HALF-FULL REPORT 06/18/10
Do you hear that music? Sure sounds beautiful. As the Left becomes more disenchanted with Zero, folks inside the Zero White House are leaking what's going on to leftie blogs. Here is a compilation of those leaks that is appearing all over the liberal-left blogosphere.
Disturbing and mesmerizing whispering that the Oval Office is the scene of stormy and romantic melodrama between POTUS and his most senior and trusted advisers. Whispering that POTUS is sleeping poorly and is much aggrieved at slights, shortfalls, interruptions. Whispering that POTUS is vulnerable to jet lag. That POTUS has returned to chain-smoking. That POTUS hesitates to heed his advisers, because POTUS frets that he is being sand-bagged by experts, allies, confidantes. Whispering that POTUS frailties most in display in West Wing settings. That POTUS evidences a Nixonian persecution mania. Can any of this be confirmed? Not easily. Less detailed, POTUS is said to express his opinion to pals in Chicago that he dislikes his job. Wilder whisperings that some pros are now weighing that POTUS try an LBJ exit after one term - rather than face a Carter collapse.What music to our ears. You may recall this from The Zero Resignation Challenge from a year ago (June 2009):
AMPUTATE OR DIE
It was a sobering dinner party last night (6/16). Hosted by a London billionaire in his exquisite home - a Boccaccio hung on the wall behind me - the wine flowed liberally, but the conversation between the ten of us was stone-cold serious. There were lighter moments, as when I proposed a toast to "a great hero of Europe - Geert Wilders." Every one raised their glass in a smile, but the biggest smile was that of a spectacularly gorgeous super-model (you've seen her in many a high-fashion ad). She was from Holland. Then a well-known Hollywood producer raised his glass to toast his hero - Ronald Reagan. "We need him again," he commented. I guarantee you've watched one of his TV shows. But when a self-made billionaire with an 11-figure private equity fund and a clear grasp of Austrian economics starts to talk about America's prospects, you listen. So we all listened.
MORE REGULATION MEANS LESS FREEDOM AND PROSPERITY
If a sports league set up a permanent office with a number of lawyers to write new regulations for its particular game (basketball, for instance), what do you think would happen after a few years? The lawyer-regulators would know that if they stopped writing new regulations, whether needed or not, they would be out of a job. Over time, the regulations would grow in both number and complexity, and the players would have a more and more difficult time understanding what the rules were and would increasingly, though unintentionally, run afoul of them. As the United States becomes one vast regulatory state, our economy is being strangled by its own regulations. As is our freedom. No individual can know the vast number of laws and regulations to which he is subject, and hence, the government (if it chooses) can target anyone and almost certainly be able to find some law or rule that the targeted person has violated.
A TRILLION DOLLARS’ WORTH OF BAD NEWS
Afghanistan just got its worst news since the Soviet invasion three decades ago: American geologists have charted as much as a trillion dollars' worth of mineral deposits in that tormented landscape. Up to now, Afghanistan's internal factions and neighbors have been fighting over worthless dirt, Allah and opium. Assigning the battlefield a trillion-dollar value is not a prescription for reconciliation. Expect "The Beverly Hillbillies" scripted by Satan. Even were Afghanistan at peace, its endemic corruption would generate a grabocracy -- a Nigeria, not a Norway. Throw in inherited hatreds and the appetites of its neighbors, and Afghanistan may end up more like eastern Congo, a playground for state-sanctioned murderers and looters. Beyond reportedly vast deposits of rare minerals (lithium, etc.) essential to popular technologies, there's copper, cobalt, iron and gold in them thar hills. Afghanistan never before offered so much to fight over. Afghanistan's one hope was that, eventually, outsiders would leave it alone. That hope's gone now. Development of a full-blown mining industry will take decades, but that just means decades of violent competition.
A LITTLE MAN IN A BIG OFFICE
Journalists who in the past have had orgasms when President Barack Hussein Obama spoke were unimpressed by his speech from the Oval Office Tuesday (6/15) on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "We know that the country is eager for reassurance," the New York Times said in an editorial. "We're not sure the American people got it from a speech that was short on specifics and devoid of self-criticism." "President Obama said he is going to use the Gulf disaster to immediately push a new energy bill through Congress," said comedian Jay Leno. "How about first using the Gulf disaster to fix the Gulf disaster?" The most hilarious line of the evening came when Mr. Obama said: "the one approach I will not accept is inaction," because inaction is what has characterized his response in the first 57 days. This president doesn't act in a crisis. He reacts -- sluggishly -- and does so chiefly to deflect blame from himself.
HALF-FULL REPORT 06/11/10
Well, hasn't this been a fun week. An icon of the liberal media - the execrable Helen Thomas - is exposed as a disgusting anti-Semitic racist and her life career ends in ruins. Zero exposes himself as a no-class punk president who belongs in Junior High School rather than the White House. His kick-your-ass taunt is that of some 8th-grade wimp trying to pretend he's tough. All such a taunt gets is derision and ridicule. It invites the response for which the Brits are applauding London Mayor Boris Johnson - "Hey, STFU!" On both sides of the Atlantic, this summer's most enjoyable pastime promises to be Dissing Zero. Kicking things off, America's favorite Congresswoman, Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) views Zero as "infantile," and "the worst president in US history." That was followed by the leader of that cabal of America-haters, the ACLU, saying "I'm disgusted with this president." Now for more fun...
WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIAN TERRORISTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST?
Last weekend, the Feds popped two more US citizens who yearned to kill their fellow Americans for Allah. Add them to the would-be Times Square car bomber, the guess-what's-in-my-knickers Christmas Day airline bomber, no end of got-‘em-in-time apprehensions, plus the Ft. Hood butcher, Major Nidal Hasan... both the Feds and the media barely hint at what all these fanatics have in common. Dare to suggest that radical Islam might be to blame, and you're a bigot. Just as pointing out that Palestinian terrorism led to Israel's hard line stand makes you a fascist. But those who reject radical Islam's role as the driving force behind today's terrorism must answer one obvious question: Where are the Christian terrorists? The ignored persecution, deprivation and massacres aren't in Gaza, the global left's favorite petting zoo. The cover-up victims are the Middle East's Christians.
OUR GOVERNMENT: TOO MUCH AUTHORITY, TOO LITTLE ACCOUNTABILITY
Who is in charge of stopping the oil leak and the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico - BP or the Obama administration? If you have a hard time answering the question, it probably is because the president has told us the "buck stops" with him and officials of his administration say they are "in charge." Yet the administration also tells us that BP has the responsibility for stopping the leak and for the cleanup - but the company's every action has to be approved by the government! One, among several, major reasons government agencies tend not to perform as well as private ones is because often there is little or no accountability. BP stockholders are being severely punished because of the failure of BP's management to prevent this crisis - and you can bet many heads will roll at BP. Yet how many heads will roll in the U.S. government, which had the responsibility to make sure BP operated safely and that the beaches and marshes were protected?
DEMOCRAT WEEDS IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL GARDEN
Here is the great conundrum of our day: Why can't conservatives and Republicans be as ruthlessly and passionately focused on reducing government power as liberals and Democrats are on expanding it? Until a solution to this is found, government guns and bureaucrats will relentlessly continue to control ever more of our lives, as they have for generations. The most that can be achieved, such as under President Reagan, is to marginally slow down the continuing advance of fascism. Here's a metaphor. Suppose you had a beautiful garden and you let the weeds grow in it. The only gardening you did was half-hearted because you had to work to make a living and couldn't take the time - or you were just too lazy - to trim and prune and de-weed adequately. How would your garden look after a few years? After a hundred years? Would the folks who originally created the garden recognize it? No - of course not, it would be an overgrown morass of weeds and brambles that had choked the garden out of existence. Democrats are the weeds in America's garden of government. Republicans are supposed to be the gardeners - and they've done such a lousy job they've let the weeds take over. The problem is not so much that too many of them are RINOs or insufficiently principled. It's that they don't understand the job Republicans are supposed to do.
THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY IS WORSE THAN A LIE – IT IS A BLUNDER
The 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) once commented on accusations that a political opponent of his was lying regarding an important issue before Parliament: "It is worse than a lie - it is a blunder." Disraeli's ghost is talking about our president today. President Barack Hussein Obama went to a photo-op at a trucking firm in Hyattsville, Maryland last Friday (6/4), and made a fool of himself. The addition of 431,000 jobs in May shows "the economy is getting stronger by the day," he said. This was a remarkably stupid thing to say, since the employment report issued that morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was so disappointing the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 324 points on the news.