Obama’s Centrist Position

The only time the world revolves around you is when you are drunk!

This about sums it up. Pirates, centrifuges, Nork rockets, G-20 repudiation are distractions to this empty suit.

OJT is possible if one has certain skills to start; CinC skills do not come from a book.
Ditherer in Chief skills do!
At some point, you have to squeeze the trigger and somebody dies.

Obama will make Carter look competent!

Humorous economics

The dismal science is not supposed to have lead characters as buffoons. Reading this interview in Fortune Magazine leaves one with total incredulity. It will however, go to an astonishing degree in explaining that conclave of clowns leading banking and investing since FDR.
Here’s a “Master of the Universe” telling us he didn’t know what was going on. Who is this maven? Does the name Robert Rubin ring a bell? After reading this, the only place you’ll think he’s qualified to work is Notre Dame as, you guessed it…

The reluctant chairman tells Fortune’s Carol Loomis why Citi didn’t see the subprime mess coming.

Keep a barf bag handy.

The more Barack Obama speaks the clearer it becomes that he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s 2^nd term.  Obama’s latest jab at the American people is something that would sound right at home in almost any Carter speech:

“You know, it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say (is), ‘Merci beaucoup.’ “

He and Michele are certainly establishing a pattern here.  They’re not proud of Americans.  He can surround himself with as many flags and pins as he wants, but the words coming out of his mouth tell the real story.

And then there’s this little tidbit from the same talk:

“But understand this: Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.

Our schools are doing such a wonderful job teaching basic English that I’m sure Spanish won’t be a problem.  So now our children can barely speak 2 languages instead of just 1.  That certainly sounds like a “progressive” agenda.

And instead of a melting pot, we can divide the country into the Spanish speaking areas, the English speaking areas, the Arabic speaking areas, the Mandarin speaking areas, etc.  After all, why worry about 100s of years of success with the melting pot concept when elitist liberals like Obama want everyone speaking a different language.  I’m sure that’ll work out wonderfully.

Looks like Barack Obama was a model student at the Jimmy Carter school of Energy Policy. We all know how well those policies worked out.

Obama yesterday:

“You can’t drive your SUVs, eat what you want, and heat your homes to 72 degrees and expect other countries to just say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.”

Carter on July 15, 1979:

“And I’m asking you for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel”

Hat Tip to Francis Cianfrocca at Redstate who summed it up nicely:

If nothing else, he’s now made completely clear his view that the answer to the global energy problem is for Americans to net-reduce our usage of energy, even before more efficient technologies become available. To Obama, this is leadership. He may suppose that everyone else will say “if you do that, we’ll do it too.” Their actual response is more likely to be: ”Thanks for the cheaper energy, suckers.

What is the difference between 1980
and 2008? There’s no Reagan up next.

 We’re getting a good dose of economic malaise, support for a gun ban in DC, Israel gets butt kicked again by us and the  Olympics in China not Russia.

Looks like that Seventies Show rerun.

Carter had the field to himself for worst President, pushing Harding back into the gloom. Bush certainly clawed his way down, crawling over Harding. The damn apple didn’t fall far from the tree, did it.

 A passing thought

Hucksterbee’s campaign is getting short on cash. Y’all git down to the camp meeting for the laying of hands on wallets. Time to pass the plate.

For those whose memory hasn’t fallen down the Memory Hole, this hunt for a pastoral president has some down home roots.

The last religious (read evangelical) President was Mr. Peanut. He gave away the Panama Canal in a white hot, snake handling fervor. Then we had to invade the place to get the leftist crook out of there.

I didn’t think Mr. Peanut could be topped. Then in a gout of remorse, Hucksterbee wants to invite everybody south of  26^o N. Lat. up for citizenship. That doubles down on the canal.

Every time I hear something like Acts 2:38 or a bible being thumped, I think of- of-of Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker or Marjoe Gortner. The Huckster may have all them beat for contorting the truth.

Oh well, I had nothing better to do for this time except scratch this itch.

Non-believing US voters feel demonized

One presidential hopeful is a preacher, another proudly Mormon, and most openly tout their Christianity. In an arena where faith can make or break a politician, the one in 10 Americans who profess no religion feel left in the cold.

“They’re very disconcerted,” said Darren Sherkat, an atheist sociology professor specializing in religion at Southern Illinois University. [snip]

I’m sure this gentleman has a solid religious background from which to expand his knowledge of faith and beliefs.

Ian Thomas, 25, got involved in political campaigning as a student and in 2005 ran for a place on the school board in his local district in Pennsylvania.

Days before the vote, a county council member emailed local community groups disparaging Thomas for having an atheist bumper sticker on his car, and for writing a letter about atheism to a local newspaper.

“They are entitled to their beliefs and free speech but it doesn’t make a sound foundation for elected officials who makes our laws … to promote an Atheist that we know anything about,” read the ungrammatical email, shown to AFP. [snip]

But they are also “the least tolerated group by conventional standards of religious toleration in the US,” Sherkat said. [snip]

One might say the sins of their “religion” are visited upon them; who believes the Missouri Synod or the Archdioceses of NY and DC sued to remove “In God We Trust” from coinage. Or wishes to eradicate the word God from general use. Why do they want “religious toleration” since they reject religion

“Legally, there is no religious test for office, but culturally there obviously is,” he said, as polls showed Republican Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, surging ahead in key early nominating states. [snip]

More than one in 10 US adults have no religious affiliation, according to the census figures.

Having no religious affiliation does not default to atheism or agnosticism.

But a Gallup poll in February found more than half of voters would not back an otherwise well-qualified candidate from their favored party if that person was an atheist. [snip]

“The fair question would be to ask … will you impose your theology on civil law?”

And another fair question is, from what body of law was civil law derived? Heh?

“There is no candidate that an atheist would vote for … other than maybe Ron Paul,” Shermer said, naming a Tennessee lawmaker, a long-shot Republican contender.

“He’s a libertarian who feels absoutely (for) separation of church and state.”

“Many of the candidates would be acceptable to me regardless of their religious faith,” Stark told AFP. “Jimmy Carter (who became president in 1977) was perhaps the most personally strident conservative Christian — and I think he did a wonderful job.”

That last statement about sums it up; what further proof of the absence of reason is necessary, except that Ron Paul is from Texas.

        Maybe you should have sent your Propeller Beanie!

Ex-President and still active dung beetle Jimmy Carter speaking about the Iranian hostage crisis to XM Radio’s Bob Edwards on October 10, 2007…..

“….I have a specific regret in not having one more helicopter when I wanted to rescue our hostages.  If I had had one more helicopter they would have been rescued.   I might have been re-elected President.”

Well, what would  YOU do?  Your books are platitudinous piles of remaindered crap.  Your only friends are found in the world’s thugocracies, in the leftist media and at the Democrat Party’s fire dances.

 You’re the model for all the social-climbing white trash political donkeys of the old, racist, anti-Semitic American South; for that species of spiritless, humorless, sewer-trout evangelicals normally found only in fiction.  Your pole-star is Revenge.  With your bulging, gelatinous eyes, your yellow Chicklet teeth and your blast-wound mouth, you’re the most physically repugnant figure in public life (next to Jack Murtha).       

You were elected President in a macabre accident of history, and launched the most luminous record of American humiliation, cosmic incompetence and  buffoonery in American history.  In a corner of your mental cell you approved speeches written for you by Chris Matthews.  You gawk and grin, shambling stooped and stupid in the company of dictators.    You were joined on the public stage by your wretched harridan of a wife, the silverware and china trademark inspector, Rosalyn.  So what do you do?  What DO you DO?  You go on XM Radio for an interview and say you “would not wanted to have changed anything” about your Presidency.

“….Carter…thinks that the Oval Office isn’t nearly as sweet a gig as his own humanitarian efforts at  The Carter Center.  After all, if he had  had that extra helicopter which would have rescued the hostages (wildly presuming, of course, that the Delta Force commanders were able to pull of a daring rescue of the more than 50 US citizens being held in Teheran) and thus help re-elect him President, Carter said, “in that case I probably wouldn’t have had The Carter Center, so in balance I would not want to have changed anything”.

Does this yammering fool have a clue about what’s going on in the world?

                       Stay away from me.  Go CARE about someone else.

In 1992, when Bill Clinton said “I feel your pain” to AIDS patient Bob Rafsky during a campaign stop, he seemed to mean it.  And he did, in the same way he felt all the narcissistic sentiments of his various realities to come.  We learned that, as he continued to emote and feel things during his priapic presidency, the facts and values of his emotions varied a great deal.  But, whatever his faults, Clinton was a lone act; he just wore the comedy and tragedy masks and didn’t try to institutionalize his pathos.  For that, we have George W. Bush and Compassionate Conservatism.

“Compassionate Conservatism” as a theoretical approach to social problems is the creation of Marvin Olasky, professor/journalist,  former communist, Jewish atheist turned Born Again Christian, Yale grad and former Bush advisor.  The term derives from Olasky’s study of the relative successes of government and private programs in relieving the effects of poverty throughout American history.  Olasky’s ideas and conclusions were the basis for faith-based initiatives, some of them adopted by GWB as governor to Texas and later as President.  

Compassionate Conservatism passed Olasky’s empirical tests.  It had less to do with religion than it did with communitarian possibilities , and almost nothing to do with the administrative state as a dispenser of compassion.  Bush, however, has infused his administration with a soft compassionate conservatism, and pushed the phrase front stage, and  thence into that deplorable family of catch-phrases inflicted upon historians and the public by political dream merchants.   These phrases define eras, visions, goals, national purposes and the evanescent pursuits of political generations, not of “the people” themselves.  

The last full century was fouled by such blinding banalities - New and Fair Deals, New Frontiers, New Convenants, New This, New That, Straight-Talk Express, WIN, and lots more, plus that apotheosis of mawkish liberal romanticism, stewed with a touch of Albert Speer,  The Great Society.  All of them foundered in some way on the shoals of reality.  As vessels for everyone’s different wishes and interpretations, they could never really function as democratic programs.  

As a digression, what the hell was The Great Society?  Someone tell me.  If the New Haven of today, with its brutalist architecture, bloodstains and cement foliage resembles the progressive vision of 1968,  someone needs to be punished for the artwork and the final rendering.  Liberals reduced the faded,  but restorable illuminated script of American urban life to loopy spray-can graffito, not only in New Haven but in every old city in the country because they cared about the inhabitants!   Listen, Uncle Sam.  Wherever I hurt, please don’t touch me there.

The same is true of Compassionate Conservatism, which to me seems to be the spiritual rationale for the President’s  swelling sympathies for anyone who can make it across an American border, to holders of burdensome mortgages, or to a select few who can lay claim to natural rights somewhere across the seas.  Despite Mexican towns emptying of young men, most who never return, despite the  deepening Latin despotism that make it desirable to leave and abandon hope of change, despite tyrannical stasis in the Middle East among our allies, our indiscriminate goodness survives the contradictions and goes looking for another heart to heal.   And we haven’t even gotten to sub-prime borrowers and their angst.

Now Bush is  waxing sympathetic about injustice in Myanmar, which is not a moral gradient he needs to scale to remain compassionate, and which fades into insignificance anyway in the shadows of monstrous injustices in Africa and the Middle East.  No doubt Rice can make a compassionate case for the Burmese/Myanmaris who must be saved by the ameliorative West.  It’s lunacy. There’s a natural limit to caring; it’s cheap, its reality is unknowable, and conservatism is not about pain, its  simply about liberty and justice for all.   You don’t attain either of these things by sloshing in sentimentality. 

With George Bush we got prescription drug subsidies,  support for affirmative action, a volcano of dollars for the orgy of corruption and graft that followed the genuine suffering of Katrina,  open borders, and Bush’s promotion of his four C’s of “civility, courage, compassion and character” (First Inaugural Address),  but not a word about The Constitution or his governing philosophy.  When you have no governing philosophy to defend as President, just a boundless heart,  then the office is your personal hair shirt.  The last time we went down this road, we got the constipated spirituality and crabbed pieties of Jimmy Carter.  Maybe we’re better off this time.  I’m not sure yet.

Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s anti-US rhetoric must be wearing a little thin.  Worrying about US “imperialism” is pretty high on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and not that large of a concern when you’re really poor.  A little thing like poverty does tend to make you notice how your “beloved” leaders are living, which is why Chavez is ratcheting up the socialist rhetoric.

“Whoever has a fridge they do not need, put it out in the village square. Whoever has a truck, a fan or a cooker they do not need, give something away. Let’s not be selfish. I demand you do it,” Chavez said at a milk producing cooperative, in remarks released yesterday. 

There’s nothing like a fridge to set you on the path to financial independece when you’re poor.  Besides, does anyone outside of former President Jimmy Carter believe that Chavez’s new socialist party is really going to share their wealth with the masses?  But he’s got good intentions, so Jimmy will certify a few more fraudulent elections for him.

The number of people who don’t remember the late 70s amazes and scares me. If you did remember that period, wouldn’t you take everything Jimmy Carter says or does with a grain of salt? He was the worst president of the modern era, but the left lionizes him as if he were the best. They gave him a Nobel Prize for acting as the world’s chief apologist for leftist regimes like Cuba, and they accept his validation of questionable election practices as gospel truth to protect lefty dictators like Hugo Chavez. And of course they lap up every anti-American and Jewish thing he has to say.

So it’s not surprising the former president’s new book, “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid”, is under fire given his track record. Brandeis University offered to have him debate Alan Dershowitz, but the former president refused. Mr. Carter is not, although he claims otherwise, open to debating his points. But what liberal is interested in an open exchange of ideas? These are the people who created political correctness to stifle debate, not encourage it. But give Jimmy credit for one thing—he saved himself a beating by throwing in the towel early. Dershowitz would have pounded him.

ATLANTA (AP) — A longtime aide to Jimmy Carter has resigned from the Carter Center think tank, calling the former president’s new book on Israel and the Arabs one-sided and filled with errors.

Kenneth Stein, the Carter Center’s first executive director and founder of its Middle East program, sent a letter that bluntly criticized the book to Carter and others.

Stein wrote that the book, “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid,” was replete with factual errors, material copied from other sources and “simply invented segments,” according to an excerpt of the letter published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Deanna Congileo, Carter’s spokeswoman, said the former president stands by the book.

Stein, who is also director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel at Emory University, did not immediately return a call Wednesday.

Carter issued a brief statement saying that Stein had not been actively involved with the center for more than 12 years and was not involved with the new book. Carter did not directly address Stein’s allegations.

Kenneth Stein had a fatwa placed on him by al-Carter. Disagreement in the ranks is intolerable.

Hugo Chavez and Jimmy Carter assure us that Cuba is a workers’ paradise so imagine my surprise to find out the infrastructure is crumbling and its economic “boom” is not trickling down to the common man. But don’t feel badly for Jimmy and Hugo, reality has never detered them before and they aren’t about to let it do so now.

It amuses me that liberals label themselves “progressive” when their policies are anything but. Former President Jimmy Carter’s thoughts on preemption exemplify progressives’ inability to adjust to the modern world:

Under all of its predecessors there was a commitment to peace instead of preemptive war. Our country always had a policy of not going to war unless our own security was directly threatened and now we have a new policy of going to war on a preemptive basis.

Isolationism was an option when the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans protected us, but the oceans no longer give us the time and space to be reactive. Modern weaponry, like North Korea’s missile program, shortens our ability to react from months to minutes. Additionally, today’s weapons are far more lethal. A nuclear strike in LA would kill thousands instantly.

President Carter should update his thinking. Waiting for 100s of thousands of dead Americans before we react should be our last option, not the first.

Republicans vs. Democrats…isn’t this really what all these television talk shows are all about? What are the main differences today between these two? When I first voted at the ripe old age of 20 in 1980, I voted for a guy who was clearly a Republican..of course we are talking about the Gipper. Anyone who voted for him….and it was quite a lot….knew exactly what he stood for….strong military, pro-business, less government programs, lower taxes, horoscope readings and a very strange son. We all voted for him as nobody in their right mind wanted to watch 4 more years of Jimmy Carter. Ok..simple enough…Reagan defined what being a Republican was…who wouldn’t like all the things I mentioned? Other than a few that enjoyed long gas lines, Iran holding our hostages, and peanut farmers…not too many.

Today we see Hillary Clinton trying to mislead the public into believing she is a “tough conservative” on some issues, while George W. spends money on programs, etc like a drunken sailor at times. It’s just not as clear as it once was. Back in the 90’s Republicans had Newt Gingrich running the Capitol, and today they have someone named Dennis Hastert, who is taken as seriously as Speaker of the House as Paula Abdul is on American Idol…………..On the other side, the Democrats are lining up such heavyweights for the Oval office as Hillary Clinton, possibly John Kerry and Al Gore again (please spare us these debates…), and listening to that Ritalin deprived lunatic- Howard Dean running the party platform.

I realize I’m rambling here..but I guess my point is this………we just don’t have any true leadership. Not just on an individual basis, but even from a particular party platform either. We used to be able to look at the Democrats and say…ok..here we go…………more programs, less military, helping the needy, tax the rich, and rather than fight the bad guys–try and hold hands and “give peace a chance”. Republicans on the other hand were categorized as a bunch of selfish meanies that would fight at the drop of a hat, stop feeding the homeless, all were members of country clubs, drank martinis, and owned all the business and land. Neither of these two simple descriptions are textbook, but they sort of encompass what we saw through the media……today however…we see such a mix and combination of deception and leaning this way and that way—it’s hard to tell just what these individuals or the parties actually stand for.