Academicide? Or is it Academentia? You Choose

Priya Venkatesan taught WRITING at Dartmouth, but didn't seem to be the most skilled & caring teacher. First, as a "writer" she should know that the sentence:

I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal [SIC] discrimination laws.

contains two egregious solecisms, one of grammar & another of fact.

First, the subject of a passive voice is in the nominative case, so it's "who" shall go unmentioned.

Second, it's the Federal anti-discrimination laws, not the "anti-federal" laws, as the [sic] points out.

This creature teaches students who almost certainly write and think better than she does, and she's at DARTMOUTH!

Some parents' money is being wasted, and she should have better luck at her next teaching location, which hopefully will be a few rungs down from the Ivy League. Another multi-culti fraud exposed.

Read the students' comments to get a flavor of why this specimen of insanity is SUING her students.

Obama Swift-Boated by His Pastor & Mentor?

Even the perpetually day-late, dollar-short fake conservative Andy Sullivan starts having second [actually in Andy's case, it's first] thoughts about the egregious "Pastor & Mentor" whose bigoted racist asides on Israel, the American flag, and the Marine Corps display breathtaking hatred of America and all this country stands for, that's when you know that Obama is being SWIFT-BOATED by an opportunistic showboat on steroids.

Kerry must be having a deju vu. Gore is saying to himself, "even I was never as careless as Obama to allow a raving ranting fool hijack my campaign."

Let's see, this elitist creme puff threw his grandmother under the bus, who raised him while his mother was out getting bigamatized again. He missed his mother's death because of a conflict in scheduling [he was running for office in Illinois] and praised his bigamist drunk wife-abusing con-man daddy in an entire book, after this manly Kenyan abandoned him at the age of two.

Now he appears to again be mesmerized by a con man who is virtually destroying his electability as president, uttering bland disclaimers when he should be throwing the Reverend Wrong under the same bus he threw his white grandmother, who dared to admit a fear of black crime being committed on her.

Wright is obviously a crackpot egomaniac. And that's a NICE interpretation of this lunatic.

Unless Obama can man up & repudiate this double-digit IQ [emotionally & morally] moron, he can kiss his presidential aspirations good-bye.

Question: How much are Hill & Bill paying this specimen of black racist hatred to spew bigotry against the Italians, Jews, and white people in general? I'd really like to know.

NYT Continues to Hemorrhage Circulation

Editor & Publisher announce once again the dreary slide into oblivion of American newspapers, except of course the Wall Street Journal. Hmmm...... I wonder why that is! The MSM would never dare guess.....

Here's the list, and if you look hard, you'll see they're all hemorrhaging at a rate that will either cause them to scale back dramatically or go out of business.

Drudge has 20 million readers a day, Rush has 20 million LISTENERS who actually switch party affiliation to vote for Hillary, throwing an iron bar in the Dem house of cards.
Laura Ingraham, Tammy Bruce, Karl Rove, Dick Morris, Sean Hannity [15 million listeners]. Keith Odorboy has about 900K eyeballs, behind O'Reilly at 5 million each night. Rachel Maddow isn't in the top 100---this Telegraph DC stringer really has his head screwed on backwards.

Oh yeah, a dozen polls over the last five years keep coming up with the same percentage: 35% of Americans consider themselves conservatives versus 20% who consider themselves "liberal." The media is overwhelming liberal and never publishes these polls, & always wonders how Americans can be so unintelligent as to ignore the MSM's insufferable drivel.

The MSM's only positive is that American media is even less stupid & Marxist/Socialist than the Euro-weenie axis of weasels press.

Oh yeah, Mark Steyn is smarter than ANY liberal commentator---including Krugboy & Rich. The only lib I enjoy reading is Maureen Dowd. Period. And that's just for her occasional barbs at fellow Dems.

So when the newspapers keep telling people that what they believe and think is not "Correct," why should these people keep subscribing?

Of course, those 20% who are liberals can keep their subscriptions, but since many of them are living on the dole or other scams on the government, don't expect them to do any eleemosynary activity for anyone except themselves---their narcissistic, self-absorbed, solipsistic selves.

And since they tend to abort their offspring, that 20% percentage might be in trouble---the silly purveyors of academentia will have to work overtime to win new converts to imbecility.

Austrian Incest Case Part of a Pattern

While in Paris recently, I had a long talk in a bar with an Austrian Prof at the nearby Sorbonne and after a half-dozen Belgian beers on tap, he confided in me that the Austrians have the highest incest rate in Europe. He cited Hitler's ancestry riddled with a few papal permissions for his father to marry his cousin, grandfather to do same, etc.

Freud famously came to the idea of the "Oedipus Complex" after many patients recounted stories of incest---his granddaughter in London has still not authorized the release of his clinical papers---one of the reasons may be the incest level in staid fin-de-siecle Vienna was so high that scandal would have ensued had they been published early on. Even today, the granddaughter refuses to let go, like the beginning of the movie Young Frankenstein!

This latest story follows the kidnapping of a young woman by a Viennese fellow for several years.----what's the name of the famous novel by John Fowkes about The Collector?

This seventy-something perv in Amstetten was living out a lot of teen's perv fantasies.

Tokyo Cat Cafes Proliferate

Dumpling is my 20-pound Maine Coon who sychronistically jumped on my keyboard as I prepared to write this little piece. When this happened during a recent call to Apple Diagnostics, the fellow in Sacramento told me that they employ the resident cubicle cats for making passwords by placing them on the keyboard!!

If you're not allergic to dander, cats are the cleanest & most pleasant and relaxing animals to cohabit with, and many medical studies claim that a friendly cats' presence will prolong your life by years. US prisons often allow cats to live with inmates as it calms down the bad-vibe atmosphere in the penal facility.

And then there's that Maine Coon in Rhode Island who comes to sit by the bedside of hospital patients about to shuffle off their mortal coils. The patients often have no symptoms of near-death ailments, but in walks the big feline fellow & a couple days later, their Maker is met!

Now for every cat lover, there is a cat hater. Egyptians probably domesticated the Wild African Cat or the caracalla [sp?], a wild cat in Saudi Arabia that interbreeds with domestics---these cats resemble larger versions of Abyssinians.

Our household has three cats & one Bichon Frise, a downsized sheepdog who herds her fellow residents inside when they manage to get their prowling mode in gear after dark. Huge nasty Blue Jays keep them indoors during the day.

Dumpling's size makes him the non-human alpha animal---wish I had him in iPhoto. Brie the Bichon is beta animal, Sacha is gamma [Brie & Sacha are both females in heat & partake of Sapphic revelry in inter-species, intra-gender sexual activity. This will go on YouTube once I get my new iMac under control!

McCain Rips Obama/Wright Connection

The Wright tapes have screaming imprecations not even Howard Dean can match! You know that those tapes are going to cut deep [many have not been put forward by the GOP party activists & are being kept in storage for the general election] when ultra-left commenters bleat that "we're beyond that" and "let's move on." McCain ain't moving on from the original ethnic-bashing tapes comparing Roman legions and Marines. Simple-minded DUI interviewers like Bill Moyers can patty-cake through whiffle-ball nonsense with Wright & say "Now that's all settled." But what about Wright & his cursing Italian-Americans?

"I saw yesterday some additional comments that have been revealed by Pastor Wright, one of them comparing the United States Marine Corps with Roman Legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our savior. I mean being involved in that, it's beyond belief. And then of course saying that al-Qaida and the American flag were the same flags," McCain told reporters.

A lot of far-left chattering class commentariat say that Rev. Wrong is part of the past, the debate is settled, let's move on, etc....

And yet this nutjob racist clown speaks utter nonsense trashing Italian-Americans, Jews [Farrakhan's buddy], the flag & PERSISTS on going on a media tour as though he's selliing a book. DUI-victim Moyers, NAACP Detroit & Dallas the SAME weekend, Nat Press Club tomorrow/today morning.

His right-brain/left-brain comments sound like some sort of Aryan Brotherhood description---but they would be put in jail or shot by the FBI!!!

And unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers is not repudiated. Obama goes on FoxNEWS Sunday & the ultra-left weenie-weasels throw tantrums.

Looks like a death-spiral approaching free-fall---Obama had better say he's sorry & that Wright is as crazy as 90% of Americans think he is.

Or bye, bye Oval Office.

Black Churches in Bad Neighborhoods

Streets of Glory is a publication out of a University of Chicago research project on black churches, which I heard called "misunderstood" on a Sunday Morning TV News Analysis Program.

Seems that Rev. Wrong is a gross exaggeration of how some of these churches go haywire while most others serve as a community glue, providing banking, mortgage, family & many other services outside the government system.

U. of Chicago has a lot of websites concerning its research in areas of interest.

Identity Politics Might Be the Dems' Downfall in '08

Morning Talk Shows echo this NYT piece on Hillary's new lease on life---Howard Dean's involvement may indicate a jinxed end-game:

But even as Mr. Dean and others lament the downward tone of the campaign, they say that with the convention in Denver in August, the healing will begin. They dismiss the intramural tensions wrought by the protracted season, citing historical patterns of voters uniting behind the nominee after similarly competitive primaries.

Still, depending on the circumstances (particularly if those circumstances involve the superdelegates overriding the popular vote or the choice of the pledged delegates), the historical comparisons might not hold up. Identity politics, some say, create a deeper schism, and the polarization by race exposed by results in Pennsylvania and elsewhere could indicate a rift that can’t be mended easily.

Certainly the depth of voters’ devotion pulsates on every politics blog, with loyalists in one camp insisting they would never back the other’s candidate. Some threaten to vote for John McCain or a third-party candidate. Whether that is fleeting angst or lasting sentiment remains to be seen.

Of course the fatuous Dean forgets a campaign I participated in, the McCarthy Campaign of '68 [I worked in Indiana among the half-dozen states I campaigned in as National Staff], which after the Chicago Convention more or less sat on its hands & let Hubert Humphrey lose to RMN.

Democratic in-fightiing can get viral, as I learned as a troubleshooter in California & New York State & City---as the Dem language always likes to squawk about how "feisty" they are and their "passion" for this and that.

Not words implying reconciliation skills.

Guantanamo "Drives" Terrorists Insane? It's Actually a Short Putt!

Osama's Ex-Driver has this mental problem. HE'S A TERRORIST!!! But the soupy drivel from the IHT makes him sound like that NYT reporter imprisoned in Zimbabwe for investigating Bobby Mugabe:

Hamdan, already the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, has essentially been driven insane by solitary confinement in a tiny cell where he spends at least 22 hours a day, goes to the bathroom and eats all his meals. His defense team says he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo "boil his mind."

"He will shout at us," said his military defense lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer. "He will bang his fists on the table."

His lawyers have asked a military judge to stop his case until Hamdan is placed in less restrictive conditions at Guantánamo, saying he cannot get a fair trial if he cannot focus on defending himself. The judge is to hear arguments as soon as Monday on whether he has the power to consider the claim.

Critics have long asserted that Guantánamo's climate-controlled isolation is a breeding ground for insanity. But turning that into a legal claim marks a new stage for the military commissions at Guantánamo. As military prosecutors push to get trials under way, they are being met with challenges not just to the charges, but to Guantánamo itself.

So instead of living in a tropical hellhole like they have all their lives, or if in Afghanistan, freezing their tail off in winter, these sad sack TERRORISTS [remember, they were captured with weapons, but no uniforms, ergo, no Geneva Convention for these TERRORISTS] have to tough it out in "climate-controlled conditions," probably the best weather they have ever experienced in their miserable sand-flea lives. And do these savages ask for books? Why don't they seek the consolations of religion by reading the Koran? Oh yeah, these slack-jaw mouth-breathing knuckle-walkers can't read! The Pentagon replies:

Pentagon officials say that Guantánamo holds dangerous men humanely and that there is no unusual quantity of mental illness there. Guantánamo, a military spokeswoman said, does not have solitary confinement, only "single-occupancy cells."

In response to questions, Commander Pauline Storum, the spokeswoman for Guantánamo, asserted that detainees were much healthier psychologically than the population in U.S. prisons. Storum said about 10 percent could be found mentally ill, compared, she said, with data showing that more than half of inmates in U.S. correctional institutions had mental health problems.

Yes, and these poor savages don't even have the loud rock-band music to get them into Queen or REM or even Derek & the Dominos' Layla! But a trial lawyer isn't doing his job if he doesn't continue a low-key insufferable whine at all times.

"Conditions are asphalt, excrement and worse," he wrote his lawyers in February. "Why, why, why?"

At Guantánamo, there are no family visits, no televisions and no radios. A new policy will for the first time permit one telephone call a year.

In the cells where Hamdan and more than 200 of Guantánamo's 280 detainees are now held, communication with other detainees is generally by shouting through the slit in the door used for the delivery of meals. Mail is late and often censored, lawyers say.

The military prosecutors declined to comment on the claims about Hamdan's condition. As is common at Guantánamo, their legal filings were not made public before the scheduled court date. But defense filings released by Hamdan's lawyers recited some of the prosecution arguments.

The prosecutors argued that the way that Hamdan was being held did not constitute solitary confinement in part because "detainees can communicate through the walls." They said that Hamdan had denied having mental problems and that he was no model detainee, spitting at guards, threatening assault and throwing urine.

Speaking generally, Storum said detainees were enemy combatants held safely. "We are holding the right people," she asserted, "in the right place, for the right reasons, and doing it the right way."

Bravissima, Ms. Storum. You Da Man!!!

Or at least the Hill-Rod!

Will Democrats Choose the Candidate with the Most Balls?

Hillary, that is.
Bob Herbert in the NYT speaks some dirty little truths to his own candidate.

And if Sharpton forces a racial confrontation in NYC over the Bell verdict, guess who's not coming dinner? Nor to the inauguration!

Do Hillary & Obama Cancel Each Other Out or Are They Seriously Flawed?

Gerard Baker of the TimesOnLine dismisses the Dems' usual explanation of the train wreck of the Hillary & Obama.

It's like a soccer match in which one team keeps conceding a penalty in the final minutes only to watch as the opponents repeatedly boot the penalty kick high into the stands.

Hillary Clinton's solid victory in the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday has condemned the party to many more weeks of strife and sinking public esteem. There's a popular view among Democrats and the media establishment that the reason for the party's current disarray is that it just happens to have two most extraordinary candidates: talented, attractive, and in their gender and race, excitingly new. But there's an alternative explanation, which I suspect the voters have grasped rather better than their necromancers in the media. Both are losers. The longer the Democratic race goes on, the more obvious it appears that each is deeply, perhaps ineradicably flawed.

Even "necromancers" can get it wrong, Baker alleges, and the MSM's shamanistic trances have overlooked the fact that these two Operating Thetans resemble Democratic nominees of the past---Adlai Stevenson's hauteur and Michael Dukakis in his tank helmet!

Until about a month ago Barack Obama had done a brilliant job of presenting himself as a transcendent figure, the mixed-race candidate with bipartisan appeal who promised to heal the historic and modern rifts in American life.

But the mask has slipped. Under pressure in a Democratic primary, Mr Obama has sounded just like any other tax-raising, government-loving Democratic politician. Worse, he has revealed himself to be a member of that special subset of the party's liberal elite - a well-educated man with a serious superiority complex.

His worst moment of the campaign was when he was caught telling liberal sophisticates about his anthropological observations on the campaign trail. In the misery of their daily lives, he said, the hicks out there in the sticks cling to religion and guns and the other irrational necessities of the unenlightened life. His wife had earlier told voters that they should be grateful that someone of his protean talents had deigned to come among them and be their president.

The events of the last month have also revealed another side of Mr Obama that threatens to undermine his whole message. He is a cynic. He tells the mavens of San Francisco one thing and the great unwashed of Pennsylvania another. In defending his long relationship with the Rev Jeremiah Wright, he shopped his own grandmother, comparing the reverend's views (God Damn America! The US deliberately spread Aids among the black population) to his grandmother's occasionally expressed fears about the potential of being the victim of crime at the hands of an African-American.

Hillary takes the low road and may get to Mandalay or Rangoon before Obama:

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has been busy shedding the final vestiges of shame and honesty in her desperate attempt to save her candidacy. She has abandoned any pretence of a message, and simply seized on every opening presented to her by her opponent.

Mr Obama's missteps with the working class of Pennsylvania have thus transformed Mrs Clinton from the bluestocking Wellesley graduate into the good old girl, hanging out there with the straw-chewing rednecks, embracing their values, their worldview and even their lifestyle.

Obliterate Iran! Here comes Osama bin Laden! I love duck hunting! I can do shots and beer at the same time! It's hard to know what's worse - expressing condescending views about the working class or pretending to be one of them. The Democratic campaign is simply disappearing in the enveloping vapidity of the candidates' making.

And what do Democrats do when they are reduced to their lowest common denominator? Tax & Spend & Insinuate Class Warfare---their Marxist genes keep popping out generation after generation. Government Ueber Alles!!

Instead of seizing the opportunity to present a convincing vision of an alternative way forward the Democrats are fumbling. When they are not scrapping about each other's street cred they are falling back on the old verities of left-wing dogma: class warfare on taxes; irresponsible (and unredeemable) promises to pull out of Iraq in an instant; a protectionism that makes a mockery of their claims to want to restore America's standing in the world.

The Democrats control the media and yet can't even surmount their own bad genes. And those simple country folk & evil corporate nabobs who comprise the Silent Majority are once again close to winning in spite of colossal wholesale incompetence on the part of their President. I'm talking about the Republicans....

Amid this sorry spectacle of cynical opportunism and atavistic dogmatism, the Republicans have contrived somehow to select in John McCain the one candidate in their party who might actually have a shot at winning the election.

American presidential elections turn as much on the characters of the candidates as they do on the saliency of policies. Democrats, of course, think this is all rather crass. They think voters should confine themselves to the “issues”. But Americans understand their government a little better. They know the limits of presidential office and they understand the president's role as head of state is as much about leadership of the nation as it is about implementation of policy.

What they want is a man - or a woman - of character and record to inspire and lead them. That may be why the Democrats are in trouble.

Hillary's turning into a character and Obama is an incredible shrinking man.

Maybe Michelle Obama is going to lose all that pride she felt for her country for the first time in January.

Barack Entered Church for Community Organizing, Plus that Opiate Thing!

Leon Wieseltier has a bit of arch fun with William Kristol's Op-Ed last week on Barack Obama's use of Marxist tropesas the reason people "cling" to religion [oh yeah, guns & prejudice too]. But he gets a bit p-o'd when Andrew Sullivan blurts out that which should not be said:

And now for the grossly undialectical bit. The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: "A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith." Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be!

Sullivan does have an identity crisis on afrequent basis. And that makes him touchy about other peoples' identity.

Moyers "Dancing with the Stars" pas de deux with Rev Wrong---No Journalism Allowed on PBS!

Bill Moyers played a silly game of pattycake with The Unrevered Reverend Wrong last night as they both tried to avoid the nasty topic of the pastor's hate-filled, incendiary sermons accusing the CIA of plotting to spread AIDS among black youth & a lot of other spurious lies and black agitprop appropriate for a Robert Mugabe or Muammar Qaddafi [before MQ wilted under US pressure].

Moyers' journalistic credentials are nil, and only his long dialogue with Joseph Campbell two decades ago gives this PR flack for ultra-left fantasies any cred at all. He is a prime example of what the shrinks call "displacement" a psychological mind trick whereby libs take their hysterical temperament to other spots when their little cloud-cuckoo land is beset by too much reality.

"Displacement" is the psychological phenomenon which takes a situation that is simply too terrible to grasp by an observer, and switches the concern to a different topic. I.e., Islamic terrorism is simply too awful to contemplate for a whining Euro-weenie, and the spineless libtard instead switches his/her anxiety to a substitute, such as "Global Warming," a fact which is occurring, but may not be caused by humans.

Nevertheless, the chattering classes latch onto GW & dismiss Islamic terrorism, allowing them to divert their hysteria into "progressive" memes that fit into their world-view paradigm.

Dr. Sanity is a highly-acclaimed blogger/scientist with a degree in psychology who has extensively examined the various ruses leftists use on themselves to follow the Party Line as emitted by the Political Commissariat in the NYT/WaPo/LAT editorial board rooms as well as prominent Ivy specimens of academentia & bizarre "thinkers" & "writers" whose imagination overwhelms their critical faculties [Kurt Vonnegut Jr. comes to mind.]

When you see a double-digit IQ dude like Al Gore who got a "D+" in the only science course he took at Vanderbilt getting a "Nobel Peace Prize" for a book/movie on AGW, you know that an elaborate set of intellectual Potemkin villages line the road of the Progressive path to Liberal do-goodism.

And this way, no terrorists need be insulted as they continue to plot additional attacks on the USA & other Christian nations.

Is Jimmy Carter a Bigot? Is El Baradei a Dishonest Cretin?

Hamas celebrated Jimmy Carter's hugs and embraces emphatically enough:

Khaled Mashaal..... at the very moment he was receiving Mr. Carter also triggered the first car bombing in several months in Keren Shalom on the Gaza strip – and ... this event elicited from poor Mr. Carter, all tangled up in his small-time mediator calculations, not one disapproving or empathetic word.

Jimmy lives in some sort of parallel universe or XBox 360 game that permits him to see beyond reality into a surreality-based environment where Israel is South Africa & Hamas the ANC.

Of course, at tge sane tunem IAEA chief El Baradei rebuked Israel & the US for not revealing the nuke facility in Syria that the N.Koreans [and perhaps the Iranians] were setting up to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Did ectomorph El Baradei think of rebuking Syria, or N. Korea? That would be even-handed, and professional---two skills the double-digit IQ El Baradei evidently doesn't possess. Or maybe he & A.Q. Khan are in cahoots to produce an Islamic bomb that could destroy Israel, as Khan told New Yorker scribbler Jeffrey Goldberg in Pakistan back in the '90s that he himself was scheming to accomplish. With the moronic Algerian UN official, AQ may just accomplish his long-term goal.

The unwitting Jimmy is probably not an accomplice, but merely a "useful idiot" in the plan to nuke Israel.

A simpleton whose well-meaning gibberish makes him look more and more foolish even to his friends on the far left who actually do HATE Israel, including not a few self-hating Jews.

In effect, however, he serves the ends of bigots, so with a bit of parsing and background explanation, the Israeli UN Ambassador is correct.

El Baradei, of course, got his Nobel for the same reasons Arafat & Carter & some other suspicious characters got theirs over the last two decades.

The UN hates America, so does Jimmy and the rest of the Nobel Peace Prize recipients, including Al Gore. It's a prerequisite.

NYT Readies Ax for Dozens of more Editorial Staff & Jouralists as Circulation & Ad Revenues Plummet

The New York Times has persuaded many dozens of it long-term staff to take a separation package giving three weeks pay for every year of employment in the ink-stained confines of the old Gray Lady. Jayson Blair got an early heave-ho, but the old-timers may have to be wrenched out of their comfortable cubicles with crowbars of a green-slip variety.

Obviously, this sad denouement to careers in what used to be the "Newspaper of Record" hurts serious journalists, oxymoronic as that term is beginning to sound under the editorial supervision of Managing Editor King Kong Billy Keller. And the Big Brother Pinch continues to play the role of a Gorbachev with ideological fixations. His front page has become the plaything of quixotic crusades, though the windmill of Augusta National which Pinch & King Kong's predecessor assaulted in hundreds of feminist rodomontades no longer is the main fixed idea in Pinch's meth-fried brain.

Pinch has become an Obama-niac in the last couple of months, shortly after he imprudently endorsed Hillary. His need for psychiatric help becomes more manifest every day and many readers simply have decided to cancel their subscriptions rather than follow the bouncing ball of Pinch's obsessions. Other reasons impinge on the slow degringolade of the NYT into mediocrity and fiscal jeopardy, but Rupert Murdoch proves that journalism can still be produced in Babylon-on-the-Hudson.

The WSJ might even hire some of the refugees from Pinch's slowly sinking Titanic.

Is Jimmy Carter a Major Obstacle to Peace in the Middle East?

BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY spanks the silly little mediator wannabe with a metaphorical paddling of the sort the diminuitive midshipman used to suffer while his upperclassmen made him sing "Marching Through Georgia" at the Naval Academy:

The problem is the wreath he laid piously at the grave of Yasser Arafat, who, as Mr. Carter knows better than anyone else, was a real obstacle to peace.

It is that in Cairo, if we are to believe another Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, whose statement has so far not been denied, Mr. Carter apparently described Hamas as a "national liberation movement" – this party which has made a cult of death, a mythology of blood and race, and an anti-Semitism along the lines of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the linchpin of its ideology.

The problem is also the formidable nose thumbing he got from Hamas's exiled leader, Khaled Mashaal, who, at the very moment he was receiving Mr. Carter, also triggered the first car bombing in several months in Keren Shalom on the Gaza strip – and that this event elicited from poor Mr. Carter, all tangled up in his small-time mediator calculations, not one disapproving or empathetic word.

Ben Franklin summed up the template of this energizer bunny with no brain & a motor mouth that keeps on spewing nonsense very succinctly:

"There's no fool like an old fool."

Wright Digs Hole Deeper In Face-off with Moyers & Did Bernardine Dohrn Mentor Michelle Obama at Sidley Austin?

Unrevered Wright will probably end up demolishing any chance Obama may have in the general election. Instead of apologizing or at least retracting his vicious anti-American "sermons," he tells patty-cake interviewer Moyers that showing his insane rants is "unfair" and "devious." I guess you have to put "God Damn America into a certain Wright context, because he says that people who criticize his inflammatory, hate-filled foul-mouthed pulpit-puke "know nothing about his church."

Obama must realize that every time this ultra-left wing "preacher" appears trying to justify his clinically insane rants, perhaps a quarter-million potential votes evaporate. Does anyone doubt that the RNC is secretly amassing a whole library of this unbalanced nutjobs Sunday exhalations and scrutinizing them for the top 100 certified whack-job incendiary "homilies."

This impostor is no more a Christian than Adolf Hitler was when he was spewing hate from his own version of a pulpit at the Nuremburg rallies or the Reichstag.

Meanwhile, various observers in the USA and overseas have begun to come out of the woodwork and are now beginning to wonder if Obama will be able to overcome the various stumbles the PA primary exposed.

Of course, the ultra-left believes that a candidate like Obama whose continuing friendship with an odious unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers and his condescending remarks about hunters and Christians and workers whose jobs are threatened by "people who look different," i.e., illegal immigrants, is a splendid spokesman for the Democrats and will sweep the country in November with the grandeur of his ideas and the daring of his proposals for "change."

Even his wife Michelle is beginning to look like Omarosa lite and one blogger asks a very interesting question about Bernardine Dohrn possibly mentoring Michelle at Sidley Austin in Chicago, where Dohrn worked [her felony conviction meant she couldn't pass the Illinois bar exam] while Michelle was an intern & later taken on board when she graduated from Harvard Law. She in turn mentored Obama in '89 & they eventually married.

The MSM will never answer the question about Dohrn & Michelle [Robinson] Obama intersecting at Sidley Austin. It would be nice if Republicans had investigative reporters.

McGovern Wing Ready to Destroy Dems Again?

TNR dares to say that which should not even be whispered---will this Obama thing be '72 all over again? Here's John Judis:

Hillary Clinton won a decisive ten-round decision over Barack Obama in Pennsylvania's Democratic primary, but she didn't score a knockout. The struggle continues. Clinton still has virtually no chance of overtaking Obama's delegate lead or his edge in the popular vote. And the superdelegates will be loath to ignore this advantage. Meanwhile, Obama's weaknesses as a general election candidate grow more apparent with each successive primary.

Yes, as Rush would say, the "Democrat Party" is not Democratic, as the media & Dems try to hide the fact that two states have effectively been disenfranchised even though they voted---because Howard Dean is dumber than dirt!

Of course, The New Republic is nothing if not "Fair & Balanced," so Political Commissar Jonathan Chait immediately responds to John Judis's Judas-move [by mentioning the truth that dare not speak its name, i.e., Obama is a loo-zer & will give the WH to McCain] with the usual persiflage & rodomontades that the ultra-left reserves for those who utter the truth.

Stick a fork in Obama.

Pass it on. Maybe the whispering campaign will reach the super-doopercalifragilistic delegates that make that "Democrat Party" so undemocratic!

High Middle Ages Full of Meaning That Trumps "Facts"

Dante got much of his inspiration for Divina Commedia when he was in Rome for the very first Holy Year in 1300. He was already an official from the esteemed city of Florence who had been summoned by the Pope in a dispute between the Guelphs & Ghibellines which raged between the advocates of Papal Supremacy & Holy Roman Emperor secular rule. Dante was involved in the "Haute Politique" between the two giant forces of the age, but marvelled at the swelling hordes of the one true Church who came from Iceland & every European land as well as enclaves in the Crimea & the Lebanon. Remember that this was the only Holy Year before the Black Death came in 1347 to decimate Europe and revert much of society to a subsistence level, while enabling city dwellers to escape from virtual bondage and develop a commercial culture that would lead to the Renaissance. Dante was there for the Highest Point in the entire panoply of the Christian world before it was beset by Ottoman expansionism and a definitive break with the Eastern Orthodox Church, which has lasted to this day. His Divine Comedy gave this world a life which persists long after its branches have died off. The recent visit of Pope Benedict XVI demonstrates there is still a place for religion in this crazy world of competing technologies. Religion that doesn't want an earthly dominion or persecutes gender or non-believers.

I have just finished re-reading Henry Adams monograph on Mont St. Michel & Chartres, which tries to explain the miracle of Gothic cathedrals which suddenly sprang upwards to God in the Loire Valley in the early Eleventh Century. I am already part-way into Thomas Cahill's brilliant evocation of the entire era of the Middle Ages, which he starts around 400 AD & does somewhat as a riff on Christopher Dawson, whose books on the Middle Ages inspired me back when Dawson hung out with T.S. Eliot & Martin D'Arcy, SJ.

CS Lewis is one of the great writers of the 20th c. & his close relationship with Tolkien, who was the sole survivor of his graduating class & of his officer cohort at the Somme, another book I'm perusing right now. That Lost Generation truly groped for meaning in a modern world, as David Brooks notes:

“C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Peterhouse College at Cambridge. It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, “was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”

Lewis tried to recapture that medieval mind-set, Ward writes. He did it not because he wanted to renounce the Copernican revolution and modern science, but because he found something valuable in that different way of seeing our surroundings.

The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.” When we say that a star is a huge flaming ball of gas, he wrote, we are merely describing what it is made of. We are not describing what it is. Lewis also wanted to include the mythologies, symbols and stories that have been told about the heavenly actors, and which were so real to those who looked up into the sky hundreds of years ago. He wanted to strengthen the imaginative faculty that comes naturally to those who see the heavens as fundamentally spiritual and alive.

CS Lewis and Tolkien & Eliot & even Robert Graves wanted to rescue the modern world by injecting the Classics, History, and above all the faculty of Imagination into the sterile Marxist/Fascist/Socialist bromides which as Morris West once said in "The Shoes of the Fisherman" were in the process of "doing surgery with a dirty scalpel."

Brooks and Adam Gopnik are both from Philly, and that sad city of Brotherly Murder inspires more than mere despair at the human condition in this new milleniium.

Lotus-Eater LAT to McCain: Are You Fit to be POTUS? You're Disabled!

"The Sargasso of the Imagination" of the Los Angeles Times always raises the bar for the utmost stupidity in an editorial on the news page. Just when you think the NYT has retired the Guinness Cup, as it has been doing in its adoration of the Obamanable Showman and its "outing" of McCain's bogus hoax affair with a lobbyist, the LAT puts the Reward for the Most Bogus Issue Cup Competition back in play.

Sen. John McCain has long said he is in robust health and is strong enough to hike the Grand Canyon, but he also is receiving what his staff Monday termed a "disability pension" from the Navy.

When McCain released his tax return for 2007 on Friday, he separately disclosed that he received a pension of $58,358 that was not listed as income on his return. On Monday, McCain's staff identified the retirement benefit as a "disability pension" and said that McCain "was retired as disabled because of his limited body movements due to injuries as a POW."

McCain campaign strategist Mark Salter said Monday night that McCain was technically disabled. "Tortured for his country -- that is how he acquired his disability," Salter said. Certain types of military and veterans pensions are either partially or completely tax-exempt, depending on the seriousness of the disability. In McCain's case, the exemption is 100%.

The sun-worshippers in the LA Basin will shudder with a frisson of anger that this tax exemption for a war hero disturbs their Obamadoration. Didn't Obama suffer taunts and jibes from whites? Actually no, it was the Indonesian kids who threw young "Hussein" Obama into a watery swamp to drown after they beat him up. But he leaves that out of his autobio and instead remembers bitterly imaginary slights from white kids in Hawaii [actually he was BMOC for his athletic abilities!]

The Sargasso is stagnant and reeks of hypocrisy, but it is a breeding ground for all sorts of strange creatures. The LAT is one of them.

Webtards: 11 Ways The Internet Can Kill You

Gawker [h/t Althouse] has the ultimate 4:30 AM tickler---how the Internet can rob, cheat, abuse, and even kill you---some self-destructive urges are required.
Colossal stupidity also helps.

Remember, Chelsea Clinton's boyfriend is the son of Cong. Medvinsky, who is now serving time for stealing money to participate in a Nigerian scam involving turning black-coated money into real money using a chemical process. This Former Congressman is married to a Former Congresswoman---I wonder what Chelsea sees in his son?

But almost on a level with Scientology dupes who pay $360K to reach the highest levels of Operating Thetan, it's those sad souls who achingly aspire to higher levels of celebritard consciousness who usually use the internet to kill themselves---the druggies and the webcam junkies.

Oops, the cat just jumped in my window onto the keyboard. Guess my time is up. Dumpling rules. [Dumpling is our 20 pound extremely athletic Maine Coon who is the alpha animal among our four pets---three cats and a dog.] Unfortunately both the female Bichon Frise and the female unspayed Persian are currently in heat, so the neutered super-dude has to watch curiously as his two beta, gamma companions engage in intra-gender, cross-species foreplay. No wonder he jumps on the keyboard!

Operation Chaos---Full Throttle Ahead For the Sin That Cannot be Mentioned, At Least on NBC

MSNBC is serving, in its after-the-catastrophe coverage of Obama's decline-and-fall in PA, as a sort of scripted ultra-lib cheat-sheet. Keith Odorboy's constant references to an NYT editorial and Chris Matthews still laboring under the delusion that Hillary was "only" getting an 8% edge over the Obamanable Showman---whose waffle woes the ever-irreverent irrepressible href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/opinion/23dowd.html?ref=opinion">MoDo notes as another brick in the wall ["We don't need no education riff"] of Obama's angst. She chronicles better than Jon Stewart can how this cafe-au-lait Marathon Man hits the wall of pain.

Reality is not the strong point of adenoidal stentorian-toned Brian Williams, who dismisses Hillary's strong comeback with his normal sophomoric NYT-editorial-page fatuous twaddle. That's why Charlie Gibson gets a million more viewers every night, Brian. They want to hear from grown-ups. Matthews is so far over-the-hill, he should be put out to pasture.

As Hillary outpaced the exit polls two-to-one and the Bradley Effect which Fox had already built into its model slowly made the MSNBC cloud-cuckoo morons look like clucking fools, Keith Odorboy kept badgering Tom Brokaw & the feckless Tim Russert to make positive statements about Obama---the fact that NBC is TOTALLY IN THE TANK for the Operating Thetan III that is Obama becomes not only obvious, but the constant quotes from the NYT make these talking-head brainiacs sound like an echo chamber. They sure can't riff off of Tom Shales, or any other Wash Compost lib---they seem to have truly gone over the top for Obama, slave of Xenu or perhaps a new edition of cylon from Kenya/Hawaii/Indonesia/LA/Chicago. In any event, I'm waiting for South Park to give the definitive definition of this tortured young man who may have to wait a bit longer in the Senate Cloakroom before he breaks the ivory ceiling.

Brokaw relieves the monotony by bringing up an interesting analogy when he recalls the Kansas City Convention of '76 where Reagan was just edged out by a luckless feckless Gerry Ford, who was ignored by the Convention along with his VP pick Bob Dole while Ronald got thunderous cheers and a standing ovation---Brokaw pointed out that Hillary may want to do to Obama what Reagan did to Ford, who managed to free Poland from the Soviet Union in one debate. Gerry had played too much football without a helmet. And Obama might have thought that he was playing in the NBA, whereas this turns out to be a five-set match at Wimbleton that could go on without tiebreakers.

But I digress. Rush Limbaugh must be ROTFLHAO with the AP lede below:

After a six-week lull since the last Democratic primary, Pennsylvania voters were so eager to participate in the hotly contested battle between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama that one in 10 changed their party registration since the start of 2008 so they could vote Tuesday. The contest was open only to registered Democrats. About half the party-switchers had been registered Republicans, while the rest had been unaffiliated with either party.

Duh...

Comintern rules prevent NBC from mentioning the Sin That Hath No Name, namely OPERATION CHAOS!

So the dull party functionary Nomenklatura of apparatchiki which comprises the "Murderers' Row-wannabees" at NBC cannot note that Hillary may have only won by a piddling single-digit margin had not Rush's legions switched party affiliations and voted for Hillary, just to keep the fat in the fire and the chattering classes bemoaning the racism of "the masses." MSNBC is hobbled by the constrictions of its PC ideology which has morphed into "no fault for Obama." And no mention of Rush-bo.

But Hillary has successfully morphed into the Middle Class-hero candidate with PA roots and a dad who played football at Penn State [well, not really, as Carl Bernstein pointed out in his excellent bio of HRC]

Obama has the lumpenprole victim-screamer-City of Brotherly Murder vote that doesn't work, pay taxes, or do much of anything except participate in the old academicide academentia truism: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Or car-jack & knock over 7-11s.

but BO continues to have the editorial board of the NYT, accompanied by the MSNBC boys-in-the-band backup music.

And finally, the only person with balls on the NYT Op-Ed page gets game-set-match with her exquisite smackdown as href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/opinion/23dowd.html?ref=opinion">Jonathan Swift reincarnation Maureen Dowd waxes malevolent:

The very fact that he can’t shake her off has become her best argument against him. “Why can’t he close the deal?” Hillary taunted at a polling place on Tuesday.

She’s been running ads about it, suggesting he doesn’t have “what it takes” to run the country. Her message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?

She goes on to carpet-bomb Howard Dean, Bill Clinton, Obama again, and ends up with a feigned sayonara-bye-bye to Hillary, just to keep King Kong Keller & Odorboy-hero Pinch from upchucking in public. First she girlie-man disses Obama as the ultimate Oreo:

Is he skittish around her because he knows that she detests him and he’s used to charming everyone? Or does he feel guilty that he cut in line ahead of her? As the husband of Michelle, does he know better than to defy the will of a strong woman? Or is he simply scared of Hillary because she’s scary?

He is frantic to get away from her because he can’t keep carbo-loading to relate to the common people.

In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.

But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.

“Why” he pleaded, sounding a bit, dare we say, bitter, “can’t I just eat my waffle?”

His subtext was obvious: Why can’t I just be president? Why do I have to keep eating these gooey waffles and answering these gotcha questions and debating this gonzo woman?

The shots at Bill Clinton waving a "Brobdingnagian finger" and Howard Dean "like Micronesia telling Russia to denuke" are worth the price of admission to MoDo's one-finger-disses-all style. She has to end on some sort of wishful sayonara to HRC to fit in with the Op-Ed Adam Nagourney girlie-man crowd who hates strong women, so she does it in a derisive rhyme that disses her bosses more than it says anything about Hillary:

Before they devour themselves once more, perhaps the Democrats will take a cue from Dr. Seuss’s “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” (The writer once mischievously redid it for his friend Art Buchwald as “Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now!”) They could sing:

“The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. ... I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis. ... You can go in an old blue shoe.

Just go, go, GO!”

But the Grand Prize still goes to Rush, who will never be invited to Dancing with the Stars, but has thrown the ultimate iron bar into the Democrats' House of Cards.

Operation Chaos proceeds on schedule.

McCain waits on the bench for the handoff when the game turns into tackle football.

Another NYT editorial for the ages

Just another NYT complete shambles of an editorial---does Gail Collins still have her claw hammer dirty-scalpel mindset implanted in the cylons churning out the amazing drivel below? Who can write this stuff except out-of-work comedians?:

Last July two recently paroled men broke into a home in Cheshire and tortured and murdered three people. Last month a man who served more than eight years for assaulting a 5-year-old — and had been out on probation for less than a month — broke into a New Britain home. He accosted two women, wounding one and killing the other.

Republicans, led by Ms. Rell, have responded by calling for a “three strikes” law. Democrats have rightly resisted. The proposed law, which would mandate life in prison for anyone convicted of three violent felonies, is a bumper-sticker solution that would create injustices by barring judges’ discretion in sentencing. It would also not deter the many crimes committed by people who have not committed three violent felonies.my emphasis

Number one: So the serial misdemeanor crowd would not shrink from more petty crimes? What an argument!

Number two: There are a bunch of judges in New England infected with a mental illness called "non-retaliatory justice" or some such cloud-cuckoo hooey that strains the gnat while ignoring the toxic waste dump of chronic criminal behavior by what hermaphrodite Al Gore would call "extra-Y chromosome" male predators.

Number three: Why do the scribblers in the NYT editorial mosh pit consistently support and defend criminal behavior and castigate law-abiding, tax-paying citizens who go to Church & work hard to make the US a better place?

Do these scribblers actually hate law and order, or is it just a case of psychological "displacement" which masks their hatred of the USA and civilized behavior in general?

Obama Runs Out the Clock and Waffles [Literally] About Hamas

Barack can't even get a bite to eat nowadays without another Charlie-Gibson type annoying question----liberals hate it when their cloud cuckoo Pollyanna side is exposed, or in John Kerry's case, a less-than-splendid three-month stint in the Nam blindsided by 55 real true American heroes.

Barack has been very strong on talking to terrorist states like Iran & Syria without preconditions---let's just go in there and question why we just can't all get along! Hmm..., them 'splodin' dudes over at Hamas would seem to fit into the same mold as their terrorist godfathers, as the simpleton supporting Obama, a clown named Jimmy, would appear to be acting out as he parades his PR skills to the terrorists---oops, the Israelis & the US aren't biting....can't make the sale, but Jimmy never could make the sale. Especially with the American people in 1980. But is Barack going to fit into just another elitist Dem who pretends the world is a wonderful place that the US has done its best to drag into conflict?

Chomping down on sausage and waffles at Glider's Diner today with Sen. Bob Casey at his side, Barack Obama declined, in a sense, to comment on Jimmy Carter's meeting with Hamas.
Asked if he had heard that Carter reported a positive outcome from the meeting, Obama looked at the reporter who questioned him and said, "Why can't I just eat my waffle?"
Asked again by the reporter, Obama bit. Not at the question but into a butter-covered bite of Glider's specialty over-size Belgian waffles. With a wink this time he said, "Just let me eat my waffle."

Yes, those charming winks will go far with the 'splodin' dudes like Hamas & Hezbollah, who actually have agreed to verbiage not to drive Israel into the sea if a few preconditions are met---like ceding Jerusalem & a lot of defensive emplacements & suburbs the size of Levittown. James Taranto has more on food, along with a riff on Pink Floyd:

Obama, who has the support of Hamas honcho Ahmed Yousef, henceforth will be known as the waffle man, joining other food-associated politicians such as Ronald Reagan (jellybeans), George H.W. Bush (pork rinds), Michael Dukakis (endive), Dan Quayle (potatoes) and Bill Clinton (McDonald's french fries). [no GWB? my observation]

The Chicago Tribune's "Swamp" blog adds this detail:

On the other side of the diner, two high school seniors had skipped school to meet Obama and got him to sign passes saying "Excuse Colin!" and "Excuse Joey!"

New Obama slogan: "We don't need no education!"

It looks like Obama has been badly burned by the forthright candor of Charlie Gibson & George Stephanopoulos, so North Carolina won't have a debate. Obama will stall like the old NC Tarheels coach whose running out the clock instigated the 24 second rule.

Obama may have some game left, but he sure ain't no MJ.

NYT Un-Endorses Hillary---With Friends Like Pinch & King Kong Keller...?

This NYT editorial was obviously as dishonest and mendacious as its journalistic content elsewhere in this rag whose stock is sinking as fast as the Titanic.

If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1.

Fact: Mrs. Clinton got a MUCH bigger win than the NYT expected when this cowardly disclaimer was written on deadline. The clowns in the editorial room---Keller [King Kong Keller was a NYY third-baseman in the '40s] & Pinch may have given them the nod or written it themselves---relied on unreliable exit polls that gave Hillary a four percent victory, not the ten percent she ended up with. As everyone except the NYT knows, exit polls suffer from the "Bradley Effect" named after the black LA mayor who failed to beat Gray Davis for governor when all the polls said Bradley was ahead. Of course, given its pervasively dishonest corporate & editorial culture, its cloud-cuckoo land mistake fits right into its normal libtard paradigm.

And, of course, even Tom Brokaw on MSNBC, admitted Obama outspent Hillary 3 to 1 [and possibly 4 to 1], so the stat in the NYT editorial follows its general policy of lying out loud throughout its news operations. Pinch should realize he is a compleat third-rater and stay out of the adult end of the pool. He's in deep water anyway financially & within a few years, the Murdoch-owned WSJ will probably be wiping the floor with the leftist treacle of what used to be called "Bum Fodder" turned out daily by the NYT.

Actually, on CNN's Larry King Live, a truly borderline name for the eponymous host who appears half-deceased mentally, the sound of crashing furniture in the background kept interrupting Lanny Davis [my old pal from the '68 McCarthy Campaign] & his black Obama-supporter counterpart during their ping-pong interview in Philly as evident chaos reigned at the CNN Philly studio! Ah, the natives are restless in the city of Brotherly Murder!!!

Could all the crashing be the sound of falling presuppositions and miscalculations?
UPDATE Rich Lowry's Take on the NYT stink-bomb editorial unendorsement:

If Hillary can’t win the nomination—and it’s clearly very, very hard for her—she’s basically a stalking horse for McCain. She’s preparing the demographic ground for McCain, by getting white working-class Democrats used to (if you will) not voting for Obama. And she’s softening Obama up for McCain, prodding at and exposing her fellow Democrats’ weaknesses. The only way she can stop the super-delegates’ drift to Obama is conclusively making the case that she’s more electable. Given the fall-out from Bosnia, on top of her negatives to begin with, she’s probably never going to be strong enough to do that. And as long as Obama just seems sort of weak—but not catastrophically so—I think super-delegates will perversely be more inclined to declare for him quickly. They’ll want to protect him and stop the nomination race before even more of his vulnerabilities become evident. That’s clearly part of the sentiment behind “The Low Road to Victory” New York Times editorial.

She's the Hill-Rod 50-Foot Woman who, like Reagan in '76, will be back in 2012---fired up and ready for more Gonzo Woman Scorpio XBox360 Action. McCain is a one-term phenomenon. Obama will be her age after her two terms!!!

Hillary Needs Operation Chaos With Her Hubby Flaming Out

Andrew McCarthy has a summary of just how incompetent the Clinton Administration was about terrorism. And he doesn't even mention Jamie Gorelick as the real AG [with swamp thing doing the dirt-slog Elian & Waco disasters] who effectively kept the FBI & CIA from communicating with each other. You know she's got that Marxist fear of wiretaps & effect international security---not in the ultra-liberal playbook:

Mrs. Clinton said the advertisement addressed the reality “that the new president will inherit some of the most dangerous and difficult decisions that any president has had to make in a very long time.... I want people to think seriously about leadership, because that’s what I’m offering in this campaign.”

This mind you, is the Hillary Clinton whose husband's administration pardoned FALN terrorists and Weather Underground terrorists. The Hillary Clinton during whose husband's administration bin Laden's network trained jihadists fighting U.S. troops in Somalia; bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over 200 people; and bombed the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 members of the U.S. Navy — and whose response was, respectively, to pull out, file an indictment (after an ineffectual bombing raid), and ... do nothing. The Hillary Clinton whose husband's administration took no action when Iran killed 19 members of the U.S. air force at Khobar Towers — no action except, perhaps, to impede the FBI's investigation into the atrocity.
Obama would be a disaster, but how much worse could he do on terrorism than that? Is this really what the Clinton campaign wants to remind Pennsylvanians about?

With Jamie back as full-fledged Attorney General & a lot of ultra-lefties infesting the national security apparatus, a HRClinton presidency would leave the US more vulnerable than when it sleep-walked from the WTC bomb in '93 to 9/11/01.

On the other hand, with Obama we'd have Bill Ayers in charge of Pentagon security, so choose your poison!

Jimmy Carter--Incompetent & Nasty

Ron Kessler notes that Jimmy Carter didn't just start being obnoxious and stupid when he got involved in the Middle East---according to the Secret Service & GSA & Air Force One & other White House functionaries like ushers, he was a persnickety silly little micro-managing engineer-manque.

Aside from the link above, I had a couple of weird experiences with the Carter regime. During a presidential visit to Saudi Arabia while I was senior Political Officer for Internal Affairs, I had an interesting window on just how screwy the Presidential caravan was. While in Jidda, Carter was staying in a Royal PaIace & after he had finished & was on his way to Air Force One, Ambassador West's Secretary, Betty Barger, was double-checking the Presidential living quarters for a last check-out and found the PRESIDENTIAL BRIEFING BOOK for the entire Middle East trip, JC's personal copy, sitting on a bed table next to his bed!!! The briefing book had all JC's talking points for his Saudi, Egyptian [his next stop was Aswan with Anwar Sadat] and Israel all in the same large book. And the silly fool had left his personal copy behind in the bedroom!

Betty managed to get through cordons of Saudi security, Secret Service Security, and get to Air Force One just before wheels-up.
The whole thing reminded her of Inspector Clouseau, or Peter Sellers on any number of his nutjob acting roles, in the way Carter [who was close to Ambassador West, former Gov. of South Carolina who was the first governor to support him in '74 & got the Saudi Ambassador job as payback] handled himself during the entire visit. Very eccentric & prickly. And incompetent in certain respects.

Of course, we professonal FSOs in the Embassy had a great time hypothesizing what the Saudis would have done with the entire Presidential Briefing Book were it to have fallen into Saudi Intelligence's hands. First of all, the Saudis would have thought that the president had left it behind on purpose, as a diversionary move to throw them off the scent, because the Carter Briefing Books were so banal & simple-minded & straight-forward that the conspiracy-minded Saudis would not believe it possible for the Americans to be so naive.

Or stupid, as Carter was/is.

A further personal note: I was dating Cy Vance's personal assistant Elva Morgan, who was close to Susan Clough, Carter's Personal Secretary mentioned in the link above. Elva told me that Clough was a devotee, as Carter's staff in general was, of an institution called The National Spiritual Science Center. It was on 16th Street & I visited once & got a "reading" through the woman who ran the Center. Actually, the woman had some second-sight capabilities & recorded our session on a cassette tape, which I must have lost over the years. But she did come up with some interesting predictions as I recall. I don't think JC & his wife Rosalyn ever dabbled in spiritualism, but his staff did. My wife was a Carter White House invitee on several occasions & got her sister a job working in a new office called Ethnic Affairs. The beginning of Democrat identity politics.

One final episode about Carter: I left the State Dept to work for John Anderson in '80 as his Middle East Advisor. While in the Anderson Campaign [I had also dabble in Howard Baker's abortive effort, and recall vaguely seeing Fred Dalton Thompson in the Baker HQ on North Capitol St]. During the campaign, it became apparent that Jimmy Carter was reviled by the American Jewish Community. I had access to the money people in the Anderson Campaign & was told by a senior money guy that "70% of the contributions came from Jews or Jewish organizations [Ed Asner was a big Anderson supporter in Hollywood, I recall.]

My theory is that back then, when AIPAC was in its heyday, Teddy Kennedy was induced by the Lobby to run on JC's left while John Anderson ran on his right, pincering Carter & trying to punish him for what the Israelis called his zany moves at Camp David. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who had been Jacob Javits rabbi & sadly died last year, told me much of the same thing when I met him at Columbia. Hertzberg was a big Anderson supporter and hooked my up with Wolf Gelman, who ran the Jewish Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, who was head of the Rabbinical Assembly, the chief organization of Conservative Jews, as opposed to Orthodox or Reformed Jews. Gelman himself was a free-thinker and showed me a lot of Kabbalistic Talismans which the Seminary kept under lock and key. I had a bizarre "spiritual zap" like the Hindu shock one gets [I forget the name] when Gelman allowed me to pick up a couple of the revered Talismans.

But I digress.

Carter was far ahead of Reagan when the campaign started and I remember one debate where Jimmy scored all the debating points and Reagan came across as a natural leader and not the crazy-man bomb-thrower who was going to set off WWIII.

Carter was and will always be an engineer, always looking at the notes and never hearing the music. Petty, meddlesome, a detail-man as Kessler portrays him in the link above---Carter never got the big picture, though he always thought and still does, that he is a world statesman.

In his own mind. And the "mind" of Hezbollah & Hamas!!!

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

I took my 18-year old
daughter who is taking several courses in history, philosophy, and political science at the University of Miami to see Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. She was very impressed [we are functionally agnostic] with the argument that suppression of the teaching of ID even as a heuristic device is streng verboten as Dr. Berlinski said. Ben Stein cornered Dr. Dawkins and the arrogant professor simply was unable to answer the "prime mover" argument when after he posited panspermia from advanced civilizations from other planets [which was the Soviet party line for a while], Dawkins was unable to say how the advanced aliens got kick-started. Stein gently kept Dawkins writhing on the hook. All in all, so much better than the apodictic twaddle doled out by Michael Moore, laughable to the extreme on health-care as any Miami Cuban can inform you---and Al Gore, who simply says "the argument is settled" and let the evidence be damned.

Berlinski and Stephen C. Meyer were very impressive, and other interviewees on both sides were less so. The Berlin Wall imagery fit the concept almost exactly.

However, I would have liked to push the envelope further, which the movie didn't do in the interests of keeping the polemic clear and simple. Some of the deeper philosophical and religious questions were not even touched upon.

To wit, evolution & Darwinism has never been able to explain human consciousness, that is, the reflexive ability to consider oneself in contexts imagined or posited outside one's own experience. No one, not Skinner nor Bertrand Russell nor Wittgenstein nor Rorty can even begin to approach the complexity of the human soul. Dawkins & others like the silly skeptic Shermer, who surfaces on Larry King to spout his apodictic homilies, simply refused to answer the questions put to them by Stein. Dawkins, to give him credit, was simply unable to do so. Shermer was totally dishonest when presented with the facts of the case of Stephen Meyer, which he was already aware of. He simply pretended not to understand or refused to answer honestly---of course it was the latter.

I would have liked to see the crew of Reason Magazine, a libertarian outfit which is far more intellectually honest than the likes of Shermer, in the film.

But all in all, Stein did a good enough job, though it was about fifteen minutes longer and a bit more redundant than needed. I gave it five stars on the NYT review board---it simply was the best polemic I've seen since Planet of the Apes.

Stein has put together a pretty good movie, talkative and sometimes a wee bit preachy, but overall much better than the Moore & Gore fiascos.

Get a Load of this, This is Rich

The nice thing about Frank Rich is that he, a failed play reviewer, and his fellow NYT Op-Ed podner, Paul Krugboy, are perfect fools. You can pretty much take what both of them say, negate it, and come out with a pretty close approximation of what is really happening.

In this case, he's two days late and many dollars short. He has fallen for the Obamanable Showman hard, and thinks Hillary knocking back a boilermaker is a big no-no, because of something the Bush Administration did.

The NYT is hemorrhaging readers and its stock price is plummeting and Pinch Sulzberger stocks his Op-Ed pages with clowns who are failed play-reviewers [Rich was no Brooks Atkinson] and economists [Krugboy couldn't shine Milton Friedman's shoes.]

Oh well, by 2010, the daily newspaper will be close to closing time, and the economics of wrong-headed opinionators will have contributed to the downfall of the Sulzberger family jewels. But Pinch on his Harley will lead the pack out of town---it'll be a bummer.

The Pope, Cats & Myself

Catholics seem to like cats, as I recall in my youth living near a convent where cats roamed freely. [Actually it was a School Sisters of Notre Dame Motherhouse with many acres of roaming room.]

Our household is ruled by three cats and one dog. Dumpling, a twenty-pound Maine Coon, is the alpha animal and Brie, a Bichon Frise is the Beta animal, a female dog who follows Dumpling around & wishes to engage in inter-species sex, which the neutered Dumpling cannot engage in. So Brie now engages in a Sapphic duo with little Sacha, a non-spayed Persian, so we have same-sex inter-species intercourse attempted by these two. Chloe, Dumpling's mother, looks down on all this with aloof aplomb---she had seven kittens before being spayed several years ago. Her kittens, from three different daddies, were so cute and gorgeous that we SOLD five of them---that's how pretty Chloe is.

So when the Pope says he's crazy about cats, this household sympathizes, though I don't know how the theology of same-sex inter-species coupling would square with God's Plan for Creation.

Another Example of a Victory for Socialism

The New York Times has a nice article [INTERESTINGLY, NO BYLINE OR AUTHORSHIP ATTRlBUTED] on the joys of a centrally-planned and government-run economy. Of course, being a good socialist country means that there is no need for privately owned firearms, as is noted by an observer named Washington, who also praises the efficacy of the United Nations:

One Zimbabwean named Washington, who goes back and forth across the border ferrying Super Sure cake flour and Blazing Beef potato snacks, said the government was now using food as a weapon and channeling much of the United Nations-donated grain to supporters of the ruling party.“As we speak,” he said, “people are starving.”

He seemed more defeated than anything else. “People hate the government,” he said. “But they are too scared to fight it.”

No need for guns, since the Heroes of the Liberation will defend the country from its foes:

It does not look as if Mr. Mugabe, an 84-year-old liberation hero who has ruled Zimbabwe for 28 years, will leave office without a fight. After early election results from the March 29 vote indicated he was losing to the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, the election commission put the brakes on announcing results. The presidential results still have not been released, and a recount begun Saturday in 23 Parliament races is now threatening to drag things out further — the opposition has deemed it “illegal.”

If there is a runoff between Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai, many fear it could get even bloodier. Human Rights Watch issued a report on Saturday saying members of Mr. Mugabe’s party were running “torture camps” where they took opposition supporters for nightly beatings.

On Sunday, the leading opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, said more than 400 supporters had been arrested, 500 attacked, 10 killed and 3,000 families displaced. The party released a detailed, day-by-day chronicle of violence that listed huts being burned, people getting cracked in the head with bottles and farms being invaded. The party blamed Mugabe supporters and sometimes government soldiers.

The government has denied any wrongdoing and accused opposition leaders of treason. Mr. Tsvangirai has said it is too dangerous for him to stay in Zimbabwe and has been spending time in South Africa.

However, this is the New York Times and therefore the historical context has to be set in a delusional nutjob inversion of what actually happened, as per the following paras:

in the 1980s, when South Africa and newly independent Zimbabwe were practically at war. Back then, many people were going the other way, fleeing South Africa’s repressive apartheid government to escape to Zimbabwe.

At the time, Zimbabwe was one of Africa’s stars. Mr. Mugabe had turned a relatively small, landlocked country into an economic powerhouse that produced beef, grain and tobacco.

“Bob Mugabe was my hero,” said a white Zimbabwean farmer who drove into Messina the other day for supplies. He did not want to give his name because he went on to criticize Mr. Mugabe’s more recent policies and said he was afraid he could be evicted from his farm for doing so. “I know it sounds funny, but it’s true. You have no idea how beautiful Zim was.” Zim is the affectionate nickname for Zimbabwe.

But in the late 1990s, Mr. Mugabe felt he needed to deliver on long-promised land reforms, and Britain, the former colonial ruler, was stalling on paying for them. Mr. Mugabe then encouraged blacks to seize white-owned farms. Whites fled, industrialized agriculture crashed, and today the inflation rate is more than 150,000 percent. Supermarkets often have no food, and 80 percent of the people have no jobs.

You see, it was the "repressive apartheid government of South Africa" and it was "Mr. Mugabe [who] had turned a small ....into an economic powerhouse." Oh yeah, Bob Mugabe was the dude who did all that, then "Mr. Mugabe encouraged blacks to seize white-owned farms. Whites fled, the ...crashed." Hmmm.... I wonder how the causality of this little drama worked, as socialism always is successful and---it must have been the evil colonialist British who didn't pay for the land-reforms, since a socialist like Mugabe couldn't have dropped the ball.

That's the ticket. It was the white farmers' fault! And the evil British who until Mugabe came along had kept the country in such an economically backward state. But suddenly, "Mr. Mugabe had turned a relatively small, landlocked country into an economic powerhouse that produced beef, grain and tobacco."

And then.... somehow it must be them evil outsiders....

I can see why the "journalist" who wrote this shameful shambles didn't want to put his name on the article.

And I'm sure the founding father George Washington, whom a fellow Los Angeles Times "journalist" Mary McNamara this weekend wrote was a one-term president, looks down from heaven on poor Washington in Zimbabwe trying to get through the razor wire.

Fishy French Follies

Stanley Fish demonstrates why the French don't always say what they mean or mean what they say.

China Berates American Press---Sunday Sermon

My brother is fluent in Mandarin & has traveled all over western China, which few foreigners visit---he was working for the UN org FAO as a rice pest expert and would explain to the local farmers how to avoid diseases & parasites affecting rice. His Australian wife accompanied him on for six months as she gathered info for an advanced degree at an Aussie U.

They wrote back that health & living conditions in these remote provinces were abysmal, abominable, and the population barely educated---even the local officials spoke poor Mandarin & had little expertise in anything except officious incompetence.

The Chinese continue to flood the US with shoddy merchandise of all kinds, and a recent health epidemic in Panama was from their substituting diethylene glycol for glycerine, causing over 100 deaths in Panama alone. While their high-end goods generally meet standards, the infractions against copyright infringement and patents continue to multiply. In a certain sense, the PRC is an international scofflaw and the Olympics are in danger of becoming just another marketing tool to vault them into respectability.

My brother told me that the Chinese are intensely nationalistic and have the "Middle Kingdom attitude," which puts China above all other countries---at least in their own consciousness. He compared it with American exceptionalism, but said that the squalor and mendacious peculation he encountered on every level of Chinese society made the comparison ridiculous, totally ludicrous. And my brother has become an Australian citizen---not even being a big fan of the USA! He does have a PhD & speaks Bahasa Malay fluently as well, and now heads a major USAID project in Indonesia. He's glad to live there rather than the PRC.

Yet the pretensions of an authoritarian military dictatorship to impugn American journalists appear okay to the servile American media who bow and scrape and "kowtow" to their Chinese masters---especially NBC, which has the Olympic Games broadcast rights stateside that it paid around $100 million to acquire.

Indeed, the PRC seems to be getting a free pass in much of the US MSM, as leftist social-engineering projects usually do. Even a book against Stalin, Koba the Dread, was pilloried in the British commentariat as impolitic, although author Martin Amis had impeccable leftist credentials and had simply decided to recant some of his more preposterous political stances of yore. Streng verboten.

Tsk, tsk. "No fault on the left," Lenin's Comintern directive to all fellow-travelers, is still robotically obeyed by almost all the western media---which makes excuses for Chinese Communist mega-projects that cause massive pollution and flood millions of riverine inhabitants out of their homes. Can't make those omelettes without breaking eggs, Uncle Joe used to say.

Preposterous human catastrophes like N. Korea and Zimbabwe and Cuba are simply given a wink and a nod by the chattering-class commentators. When Bush overthrew Saddam's socialist regime, the world recoiled. Bush is a Republican. When Clinton & NATO attacked Serbia over Kosovo, that was okay. Clinton was perceived as a man of the left, and Milosevic wasn't paying off the French and UN officials with big under-the-table oil money.

Laughingly, a nationalist party winning an election in Germany & Austria is cause for great alarm. And India, a country truly struggling to remain a true democracy, warts and all, simply gets little respect in the MSM. Indians don't hate America enough.

The international left still exists, as Ben Stein's excellent flick, pilloried by the socialist automatons at the NYT & in Hollyweird, pretty much lays out the landscape for the steady encroachments on American freedoms that "hate crimes," "intellectual deviation from Darwinism," and other threats Orwell and Huxley warned us about. The insipid second-raters in academentia keep pitching cloud-cuckoo land EUtopia to us Americans, who are not going to consign our rights to faceless bureaucrats in Washington, let alone Brussels.

The world we are entering in the 21st century is neither Brave nor New, but a rehash of authoritarian state controls gradually limiting human freedom to harmless superficial banality. Hannah Arendt was right about the origins of totalitarianism. And so were the Founding Fathers of America, who fought long & bravely to avoid what the world wants to inflict on the USA.

To the EUtopians, no nanny-state here, please.

And to the PRC, when you get a truly free press & stop oppressing your neighbors, as you do with your colonization of Tibet and your threats to Free Taiwan, then you can start preaching to free peoples. Until then, just keep your anthill to yourselves.

Camille on Hillary: A Busted Flush or One Brick Short of a Load?

Camille Paglia is a kinder gentler feminine version of Christopher Hitchens, full of biting sarcasm larded with startling apercus that make her articles a joy to read from beginning to end.

The link above to the Daily Telegraph is the best description in a dozen paragraphs or so of what makes Hillary tick, and why she is never quite in synch with her times:

Hillary's voter base consists of middle-aged to elderly white women who identify with her caustic, stubborn, bulldog resilience. Humiliated and upstaged by her philandering husband, Hillary is the champion of an army of women who were stymied, betrayed or outmanoeuvred by men. Over the past year, whenever her cowed male opponents mildly rebutted Hillary in debate, her campaign jumped into über-feminist mode: male bullies, they screeched, "ganging up" on a helpless damsel.

Losing ground with other core groups - notably her own cohort of upper-middle-class, baby-boom career woman - Hillary played the gender card to the max. When polling showed she had seemed too harsh to the caucus-goers of Iowa, she rolled out teary eyes for New Hampshire, which handed her a primary victory. Hillary will scratch, claw, and morph through every gender trick if it rakes in votes.

This symbol of raw female ambition has never comfortably fitted into a conventional sex role. As the first child of a hard-working and authoritarian father, Hillary absorbed his willfulness, competitive drive and suspicion. Excelling academically, Hillary felt ill at ease with the feminine persona so deftly deployed by pretty, popular girls in that era. Frumpy, stumpy and myopic, she identified with the new idolatry of shiny careerism promulgated by the second-wave feminism of the late 1960s, when she emerged from posh Wellesley College.

She hooked her wagon to a star, a luminescent Supernova who quickly morphed into a black dwarf, "our first black president" in a silly encomium by a black author. All the way up the ladder, she cut corners on special "deals" such as the cattle futures lottery fix and other backstairs politicking in a corrupt little backwater state where her hubby was Duke of Hearts.

Whatever her official feminist credo, Hillary's public career has glaringly been a subset to her husband's success. Despite her reputation for brilliance, she failed the Washington, DC bar exam. Thus her migration to Little Rock was not simply a selfless drama for love; she was fleeing the capital where she had hoped to make her mark.

In Little Rock, every role that Hillary played was obtained via her husband's influence - from her position at the Rose Law Firm to her seat on the board of Wal-Mart to her advocacy for public education reform. In a pattern that would continue after Bill became president, Hillary would draw attention by expressing public "concern" for a problem, without ever being able to organise a programme for reform.

Hillary has always been a policy wonk, a functionary attuned to bureaucratic process, but she has never shown executive ability, which makes her quest for the presidency problematic. Hillary's disastrous botching of national healthcare reform in 1993 (a project to which her husband rashly appointed her) will live in infamy. Obama may also have limited executive experience, but he has no comparable stain on his record.

So actually, on the executive side, it is Obama zero, Hillary minus-one! More in sadness than in anger Camille proceeds to defenestrate the Former First Lady:

The argument, therefore, that Hillary's candidacy marks the zenith of modern feminism is specious. Feminism is not well served by her surrogates' constant tactic of attributing all opposition to her as a function of entrenched sexism. Well into her second term as a US Senator, Hillary lacks a single example of major legislative achievement. Her career has consisted of fundraising, meet-and-greets and speeches around the world expressing support for women's rights.



Hillary Clinton is aiming to become the first female president of the United States

What feminist supporters have recently denounced as troglodytic misogyny in media portrayals of Hillary has in fact been a function of her own strange sexual accommodations and ambiguities. Yes, she may surround herself with luscious, multicultural babes (such as her minder, Huma Abedin, or her now sacked aide, Patty Solis Doyle), but Hillary, despite the rumours, is no lesbian. She's a crucifix-wearing, Methodist do-gooder who confidently thinks she's God's agent. There's no room for random eroticism in her calendar.

Rumors in Chicago that I have heard, but only from a socialite with access to Hillary's outer circle, have her in a "relationship" with a female NYC MD. But that aside, I believe Camille because the Park Ridge ethos of Hillary's generation is pre-Sapphic & Hillary should be hanged more as a fool/knave on her ridiculous performance {Brad Delong was privy to her authoritarian incompetence in that fiasco] than any personal dalliance. She may be too cold to the touch. Friends of ours in DC with kids in Sidwell Friends had Chelsea telling Daphne that she was sick so often because the White House Staff was completely unsupervised and failed to buy fresh milk for the fridge!!! I'm not making this up. Chelsea was ill from tainted food, a sort of vengeance as a dish grown cold engineered by a White House staff treated like dirt.

Genuinely disturbing are the caricatures of Hillary (called "Hitlery" or "the Hildebeast" on the web) that rarely accrue to male candidates: she's portrayed as a hectoring nag, a witch on a broomstick, or a castrating bitch. But if such images were truly generated by simple fear of female power, we would expect to find them around other women politicians too, such as the current female Speaker of the House.

No, Hillary was demonised by the American electorate long before she sought elective office. It is Bill Clinton who is responsible for the tainted sexual aura around his wife.

Furthermore, Hillary's mythomania and her chameleon-like daily alterations of persona and voice are unsettling. (Even Hillary's eye colour is fake: she wears blue contact lenses.) No male candidate enjoys Hillary's options as a woman to tailor her costume to the audience.

Hillary is a Scorpio for those with the slightest interest/curiosity about astrology. She fits the mold of fierce unrelenting Medea who will serve her children to her philandering spouse before finally ceding to a sad destiny. I'd wonder what will happen if the Obamanable Showman gets nominated. Will Hillary support the ticket or, Gene McCarthy style, sulk through the campaign & let McCain reap the benefits ala Nixon in '68? Camille's prognosis is grim:

Hillary's recent remarks about politics as a "boys' club" resistant to uppity women was sheer demagoguery. By progressing farther than any woman presidential candidate, she has become a role model for future aspirants. But by attaching herself so blatantly to anti-male rhetoric - particularly in view of her debt to her husband - she is espousing a retrograde brand of feminism no longer applicable to the US.

If Hillary loses, batten the hatches against a mass resurrection of paranoid, paleo-feminist martyrs, counting their wounds and wailing at the blood-red moon.

"Hell hath no fury...." and the Democrats may pay the price of that canonical saw.

Ayers & Boudin & Dohrn are Criminals with Tenure

When Al Gore got a Nobel for his latest collection of tendentious hooey, I knew something was wrong with the Euro-weenie Snobama-lovin' hypocrites [though being Norwegians, the Peace Prize Committee does work with a handicap].

Now I see that a convicted criminal named Boudin got a Rhodes Scholarship in 2002. Wonder if Billy Jeff, who pardoned two Weathergirls, was on the Rhodes committee and, if so, what he would do during the interview? I do.

I wonder what "perfesser" Ayers policy is on school vouchers.

Isn't Ayers just an unsuccessful version of Timothy McVeigh? Doesn't he deserve the same end-game as TV?

The link to the Washington Compost above has the full "exoneration," as Billy Bubba would put it, of Ayers. Including Dick Daley's blow-kiss to the ultra-left rads in Hyde Park who keep his machine oiled and running.

I saw the movie "Expelled" last night & recommend it for a searing indictment of "higher education," AKA indoctrination, in America.

Crackerquiddick Sinking Obamanable Showman's Act

Obamanation is beginning to dwindle as the Gallup national poll shows Hillary vaulting back into the lead after weeks in the doldrums behind the silky-smooth non-bowler from Hyde Park & its non-cracker intelligentsia to use a word falling into deserved ill repute. Mark Steyn has some choice observations certain to whiten some liberal knuckles as they once again [McGovern, Carter II, Mondale, Dukakis, Bore, Kerry] seem to be putting forward a dog that won't hunt---to use LBJ's homey expresson.

Mark brings a Euro-Canuck sensibility to the discussion:

...In my book "America Alone," I note a global survey on optimism: 61 percent of Americans were optimistic about the future, 29 percent of the French, 15 percent of Germans. Take it from a foreigner: In my experience, Americans are the least "bitter" people in the developed world. Secular, gun-free big-government Europe doesn't seem to have done anything for people's happiness. Consider by way of example the words of Keith Reade. He's not an Obama speechwriter, he's a writer for the London Daily Mirror. And the day after the 2004 presidential election he expressed his frustration in an alarmingly Obamaesque way:
"Were I a Kerry voter, though, I'd feel deep anger, not only at them returning Bush to power, but for allowing the outside world to lump us all into the same category of moronic muppets. The self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', nonpassport ownin' rednecks, who believe God gave America the biggest d*** in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong.'"
Well, that's certainly why I supported Bush, but I'm not sure it entirely accounts for the other 62,039,073 incontinent rednecks. Reade, though, does usefully enumerate some of the distinctive features that separate America from the rest of the West. "Self-righteous"? If you want a public culture that reeks of indestructible faith in its own righteousness, try Europe – especially when they're talking about America: If you disagree with Eutopian wisdom, you must be an idiot.
Obama and far too many Democrats have bought into this delusion, most thoroughly distilled in Thomas Frank's book "What's The Matter With Kansas?", whose argument is that heartland voters are too dumb (i.e., "moronic muppets") to vote for their own best interests.
Europeans did "vote for their own best interests" – i.e., cradle-to-grave welfare, 35-hour workweeks, six weeks of paid vacation, etc. – and as a result they now face a perfect storm of unsustainable entitlements, economic stagnation and declining human capital that's left them so demographically beholden to unassimilable levels of immigration that they're being remorselessly Islamized with every passing day. We should thank God (forgive the expression) that America's loser gun nuts don't share the same sophisticated rational calculation of "their best interests" as do Thomas Frank, Obama, too many Democrats and the European political establishment.

We poor stupid Americans have not signed onto the Euro suicide-pact which will eventually turn their economic scientific materialism supervised by nanny-states supervised by Brussells know-it-alls into an "unsustainable entitlement" nightmare---unless all those Muslims importing themselves into the working classes suddenly convert! But now gays are being bashed in Amsterdam of all places, probably by pot-smoking skinheads! Mark ends his Obama-bash with a nice fillup, recommending [honorary?] membership of the city of San Francisco in the EU!:

As for "gun-totin'," large numbers of Americans tote guns because they're assertive, self-reliant citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. The Second Amendment is philosophically consistent with the First Amendment, for which I've become more grateful since the Canadian Islamic Congress decided to sue me for "hate speech" up north. Both amendments embody the American view that liberty is not the gift of the state, and its defense cannot be outsourced exclusively to the government.
I think a healthy society needs both God and guns: It benefits from a belief in some kind of higher purpose to life on Earth, and it requires a self-reliant citizenry. If you lack either of those twin props, you wind up with today's Europe – a present-tense Eutopia mired in fatalism.
A while back, I was struck by the words of Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). Reflecting on the Continent's accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved, but what could he do? "I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."
Sorry, it doesn't work like that. If you don't understand that there are times when you'll have to fight for it, you won't enjoy it for long. That's what a lot of Reade's laundry list – "gun-totin'," "military-lovin'" – boils down to. As for "gay-loathin'," it's Oscar van den Boogaard's famously tolerant Amsterdam where gay-bashing is resurgent: The editor of the American gay paper the Washington Blade got beaten up in the streets on his last visit to the Netherlands.
God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn't it. And even complacent liberal Democrats ought to be able to look across the ocean and see that. But, then, Obama did give the speech in San Francisco, a city demographically declining at a rate that qualifies it for EU membership. When it comes to parochial simpletons, you don't need to go to Kansas.

I'm finishing a book by Thomas Fleming called "Washington's Secret War" about conniving "true whig" radicals from New England whose distrust of a standing army was so strong they tried to hamstring Washington at Valley Forge & replace him with "Nanny Gates" who believed along with the Sam Adams, John Adams, Benjamin Rush crowd that militias would suffice to throw the Brits out of N. America. But Washington wisely resisted all attempts to undermine him and imported Baron Von Steuben who did a marvelous job of training the regular Continental Army in a short time, but noted one thing that distinguished American soldiers from European soldiers.

The Good Baron said that with European subjects, all you had to do was give show them what to do and give them orders & they would do it.

American soldiers had to be told WHY they should do what they did and sometimes WHY they should obey orders.

Big difference.