Fuad Ajami on Obama's "Recessional" or, Obama, the Cheater!

Fuad Ajami remains the spark of conscience in America's foreign policy firmament. His column in the Wall Street Journal delineates the "false dichotomy" Obama and his isolationist ideologues project:

With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. This is the genuine calling of Barack Obama, and of the "progressives" holding him to account. The false dichotomy has taken hold—either we care for our own, or we go abroad in search of monsters to destroy or of broken nations to build. The decision to withdraw missile defense for Poland and the Czech Republic was of a piece with that retreat in American power.

In the absence of an overriding commitment to the defense of American primacy in the world, the Obama administration "cheats." It will not quit the war in Afghanistan but doesn't fully embrace it as its cause. It prosecutes the war but with Republican support—the diehards in liberal ranks and the isolationists are in no mood for bonding with Afghans. (Harry Reid's last major foreign policy pronouncement was his assertion, three years ago, that the war in Iraq was lost.)

Harry Reid and the rest of the "lefty losers" personify the entitlement of those redistributors of wealth on the left who want to concentrate on domestic restructuring, weakening both our foreign and domestic establishments at the same time.

In retrospect, that patina of cosmopolitanism in President Obama's background concealed the isolationism of the liberal coalition that brought him to power. The tide had turned in the congressional elections of 2006. American liberalism was done with its own antecedents—the outlook of Woodrow Wilson and FDR and Harry Truman and John Kennedy. It wasn't quite "Come home, America," but close to it. This was now the foreign policy of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. There was in the land a "liberal orientalism," if you will, a dismissive attitude about the ability of other nations to partake of liberty. It had started with belittling the Iraqis' aptitude for freedom. But there was implicit in it a broader assault on the very idea of freedom's possibilities in distant places. East was East, and West was West, and never the twain shall meet.
We're weary, the disillusioned liberalism maintains, and we're broke, and there are those millions of Americans aching for health care and an economic lifeline. We can't care for both Ohio and the Anbar, Peoria and Peshawar. It is either those embattled people in Iran or a rescue package for Chrysler.

Of course, Fuad doesn't directly mention the subtle condescension, not to mention racism, contained in this sort of retreat from the twentieth century legacy which has unintended consequences all across the board that faux-philosophe Obama may not be aware of, or if so, doesn't give a damn. The dumb [female] Peace Prize Cte in Oslo even was conned out of a Prize!

The joke is on the enthralled crowds in Cairo, Ankara, Berlin and Oslo. The new American president they had fallen for had no genuine calling or attachments abroad. In their enthusiasm for Mr. Obama, and their eagerness to proclaim themselves at one with the postracial meaning of his election, they had missed his aloofness from the genuine struggles in the foreign world. It was easy, that delirium with Mr. Obama: It made no moral demands on those eager to partake of it. It was also false, in many lands.

Thus Turks who loathed the Kurds in their midst, who denied them the right to their own memory and language, could identify themselves, or so they said, with the triumph of Mr. Obama and his personal history. No one questioned the sincerity with which Egyptians and other Arabs hailed Mr. Obama as they refused to be stirred by the slaughter in Darfur, and as they gave a carte blanche to Khartoum's blatant racism and cruelty. Surely there was something amiss in Paris and Berlin—the vast crowds came out for Mr. Obama, but there were millions of Muslims in France and Germany, and the gates hadn't been opened for them, they hadn't been swept into the mainstream of European life. Postracialism, rather like charity, should have begun at home, one would think.

By [inadvertently?] supporting Arab racism against non-Arab blacks and Turkic racism against non-Turkish Kurds, Obama simply slips lower in the eventual poll of historians of the presidency, if he leaves enough of that office intact for future scholarship to ponder. Fuad goes on to note that, contrary to Joe Biden's preposterous claim that Hezbollah were ousted from Lebanon, Rafik Hariri's son now has to go kiss the hem of the robe of the dictator responsible for murdering the President of Lebanon. And someone should inform Joe Gaffe-a-Minute that Hezbollah now runs Lebanon the way he incompetently used to run the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

[Now], no despot fears Mr. Obama, and no blogger in Cairo or Damascus or Tehran, no demonstrator in those cruel Iranian streets, expects Mr. Obama to ride to the rescue. To be sure, it was in the past understood that we can't bear all burdens abroad, or come to the defense of everyone braving tyranny. But there was always that American assertion that when things are in the balance we would always be on freedom's side. .... It is different today, there is a cold-bloodedness to American foreign policy. "Ideology is so yesterday," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed not long ago, giving voice to the new sentiment.

History and its furies have their logic, and they have not bent to Mr. Obama's will. He had declared a unilateral end to the "war on terror," but the jihadists and their mentors are yet to call their war to a halt. From Yemen to Fort Hood and Detroit, the terror continues.

But to go by the utterances of the Obama administration and its devotees, one would have thought that our enemies were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, not the preachers and masterminds of terror. The president and his lieutenants spent more time denigrating "rendition" and the Patriot Act than they did tracking down the terror trail and the latest front it had opened at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. Our own leaders spoke poorly of our prerogatives and ways, and they were heard the world over.

Under Mr. Obama, we have pulled back from the foreign world. We're smaller for accepting that false choice between burdens at home and burdens abroad, and the world beyond our shores is more hazardous and cynical for our retrenchment and our self-flagellation.

Obama and his legions of lefty losers are growing smaller and smaller in the eyes of both Americans fooled by his moondance and in the gaze of brutal thugs like Chavez, Ahmedinejad, and Putin. Not to mention wannabe-thug Bashar Assad.

Why is Hillary Clinton Not Being Roughed Up like Janet N?

The NYT has an interesting story on how the Detroit near-miss has all the overtones of the 9/11, even to the lack of data sharing. But strangely, the Dept. of State is left out of the mix.

...the flood of intelligence collected against a scattered and shadowy terrorist network continues to grow, threatening to overwhelm the system, said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian whose book, “The Secret Sentry,” examines the N.S.A. The eavesdropping agency, tracking e-mail and cellphone traffic around the world, each day collects four times the volume of information stored in the Library of Congress, Mr. Aid said.

“To pluck out the important threats is an almost impossible task,” he said.

In the case of Mr. Abdulmutallab, the N.S.A. appears to have captured critical intercepts, and his father provided the name that would have allowed American agencies to take action. For Mr. Kean, of the Sept. 11 commission, it is the father’s role that should have moved even the most jaded bureaucracy.

“Think of what it took for the father, one of the most respected bankers in Nigeria, to walk into the American Embassy and turn in his own son,” Mr. Kean said. “The father’s a hero. His visit by itself should have been enough to set off all kinds of alarms.”

That "most jaded bureaucracy" would be the Dept. of State.

Ex-Guantanamo Prisoners Planned Detroit Xmas Terror

ABC has a lot of the details of the Christmas salute to Detroit planned in Yemen, according to the Nigerian terrorist nabbed in the attempt, who is now singing like a birdie. And promising to raining more death and mayhem from the skies as he has many supporters among Al Qaeda in Yemen, no matter how well Skank-in-Chief of Homeland Security Napolitano says the airline secuity works.

The Red Cross, Amnesty International and other terrorist-support groups put pressure on the US to get
.

..[t]wo of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit .... released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents

.
Hilariously, the pair was sent to the Mothership of terrorism groups.

American officials agreed to send the two terrorists to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.....Both Saudi nationals have since emerged in leadership roles in Yemen, according to U.S. officials and the men's own statements on al Qaeda propaganda tapes. Both of the former Guantanamo detainees are described as military commanders and appear on a January, 2009 video along with the man described as the top leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Abu Basir Naser al-Wahishi, formerly Osama bin Laden's personal secretary.

I read now that Janet N has recanted on the efficacy of TSA's security and I'm sure Obambi will be coming out strong against future terrorists.

Barack Hits the Beach as Detroit & Iran Sizzle.

Iran anyway. His witless cabinet ditz Napolitano does insist that the "system worked" when the Dutch hero stopped the Nigerian nitwit from blowing up the plane.

Informed Comment insists that now is not [yet?] the time for a true revolution or counter-reformation or whatever, but has some interesting reasons why the Ahmedinejad regime and the Khamenei religious totalitarians are going to run the Islamic Republic off the road, and soon!

Hey, why not send John Kerry over to Tehran to heighten American credibility over there and get those pesky nukes taken care of---a smoothie like John would wow the mullahs and their basiji followers enough to tip the scales back to a pro-American stance.

Yeah, Kerry's the ticket!

John {Hari] Kerry Outhumbles Obama in Bowing & Scraping to Iran

The Democrats have a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair even dumber and less morally scrupulous than the previous, the gaffe-a-day Joe-the-Joke Biden. The flip-flopper from MA about whom nothing is authentic [a fake-Catholic Jew-boy who got three purple hearts and will not authorize the paperwork behind their suspicious origins---three PH's got you out of 'Nam back when this scam-meister was operating in the Mekong Delta] now is mediating between Obama and Karzai, of whom Karzai is the lesser crook, Obama and Bashar Assad in Syria, where Obama & Bashar come out even, and Kerry is the low-point of that triangle.

This Perfect Hairdo whose empty head beneath acquired lower grades at Yale than his antagonist GWB --- Jerk-off John had a GPA of around 75, while comporting himself like some sort of Continental Intellectual. [Which brings to memory the feeble-minded Al Gore, whose HIGHEST grade in a science course at his DIVINITY SCHOOL was a D+!]

However, Teresa Heinz's husband [she dropped the Kerry moniker recently just as Rush Limbaugh had predicted back in 2004] now believes that he is the reincarnation of Talleyrand and therefore is aiming to get an invitation from Iran before the end-of-year deadline Obama set for getting more serious economic sanctions into play. The WH has no objections, of course, and will enjoy seeing this pretender come a cropper and if by some weird chance, he succeeds, it's found money for them.

Al Gore recently had to retract a misstatement of a world-famous scientist's predictions on the Arctic Ocean when that liviing scientist inconveniently showed up in Copenhagen and pointed out Lyin' Al's convenient lie.

Kerry has been able to lie his own way to the top of the Demo-rat Party by calling his fellow soldiers murderers and war criminals---which in a way, if you look at the world through his own looking glass, he himself also is in no uncertain terms.

Chris "Tingle-Up-My-Leg" Swirling Clockwise in the Porcelain Exit Tunnel?

Chris Mathews never was as obnoxious or spiteful as Keith Overbite nor a 'sport of nature' like hormone-train-wreck Maddow, but Tweety Bird let us know of his billowing clouds of emo through images best suited for a Victorian boudoir. Looks like Tweety's close to catching terminal vapors very soon and the misnomer "Hardball" will no longer disfigure the fast-fading CNN lineup of losers.

Now if the moronic 'droid David Shuster and DUI-felon Rick Sanchez would leave, MSNBC would be ready for a redo.

Urkel Strikes Again---This Time Sucking Up to Iran

What, Me Worry?

Obama's calm rhetoric doesn't prevent him from being the Steve Urkel of foreign policy presidents---Missile Shield Removed from Poland at the behest of Vlad the Empoisoner on 70th
Anniversary of Soviet '39 Invasion from the East, Sucking up to America-Hating Commie Caudillo Narcostates in Latin America, Slapping Down American allies [Honduras, Israel] at every opportunity while bowing and generally doing a "yes, sir; please, sir" step'n-fetch-it routine with Muslim tyrants and Saudi "monarchs."

And let's not forget that "reset" button famously given by Hillarious Clyntoon to her Russian counterpart Lavrov in incorrect faulty Russian!!! Did someone from Foggy Bottom get booby-trapped by a Rosetta Stone fake? Try Pimsleur next time! [Hillarious is the bimbo who also timed the missile extraction six months after Urkel claimed that GWB's anti-missile shield versus Iran was "set policy."]

Now Iran tests a missile capable of reaching Poland & the Czech Republic [and Israel] and is caught fashioning a nuclear-trigger mechanism and refusing to export the enriched uranium it is making and what does Urkel do?

Exactly what Gilly's teacher does in those tedious SNL skits they bored us with late last week with "An SNL Christmas."

Either Nothing.

Or an Urkel-like stumble-fumble.....

I for one disapprove of this Urkel dude representing our country overseas and believe he should be kept safely stateside for the remainder of his one-term administration.

State-Controlled Media Takes Direct Feedback from Obama WH Top Thugs

Morning Joe had the ultra-left feeble-minded libtard Ed Schultz on air and during commercial breaks Ed the neighing Horse was amazed to see former Repub Congresscritter and still thimblewit Joe Scarborough and his Polish sidekick Mika Brzez...... taking advice and guidance on how to handle Ed after the profit-break was over. That shocked even Ed.......

Meanwhile, over on the radio side of the ledger, Mediaweek named Rush Limbaugh the Radio Personality of the Decade---really a no-brainer by the numbers and influence wielded by the Missouri "Show Me" Pundit. Steve Jobs and Apple and Google and Rupert Murdoch dominated the other categories, with Sopranos taking the best TV show and Wired the best mag.

EuroStar Blinking Out Because of a "Snowstorm."

Eurostar is the fast [expensive] superservice between and among London, Paris, and Brussells and succeeded the Chunnel which began in the eighties.

Remember when we Yanks used to look down a wee bit on the Euros for being quaint and slightly technically retarded, but forgave them because of their marvelous railroad system and the EurailPass? Those days seem to be behind us, not that the US has a rail system above barely adequate. Verging on a national disgrace.

Eurostar virtually stopped functioning last week because of some snowstorms more or less normal for this time of year and while it coincided with the bogus St. Vitus Dance taking place in Copenhagen, the foul-ups demonstrated again that Europe shouldn't attempt assuming some sort of world political role while its own affairs are in such a tedious snarled condition.

I recall from my student days reading somewhere that a European savant of the nineteenth century of the Nietzchean mold wrote that the US was the only civilization to pass from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Perhaps the Europeans can be described in a similar manner as to mastery of modern technologies dealing with civic order and convenience.

Monkey Jumping on Piano Plays First Tune!!!

The Krugboy proves that you can be dumber than Al Gore and STILL get a Nobel Prize

1] His First-Ever Accurate Prediction!
• "The big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster."--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, March 29, 2005

• "We need to take on the way the Senate works. The filibuster, and the need for 60 votes to end debate, aren't in the Constitution. . . . So it's time to revise the rules."--former Enron adviser Krugman, New York Times, Dec. 18, 2009

This moral retardo would still be working for Enron if they hadn't had a couple of missteps---nothing to do with his economic or business advice, of course, let me be o-so-clear about that!!!

So Paul Krugman fetched up on the beach where all moral retards seem to wash up---the New York Times!

Democrat's First Principle

James Taranto in his Mencken-like way notes the what REALLY counts for Demo-rats:

Bringing ObamaCare to the floor requires an affirmative vote from every non-Republican in the Senate, which means that Reid and his men will fail in their efforts unless they persuade Nelson to vote with them. To win over Lieberman, the Dems were willing to give up government-run insurance in the form of both the "public option" and the "Medicare buy-in." It seems that abortion is more dear to them than socialism.

This is so true because even though he lost by a margin of four percent, McCain actually won a majority of male voters in the 2008 election. The Demo-rats are becoming a party of women, which makes understandable the hysterical reactions so many of its female or gay members demonstrate when confronted with reality.

That will come in 2010.

Howard Zinn Recruits More Dumbies for His Propaganda War by Book

Daniel Flynn always has a level-headed look at his blog at the History News Network at George Mason University. I was skimming through the end of the year mags at the library waiting to pick up my daughter at the doc and the Entertainment Weekly Magazine had an [unintentionally] funny piece on Matt Damon and Josh Brolin planning to read on the History Channel out loud [teleprompter? LARGE PRINT? Phonetically Spelled?] segments of Howard Zinn's Unabridged Marxist Anti-History of the USA---the stuff they don't teach you in high school.

Mainly because it's Marxist lies concocted by worms from an alien universe, or at least their moral equivalent....

Daniel Flynn asks the fundamental question that his job as Executive Director of Accuracy in Media aims at everywhere---why are deliberate distortions of historical facts on which there is a wide consensus so frequently met with in Zinn's writings? Or as Flynn puts it:

Readers of A People’s History of the United States learn very little about history. They do learn quite a bit, however, about Howard Zinn. In fact, the book is perhaps best thought of as a massive Rorschach Test, with the author’s familiar reaction to every major event in American history proving that his is a captive mind long closed by ideology.

Theory First, Facts Second

If you’ve read Marx, there’s really no reason to read Howard Zinn. The first line of The Communist Manifesto provides the single-bullet theory of history that provides Zinn with his narrative thread— “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.” It is the all-purpose explanation of every subject that Zinn covers. On other hand, why study history when theory has all the answers?

Thumb through A People’s History of the United States and you will find greed as the motivating factor behind every act of those who don’t qualify as “the people” in Zinn’s book. According to Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and both World Wars all were the result of base motives of the “ruling class” -- rich men to get richer at the expense of others.

But the greed gets zanier and Zinn's mind must be addled by some of that good dope Eddie Vedder and other rock stars slip him which put his imaginative powers into a virtually hallucinagenic warp-speed:

Here we come to the real secret of the commercial success of A People’s History. It is a case of simple ideas for simple minds – a broken record for the tone deaf. When we come to World War I, it sounds very much like the Civil War. “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor,… supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” Yet another conspiracy to distract the proletariat from its destined revolution.

The account of World War II made slightly more interesting by author’s preposterous account of its origins. According to Zinn, suggests that America, not Japan, was to blame for Pearl Harbor, provoking the Empire of the Sun and forcing it to attack us. It’s the devil made them do it theory of history, which is great fallback position of the left when confronted with the imperialistic aggressions of “people of color.” Like the war to end slavery, the fight against fascism was an optical illusion. It was really a struggle by American capitalists to rule the world. Regarding America’s neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, which preceded World War II, Zinn asks: “Was it the logical policy of a government whose main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States? For those interests, in the thirties, an anti-Soviet policy seemed best. Later, when Japan and Germany threatened U.S. world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy became preferable.”

Thus is reality inverted or more accurately twisted. Zinn – a pro-Communist supported Stalin’s monster regime at the time, elides the fact that it was the Soviet Union that pretended to be anti-fascist in Spain, then signed a pact with Hitler and then – when Hitler double-crossed his Communist ally and invaded the Soviet Union became anti-fascist again. The United States was isolationist in 1936 and until Pearl Harbor. But it was always anti-fascist. Zinn projects the Soviet Union’s schizophrenic policies (and his own schizophrenic allegiances) onto America. While the Hitler-Stalin Pact is awkwardly excused, Zinn all but invents a Hitler-Roosevelt Pact to serve his social aims

.
Yes, you can always wrongfoot a leftie and watch him stumble and lurch to the ground over that Ribbentrop [throw in the Count Herr Von just to rub in ironic strokes of proletarian hypocrisy] and Molotov Pact in August 1939, which even the witless pair Hillary and Barack-O completely forgot about seventy years later when they pulled out the rug under Poland --- not that the witless propagandist media in the USA would say peep except Anne Applegate of the Washington Post , who found it difficult to keep silent since her husband was the Polish Foreign Minister.

But Howard Zinn, ever the faithful Emmanuel Goldman, Howard would have found a way. Just like

“...when the Scottsboro case unfolded in the 1930s in Alabama,” Zinn writes in an even more egregious fit of historical amnesia, “it was the Communist party that had become associated with the defense of these young black men imprisoned, in the early years of the Depression, by southern injustice.” Perhaps the Party had become “associated” with the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, but in reality the Communists merely used the embattled youngsters. Richard Gid Powers points out in Not Without Honor that the Communists had raised $250,000 for the Scottsboro Boys’ defense, but had put-up a scant $12,000 for two appeals. At the time, a black columnist quoted a candid Party official who stated, “we don’t give a damn about the Scottsboro boys. If they burn it doesn’t make any difference. We are only interested in one thing, how we can use the Scottsboro case to bring the Communist movement to the people and win them over to Communism.” As a fellow-traveler, Zinn has the identical view. He is only interested in history so long as it serves as a weapon of socialist ideology.

And sells more of his "textbooks" by fellow-traveller instructors too lazy to think for themselves. Any way, no TIVO for the History Channel and here's a final send-off from Flynn:

“Unemployment grew in the Reagan years,” Zinn claims. Statistics show otherwise. Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent in his first month in office. By January of 1989, the rate had declined to 5.4 percent. Had the Reagan presidency ended in 1982 when unemployment rates exceeded 10 percent, Zinn would have a point. But for the remainder of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment declined precipitously

.
Not that a simpleton like Damon would know, but Zinn is a chronic serial liar and a P.O.S.

Rubio Overtakes Crist

Charlie Crist was counting his chickens long before they hatched, showing his porkie-stimulus inclinations and a tendency to support Obama, which now that that ship is heading out into stormy weather, he denies ever happened.

Luckily, there's plenty of video evidence that he like his hero John Kerry was for the stimulus package before he was against it. And his proxy-Senator LeMieux's first move in Congress was to put a hold on offshore drilling already agreed upon.

Showing his hand was for the fruitless environmental crusade rather than garner low-hanging fruit from taxes and royalties paid by oil companies operating one-hundred miles offshore, Crist may have a silent partner. [Cuba drills & explores offshore closer to Florida in gas & oil fields run by Venezuelan, Chinese, and Russian operating companies than LeMieux would allow the US to operate.] Is Charlie Crist a friend of Chavez and his [ex-] Commie pals?

Probably not, but this is one candidate who overreached too soon and hopefully will pay the price. Or as John Fund predicts:

Mr. Crist's fall has been so precipitous that it has prompted rumors that he might abandon the Senate race and try to hold onto the governor's mansion for a second term. That would require elbowing aside GOP state Attorney General Bill McCollum, who has been running for governor for months -- but that might be an easier task than Mr. Crist trying to convince Florida's Republican primary voters that he's the man they want in Washington to resist the big-government ambitions of the Obama administration.

Bill McCollum would make a better governor, perhaps. But Crist is the sort of fellow who needs to be kept on a short leash, in Tallahassee, lest his personal national ambitions quickly take hold once he catches Potomac Fever.

Welcome Back, Carter!

The Old Scissors To A One-Term POTUS

47% is the new low of Americans who APPROVE of this on-again, off=again, now-you-see-him, now-you-don't mind changer. Hillary was right last year when she said that the POTUS job is not a calling for on-the-job training.

Seems like the American people are beginning to understand she was right all along.

Politics Trumps Policy on Health Care for Dems

John Fund at the WSJ has a nice little piece on the Dems' obsession with getting ANY healthcare bill passed, but preferably one with a public option. Fund notes:

...many [Dems] in the trenches are uneasy about the sprawling, complex bill they privately acknowledge has no bipartisan support, doesn't seriously tackle soaring costs and will increase insurance premiums. That may explain Majority Leader Harry Reid's haste—he has ordered a rare Sunday session this weekend to hurry up the debate. Public support for the bill averages only 39.2% backing in all polls compiled by Pollster.com.

But Dems who vote do care about the health care bill and polls show that in 2010, a lot of Dem Coingresscritters & especially Harry Reid might have their political careers shortened by an avalanche of Republican voters, who besides paying taxes are p-o'd:

That fear is backed up by a new poll taken for the Daily Kos, the left-wing Web site: 81% of self-described Republicans say they are certain or likely to vote in 2010 compared to 65% of independent voters and only 56% of Democrats. "Democrats have simply not been given enough of a reason to come out and vote yet," writes liberal blogger David Dayen. "The left is waiting for that long-promised 'change' they can believe in."

So in the eyes of a lot of borderline Dems who really think the colossal dead-tree dump of several thousand pages is policy gone terribly wrong don't want to lose their offices, and as a long shot, are credulous enuf to believe that the liberal base will rescue them if they pass the policy poisonous cup to all American citizens, while themselves retaining a gold-plated health benefits program of CEO Fortune 500 quality---no waiting in doctors' offices for the lawyers and lifetime career politicians the Dems recruit to represent them in Congress!

Congress is so gerrymandered and sliced/diced so that only a few swing districts will usually turn even if off-year elections. But if the Dems in Congress really think that the 20% self-professed liberals in the USA are going to re-elect them over the 35% conservative and the over-40% self-proclaimed independents---of which I am one---then I think they are completely offbase and need a little time on K Street to plot how to get back into office.

National Journal reports [Harry Reid] included a public option in the bill in part because his staff felt he "could get the liberal left off his back for a while."

Other Democrats are in a similar bind. One Senate Democrat thinks the bill is bad policy. But last month that same senator joined with all of his fellow Democrats to bring the bill to the floor. The party leadership has made it clear that anyone who votes against health care will have a difficult time passing their own bills in the future.

So the Senate death march continues. Many Democrats have grave misgivings about making the bill a top priority given the economy. But in the age of bloodthirsty partisan bloggers they dare not be fully candid. They can only hope their march doesn't lead them right over the edge of a political cliff next November.

As certifiablly chronic victims of lemming-like groupthink, the Dems' probabilities of a rock plunge range from slim to none and slim just left town.

UPDATE:

Just when you thought that Harry Reid just couldn't get any more stupid than his statement in 2007 that "the war is lost," combining ignorance and treason in a four-word expression of Demo-rat feckless incompetence as the Surge crested to an unexpected VICTORY which the treason-left of Reid/Pelosi still cannot acknowledge, Reid yesterday PLAYED THE RACE CARD WRONGLY as he accused Republicans of having been the Party which had supported slavery during the Civil War. Next thing you know, Reid will anoint Abe Lincoln as the greatest Demo-rat POTUS. Treason and ignorance make a hilarious combination!

Dr. Watson, You've Projected Yourself Live on the BBC!

A Climate Hoax "Professor" blurted out his assessment of his own behavior projected onto Marc Moreno by calling M.M. an "assh*le" live on a televised debate in the UK.

Methinks you don't need to be a Sherlock to figure out that this Dr. Watson is a complete fraud...!

NASA stateside has been dragging its heels on FOIA requests because the Chief Fraud Hoaxer is a certain Lyin' Al Gore named James Hansen. This batsh*t freak is the head of the Goddard Center in the D.C. area where he can confabulate with second-rate minds in the DNC on how to raise taxes using the AGW hoax and cap & trade [AKA "Crap & Enslave!" h/t The Other McCain] to turn the world's greatest economy into a corpse consumed by Third World Parasites like Zimbabwe. China, of course, gets away free while polluting more with its brown coal power plants than the USA does in its entire power generation emissions output.

Big Science's demise may be near as the colossal scamming by "peer review" posses restricting any contrarian input is revealing the complete falsification of the scientific method to achieve Big Government's socialist objectives. Read Dan Henninger's thoughtful article on the end of an era. And NASA, stop killing Shuttle astronauts with your bogus science, which Richard Feynman predicted in the eighties would cause "catastrophic events" every fifty launches.

Obama Fakery on Afghanistan: Both Sides of His Mouth

Karzai's Corruption is a buzzword resounding from the empty cavernous mouth of Bill O'Reilly to the shibboleth-prone Obamaniacs, the ones who still think the Won is wearing clothes---not the Weisberg reincarnation of FDR, but still more than a half-wit artful dodger.

A senior State Dept buddy just got back from Afghanistan on this diplomat's dozenth iteration of that dreary mini-slog---still living in converted aluminum cargo bins with about five US officials crammed into each rabbit warren. This diplomat has been in a position to oversee and monitor the situation in that country for most of the century so far---daily briefs to the Seventh Floor and weekly ones to the WH back in DC and a long sojourn in the region every four months or so since 2002. But this public official has come to the sad conclusion that Kabul is Baghdad all over again. Every US agency and department has its "mission staff" crammed into one or more cargo crates and the lack of oversight or even sustained US policy coherence is simply breathtaking.

So the latest pariah in Afghanistan, and Pakistan for that matter, Richard Holbrooke, has devised a mantra which might keep this careerist's hopes alive for the Chief Foggy Bottom job should Hillary slip or be thrown under a bus, Obama's normal M.O. in reaction to the slightest glitch [just ask Gregory Craig or Susan Rice]. Holbrooke has been insinuating what everyone knows, only with a foghorn -persistance, that the Karzai administration hasn't been lickety-split in cleaning house and had committed election irregularities.

But according to my Foggy Bottom correspondent, Karzai has been doing pretty much his or anyone else's best to clean the Augean stables of the accumulated graft, corruption, peculation, and war-lord kickbackism that has long been the background noise of doing political business in Afghanistan, and especially since Kabul and environs began sliding down the slippery slope into a narco-state export hub in the late sixties. However, after Holbrooke quickly alienated every single sincere or at least dedicated Afghani official with his abrasive nasty stab-in-the-back contortions, he himself decided that some sort of an exit strategy to extract his career from this dreary cul-de-sac of Kabul was in order. Ditto Islamabad and the Paks, who are more corrupt than the Afghanis if that is any solace to a bemused US regional hegemon trying to sort out the baddies from the worsies.

The constantly conniving Holbrooke appears to be positioning himself for a safe exit from his thankless task in S.E. Asia of reconciling three regional players who hate each other cordially. To do this, Dick is quietly whispering innuendoes, quietly sniping and backbiting with the downbeat subtext that Karzai and his sordid political crew might be worse than the Taliban alternative. Although this might be an exaggeration and of course is surely absurd on the face of it, but Holbrooke thereby gives a leit motif to the constantly bobbing and weaving Obama, who has already slithered from "a necessary war" to some sort of multicultural rainbow of contingencies as concerns the Afghan military quandary, and who might want to strap on this parachute should his notorious lack of consistency and will power again assert itself.

The drumbeat of empty chatter about Karzai's "corruption" fits Dear Leader's chameleon-on-plaid moral posturing in the Oval Office as it also does the hidden agenda of his regional Proconsul Holbrooke, whose devious sniping and conniving mirrors that of his boss back in DC, even though it has lost Holbrooke any real access or credibility with the powers that be in the region, including Islamabad and Kabul.

Echo chambers ranging from the NYT's editorial staff to book-hawking t-shirt salesmen like BOR all find the theme of Karzai's Bad Boyz, Bad Boyz in Kabul a useful way to undercut US efforts in the region, and to offer Obama a way out at an early opportunity once resistance to his latest juking and backpedaling becomes apparent. With the Dems as with the Repubs., foreign policy is always style and symbols and a morality play.

Except occasionally with Republicans, even though it may be wrong-headed or need strong corrective measures, the foreign policy effort is sustained for more than twelve months at a time.

Obama's weathervane spins with each new coldfront, and like his predecessor Jimmy Carter, foreign policy is not his strongest suit. Look for more Afghan policy permutations in rapid-fire order, says my Foggy Bottom buddy, in the next year or so.