TRADING TERRORISTS FOR A TRAITOR IS THE VA SCANDAL ON STEROIDS
When Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, 23, walked away from his guard post at OP-Mest in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan June 30, 2009, he left behind his rifle, helmet, flak jacket -- and a note saying he'd become disillusioned with the Army. "I am ashamed to be an American," he wrote in an email. "The horror that is America is disgusting." Afghans in Yahya Khel, a village two miles away, said PFC Bergdahl asked for their help in getting in touch with the Taliban. A Taliban deputy district commander in Paktika province told the London Sunday Times PFC Bergdahl taught him how to turn a mobile phone into a remote control for a roadside bomb. Many in the Intelligence Community think PFC Bergdahl was an "active collaborator," reported James Rosen of Fox News. The White House had expected "near euphoria" to break out when the deal was announced, said Chuck Todd of NBC News. It did - among the Taliban, not Americans. This was a "great victory," said Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
THE US ECONOMY IS BEING DRAGGED OVER A GREEN CLIFF
"Feeding the masses on unicorn ribs". That was how Walter Russell Mead once poured scorn on Obama's misbegotten attempts to revive the US economy by creating five million "green jobs." Mead was quite right, of course. And there was plenty of evidence to back him up, such as the 2009 report by a Madrid university professor Gabriel Calzada Alvarez that for every expensive "green job" created by government subsidy, 2.2 jobs were destroyed in the real economy. The Obama administration responded as only the Obama administration knows how: by calling in its left-wing attack dogs. Friendly organizations including George Soros's Center for American Progress and various well-funded wind industry lobbyists were recruited to monster this unhelpful evidence, which was dismissed for its "lack of rigor." It's in this context we need to view the Environmental Protection Agency's dispiriting announcement of its latest assault on US industry - disingenuously billed as a "commonsense plan to cut carbon pollution from power plants." Because here's the bottom line: The more "clean energy" you develop, the more scum-sucking corporatist parasites you attract, the more eagles you slice and dice, and the greater the burden you place on both the taxpayer and the economy - all to no discernible practical purpose whatsoever.
WHEN IT’S GOOD TO WIPE OUT A SPECIES
The prospect of the deliberate extinction of some harmful species is getting closer. Be in no doubt - it would be an unambiguously good thing. Smallpox was eradicated outside laboratories in 1977, when Ali Maow Maalin recovered from the disease in Merca, Somalia (he died last year of malaria). The last case of smallpox was the death of Janet Parker, a medical photographer, in Birmingham in 1978, who caught it from a laboratory. If you had predicted in 1978 that 36 years later we would have extinguished no more diseases (apart from rinderpest, a cattle disease), you would have been thought a dire pessimist. Yet smallpox turned out to be uniquely vulnerable to eradication because its short incubation period, lack of an animal reservoir and its obvious symptoms allowed rapid vaccination responses to contain outbreaks. Polio was expected to follow it to the viral grave soon afterwards, but that dream has been repeatedly postponed. Indeed, this year polio is resurgent, with 82 cases so far, compared with 34 by this date last year. Most of them are in Pakistan, a country where polio vaccinators are sometimes murdered by the Taliban on the suspicion that they are US or Israeli agents spreading Aids or sterilizing girls.
OBAMA’S SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL
The 18th century playwright Richard Brimsley Sheridan wrote one of the comedic classics of the British theatre, A School for Scandal. We certainly have such a school in the White House today. President Barack Hussein Obama's usual response to scandals swirling about his administration is to stall until people lose interest. When a scandal breaks, the president expresses surprise (he didn't know what was going on until he heard about it from the news media) and outrage (he's "madder than hell"). He vows to get to the bottom of it, but doesn't actually do anything. In the past, the news media have covered for Mr. Obama when he's hidden policy failure in a flurry of words. But now they've begun to take note of the widening gulf between what he says and what he does.
THE IRONY OF HOW FRACKING SAVED OBAMA
Without fracking of oil and gas deposits, there would have been no economic growth in the U.S. over the past five years. Yet the oil and gas industry has been a favorite whipping boy of the environmental zealots both inside and outside of the administration. Without those brilliant entrepreneurs and engineers in the private sector who developed the new techniques to unlock massive amounts of oil and gas at reasonable cost, it is unlikely that President Obama would have been re-elected - for it is they who have kept his economy afloat. Mr. Obama owes his renewed presidency to the very people he gives his back of the hand to. Is there no end to the irony of this president?
HALF-FULL REPORT 05/30/14
Before we dive into all the fun of this week, I really need to thank all of you who wrote such kind comments on the Forum regarding the completion of my Every Country in the World life goal. It's still sinking in that I've done this at last, and your words meant a lot to me... By contrast, Zero's words certainly didn't mean very much to West Point graduating cadets when he spoke to them on Wednesday (5/28). His speech was an "icy" disaster as described by CNN. It was so bad that both the WaPo and the New York Times sneered at it... As Americans celebrated Memorial Day last Monday (5/26), with soldiers being told by their Commander-in-Chief that he will "never forget" their sacrifices, US Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi is shackled in a pestilential Mexican prison cell with Zero not lifting a finger to get him out. Here's what to do... I've regarded Eric Shinseki as an impossible jerk since he was Clinton's Army Chief of Staff - and by his unilateral decision decided to degrade the Army's elite soldiers by issuing black berets to every soldier in the entire army... OK, humor break. Question: How do you brainwash a liberal? Answer:
CHOOSING EMPATHY
There are several important qualities that define our humanity. Today I want to talk about two of them: our capacity for conscious empathy, and our ability to consciously redirect our emotional impulses. We have a choice of whether and how we will use these; the benefits can change the course of our lives. Empathy is the quality that allows us to relate to other people, to have feelings for them, to understand them in an experiential/emotional sense, and not just as an intellectual study. Without the capacity for empathy, we could not see one another as human, with common feelings, thoughts, and experiences. The opposite of empathy is envy. When we are envious, other people become simply, "the thing that possesses something we want." But to override our impulse to see people as things requires us to stop and think, to reconsider our initial, more primitive impulses, and to make a different choice.
COMMENCEMENT 2014
[This commencement address was originally published in 2005. We rerun it at college graduation time. Feel quite free to send this to any recent college graduate you may know.] Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents, Members of the Faculty, Honored Graduates, Families and Friends: It's funny that they call this ceremony a Commencement, for you've all reached the finish line: college, goodbye, we're outta here. Yet of course, "commencement" means a beginning, not an end. But one is supposed to at least start - commence - a talk such as this by saying funny things. So I'll start by talking about Clark Gable movies. If you've heard of Clark Gable at all, you know he was the biggest movie star in Hollywood a long time ago. His most famous movie was Gone With The Wind. He made a movie in 1955 called The Tall Men with Jane Russell as his girlfriend and Robert Ryan as the heavy. It's a pretty ordinary Western flick with outlaws and cowboys and Indians - and at the end, Ryan, the bad guy, and his henchmen get the drop on Gable, the good guy, and all seems lost. Suddenly, surprise, Gable outfoxes Ryan and triumphs. Gable makes his exit, and after he does, Ryan delivers a line that I want you to never forget. Serendipity is funny, a very funny thing, finding something where you least expect it. Out of the blue, out of a movie awash with pedestrian dialogue, comes a line so profound it detonates inside your brain. Ryan turns to his men and says:
HOW ANTI-ISRAEL IS THE POPE?
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman were right when they blamed the noxious anti-Israel incitement rampant in Europe for Saturday's (5/24) murderous shooting attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels and the assault and battery of two Jewish brothers outside their synagogue in a Paris suburb later that day. Anti-Israel incitement is ubiquitous in Europe and is appearing in ever-widening circles of the Western world as a whole. Until this week, the Catholic Church stayed out of the campaign to dehumanize Jews and malign the Jewish state. Pope Benedict XVI was perceived as a friend of Israel, despite his childhood membership in the Hitler Youth. His opposition to Islam's rejection of reason, eloquently expressed at his speech at the University of Regensburg in 2006, positioned him as a religious champion of reason, individual responsibility and law - Judaism's primary contributions to humanity. His predecessor Pope John Paul II was less willing to confront Islamic violence. But his opposition to Communism made him respect Israel as freedom's outpost in the Middle East. John Paul's visit to Israel in 2000 was in some ways a historic gesture of friendship to the Jewish people of Israel. Alas, the Golden Age of Catholic-Jewish relations seems to have come to an end during Francis's visit to the Promised Land this week.
MOSLEMS ARE LOSING THEIR WAR ON FUN
We all know the Moslem world is a political and cultural disaster zone. All you need to know is the spectacularly low level of book sales in the Arab world, and a similarly miserable record in winning Nobel prizes, whether in literature or hard science. A dozen years ago, a group of Arab scholars did a report for the United Nations that ascribed the failure of Arab society to a lack of freedom, knowledge and womenpower. And things have gotten considerably worse since 2002; the authors could write that there were no ethnic conflicts then. That's long gone. Never mind failed states - we're talking about a failed civilization, even in the most culturally advanced Moslem domain, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The root of their failure is the War Against Fun. They're not only failures, but grim, humorless failures. This is the miserable common denominator of the Moslem world. But it is a war that is being lost.