whenever I have been at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, I have noticed that the applause always rises noticeably for two contingents - the Chelsea Pensioners and the Gurkhas.
It's a view shared within the Army itself. When British forces embarked for the Falklands in the QE2, the other regiments pointedly lined the upper decks to cheer them aboard.
Stories of the Gurkhas are legion. My favourite is the tale of the Gurkha sergeant being told his men would be jumping into enemy territory. He returned next day to say the men would rather jump from below 500ft on to marshy ground. 'But your parachutes won't open,' said the Colonel. 'Ah,' said the sergeant. 'No one mentioned parachutes.'
Apocryphal? Probably. But among the documented accounts is that of the U.S. Air Force's Colonel John Alison on meeting uncharacteristically anxious Gurkha troops preparing for a glider assault on Japanese positions.
'We aren't afraid to go,' a Gurkha sergeant told him solemnly. 'We aren't afraid to fight. But we thought we should tell you that those "planes" don't have any motors.'
So, ask yourself this. Now that the story of the head-hunting Gurkha of Babaji has gone global, do you think that the insurgents of the world will be more inclined or less inclined to pick a fight with the British Army?
Posted by: john frum ||
07/20/2010 07:53 ||
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#1
Nato forces are supposed to be winning 'hearts and minds'
Soory but there are regions in the world where this wins hearts and minds. This for causing fear and bravery for causing admiration.
Oh and peope who whin about a whiole corpse being important in Muslim countries let's remind that Muslims have historically been fond of mutilating enemy corpses. Not only heads but genitals and that pussyfooting ie disciplining a Gurkha for doing what Taliban do, in fact only a part of what they do, is NOT the way to gain their respect.
#2
As one put it to me: 'This man was only doing what his grandfather and father would have done before him.'
Then it a cultural thing. You have to be sensitive about these things, just as you are about honor killings and intimidation of the kaffir. Rationalize one set of cultural differences and tolerate it, then be prepared to treat other cultures in your midst with the same sniveling deference.
#3
I was going to reference Subadar Prag Tewarri, but it looks like someone beat me to it.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
07/20/2010 9:33 Comments ||
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#4
Nought out of ten for diplomacy.
This statement does not belong in this article. But the author put it there anyway. I'm on the Gurkha's side. The guy wasn't using it anymore. He wasn't using it to begin with.
#8
I went to law school with a Nepali classmate who was an ethnic Gurkha. Friendly, pleasant, laid back, generous, great sense of humor, nicest guy you'd ever want to meet. (Hot wife, too--we're talking smokin'.) I never had occasion to get into even the mildest disagreement with him.
You just knew, though, that if you ever gave him a rifle and a kukri and told him to assault a ridgeline or defend a checkpoint . . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
07/20/2010 12:01 Comments ||
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#10
To quote the article ... "It's even in the Geneva Convention." I may be misinformed but does not the Geneva Convention only apply to those who have signed it. Have the Taliban recently signed it ? Throwing around the phase "Geneva Convention" is one of the MSM favorite red herring.
#12
The reporter states that the beheading appalled Afghans all around but I have to wonder, how many Afghans did he actually interview to see who was appalled and who wasn't? Talibunnies obviously were but who else?
If ever there was a shooting which made zero sense, the July 18th massacre of 18 people at a late night party in Torreon was it. We have seen this pattern before. An armed group riding in SUVs drives up to an area late at night where there are lots of young people generally enjoying their lives, exit their vehicles, enters an area and then opens fire, hitting everyone inside. Happens a lot especially recently in Chihuahua and Nuevo Leon and even Tamaulipas.
Continued on Page 49
Presidents typically invite Americans to appear at Rose Garden press conferences to trumpet their policy successes, but yesterday we saw what may have been a first. President Obama introduced three Americansan auto worker, a fitness center employee and a woman in real estatewho've been out of work so long they underscore the failure of his economic program. Where are his spinmeisters when he really needs them?
Sure, Mr. Obama's ostensible purpose was to lobby Congress for the eighth extension of jobless benefits since the recession began, to a record 99 weeks, or nearly two years. And he whacked Senate Republicans for blocking the extension, though Republicans are merely asking that the extension be offset by cuts in other federal spending.
But Mr. Obama was nonetheless obliged to concede that, 18 months after his $862 billion stimulus, there are still five job seekers for every job opening and that 2.5 million Americans will soon run out of unemployment benefits. What happens when the 99 weeks of benefits run out? Will the President demand that they be extended to three years, or four?
Only last week Vice President Joe Biden was hailing the stimulus for "saving or creating" three million jobs. This week the White House says we need even more stimulus, in the form of jobless checks, to make up for the jobs his original spending stimulus didn't create.
The one possibility the President and Congressional Democrats won't entertain is that their own spending and taxing and regulating and labor union favoritism have become the main hindrance to job creation. Since February 2009, the jobless rate has climbed to 9.5% from 8.1%, and private industry has shed two million jobs. The overall economy has been expanding for at least a year, but employers still don't seem confident enough to add new workers. The economists who sold us the stimulus say it's a mystery. But maybe employers are afraid to hire because they don't know what costs government will impose on them next.
In the immediate policy case, Democrats are going so far as to subsidize more unemployment. If you subsidize something, you get more of it. So if you pay people not to work, they often decide . . . not to work. Or at least to delay looking or decline a less than perfect job offer, holding out for something else that may or may not materialize.
The economic consensuswhich includes Obama Administration economists in their previous livescouldn't be clearer on this. In a 1990 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, labor economist Lawrence Katz found that "The results indicate that a one week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of UI recipients by 0.16 to 0.20 weeks."
A March 2010 economic report by Michael Feroli of J.P. Morgan Chase examined several studies and concluded that "lengthened availability of jobless benefits has raised the unemployment rate by 1.5% points."
A 2006 NBER study by Raj Chetty of UC Berkeley on a related subject begins, "It is well known that unemployment benefits raise unemployment durations."
The current recession is bearing this out, as a record 6.7 million Americans have now been out of work for at least six months. That's 45.5% of the total jobless, close to the highest share ever recorded. The number was 23.4% in February 2009. Americans tend to support jobless benefits on compassion grounds, but at some point such a policy becomes the false compassion of welfare by keeping people out of the job market and thus not learning new skills.
Mr. Obama also claimed yesterday that he wants to cut taxes on small businesses. That's a good idea, but Mr. Obama's proposal to provide one-year temporary tax cuts, such as expensing of certain capital purchases, will be dwarfed by one of the largest tax increases on small- and medium-sized firms in history that is scheduled to hit on January 1. The increase in the capital gains tax will fall hardest on start ups and expanding businesses that need capital for growth. More than half of the "rich" who will pay higher income tax rates next year are small business owners and investors.
The President is right that "we've got a lot of work to do" to get Americans back to work and that the toll on families from high unemployment is considerable. There are few things in life more demoralizing than being unemployed for a lengthy period of time. But paying people not to work and adding $30 billion more to nearly $1.4 trillion of deficit spending is a dismal substitute for real economic growth and private job creation. Republicans are right to resist it.
#1
I heard of a friend of my sister-in-law's who had become an unemployed auto entertainment installer. I have a buddy who is in the business an got the young man a interview. He was given an offer and turned it down.
He decided that since his wife was still working full time, he was on unemployment and they were saving on daycare for the kids, it was to his advantage not to work. He's still unemployed after almost eight months.
P.S. They're upside-down on there house and are ready to default.
#2
Sure, Mr. Obama's ostensible purpose was to lobby Congress for the eighth extension of jobless benefits since the recession began, to a record 99 weeks, or nearly two years.
The people don't need extended unemployment benefits, they need employment. The inhabitants of the Beltway know how to create unemployment. They just can't fathom how to create real self sustaining employment outside of tax base patronage jobs.
Many recent polls suggest US president's popularity has diminished due to growing public concern over Obama's handling of the economic recovery and joblessness.
Obama's poor poll ratings indicate that Americans are losing faith in their president, blaming him for their money woes.
His approval rating on the economy has tumbled five percentage points from last month, according to a new CBS News poll.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
07/20/2010 00:00 ||
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""a president on the verge of failure," even though his legislative achievements have been considerable."
And those effects will take years to be felt.
Let US be clear, this government is not a toy. When you play too much with it, you will break it.
It's broken. No one has faith in it, the currency, or the lawfare they shall be subjected to.
I will not start my business in the US now no matter what he says as he is 82% guile and the rest is ignorance.
Whats the use if all the rules change every week?
If I wanted to work for the government, I would have stayed in the military but I saw how that was going.
Now, they have forced the US government on every man in this country.
Act like American Citizens instead of loyal subjects and dumb serfs. This is really outta hand.
#2
Students and professionals who are serious about achievement, personal accomplishment, and success are dedicated, and oftentimes work very long hours. Layabouts and jokesters on the other hand, have little concern for grades, measures of success, or the future. You decide.
#4
Soon you will see, my minions! I am wearing flashy duds, dudes, and my suit is filled with rock-ribbed muscles! Someday, I will be appreciated as the Greatest President, even surpassing James Earl Carter. My time will come!
Obama made me say it.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/20/2010 7:40 Comments ||
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#5
Is this why he's about to pass OPEN SEASON on American Citizens that go against his policies and call them terrorists so they can be shot in cold blood??
#7
It is time for some "Hosses" in the Democratic party to have a "come to Jesus meeting" with Obama - & tell him to resign.He should not finish he 4 years.
#8
#7 It is time for some "Hosses" in the Democratic party to have a "come to Jesus meeting" with Obama - & tell him to resign.He should not finish he 4 years.
Posted by: whatadeal
I suspect the bastids are setting the stage for an Obama single term as we speak; with the Hildebeast as his follow-on. She appears to have undergone a facelift, is wearing a brand new smile and blathering forth lots of happy talk. Slick is on the stump once again gearing up. I've feared these power hungry vermin would attempt return to center stage for quite some time. Will it never end.
#5 Is this why he's about to pass OPEN SEASON on American Citizens that go against his policies and call them terrorists so they can be shot in cold blood??
Posted by: armyguy 2010-07-20 09:38
The Bhuttos, and Bhutto-led governments, seem lost in a rut that has become brittle and boring through over-use. Their only measure of Pakistani patriotism is the level of hysteria that they can simulate against India. A psychiatrist would be tempted to trace this habit to the fate of Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, Prime Minister of Junagadh before partition, whose plan to merge his state into Pakistan went badly awry. Bhutto went, of course, minus his state, closely followed by the Nawab of Junagadh who left his family behind but escaped with his dogs. Such speculation, however, is not quite within the realm of a newspaper column.
It is unarguable, though, that the Bhuttos, having proved pathetically impotent whenever they waged war against India, have tried to reassure themselves with the flatulent hype of a war of words. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was the theorist as well as leader of the 1965 war for Kashmir, a claim that he would doubtless have stressed with far greater glee if Pakistan had succeeded. Operation Gibraltar and Operation Grand Slam failed miserably, an assertion proved by the simple fact that not an inch of territory changed hands along the Cease Fire Line in Jammu and Kashmir.
In 1971, Bhutto tried to camouflage humiliation in Dhaka by promising a thousand years of war against India. Well, we still have 960 years left. No hurry, then, for a peace treaty. Implicit in the 1000-year threat is the recognition that Pakistan cannot win on the battlefield, since if you win war ceases. Futility is, apparently, not sufficient reason for Pakistan to stop fighting.
Zulfiqars daughter Benazir Bhutto came to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in 1989, abused Narasimha Rao and promised Kashmir azadi, her decibel levels rising to a shriek by the time she had finished the last azadi in her speech. Two decades have passed since then, Benazir has been assassinated in her own country, and not an inch of territory has changed hands in Kashmir. Her husband Asif Zardaris government will sooner or later leave office, either after a peaceful election, or a more violent ejection by the cantonment, and not an inch of territory will have changed despite his plastic smile or his Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshis immature incandescence. War, formal or clandestine, will achieve nothing.
It is possible that the Bhuttos and their servitors do not mean what they say, that this is their default position in the confrontation with their permanent foes in the armed forces. It is time, however, they learnt that terrorism has made the world too dangerous for bluster. The international consensus against this plague will not tolerate the tepid root cause argument, either, as justification.
Qureshi forgot that the world was listening when he said that terrorist-infiltrators in the Kashmir were Indias problem. He would not last a minute in his job if he told America that Al Qaeda was Washingtons problem and the Pentagon should deal with them once they had infiltrated into America. When the FBI wants a suspect, Pakistan picks up six in six hours. When India asks for Hafiz Saeed, Qureshi talks about Indias home secretary G.K. Pillai not in the quiet of a conference hall, but at a press conference.
It is no ones case that S.M. Krishna, a suave and seasoned politician, should stoop to Qureshis levels of street rhetoric. Perhaps Krishnas courtesy prevented him from describing this as nonsense, but silence is not always the best answer to stupidity.
India is Americas friend. Pakistan is Americas ally. Islamabad has the transcript of David Headleys interrogation in which he exposed the fact that ISI gave at least Rs 25 lakh to fund the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008. Any criminal enquiry will take the trail to the most powerful force in Pakistan. Qureshi had to try and deflect the terrorist issue. He did not have the intellectual sophistication and diplomatic skills for such a responsibility.
Pakistan does not have a foreign policy. It has relationships. Three, with America, China and Saudi Arabia, are as steady as an alliance between a benefactor and client. One, with India, is inimical; which is why Army controls India policy. America, Saudi Arabia and China factor in Pakistan, but do not hold India hostage to Islamabads interests. However, Pakistan uses India as the bogey through which it can try to massage benefits from friends and sympathy from neutral countries or blocs. Confrontation suits it better than conciliation, domestically and internationally. Many Pakistanis are convinced about the wisdom of peace with India, but they are not strong enough to challenge the cantonment.
Dr Manmohan Singhs mandate to Krishna was to reduce the trust deficit. One wonders how much trust is left after Qureshi has equated Pillai with a terrorist and dismissed Krishna as unprepared and incompetent. Delhi should not respond with hostility. But a little indifference could go a long way.
Posted by: john frum ||
07/20/2010 07:41 ||
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India is Americas friend. Pakistan is Americas ally.
The latter is accurate. As to the former, I'm not so sure.
There's 60-plus years of history to deal with on both statements.
Where? At Six Flags Great Adventure near Chicago, that's where.
We're learning that organization that is funding the Muslim Family Day at Six Flags, the Islamic Circle of North America, has some rather interesting items on it's website. Something about all Muslims and Pakistanis "uniting against America." There is also evidence that this group does it's share of funding Islamic organizations involved with terrorism and Islamic radicalism.
In the meantime .. just a few weeks ago Porky Pig was attacked at this same Six Flags. Two employees were charged in the attack. The employees were named Sikalchuk and Petrychenko. Sounds somewhat Russian to me. Chechnyan perhaps? Now this is just horribly insensitive of me (like that bothers me) but you can't help but wondering if the two off-duty employees who attacked poor Porky were Muslims. Don't look for any information on that in the media coverage.
Oh ... and does Porky get the off on September 12th?
Al-Qaida's new English-language magazine, Inspire, is not living up to its name. According to NPR, the month-old publication has failed to reach its target audience: young men trying to decide whether to join the jihad against the West. But it's nothing a team of media consultants can't fix. Here are a few tips they might offer:
Get on the Web. News flash: The Second Caliphate is over. Glossy magazines are dying, and not in a good way...Go daily. It's been a month since Inspire launched, and we're still waiting for Issue No. 2. Here' a tip: Publish every day. There's no shortage of jihadi news. (Suicide bombings, fatwas, and beheadings are especially click-y.)...Lists. Lists get eyeballs. Suggestions: "Top 10 Albums Not To Listen To." "60 Peaceful Quranic Verses To Ignore." "15 Jihadis Under 15." And, of course, an annual "Best Mullahs" list.
Posted by: lord garth ||
07/20/2010 18:15 ||
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I think most of our problems transcend politics, which is increasingly a reflection of an elite, insider culture that is completely at odds with the majority of the country that it oversees.
So what is a cultural elite?
It is a sloppy term that might include the academic class in the university that educates our children in college. The upper echelons that run government departments constitute part of this cultural elite. So does an entertainment cadre that oversees television and Hollywood. Corporate managers are elites as well.
There is no racial, regional, religious, or tribal commonality. One shared allegiance perhaps is to higher education that certifies the cultural elite by diplomas of all sorts from a good school, as well as a respectable salary and a nice home with appurtenances. The good life of the elite is defined by both the absence of worry about necessities, and a certain status that accrues from properly recognized advanced education and sensitivity.
How would we characterize the new aristocracy? In a number of ways.
1) Untruth. One requisite to being a cultural elite, unfortunately, is a certain allegiance to untruth, to saying one thing and doing another. Consider the manifestations of falsity from ecology to race. Often exempt from worry over a weekly check, and distanced from the mechanics of how things work, the elite clamors for a green cap-and-trade revolution. It rejects compromise with a fossil fuel near future that would transition us in a half-century or so to renewable energy.
That said, it is hard to find cultural elites who live green lives. Most use their money at times to fly on jets or boat (like the president this weekend). As in the manner of the tastes of a John Edwards or Al Gore, the bigger and more impressive the home, the better to contemplate how lesser others use too much carbon-based power. Usually green sacrifice is to be made by coal miners, oil drillers, and timber men of politically incorrect industries the distant horny-handed classes whose unmentioned work brings us instant convenience.
On matters racial, it gets complicated since advocacy is one thing, living another. The cultural elite use pull to get their kids into college, money to live in a good neighborhood, and networking to marry and place like others from a good background. All that remains unspoken and rarely articulated. Why so? Because otherwise the logical ramifications of such a liberal belief system would be to live in the San Jose or Fresno mixed suburbs, to have their children school with the other at Cal State Stanislaus or Indiana State, and to marry their children to Rick Lopez or Tyrone Hiller to encourage diversity.
In short, money, privilege, and status create in the cultural elite both a fear of mixing it up with others that might jeopardize position and placement, and yet guilt for that very sense of entitlement and exemption. All that, in turn, only heightens the shrill and sanctimonious rhetorical demands on less blessed others to prove their morality.
Barack Obama was a genius in recognizing all this, and at a very early age no less. The subtext of Dreams from My Father, and indeed Obamas life from 18 to 45, was to allay elite fears, guilt, and suspicions. And by proving to be a calm, charismatic, minority wannabe fellow elite who could ipso facto offer instant penance for rather isolated and shamed cultural elite s Obama in return grasped that the rules simply would not apply to him (elites having few real unchanging principles and values): graduate admission without commensurate grades and test scores (their release to the public could in theory prove my hypothesis wrong), law review without a paper trail, teaching and offers of tenure at law schools without normal publication, community organizing without worry of tangible results, running for office without repercussions from tawdry attacks ranging from suing to invalidate petitions to leaking divorce records.
2) Nature. The cultural elite class tends to romanticize nature, since it has little contact with it. Energy Secretary Steven Chu cheaply announces that California farms will dry up and blow away, with no clue how the tomatoes in his salad or the lamb chops on his plate are grown, cleaned, shipped and land in his mouth.
The elite like big hiking boots and four-wheel-drive SUVs that can go anywhere, and once that is exhibited usually stick to the hallways and freeways. The further the distance from nature, the greater the desire to experience it vicariously, symbolically, or representationally. The more we dont clean and eat the fish we catch, the more we dont know an apple from a cherry tree, so the more we idolize something like a three-inch Delta smelt and shut down 500,000 acres of icky distant irrigated land to ensure the minnow-like, but beloved, fish has enough oxygenated water in the California delta.
I think that instead of SAT camp or a summer tutorial in estuary biophysics, it would be far better to assign Jason to apprentice with Motts septic service or Wrights tree-trimming. All during the BP mess, I tuned out the Steven Chus and Barack Obamas, and instead wondered what sort of people can weld, or lift, or hammer these massive derricks, casings, drills into place, and what will it take from them to plug the leak thousands of feet below? We just assumed that once the proper strategy was finally formulated, its implementation was assured. But any military historian knows that even the greatest generals sometimes failed for the lack of one brilliant major or lieutenant to take a hill or calm a shaky brigade and so reify a good plan.
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.
It seemed a little odd last week when the Securities and Exchange Commission settled its lawsuit against Goldman Sachs within two hours of Senate passage of the Democrats' Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. After all, who could ask for a more perfect backdrop than a successful prosecution of the investment colossus of Wall Street and a prime mover in the economic crisis of 2008? But this one looks stranger still considering that the SEC action was announced on April 15 of this year, only a week before the legislation was brought before the Senate, thus neatly bookending debate on the proposal. And it gets even stranger. On the same April 15, President Obama's campaign organization, Organizing for America, purchased a Google ad directing people who Googled "Goldman Sachs SEC" to donate money at my.barackobama.com .
Presidents typically invite Americans to appear at Rose Garden press conferences to trumpet their policy successes, but yesterday we saw what may have been a first. President Obama introduced three Americansan auto worker, a fitness center employee and a woman in real estatewho've been out of work so long they underscore the failure of his economic program. Where are his spinmeisters when he really needs them?
