Laugh? We thought we'd die!

Yes, folks, those kookie-loonies in government are at it again, entertaining the silly-goosest ideas in our time. How funny! How droll. How clever they are. Obamously Hilaryous.

Martin Fletcher, " Iranian President Ahmadinejad celebrates win with show of brutality." Tehran: Times Online. 15 June 2009

Chanting Allahu akbar” — God is greatest — and “Ahmadi, we love you” the army of hardliners poured into central Tehran in a massive show of strength for President Ahmadinejad.[...]

Mr Ahmadinejad gave a surreal, Orwellian press conference.

He called his victory an “epic achievement” that made Iran’s brand of religious democracy, with its emphasis on ethics, a model for the world.

Mr Ahmadinejad dismissed the protests as unimportant, comparing the rioters to disappointed football supporters after a match. He said there was no evidence that he had stolen the election, and that his margin of victory — 28 per cent — was so great that it was absurd to question his legitimacy. “Don’t worry about it. Freedom prevails absolutely in our country,” he told incredulous foreign journalists.

[....]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6499534.ece

Funnier and funnier:
"Clinton Reverses: Israel on its Own With Iran," from Israel National News, June 14 (thanks to Sr. Soph):

...When asked if her new statement was official U.S. policy, Clinton dodged the question, "I think it is U.S. policy to the extent that we have alliances and understandings with a number of nations. I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind that, were Israel to suffer a nuclear attack by Iran, there would be retaliation." Stephanopoulos pressed her: "By the United States?" But Clinton declined to commit: "Well, I think there would be retaliation.”

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/026574.php

How are we going to stand any more of this wacky humor from our government? My gut aches already, and it's only been six months of this comedy.

After the ball

At our last Thursday meeting, Charles was remarking how if you look at the legions of young people who flock to Obama, what is remarkable are the faces that look as if this man is the last best hope for mankind (not his exact words, I hope i get the gist of the observation right, Charles): in our age when nihilism and relativism is preached in the classrooms, it's almost as if young people have gotten to the point where nothing good in the world can be believed, but Obama.

This led to a discussion of the likelihood of suicide rates going up in the Obama era as young people see their faith in The One come to terms with a human reality in which the Messiah has not yet returned to earth and we remain stuck with all the usual folly, and maybe worse.

McCain may still win, for all I know, and we can look forward, among other things, to Bush Derangement Syndrome taken to the nth degree.

The optimistic necessity about an Obama presidency is that given the current economic climate, and the nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, it is very likely to be a time of crisis and crisis spells opportunity for those who really know something of the need for new directions.

One new direction, it seemed to me at our discussion, is for someone who can effectively preach to young people, after Obama, the nature of real hope and change. Maybe Thomas Sowell is our man, for he sees right through the vanities of the young person:

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise-- whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team-- is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges-- very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in real world.

The signs of Barack Obama's self-centered immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents.

The triumphal tour of world capitals and photo-op meetings with world leaders by someone who, after all, was still merely a candidate, is just one sign of this self-centered immaturity.

One of my insights into the eternal student was when he visited Iraq. Visiting with the Prime Minister of that country, the two men entered a hall of reporters for a photo op. As is the norm, there were two chairs for the men to sit in and put on a show of discussion. It was the mere visiting Senator from Illinois who made the ritual gesture of inviting the leader of Iraq to have a seat. A cocksure sign, but not exactly a sign of confidence in the guy who will be left holding the bag if Obama rushes too quickly to pull the troops out.

Sympathy For The Devil: Bill Ayers' Approval Rating

''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' says former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in his 2001 book Fugitive Days.

When New York Times reporter Dinita Smith interviewed Ayers about his new book for an article published on September 11, 2001, he admitted:

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.''

...
He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972.

Even more chilling was Ayers response to a question about whether he would bomb again.

''I don't want to discount the possibility,'' he said.

So what to make of a recent Rasmussen poll, identifying a number as large as 13% who can somehow hold "favorable" views about this callous, unrepentant terrorist bomber?

...
[William Ayers], now a college professor in Chicago, was part of a domestic terrorist group in the 1960s and remains unrepentant for his activities during that era. Just 13% of American voters have a favorable opinion of him while 62% hold an unfavorable view. Twenty-five percent (25%) don’t know enough to have an opinion either way.

Among political liberals, 25% have a favorable opinion of him while 44% give Ayers negative reviews. Seventy-three percent (73%) have an unfavorable opinion of Ayers, including 59% with a Very Unfavorable opinion.
...

It boggles the mind; after all that's been revealed about this awful man, there are still so many people who can, somehow, like him. Rasmussen tries to dampen the bad news by introducing it with a "just", but the revelation that "just" a little more than one out of ten Americans can find room to morally accomodate this man's evil is one out of ten too many.

Is this sympathy for the devil the result of their paying attention, and approving of what they learn? Or is this from not paying attention at all, reflecting simply the knee-jerk reaction of one out of four liberals that if Ayers also wants to spread the wealth around, then it follows by extention that he must be a fine fellow.

"And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil."
___ King Richard III (I, iii, 336-338)

New Obama Times: Running on empty.

US-POLITICS Summary

New York Times endorses Obama for president NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for U.S. president on Thursday, saying he had "met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change."

Yeah, and now for some news:

New York Times Company sinking faster - http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/10/new_york_times_company_sinking.html

Thomas Lifson
The death spiral accelerates, as NYTCo earnings fell by 51.4% in the third quarter. As AT predicted would happen after it was raised, the company now recognizes it is unable to sustain its dividend. That's critical because Sulzberger family members control the board of directors, and many of them depend heavily on dividend income for their lifestyles.

"Our board of directors plans to review our dividend policy before the end of this year to determine what is most prudent in light of the overall market conditions," the company's chief executive, Janet Robinson, said in a statement.

Pinch Sulzberger hiked the dividend from 17.5 cents to 23 cents a share to buy family support, whatever the cost to then company's ability to cope with the maelstrom of economic forces it must navigate. He clearly put his own tenure in office above the survivability of the company, in effect liquidating it in slow motion.

When the brighter among the staffers of the New York Times realize that Pinch has sacrificed the viability of the company in order to keep himself in office, they will turn on him. But that will probably be after the family tosses him out (it will be called voluntary retirement), now that (presumably) they have caught on themselves that Pinch has been scuttling the Good Ship New York Times through decades of disastrous business decisions. Those smaller checks are really going to pinch, now that the stock market and real estate are down.

Anticipating the dividend cut, investors are dumping the stock and it is below $10 for the first time in many years.
****

Yes, many people have stopped subscribing to the NYT for the simple reason that they use the Internet to read at Covenant Zone instead; but many must be plumb fed-up with the pimping for Obama that the Times tries to pass off as news and intelligent editorial. More than Obama: people are likely just disgusted by the leftard vision the Times presents as the way of sophisticated people. It ain't; and in a world where people have to choose wisely how to spend their limited time, they are decreasingly opting to spend their time and money on the NYT. The market tells, the smart money seeking new visions, regardless of how "stupid" we are, those of us who have abandoned The New York Times.

There will always be the NYT, but it'll be an obvious joke, like a fancy version of a street-corner give-away paper. The people speak. They say: The Times, they are a'collapsing.

Osama Barka Campaign '84.

I don't believe everything I hear. You have to show me. There is a report that a tv station in Missouri is making threats against those who slag Osama Barka. I'm not sure what to make of it. I'd like some input.

Watch the video: http://www.kmov.com/video/index.html?nvid=285793&shu=1

Link available at Free Republic.

Here's a text synopsis of O Soma Merica.

September 27, 2008

Missouri's Obama Truth Squads

Lee Cary

Last Tuesday, CBS affiliate Channel 4 TV News in St. Louis reported that some Missouri sheriffs and prosecutors have formed a truth squad to target anyone who engages in misleading ad or statements about Senator Obama.

Here's the transcript of the lede on the CBS story:

"Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign is asking Missouri law enforcement to target anyone who lies or runs a misleading television ad during the presidential campaign."

The implied threat in the Channel 4 report is that prosecutors and sheriffs across Missouri will enforce "Missouri ethics laws" and conduct criminal investigations of "anyone who lies or runs a misleading television ad" against Barack Obama. Although the report did not directly state that intent, that implied message was clearly conveyed.

Two high-profile officers of the court spoke on camera: Jennifer Joyce, St. Louis Circuit Attorney, and Robert P. McCullouch, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney. No one was available at either of their offices on Friday to comment on the story.

Channel 4 mentions the expected support of Jefferson County Sheriff Glen Boyer in the truth squad efforts. Captain Ralph Brown, in charge of press relations for the Sheriff's Department, could not be reached for comment on Friday.

Scott Holste, speaking Friday on behalf of the Missouri Attorney General's office, was available for comment. He said he had already been contacted about the Channel 4 report, that the Attorney General's office was not involved in any way with truth squads, and that he found the CBS news item to be "a mangled story."

Also on Friday, Joe Carroll, Director of Campaign Financing, Missouri Ethics Commission, said that he is "not familiar with any campaign law that applies."

John Mills, the Channel 4 reporter, was unavailable for comment Friday.

Was the St. Louis CBS affiliate complicit in the attempt, by some elected Democrat court officials in the St. Louis area, to stifle free political speech in Missouri on Senator Obama's behalf?
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/missouris_obama_truth_squads_2.html

Please feel free to leave a comment on this story. O Brave New World.

Polls show massive support for Obama

A BBC poll published today will show that, despite the tightness of the race in the US, Obama is the overwhelming favourite in 22 countries. He is preferred to McCain by a four to one margin on average across the 22,000 people polled.

The margin in favour of Obama ranges from just 9% in India to 82% in Kenya. On average 49% prefer Obama to 12% preferring McCain. Nearly four in 10 do not take a position.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/sep/10/women.uselections2008

Looks like Obama can be the resident dictator of Kenya if he wants to be. I'm sorta for it. Otherwise, who gives a flying fiddle what others think? Put that in your hoot and toke it.

Obama's crowd kind of want him to die...

When I talk about the victimary culture positively needing and wanting victims to make sense of the world, what follows is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Thankfully even some on the left are revolted by this: Brendan O'Neill, Please kill this ‘Obama assassination porn’ | spiked

From the moment he entered the primary race to become the Democratic candidate for president, Obama, his team, his security detail and his backers in the media and literary worlds have been positively obsessed by the possibility that he will be bumped off. Caniadian newspaper columnist and unapologetic neocon, Mark Steyn, refers to it as ‘Obama assassination porn’, part of a self-flattering, ersatz ‘determination to appropriate Camelot and [its] mythic narrative’ (4).

The palpable fear of assassination is certainly revealing. In the past, it was aristocrats – isolated princes, kings and dukes – who were consumed by assassinophobia, whereas democrats, from Abraham Lincoln to Bobby Kennedy, tended to make a public display of their lack of fear of the lone gunman (5). The Obama crew’s fear, even fantasy, that America harbours a killer who wants to take down their candidate reveals much about Obama’s aloofness, and about political crisis in the Democratic camp.
[...]
assassinophobia has been a continual undercurrent in the discussion about Obama, frequently revealing a broad-ranging fear of Americans rather than a specific fear for Obama’s life.

Supporters of Obama often talk about the wonderful things he will do ‘if he survives…’ The UK Sun hopes Obama ‘lives long enough to bring in the reforms that could rehabilitate America’ (6). Doris Lessing, the British Nobel Laureate, caused a stink in February when she declared that Obama would not survive in the White House: ‘He would probably not last long. They would kill him.’ (7) She didn’t specify who ‘they’ were, but she didn’t need to: ‘they’, in the words of one newspaper, are those ‘pockets of the US, and they are deep and large, that simply will not vote for a black man and where racism is ingrained’ (8). Earlier this year, the Daily Telegraph reported that some Democrats are ‘reluctant to vote for Mr Obama because a Southern racist might shoot him’ (9). Darkly ironically, their desire to save Obama from a bloody fate by not electing him is given sanction by the Obama camp itself. From day one, his circle has organised around the possibility of assassination. He was given Security Service protection in May 2007, ‘far earlier than previous presidential candidates’, and since then his security detail has been ‘stepped up amid fears he could be an assassination target’ (10).

Some Obama supporters have been rattled by the suspicion and heavy-handedness of his security detail. It is reported that ‘tensions have flared’ at some of the crowded pro-Obama rallies, where chanting and passionate crowds have ‘caused major headaches for his Secret Service bodyguards’ (11). At the Iowa caucus in January, Obama’s bodyguards drew their weapons when a man ran towards Obama shouting ‘Obama, Obama!’ The man only wanted to shake Obama’s hand. Later, an Obama aide said to the man: ‘Hey, you can’t do that man. Be careful.’ (12) It seems that while the Obama camp publicly heralded these mass displays of support as a ‘new kind of politics’, privately it viewed them as ‘security nightmares’ where every passionate supporter was a potential killer (13).

Some Obama-backers have seemed almost to fantasise that he will be killed. Writing in the Ottawa Sun, Earl McRae said: ‘Barack Obama is waving his arms. The crowd is cheering… I see Barack Obama, one minute smiling, the people crying his name. I see Barack Obama grab his chest and his eyes widen and his mouth opens, and the crowd screams as Barack Obama, black candidate for the presidency of the United States of America, falls to the ground, dead, an assassin’s bullet inside him.’ (14)

This is what Mark Steyn labels ‘Obama assassination porn’. Steyn points out that where it was the opponents of George W Bush who fantasised about his possible assassination – remember the Channel 4 made-for-TV-movie Death of a President? – it is Obama’s supporters who talk endlessly about his possibly being killed. ‘Obama assassination porn is written by his worshippers and testifies to one of the most palpable features of the senator’s campaign’, said Steyn: its desire to ‘appropriate Camelot’ (the figurative name for JFK’s administraton from 1961 to 1963) (15).

Steyn has a point: fears of an assassination attempt have left the realm of practical policing and become part of a political drama, part of a story about Obama being the heir to the slain Kennedys and Dr King who is risking everything to save America. In lieu of a clear-cut political programme or radically new vision, the ‘assassination story’ has unofficially, but stealthily, been co-opted as evidence of Obama’s dual vulnerability and bravery, and of the sacrifices he is willing to make to ‘rescue American values’ (16).

Yet the widespread assassinophobia also reveals Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s increasing dislocation from the masses. It captures the continual decline of the Democrats from a mass political party with sometimes passionate grassroots support into a kind of court outfit bereft of democratic vision and essentially fearful of the populace.
[...]
The return of assassinophobia in the American presidential campaign shines a light on the current state of the Democratic Party. It reveals their disdain for large sections of the American populace and the new class snobbery that infects liberal sections of the US; as one pro-Obama assassination fantasist says, some Americans just cannot accept that Obama is ‘a better American than they are’ and so they turn ‘zealously’ to trying to ‘protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Mom’s apple pie and the cross of Jesus in every home’ (23). It also reveals the inexorable transformation of the Democrats into a kind of feudal outfit, essentially cut off from the people and suspicious of their beliefs and motivations. The end result of this ‘assassination porn’ could well be that an assassination attempt becomes more likely. The Duke of Wellington lived in fear of assassination while posted in Paris in the 1810s, but he refused to change his behaviour because ‘I say the danger increases with the appearance of apprehension of it’ (24). In continually advertising their apprehension of death, and even volunteering the kind of ‘rednecks with rifles’ who might make it a reality, the Obama camp may unwittingly be issuing an invitation to some racist nutjob to make their fanatasies come true. Their fears might be one kind of ‘porn’ that really does give rise to violence in the real world.

O'Neill sees "assassinophobia" as the mark of feudal aristocracy. However, one might see in it something yet more primitive. In the Golden Bough, James G. Frazer recounted many stories of primitive, early agrarian-age, kingdoms in which the king enjoys only temporary reign before he must become the victim of a human sacrifice, and thus made, or confirmed, divine.

A general anthropological rule is that humans model themselves on their understanding of the gods, and not vice versa (Frazer was confused on this point). Men first invoke a God before they learn to discuss themselves. At the origin of culture, men signified the presence of a common God, via the things S/he had (apparently) made sacred, untouchable. The first men then went on to begin a process to understand their own humanity by reference to the sacred they had figured/been given, and, over millennia, by the transformation of the sacred understanding into the secular understanding of human nature.

Thus, a primitive king must model himself on the gods. And to the extent his culture is not sufficiently secularized as to allow for a king who is seen as merely or largely human, the pressure to become godly, to justify to the rest of the human crowd this one lucky "man"'s centrality (his access to wealth, women, ritual power), will positively require a day when the king is sacrificed to the sacred image of his divinity. In the primitive world, according to Rene Girard, gods are nothing but the mythologically-disguised memory, or re-presentation, of sacrificial victims. What Girard does not make clear is that before you can have a sacrifice, men first have to have come up peacefully with the idea of a god to whom to sacrifice. The peace that comes with agreeing to share a god comes before the secular decline into resentment, the decline that seems, to primitive thinkers, to require a human sacrifice to stop. Human sacrifice is merely the primitive attempt to re-new a remembered, or original, peace, that lost "Camelot", that Garden of Eden.

If that's what we're seeing with Obama, it is another sign of the reversion of American political culture to something unworthy of a self-ruling Republic.

The grandiose one speaks...

Just back from a long weekend beyond the electronic networks of our world, and catching up with the blogs. It's as if the stage of American presidential politics has changed dramatically. T'will take me a while to get my bearings....

God and this blog's readers know what I sound like at times, with my anthropological theorizing... FWIW, I tend to find "Spengler" of the Asia Times unjustifiably brash in his grand theorizing, often with little rigorous thinking to back him up. Nonetheless, I am really quite amused by his latest offering:

DENVER - Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech last week seemed vastly different from the stands of this city's Invesco Stadium than it did to the 40 million who saw it on television. Melancholy hung like think smog over the reserved seats where I sat with Democratic Party staffers. The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at the tag lines, flourished placards, and even rose for the obligatory wave around the stadium. But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat, and the crowd took shallow breaths. Even the appearance of R&B great Stevie Wonder failed to get the blood pumping.
[...]
On television, Obama's spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead. The longer the candidate spoke, and the more money he promised to spend on alternative energy, preschool education, universal health care, and other components of the Democratic pinata, the lower the party professionals slouched into their seats. The professionals I sat with were Hillary Clinton people, to be sure, and had reason to sulk, for an Obama victory might do them little good in any event.

The Democrats were watching the brightest and most articulate presidential candidate they have fielded since John F Kennedy snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this was before John McCain, in a maneuver worthy of Admiral Chester Nimitz at the Battle of Midway, turned tables on the Democrats' strategy with the choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Speaking to Obama supporters on the periphery of the big event, I was startled by the rapturous devotion elicited by the junior senator from Illinois. He is no symbol for identity politics, no sacrifice on the altar of white guilt, but the most gifted persuader of individuals that I have encountered in any country's politics, as well as a powerful orator on the grand stage. This is not a crowd phenomenon nor a fad, but the response of hundreds of people to an individual.

I sat in on a session with three leaders of Veterans for Obama, a group of retired young officers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, courtesy of the New Republic's writer on the scene, David Samuels. With passion and enthusiasm, these young people spoke of their hopes for nation-building in Iraq. The George W Bush administration should have put twice the resources into the beleaguered country, they harangued me - not just soldiers, but agronomists, traffic cops, lawyers, judges, and physicians. The Department of Agriculture should have mobilized, along with the Department of Justice.

Nation-building? Doubling down on the US commitment to Iraq? Isn't that trying to out-Bush the Bush administration, while Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq and spending the money on programs at home? Unblinking, one of the soldiers said, "That's what we think Barack will do." They believed in a more expensive version of the administration's program, and faulted Bush for half measures - and somehow they believed that Obama really agreed with them, all the public evidence to the contrary. And they believed in Barack with perfect faith.

Gandalf's warnings about the irresistible voice of the wizard Saruman in J R R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings come to mind. If these battle-hardened veterans of America's wars fell so easily under the spell of Obama's voice, who can withstand it? Obama's persuasive powers, though, are strongest when channeled through the empathy of his interlocutor. Everyone believes that Obama feels his pain, shares his dream, and will fight his fight and heal his ills. But that is everyone as an individual. Add all the individuals up into a campaign platform, and it turns into three-quarters of an hour worth of promises that echo all the ghosts of conventions past.

Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain's selection was a statement of strength. America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.

That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama's prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory. [...]
Why didn't Obama choose Hillary? The most credible explanation came from veteran columnist Robert Novak May 10, who reports that Michelle Obama vetoed Hillary's candidacy. "The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility," Novak wrote. If that is true, then Obama succumbed to the character weakness I described in a February 26 profile of (Obama's women reveal his secret). His peculiar dependency on an assertive and often rancorous spouse, I argued, made him vulnerable, and predicted that Obama "will destroy himself before he destroys the country".
[...]
Obama, in short, is long on brains and short on guts. A Shibboleth of American politics holds that different tactics are required to win the party primaries as opposed to the general election, that is, by pandering to fringe groups with disproportionate influence in the primaries. But Obama did not compromise himself with extreme positions. He did not have to, for younger voters who greeted him with near-religious fervor did not require that he take any position other than his promise to change everything. Obama could have allied with the old guard, through an Obama-Clinton ticket, or he could have rejected the old guard by choosing the closest thing the Democrats had to a Sarah Palin. But fear paralyzed him, and he did neither.

In my February 26 profile, I called Obama "the political equivalent of a sociopath", without any derogatory intent. A sociopath seeks the empathy of all around him while empathizing with no one. Obama has an almost magical ability to gain the confidence of those around him. Perhaps it was the adaptation of a bright and sensitive young boy who was abandoned by three parents - his Kenyan father Barack Obama Sr, who left his pregnant young bride; his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetero; and by his mother, Ann Dunham, who sent her 10-year-old son to live with her grandparents while she pursued her career as an anthropologist.

Combine a child's response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had no natural defenses. He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in but not of the American system. No country's politics depends more openly on friendships than America's, yet Obama has not a single real friend, for he rose so fast that all his acquaintances become rungs on the ladder of his ascent. One human relationship crowds the others out of his life, his marriage to Michelle, a strong, assertive and very angry woman.

If Novak's report is accurate, then Michelle's anger will have lost the election for Obama, as Achilles' anger nearly killed the Greek cause in the Trojan War. But the responsibility rests not with Michelle, but with Obama. Obama's failure of nerve at the cusp of his success is consistent with my profile of the candidate, in which I predicted that he would self-destruct. It's happening faster than I expected. As I wrote last February:

It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama ... Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals.

By all rights, the Democrats should win this election. They will lose, I predict, because of the flawed character of their candidate.

Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy.
"...I called Obama "the political equivalent of a sociopath", without any derogatory intent..." Call him what you will, but you can't help laughing with Spengler, at times. Sometimes it takes one to know one... -:)

I Agree With The Democrats

I had come to believe that there was no longer much common ground between the current Democratic Party and my own political views. I certainly used to feel at home with them, many years ago, but as I followed their response to the last decade of changes across our world, my faith in their wisdom and judgment subsided... to say the least.

Yet, I'm man enough to admit when I've made a mistake.

I owe them an apology, for a lot of the bad things I've said about them in recent times. It seems that I do, indeed, retain much in common with the Democrats, after all. Shows what happens when you take the time to listen, to actually listen, to what the "other side" is saying, to get first-hand, straight-from-the-source information, rather than listen to someone merely telling you what it is that someone said. Shame on me for forgetting: "you're not always right, they're not always wrong."

This video provides many examples of sincere sentiments expressed by former President Bill Clinton, Senator Hillary Clinton, Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden, even Barack Obama, that I find myself nodding along with in complete, genuine, agreement.

Normal Schizophrenic Canadian Vacationing in Denver Found Dead with Pound of Cyanide, Not a Jihadi.

"He was fine. He was just a normal person."

The pound of cyanide found in a Denver hotel room with the Muslim's corpse? Well, a souvenir, of course. The man's sister says he was normal, so that's it. Normal.

"In Ottawa, Mr. Dirie's sister told the Citizen that her brother suffered from mental illness, and she angrily rejected any suggestion that he was tied to terrorism or had any intention of harming Mr. Obama."

Canadians have a northern, deep-snow sense of normal, maybe. Who are we to judge?

"He was not a terrorist," said the sister, who declined to give her name. "We don't want to hear that word, it hurts us. It is against our religion."

I'm becoming more convinced each line that a pound of cyanide in a Denver hotel room is just normal prior to the Democratic Convention.

"Her brother, she said, had travelled alone to Colorado for a vacation. The family, she said, was devastated to learn that he had died in his Denver hotel room. "He was just going on a trip," his sister said." .... Mr. Dirie's sister said her brother had been doing well since he began receiving treatment for his illness at the Royal Ottawa Hospital about three years ago.

"He was fine. He was just a normal person."

Her brother was taking his medication regularly when he left Ottawa, she said, and was not suicidal. She did not know how or why he would have come in contact with cyanide....

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/022205.php

Not possibly related to this:

http://covenantzone.blogspot.com/2008/08/utterly-baffling-hammer-attack-on-nine.html

What? Are you crazy?

Clown Nation

Imagine Phormio asking Ion for ship-building advice. What's odd about an Athenian admiral going to war against Sparta asking a pompous fool of an actor who knows about ships because he recites Homer? Uh, I think I'm being rhetorical. Maybe not.

We are going to war against a number of nations in the near future, like it or no, and we might have Osama Barka as our president. If he becomes our commander-in-chief of our military forces, who should he turn to for military advice? Obviously some actor who has great experience in war movies. I mean, of course, Ion.

Maybe I failed too at irony.

I might next try being irenic.

The art of representation. That's what it's all about here. Who represents us? And in the seeing and the re-presentation, who are we really? Go Osama! Lead on. And Send in the Clowns.


Isn't it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground,
You in mid-air.
Send in the clowns.

Isn't it bliss?
Don't you approve?
One who keeps tearing around,
One who can't move.
Where are the clowns?
Send in the clowns.

Just when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my entrance again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines,
No one is there.

Don't you love farce?
My fault I fear.
I thought that you'd want what I want.
Sorry, my dear.
But where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns.
Don't bother, they're here.

Isn't it rich?
Isn't it queer,
Losing my timing this late
In my career?
And where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns.
Well, maybe next year.

This year we have people determined to vote for Osama Barka. Who sent for the clowns?

Politic of the General Will

Some folks get known for things they might rather wish they'd been forgotten for. The Duke of Valencia, Don Ramón María Narváez y Campos, died at Madrid on April 23, 1868. On his deathbed, he was asked to forgive his enemies. He said: "I have no enemies. I had them all shot."

That people found his parting words a scandal tells us that the times were not as inherently evil as the Duke made them. If people had accepted him and his deed as ordinary, nothing would have remained of his parting. He was outrageous. Or but....

Having made that point, an obvious one, we might benefit from looking at the idea of Stoicism as our up-coming "narrative." The man wasn't out in the night shooting people with his pistole. He was Political Power personified. Why? If people disliked him, how did he attain and retain power and act on it as he wished? Yes, we even get things we don't like if we want such. The Duke's enemies must too have wanted such a system. Even if they fought against him, still they must have wanted it or there would not have been such a system in place for them to fight against. If not, it would never have come about in the first place. The Duke's enemies must simply have been on the wrong end of the gun. We get what we want. Protest the outrageousness of it? I'm not convinced.

Everyman/Person: I will go the extra mile with thee like.

HERE BEGINETH A TREATISE HOW THE HIGH FATHER OF HEAVEN SENDETH DEATH TO SUMMON EVERY CREATURE TO COME AND GIVE ACCOUNT OF THEIR LIVES IN THIS WORLD AND IS IN MANNER OF A MORAL PLAY.

Messenger: I pray you all give your audience,

And hear this matter with reverence,

By figure a moral play-

The Summoning of Everyman called it is,

That of our lives and ending shows

How transitory we be all day.

This matter is wonderous precious,

But the intent of it is more gracious,

And sweet to bear away.

The story saith,-Man, in the beginning,

Look well, and take good heed to the ending,

Be you never so gay!

Ye think sin in the beginning full sweet,

Which in the end causeth thy soul to weep,

When the body lieth in clay.

Here shall you see how Fellowship and Jollity,

Both Strength, Pleasure, and Beauty,

Will fade from thee as flower in May.

For ye shall here, how our heavenly king

Calleth Everyman to a general reckoning:

Give audience, and here what he doth say.

Everyman is late-15th-century English morality play. Called by Death, Everyman can persuade none of his friends - Beauty, Kindred, Worldly Goods - to go with him, except Good Deeds.

Characters:


Everyman-------------------------Strength
God: Adonai---------------------Discretion
Death-------------------------------Five-Wits
Messenger-----------------------Beauty
Fellowship------------------------Knowledge
Cousin-----------------------------Confession
Kindred----------------------------Angel
Goods------------------------------Doctor
Good-Deeds---------------------Barak Obama
Fool---------------------------------Bill Moyers
Virgin Weeping----------------- Marian Wright Edelman
Hypocritical Friar--------------- John Thomas
Morality Play Mummer-------Lynne Redgrave
Knight Errant-------------------- John Thomas
Goliard Abbott------------------- Kevin Phillips
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/everyman.html
****


[The Players assemble upon the stage. Let slip the tongues of Scorn:]

Barak Obama: "Our Morality Play begins with a dramatic monologue [truncated] by Dag:

"There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright and one that feared God and eschewed evil...."

Moyers: "The Democratic Party has found out about him, and there is now an investigation underway to determine the role Bush and the oil companies are playing in his unimaginable SUFFERING. There is clear evidence that not only is Job himself suffering but that his family might well have been MURDERED. There seems to be no horror to terrible for the Republican Party to stoop to in their lust for profit, and that matters not who suffers. Barak Obama and Bill Moyers, among others, are looking into this tragedy, and we must insist they continue, regardless of the cost to the nation. It is UNFAIR what has happened to Mr. Job, an undocumented immigrant, and it is beyond evil to see such things happening to Mr. Job without trying to DO SOMETHING about it and to bring the conspirators to JUSTICE in the here and now. What, one must ask, are Christians doing about this OUTRAGE?!

Below we see an attempt by the fascist Rightwing Crusader Zionist conspiracy to smear the GOOD WORKS of Gnostic Christians. Read it and WEEP.

****

By Mark D. Tooley
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 27, 2007

Two hundred fifty years ago, Congregationalist pastor Jonathan Edwards, America's premier theological mind of the 18^th century, helped ignite the Great Awakening. That revival, winning thousands of converts, profoundly transformed America in the wake of the American Revolution.

Rev. Edwards' spiritual descendants founded the 1 million member United Church of Christ (UCC), though few share his faith. Today, UCC leftists are trying to kick off a new American revival, with help from Senator Barak Obama, PBS commentator Bill Moyers, Congressman Barney Frank, the Children's Defense Fund's Marian Wright Edelman, and recovering former Republican analyst Kevin Phillips.

"They say your church is dying, and lame, and limp," Moyers told the UCC's General Synod over the weekend. "But it is a small, committed community of people of conscience who can turn this country around."

Forty years ago, the UCC was nearly twice its current size. But its preference for left-wing political action over spiritual renewal has helped make it one of America's fastest imploding denominations. ...

What the UCC lacks in spiritual energy it hopes to compensate for in leftist political zest.

[....]

Obama, who belongs to a UCC congregation in Chicago, commended his denomination for its long history of political "troublemaking" across two centuries, from the Boston Tea Party to the Civil Rights Movement.

"My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want, but I won't be fulfilling God's will unless I go out and do the Lord's work," Obama told the enthusiastic crowd of up to 10,000 at the Hartford Civic Center. The "Lord's work," of course, is the agenda of the secular, political Left.

"We should close Guantanamo Bay and stop tolerating the torture of our enemies. Because it's not who we are. It's not consistent with our traditions of justice and fairness. And it offends our conscience," Obama told applauding UCC'ers. He denounced the Iraq War as "not just a security problem [but] a moral problem." He called for an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, an increased minimum wage, and for a universal health care bill.

Obama implored: "God's work must truly be our own." He lamented that faith had been "hijacked" by religious conservatives who had "determined that [their] number one priority was tax cuts for the rich." He could not imagine what Bible they were reading, but he was insistent: "Our problems are moral problems…there's a spiritual dimension to everything we do. Our conscience cannot rest."

At least Obama was politically upbeat, at least compared to the doomsday prophet Bill Moyers, who left his native Southern Baptist church for the more politically conducive UCC. According to the UCC news service, Moyers' speech was "inflamed with passion [and] anger," with at least 36 interruptions of applause, followed by a two-minute standing ovation.

"I have come to say that America's revolutionary heritage – and America's revolutionary spirit – 'life, liberty and the pursuit of justice, through government of, by, and for the people' – is under siege," he warned. "And if churches of conscience don't take the lead in their rescue and revival, we can lose our democracy!"

Moyers regretted that the original author of "life, liberty and the pursuit of justice" was a hypocrite who had had also "stroked the breasts and caressed the thighs of a slave woman named Sally Hennings. It is no secret." Forget that Thomas Jefferson wrote of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; Moyers believes that where Jefferson failed in moral leadership, the UCC succeeded.

"You have raised a prophetic voice against the militarism, materialism, and racism that chokes America's arteries," Moyers enthused. "It's a mystery to me. Jesus said, 'Let the little children come to me'...You have to wonder how this so-called Christian nation leaves so many children to suffer."

"For 30 years," Moyers fumed, "We have witnessed a class war fought from the top down against the idea and ideal of equality. It has been a drive by a radical elite to gain ascendancy over politics and to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that checked the excesses of private power."

For the political and economic nightmare that is America, Moyers faulted "corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a political religion of fundamentalism deeply opposed to any civil and human right that threatens its paternalism, and a series of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us."

Barney Frank was almost tame compared to Moyers' searing critique of America's moral squalor. He admitted that the U.S. economy is growing. "But the average individual has gotten no benefit from it," he insisted. As usual, he pointed to a larger welfare state as the solution. "When we step in together, that's what we call government," he told the UCC'ers.

Former Republican analyst Kevin Phillips, now one of the GOP's "harshest critics," gladdened many UCC hearts with his dark theories from American Theocracy, his 2006 expose of an imaginary, sinister alliance among conservative Christians, oil interests, and neoconservative imperialists. The American empire's overreaching in the Middle East will likely doom the United States as a great power, Phillips reassured his pleased audience.

No less pleasing to the UCC'ers, Children's Defense Fund chief Marian Wright Edelman warbled mournfully about "the children," who she insisted must not become "partisan political fodder." Interrupted by applause 24 times, according to the UCC news service, she then made her usual political demands for a larger welfare state, always to benefit "the children." Edelman inveighed against America's "rampant individual greed," even as she insisted on new multibillion dollar programs.

Trying to sound prophetic, but lacking Edelman's pulpit cadence, UCC president John Thomas spoke of the "disgrace of a broken social contract," of global warming, of "foolish greed," and of the war, with "its deceit, its torture, its demoralizing death and dismemberment, its relentless march toward chaos."

In contrast to the political tirades from Thomas and others, actress Lynn Redgrave, instead of speaking about environmentalism as scheduled, told of seeking out a local UCC congregation near her Connecticut home when recovering from cancer surgery in 2003. The worship service made her "peaceful and optimistic," she recalled. Redgrave concluded her testimony with a reading from the 23^rd Psalm.

Perhaps the UCC might reverse its 40-year decline by giving more of such hope and appealing to the Scriptures. Redgrave's message was received with applause and even tears. But for the UCC leadership, more focused on power than on the Spirit, the sparks and political fulminations against American greed and militarism are far more exciting than quiet appeals to a forgotten Savior who believed in rendering unto Caesar.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28925

****

Good greens, you have to wonder what possesses these folks. These people are not Christians in any sense I can recognize as Christian. They are a vile version of Gnostics. If you're a Christian of some real kind rather than a Good Works Gnostic, think about sitting with us at the atrium of Vancouver Canada's Public Library on Thursday this and always from 7-9:00 p.m. for coffee and discussion. We wear blue scarves, some of us donning Israeli flags on our baseball caps. We're hard to miss. Join us.