Dalrymple: Breivik's Norway and the Problem/Mystery of EVIL!!!

I'm the British Antidote to Breivik!

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of a British psychiatrist outed as Dr. Anthony Daniels, who worked fifteen [15---count em!] LONG YEARS as an official physician for the bodies and souls of British criminals---both in the UK and various outposts of the far-flung remnants of the British Commonwealth, tiny islands iin the South Pacific and other tiny isolates or sweltering hellholes too insignificant to even want to plead for independence from the Mother Island. Reading his books is an exercise in a long excursion through the farther reaches of the human, if you dare call it that, condition. The European Editor of the WSJ caught up with Dalrymple in the south of France and has some excerpts from one of the most insightful observers of our time on the politics of hatred and the madness of the criminal condition we like to paper over with euphemisms of the libtard variety.

Here are some outstanding gems, but I suggest you read the entire article for the depth and breadth of Dalrymple's seeming offhand remarks about Breivik, his obvious intellectual capacity coupled with an obvious lack of talent for social interaction, and how it resulted in catastrophe for over seventy [70---count em!!!] Norwegian youth and bystanders in Oslo. WSJ editor Brian Carney introduces him as:

author of more than a dozen books of scathing social commentary on everything from crime to travel to, most recently, what he calls "the toxic cult of sentimentality" in modern society. In his writing and in conversation, he returns frequently to the criminals he's known and treated.

Your garden-variety convicts, he contends, are much simpler subjects than a man like Breivik. To ask them why they steal, he says, "is like asking you why you have lunch." They want something, so they take it. "And since in Britain," he adds with a smirk, "the state does very little to discourage [thieves]," or to incarcerate them when they are caught, "the question is not why there are so many burglars, but why there are so few."

A Breivik is a deeper mystery. Of him, "you can say, 'This man is highly narcissistic, paranoid and grandiose,'" and this may lead you to seek reasons for that in his past—"his father disappeared at the age of 15 and so on and so forth." But uncovering such facts doesn't solve the mystery because "whatever you find, you would also find among hundreds or thousands or even millions of people who didn't do what he did." There is, he says, "always a gap between what is to be explained and your alleged explanation. So there's always a mystery, and I think that's going to remain."

Even so, we find irresistible the urge to understand an atrocity like Breivik's, even as we are repulsed by it. When asked whether we hope thereby to understand something about ourselves, the former prison doctor offers an arch denial: "Well, he doesn't tell me much about me." And then, with a morbid chuckle and wary look—"I can't say for you," before adding: "I suppose the only thing one can say is that he tells us about the range of human possibility. But we knew that already."

Dalrymple has an offhand British humour that acts as an emollient to the brutal underlying cynicism that so long an experience with the British National Health Service instills in any person with a higher-than-average Intelligence Quotient. But his wide reading and deep understanding of European history helps him explain just how and why the Europeans [and their Amcit handmaidens, the libtard establishment of the two Left Coasts] are so ineffably unable to understand their own plight and woefully equipped to make a mid-course correction in their beeline towards the largest icebergs floating through the icy North Atlantic:

The human impulse to explain the inexplicably horrific is revealing, according to Dr. Dalrymple, in two respects—one personal, one political. First, it says something about us that we feel compelled to explain evil in a way that we don't feel about people's good actions. The discrepancy arises, he says, "because [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau has triumphed," by which he means that "we believe ourselves to be good, and that evil, or bad, is the deviation from what is natural."

For most of human history, the prevailing view was different. Our intrinsic nature was something to be overcome, restrained and civilized. But Rousseau's view, famously, was that society corrupted man's pristine nature. This is not only wrong, Dr. Dalrymple argues, but it has had profound and baleful effects on society and our attitude toward crime and punishment. For one thing, it has alienated us from responsibility for our own actions. For another, it has reduced our willingness to hold others responsible for theirs.

"Most people," Dr. Dalrymple says, "now have a belief in the inner core of themselves as being good. So that whatever they've done, they'll say, 'That's not the real me.'" He recalls an inmate he once encountered: "I remember one particular chap who'd thrown ammonia at his girlfriend's face because he was jealous. He denied he'd done it. And the evidence was overwhelming that he had done it. So I said, 'Why did you say you didn't do it?'"

He delivers the convict's response in a convincing working-class English accent quite different from his own, more refined, speech: "Well, I'm not like that," the man told him. "I don't do them things." Dr. Dalrymple explains that "for him, his core was more real than what he'd actually done." It turned out that the man had been to prison before—"and it was for throwing acid in his girlfriend's face."

That sort of manifest imbecility lies at the heart of just why a formerly sensible island people who were mercifully isolated from the philosophical and political absurdities of their French neighbor [and traditional enemy] just across La Manche] disappeared sometime in the early twentieth century when they bought the French version of ridiculously absurd political and social thinking along with the socialism of Wilhelmine Germany and then the Bolshevism of Stalinist/Leninist Soviet Russia. Norway's Labour Party is a more self-defeating masochistic version of the TUC nuttiness of British socialism before Tony Blair turned it into a halfway palatable party with a heart and head partly in touch with reality.

But first, what about Breivik, this self-proclaimed patriot trying to save Norway from itself via mass murder?

Dr. Dalrymple suggests that a similar self-detachment could have been at work in the mind of Anders Breivik. As the world now knows, courtesy of his 1,500-page manifesto, Breivik "did actually have, perverse as it was, a political purpose." He had a worldview and a vision, however deranged, of what was needed to achieve it. And, says Dr. Dalrymple, "I assume that when he was shooting all those people, what was in his mind was the higher good that he thought he was doing. And that was more real to him than the horror that he was creating around him."

In itself, having a worldview that shapes our attention, informs even what we believe to be real, is perfectly normal. It may even be essential. "After all," Dr. Dalrymple says, "having a very consistent worldview, particularly if it gives you a transcendent purpose, answers the most difficult question: What is the purpose of life?"

Having a purpose is usually a good thing. "One of the problems of our society," Dr. Dalrymple says, "is that many people don't have a transcendent purpose. Now it can come from various things. It can come from religion of course. But religion in Europe is dead."

Dr. Dalrymple argues that the welfare state, Europe's form of civic religion, deprives its citizens even of the "struggle for existence" as a possible purpose in life. One alternative, then, is "transcendent political purpose—and that's where what [Breivik's] done comes in." Such a political purpose doesn't lead inexorably to fanaticism, violence and murder. "But my guess," Dr. Dalrymple offers, "is that this man, who was extremely ambitious, didn't have the talent" to realize his ambitions, whether in politics or other fields. "So while he's intelligent he didn't have that ability or that determination to mark himself out in a way that might be more—constructive, shall we say."

Some have sought to link Breivik's violence to his political thinking. The New York Times ran a story Monday about Breivik's fondness for certain American anti-Islamist blogs. And a parade of politicians on the European right have felt compelled to step forward and condemn Breivik's killing spree—as if afraid that silence might somehow imply sympathy. Dr. Dalrymple himself, he says, is quoted indirectly "several times" in Breivik's manifesto, "and that," he says, "is slightly anxiety-provoking." In the first place, it's never pleasant to find yourself in the company, however unwillingly or unwittingly, of a man like Breivik.

Of course, the New York Times has turned into a nasty tabloid that makes the News of the World look sane in its coverage. The National Inquirer has more thic probity than the NYT with its stable in maniacs running rampant on the editorial page almost every day of the week. Even the welcome ejection of two abcesses like Frank Rich and the token Negro Herbert haven't been able to calm the fevered brows or pompous pronunciamentos of buffoons like krugboy, Friedman, Kristof and d-bag of all d-bags --- token "moderate" David Brooks. A semi-sane addition named _______ fails to make the page palatable, even on days when Maureen Dowd stumbles onto some semblance of sanity. The NYT is still the Liberal DeathStar.

He has another worry, "that what he's done will be taken as a reason to close down all kinds of debate," or to delegitimize the views of anyone who, as Dr. Dalrymple puts it, "question[s] anything that the current prime minister of Norway says or believes."

"Here is a man," Dr. Dalrymple says, "behaving like this and quoting all kinds of people, some of whom I admire or agree with." But to suggest that the views of those thinkers (including himself) somehow contributed to the killing in Oslo, he argues, makes no sense. "It's like somebody saying that if you believe, for example, that bankers were irresponsible during the [2008 global financial] crisis, you are leading inexorably to the killing of three bankers in the bank in Athens," as happened during one of the recent anti-austerity protests there.

Another modern impulse in trying to understand men like Breivik is what Dr. Dalrymple calls "a kind of neuroscientific investigation combined with Darwinism, which tries to persuade us that we understand something that perhaps Shakespeare didn't understand" about human nature. "And of course," he allows, "there are things we understand that we didn't understand in Shakespeare's time. But the idea that we have finally plucked out the heart of the mystery of existence is drivel."

He notes that so far at least, the explanatory power of sociobiology combined with neuroscience is entirely "retrospective." Experts can draw correlations between this and that, "but they can't even tell you what's going to happen on the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow. So, there's a feeling that we have finally achieved some kind of understanding that our poor benighted ancestors didn't have. But this is nonsense." Human action remains mysterious, and what's more, "it's dangerous to think we do have that kind of understanding," because in the worst case, it could lead to a kind of scientific dictatorship.

"Supposing," he says of Breivik, "you examine him and you come to the conclusion that this, that and the other factor went to create the situation. You wouldn't have any more than a statistical generality." But if that statistical correlation could be verified, could it lead to "locking up people before they've done anything"?

This is not quite as far-fetched as it might seem, according to Dr. Dalrymple. At one point, "the British government . . . wanted doctors to speculate on what people might do" and to offer law enforcement their views about who was likely to become dangerous. But human knowledge, and even more so human judgment, being fallible, "any factor you find that makes them likely to become dangerous isn't going to be 100%. It's unlikely to be even 20%. So in order to prevent one incident, you'd probably have to lock up hundreds of people.

'So actually there's a potentially extremely totalitarian or at least authoritarian aspect to this drive to understand what essentially is not finally understandable."

There would also be a human cost to achieving that kind of understanding. Perfect understanding, if it could be attained, would allow perfect manipulation of others—we could "play on each other like a pipe," Dr. Dalrymple says, echoing Hamlet's accusation toward Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

And that would not be a change for the better. What's more, if we understood each other perfectly, "we'd know exactly what each other are thinking—and that would be horrific," he insists. "At least if my thoughts are anything to go by."

The NYT has been losing debates for so long that even the newest deck-chair superintendant on the Titanic, the odious Jill Abramson, will be unable to discredit some of the conservative blogs that Breivik might have quoted or alluded to in his long and literate Manifesto. The Titanic piloted by the giddy socialist Captain Pinch might slander a few as he did Sarah Palin after a [Jewish][ nutcase shot her and six others in a schizophrenic fusillade in Phoenix. That's par for the declining flagship of the degenerate left----heading for the iceberg full speed ahead...!!!

But Dalrymple's deep analysis on the inner malaise of the evils of European society---a collection of enclaves utterly unable to recognize that the evil they so desperately are fighting lies deep within themselves---an evil no Freudian self-searching or Jungian Analytical Psychologist can eradicate even if by some chance they locate it.

In the words of the long-ago kernal of wisdom voiced by a genius named Walt Kelly through his iconic character Pogo: "We have met the enemy---and it is us!"

John Boehner Debt Ceiling Speech: House Speaker Addresses Deficit Talks (VIDEO)

Obama resembles Carter in his inability to generat economic recovery. I recall vividly the double-dig­it unemployme­nt, interest, and inflation rates under the inept peanut farmer. Obamandias­'s destructio­n of the economic landscape has almost reached 10% unemployme­nt after his empty promises in '09 to diminish the rate below 7% with his Keynesian priming the pump. Interest rates remain low because of quantitati­ve easing and inflation is not a problem, but the monetary disaster of a declining dollar is only mitigated by the Euro's parallel decline across the pond.



Sadly, Obamandias wants to avoid Carter's one-term fate at all costs and had a doable deal with John Boehner who actually agreed to $800 billion in revenue hikes along with very large spending cuts---som­ething he'd have difficulty selling to the Tea Party caucus. Then Obamandias abruptly moved the goalposts another $400 billion in revenue increases-­--an obvious ploy to make the GOP refuse the deal and make him look better with his own caucus.

Plus, he'd look like he was 'jilted' at the altar to the lamestream MSM which always buys his side of the agitprop he's peddling.



A cheap con artist by any sense of the term, Obamandias wants re-electio­n on his own terms.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Gordon S. Wood Remains My Ace Guru on the Founders

The Idea of America is Gordon Woods' latest in a stream of wonderful writings on the American Revolution and all its pomps and works, so to speak. I carry around a paperback copy of his Revolutionary Characters in my backpack to avoid "People Magazine" if I am stranded waiting in a Doc's office or somewhere.

I also believe Ron Chernow and David Hackett Fischer are superb writers and can evoke the personality and the temporal environment of the Founders as well as anyone. David McCullough's John Adams and 1776 are both outstanding chronicles of great founders.

All in all, I've read about a dozen excellent histories of the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the run-up to the Coinstitutional Convention, and biographies of several of the principals, including Chernow's two masterpieces on George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, perhaps my favorite Founder after "The Father of Our Country."

Woods and McCullough have more or less convinced me, along with Dumas Malone [though in Malone's case, unintentionally] that Thomas Jefferson is highly if not vastly over-rated. He was erected in the late Twenties and Thirties as a counterpart to the Republican icon of Hamilton and much froth has been ginned up on his behalf historically by hagiographical Democrats to buttress him as some sort of a "permanent revolutiony." He turns out to have been a man of questionable moral character, unable to pay his debts or free his slaves at death, as he so often promised. And his much vaunted statements on separation of Church and State have been blown out of proportion---he was perhaps as mc a believer as he was an agnostic, and one is left with the feeling thatg sometimes he himself was unsure of just what he DID believe.

Finally, I am getting a growing respect for James Madison, the diminuitive consumptive Archtitect of the Constitution, whom Chernow describes vividly in his biography of Washington as spending weeks at Mount Vernon lobbying the Great Man to accompany him to Philadelphia to induce a quorum of all thirteen colonies to send representatives to mend the awful Articles of Confederation---with the hidden agenda to do a complete redo of the Articles into a wholly new federal compact. Although both Madison and Jefferson suffered from less than glorious presidencies, neither had the horrific the otherwise great John Adams experienced, as he fought off the insanity of the XYZ affair.

Woods in his description of Hamilton in Revolutionary Characters mentions offhand that the crafty old fox Talleyrand counted Hamilton, whom he got to know well during his two-year-plus stay in America during the height of the Terror Phase of the French Revolution, as the greatest statesman of the Age, greater than Napoleon or Pitt. This judgment the old crippled bishop Talleyrand arrived at at the end of a long and eventful career. Sadly, Woods does not have a citation for this revealing remark.

With the exception of a few occasional lapses like that of Talleyrand's citation, Woods remains the dean of the new school of Revolutionary authors whose scholarship is giving us a much wider and greater understanding of the turbulent era of our country's bloody founding.

Obama Hemorrhaging Credibility and Poll Numbers by the quart?

Doug Ross hA nixw lirrlw vlofpiwxw xommwnrinf on John Hayward's piece in Human Events titled Obama The Mad:

President Obama held a town hall meeting at the University of Maryland before a carefully screened, very supportive audience. He said a few interesting things in this relaxed and comfortable environment.

Obama blamed divided government for the debt ceiling crisis. “I’m sympathetic to your view that this would be easier if I could do this entirely on my own,” he told a questioner who brought up the theory, fashionable in some liberal circles, that the 14th Amendment gives the President power to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally. The President went on to remark, with a chuckle, that this would give him more time to spend with his daughters.

In addition to recoiling in horror at the thought of America’s chief executive being arrogant enough to even speculate about the joys of dictatorship out loud, a thoughtful town hall attendee might ask why the Democrats didn’t balance the budget when they had total control of Washington from 2009 to 2010, and point out that they have controlled both houses of Congress since 2006. But you’re not supposed to ask questions like that.

Obama also told his audience that “it’s hard to keep up with all the different plans” for handling the debt crisis. No, it isn’t. There’s are only two real plans: the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act, which enjoys the support of a huge majority of Americans, or leaving the debt ceiling where it is. There are no other plans. There are only vague outlines… absolutely none of which have come from President Obama, who has made no concrete proposals at all.

The Demagogue-in-Chief is beginning to sound like a broken record, repeating himself or making absurd statements almost as a matter of course---knowing that the lamestream MSM will invariably either not point out the arrant absurdities or it will refuse to examine his statements in any analytical fashion, merely repeating them as if they were well-know established facts. Here's another doozie that he slips by his catatonic audience:

[Obama says that] “we’ve made good choices so far.” (I am not making this up. He really said that.) He also declared, “The United States of America doesn’t run out without paying the tab. We pay our bills. We meet our obligations.”

Um… Mr. President? Running a huge deficit means, by definition, that you are not “paying your bills,” and you are the one who keeps threatening that your government will not “meet its obligations,” by shutting off Social Security checks, veterans benefits, and other essential services.

Obama's recent statements are beginning to exhibit the manifestations of either a deliberate habit of lying to keep his public sector unions and the AFL/CIO/Teamster thugs happy or he is slowly losing his grip on the wheel of the Ship of State. Take your pick. He is now either delusional or cynical enough to make statements like the following Hayward describes in Human Events:

Do you recall what George Bush’s final deficit was? It was loudly decried as a “record-breaking” figure in the mainstream press, and it was indeed far too high. The amount was about $458 billion. Barack Obama racks up that much debt in three months... The angry President who railed against oil companies and corporate jet owners one more time on Friday is a man lost in delusions the rest of us should refuse to entertain. He’s treating an existential fiscal crisis as a political opportunity to grab some more tax money, and goose his re-election numbers a bit.

Gallup's latest poll refutes everything the lyin' POTUS says about what Americans want in a debt-ceiling vote by saying spending cuts over tax raises about two to one. So much for this demagoguing moron's "80% want tax increases."
And the fatuous imbecile in the Oval Office is now losing the ALL-IMPORTANT WHITE VOTE according to the latest Pew Poll, meaning that White Males are already Republican and white females, almost gullible dupes and silly when it comes to politics, aren't far behind.

Only blacks refuse to leave their entitlement plantations and Hispanics are still almost three-to-one in their ignorance and furtive illegal status.

Always to be borne in mind is the fact that white Americans are steadfast voters while blacks depend on mood and other variables like the weather to see whether they show up at the ballot boxes.

Billy Jeff Clinton Puts Wu's Short-LIst Rape Attempts to Shame!

An alert Tea Party member named mac_691
took a silly Soros-paid Politico commenter to the back of the woodshed when challenged by said Soros dodo to put up a list of BJ Willy's so-called felonies and misdemeanors that somehow escaped the weak arm of the Law, which laughing up its sleeve, turns in the other direction when the culprit caught lying under oath after a flagrante delicto crime has been outed. Here's the laughing boy from Arkansas who immortally stained the rugs and furniture and reputation of the Oval Office with his diurnal emissions in the mouths and other orifices of willing or unwilling female objects. The devil-with-the-blue-dress intern was taped by a patriot gossiping about opening her mouth and allowing the First Dick to penetrate her tonsil-lined pink pipe...! Thank you, Monica, for inadvertently sharing with us all what an a$$hole this POS continues to be, no matter how many times he schmoozes Rush in a restaurant while trying to pick up his [unbeknownst to Billy BJ] fiance...! Here's Clinton's Wall of Shame:

Juanita Broaddrick (AR)- rape
Eileen Wellstone (Oxford) - rape
Elizabeth Ward Gracen - rape - quid pro quo, post incident intimidation
Regina Hopper Blakely - "forced himself on her, biting, bruising her"
Kathleen Willey (WH) - sexual assault, intimidations, threats
Sandra Allen James (DC) - sexual assault
22 Year Old 1972 (Yale) - sexual assault
Kathy Bradshaw (AK) - sexual assault
Cristy Zercher - unwelcomed sexual advance, intimidations
Paula Jones (AR) - unwelcomed sexual advance, exposure, bordering on sexual assault
Carolyn Moffet -unwelcomed sexual advance, exposure, bordering on sexual assault
1974 student at University of Arkansas - unwelcomed physical contact
1978-1980 - seven complaints per Arkansas state troopers
Monica Lewinsky - quid pro quo, post incident character assault
Gennifer Flowers - quid pro quo, post incident character assault
Dolly Kyle Browning - post incident character assault
Sally Perdue - post incident threats
Betty Dalton - rebuffed his advances, married to one of his supporters
Denise Reeder - apologetic note scanned

NOW and Joan Walsh and Katrina van den Heuvel and Wendy Wassermann-Slutz were unavailable for comment...! Betty Friedan [whom I met at a cocktail party in Sag Harbor on L.I. some twenty years ago] is probably doing a rotisserie slow-roll in her grave...!

Boehner Set To Call Obama's Bluff In Push For Short-Term Debt Ceiling Deal

Boehner has elected to call Obama's silly dare to Eric Cantor to "call my bluff," which demonstrat­es that the vaunted 'community organizer' has the street smarts of a ivory-towe­r 'perfesser­' while lacking the deep knowledge of a college freshman on the use of metaphors. The way to handle it is "Just see if I am bluffing" rather than admitting that you are---a sophomoric remark worthy of a tyro pol who is more at the ward heeler level of political sophistica­tion than masqueradi­ng as POTUS and embarrassi­ng the USA all around the world, except for diehard marxists who recognize him as their own. Boehner realizes that a short-term extension will end once and for all Obamandias­' fatuous claim that everything that is wrong is GWB's fault [actually it is the Dem's moronic CERA strictures and the Dodd-Frank insistence that Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac keep giving mortgages to manifestly unqualifie­d buyers] that the 2008 plunge blew the bottom out of the economy.



When the dead-in-th­e-water economy limps into the dollar losing its reserve currency status and no more vacations will be affordable [except perhaps to Eurocrippl­es like Greece, Portugal, Ireland & Spain & hopefully Italy, my fave destinatio­n], then will independen­ts finally see the light and send Obamandias into early retirement­.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Gro Harlem Grundtlandt a "Country Killer?"

Much uglier in real life, Unless she was having an awful day

Gro sat across from me at a four-person lunch table at the Chicago Hilton some fifteen years ago during an event sponsored by Amoco. As I was the Political Risk analyst for Norway where Amoco owned or leased a platform in the North Sea, I sat at the table while speeches were given. If Gro gave one, she was not a memorable speaker and at the table uttered no more than five sentences to the people around her.

As a left-wing socialist and then-Prime Minister, I suspect that she considered herself in a den of thieves, but she also looked like a legendary troll that used to live under bridges to waylay innocent travellers. The fact that she was female was not readily apparent. I now understand that she is a member of the five-man [actually four women and one man] committee that makes the final selection of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, so the selection of a dunce like Obama after only a few months in the Presidency thus makes some sort of twisted perverse sense, if you can call it that.

She is as short and [frankly] ugly as Barbara Mikulski, Senator from Maryland and an acknowledged lez-bean. I wouldn't be surprised if the supremely unattractive Gro Grundland was victim of the same affliction.

Liar-in-Chief Runs Away from Sandbox, Whines to lamestreamMSM

Obungler may have looked at the Gallup Poll linked above and then offered $800 billion in new revenues with $3 trillion in spending cuts. Then when the whining lez-beans like Mikulski and Majority Bleeder Reid whined to him, he came back to Boehner demanding $400 billion more in tax raises.

When Boehner said 'No Way, this loathsome CREEP called a press conference and lied about what happened. The lamestream MSM laps it up like the propaganda outlets they are. Boehner said that negotiating with Obama is like pushing on Jello.

The Jello is One-Termer Obungler's backbone.

Steyn: Gang of Six Isn't Serious

NRO has a succinct cry for sanity from Mark Steyn. Does anyone in their right mind think that the greedy eff-ups in DC are going to do anything except dilly-dally and dither until the USS United States hits an iceberg called bankrupcy?

GRAY WHORE of Babylon Bleeds Cash: NYT Down $100 Million in One Quarter

God and the Good Angels are laughing as The NYT continued its long slide into history's dustbin.

In an exercise of meretricious and manipulative "journalism," fake-in-chief Jill Abramson buried the lede about twenty paragraphs into the article, but finally owned up to losing $91 million in the last three months---the damage would have been much worse, but the ancient fossil avoided $120 Million more BY SELLING THE NYT's SHARE OF THE BOSTON RED SOX!!!

The creeps at the world's worst propaganda [really agitprop] purveyor did manage to slip in that they were accelerating

plans to pay back a $250 million loan from Carlos Slim Helú, a Mexican telecommunications billionaire, on Aug. 15, three and a half years ahead of schedule.

Notice that Slim is now "a Mexican telecommunications billionaire" instead of the WELL-KNOWN CEMENT CZAR who recently branched out into phones and TV networks...!!! And coyly acts as though everyone doesn't know that Slim is the wealthiest guy on the planet!!!

Of course, old whores need a lot of scams and ruses to make it through to another Quarter...!

Oh, BTW, nowhere was the PAID CIRCULATION mentioned in the article, so we can assume that that is also declining, just as rapidly as the old hooker in every other respect...!

Allen West Fundraising With DNC Chairwoman Insult

I had lunch one-on-one with Col. West and he is one prickly customer who won't take the shenanigan­s of totally-bl­onde airhead ditz motormouth Wasserman-­Slutz lying down. W-S's vulgar imbecile audience laps it up, but the grown-ups over in the GOP want someone to put this yammerholi­c in her place.



Look for the big DNC slime machine to start its revolution in the porcelain bowl as it proceeds toward its destinatio­n----the open sewer of the lamestream MSM where bitcha$$ statements like Wasserman-­Slutz's are commended and West is scolded for responding in kind. The biyotch from S. Florida is afraid to take him on face-to-fa­ce because marxist modes demand dirty tricks and sneak attacks---­-the kind this hooker-man­que specialize­s in.



If West gets half the money he deserves for sticking his head in the lamestream MSM's foul-breat­h mouth, he should garner millions.



And if Contessa Brewer isn't the dumbest blonde on the PMSNBC roster or in all of TV land, you could fool us all. She stupidly asked Cong. Brooks [R] if he'd studied economics. As a matter of fact he graduated from Duke, a school an airhead like Brewer could never get into without special pleading, in THREE YEARS with a double-maj­or in poli-sci/e­conomics with HIGHEST HONORS.



Brewer is the stuck-on-s­tupid ditz who called demonstrat­ors openly carrying weapons 'racists' without realizing that they were BLACKS. Daily Show as a regular material..­....
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Tom Harkin: House Republicans Have Morphed Into 'A Cult'

Harkin has been preaching his down-home socialisti­c nonsense for over forty years now. My wife interviewe­d for a job as his Admin Asst, to run his whole schedule and discovered that he ran through staff like Sheila Jackson Lee because of a nasty temper and short attention span. My spouse had just finished a stint with Sarbanes, who is bright but marginally anti-socia­l in a quiet way.



There is nothing this over-the-h­ill fossil wouldn't say or do to make himself look sillier than he already is. Iowa keeps re-electin­g its Senators forever, unless they burn out in office like a guy named Hughes did last century in one term. Ma femme also interviewe­d for Mikulski, the shortest lez-bean on the Hill with the possible exception of Bobo Boxer, and she was the female version of Harkin---o­nly a screamer.



For a socialist-­communist like Harkin to call the GOP a 'cult' is a black kettle calling a swarthy pot black. He is the biggest fraud west of the Mississipp­i except for Reid. Mikulski should be tossed as well. Why doesn't Shumer start braying like the ass that he is---he is your prototypic­al big-mouth no-brain yammerholi­c. Once spent an hour with him at a cocktail party on Long Island's Hamptons listening to him talking about his favorite person---h­imself.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Elizabeth Warren: Government Hasn't Sufficiently Probed Foreclosure Abuses (VIDEO)

Looks like Obama is pulling the plug on SuperNanny Warren [http://www­.boston.co­m/news/nat­ion/washin­gton/artic­les/2011/0­7/16/obama­_bypassing­_warren_fo­r_consumer­_bureau_of­ficials_sa­y/] and I guess it's not hard to see why. First, the GOP disliked her and second, the Dems disliked her, not necessaril­y in that order. Anyone in cahoots with Dodd and Frank must frankly have to pass a decontamin­ation exam to leave the experience without serious toxic aftereffec­ts.



It must be nice to be officious, overbearin­g, smarter than everyone else and receive the plaudits of the class-war lefties in the press, but when you manage not only to step on toes, but trample on feet, your chances for long-term employment in DC range from slim to none. She shouldn't have flunked out of charm school, or perhaps she'd have weathered the pre-nomina­tion storm.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Obamandias Surveys the Ruin of His Administration and Parenthetically, the USA.

Mark Steyn does a vivisection of the imbecility of The Greatest Orator in History's continuous con-man travelling road show. Here are a few delicious hor d'oeuvres.

...the Republicans....are the closest anybody gets to representing, albeit somewhat tentatively and less than fullthroatedly, the actual borrowers — that’s to say, you and your children and grandchildren. But in essence the spenders are negotiating among themselves how much debt they’re going to burden you with. It’s like you and your missus announcing you’ve set your new credit limit at $1.3 million, and then telling the bank to send demands for repayment to Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s kindergartner next door.

But Mark knows that even the Republicans, although better than the moral leper Demonrats, are not the cure, because at the core, the US government is hopelessly corrupt:

Nothing good is going to come from these ludicrously protracted negotiations over laughably meaningless accounting sleights-of-hand scheduled to kick in circa 2020. All the charade does is confirm to prudent analysts around the world that the depraved ruling class of the United States cannot self-correct, and, indeed, has no desire to.

When the 44th president took office, he made a decision that it was time for the already unsustainable levels of government spending finally to break the bounds of reality and frolic and gambol in the magical fairy kingdom of Spendaholica: This year, the federal government borrows 43 cents of every dollar it spends, a ratio that is unprecedented. Barack Obama would like this to be, as they say, “the new normal” — at least until that 43 cents creeps up a nickel or so, and the United States government is spending twice as much as it takes in, year in, year out, now and forever. If the Republicans refuse to go along with that, well, then the negotiations will collapse and, as he told Scott Pelley on CBS the other night, Gran’ma gets it. That monthly Social Security check? Fuhgeddabouddit. “I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue,” declared the president. “Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”

But hang on. I thought the Social Security checks came out of the famous “Social Security trust fund,” whose “trustees” assure us there’s currently $2.6 trillion in there. Which should be enough for the August 3rd check run, shouldn’t it? Golly, to listen to the president, you’d almost get the impression that, by the time you saw the padlock off the old Social Security lockbox, there’s nothing in there but a yellowing IOU and a couple of moths. Indeed, to listen to Obama, one might easily conclude that the whole rotten, stinking edifice of federal government is an accounting trick. And that can’t possibly be so, can it?

What a wonderful question to throw in the botox-tight faces of the RICO conspiracy that is the Demonrat Party! Or even the Republicans going back to the Dole era of ethanol and social security colas masking a much deeper malaise. &2.6 trillion is a not-so-polite lie that the Clown-in-Chief perpetuates, but that everyone knows has been borrowed against down to the last penny!

For the Most Gifted Orator in Human History, the president these days speaks largely in clichés, most of which he doesn’t seem to be quite on top of. “Eric, don’t call my bluff,” he sternly reprimanded the GOP’s Eric Cantor. Usually, if you’re bluffing, the trick is not to announce it upfront. But, in fact, in his threat to have Granny eating dog food by Labor Day, Obama was calling his own bluff. The giant bluff against the future that is government spending.

How many of “the wealthy” do you require to cover a one-and-a-half trillion-dollar shortfall every single year? When you need this big a fix, there aren’t enough people to stick it to. “We are not broke,” insists Van Jones, Obama’s former “green jobs” czar and bespoke Communist. “We were robbed, we were robbed. And somebody has our money!”

The somebody who has our money is the government. They waste it on self-aggrandizing ideologue nitwits like Van Jones and his “green jobs” racket. How’s the “green jobs” scene in your town? Going gangbusters, is it? Every day these guys burn through so much that they can never bridge the gap. By that, I don’t mean that an American government that raises $2 trillion but spends $4 trillion has outspent America, but that it’s outspent the planet. In my soon to be imminently forthcoming book, I discuss a study published last year by John Kitchen of the U.S. Treasury and Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin. Its very title is a testament to where we’re headed:

“Financing U.S. Debt: Is There Enough Money In The World — And At What Cost?”

This reminds me of a Roman historian of the Sixth Century who bemoaned the rapid decline of the Empire whose roads were in disrepair and whose money was becoming worthless: "The Roman Empire may be dying, but it is laughing as it dies. Everybody is going to die laughing...." The barbarians were already passed through the gates by then and larger threats loomed, but the partying got every more frantic and frenetic and the Colisseum was the site of lavish games until far into the Sixth Century AD. So how about Profs. Kitchen and Chinn and their prediction about financing US debt?

Meanwhile, the World’s Greatest Orator bemoans the “intransigence” of Republicans. Okay, what’s your plan? Give us one actual program you’re willing to cut, right now. Oh, don’t worry, says Barack Obluffer. To demonstrate how serious he is, he’s offered to put on the table for fiscal year 2012 spending cuts of (stand well back now) $2 billion. That would be a lot in, say, Iceland or even Australia. Once upon a time it would have been a lot even in Washington. But today $2 billion is what the Brokest Nation in History borrows every ten hours. In other words, in less time than he spends sitting across the table negotiating his $2 billion cut, he’s already borrowed it all back. A negotiation with Obama is literally not worth the time.

So Obama is laughing all the way to his gigantic "legacy" of a trillion-dollar=plus healthcare fiasco with his name on it---as long as SCOTUS doesn't declare it unconstitutional for requiring folks to buy health insurance. And buffoons like Van Jones and his "green job" con are going to be curtailed, but the cavalcade of goodies will continue to tumble out of the cornucopia of Sugar Uncle Sam's coffers until when?

In order to fund Obamacare and the other opiates of Big Government dependency, the feds need to take 25 percent of GDP, now and forever: The “new normal.” It can’t be done. Look around you. The new normal’s already here: flatline jobs market, negative equity, the dead-parrot economy. What comes next will be profoundly abnormal. His name was Obamandias, King of Kings. Look upon his works, ye mighty, and despair. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

Do they still teach Shelley in high school? Or just the “diversity manual” about “social justice” the Omaha Public Schools paid for with $130,000 of “stimulus” funding?

Ah yes, those edifying 'diversity manuals' that convince so many that the multicultural paradise of a country with a quarter of its employees working for the government and another half on welfare, food stamps, worker's comp, etc. or retired on Social Security until the Death Panels decide their diseases are too expensive or they're too old.

That's the wonderful future my teachers and parents told me would be ours if we ever stopped Communism and reached the Milennium...!

Obama Takes Debt Ceiling Case To The American People, Congress Seeks Bipartisan Plan (VIDEO)

When the Obungler got up Friday morning and claimed that "80% of Americans WANT a tax increase," his nose should have grown through the mike and halfway to the teleprompt­ers. If GWB had said something parallel, the lamestream MSM would be all over him like the squalid agitpreppi­es they are and dozens of libtard columnists would be screeching "liar" and whining that GWB was a hopeless [genocidal maniac, Nazi, total retard], you pick the choice.



Instead, this Golden Boy again finds that he's totally unaccounta­ble and can say anything to the gaping journalist­-wannabe half-wits in the Press Room without a peep of follow-up queries on what he's been smoking or which meds had he forgotten to take this morning. The complete collapse of the lamestream MSM into a claque of dolts who applaud on command persists in spite of evidence that the First-Bozo may be leading us into an economic morass deeper than any his brain-dead predecesso­r, the hapless Peanut Farmer, ever did.



Does the NYT realize that its 800K paid circ is sinking while the 2 million WSJ paid circ is increasing by 5% per annum? Even if it does, libtards never admit they're wrong and will lead the mindless Left Coasters into moral and fiscal bankruptcy­.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Progressive Change Campaign Committee Threatens To Pull Obama Support Ahead Of 2012

This is hilarious. A while back, I had occasion to deal with the "progressi­ve" money people based in Chicago, though not with these particular organizati­ons. They are always threatenin­g Dem candidates for not being hysteric half-wits about one issue or another. Everyone in DC knows that Plouffe and the other advisors plotting Obungler's 2012 election have a lot bigger fish to fry and are hardly quaking and shaking over a few "leaders" who claim to control millions of dollars and thousands of doorbell and leaflet sloggers.



The real support that The Won gets, attested by Michelle in a careless aside, that they have "the media ..with us" is worth a couple dozen "Progressi­ve Blah-blahs­" who in the end will finally voe for him and probably most of the "members" will probably get scared by the lamestream MSM into working and contributi­ng to the First-Bozo anyway.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Quotes from David Mamet's "The Secret Knowledge"

The Secret Knowledge is David Mamet's best-selling repudiation of liberalism and all its works. Here's a great collection of quotes from an Amazon reviewer:

The great irony that arrived on my iPad (via Kindle) with David Mamet's excellent book is that, as the dramatic authority of confidence games (e.g., House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner), for most of his life he was taken in by the confidence game of modern Liberalism. (Born and raised in Chicago, he still got conned.) Mamet is erudite, literary, and incisive in this set of linked essays. I rarely use the Kindle's highlight function, but I found myself highlighting more passages in the first third of his book than all 260 of the other books I have read on Kindle. His writing is that great. He resides in that specialized domain of an H. L. Mencken, or a Richard Mitchell (whose Underground Grammarian and several books are available free on the Web). He draws from Hayek and Sowell, among others, but is more fun to read. Here are some of my favorite highlights:

Chap. 1: "We cannot live without trade. A society can neither advance nor improve without excess of disposable income. This excess can only be amassed through the production of goods and services necessary or attractive to the mass. A financial system which allows this leads to inequality; one that does not leads to mass starvation."

Chap 2: "I will now quote two Chicago writers on the subject, the first, William Shakespeare, who wrote 'Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink'; the second, Ernest Hemingway, 'Call 'em like you see'em and to hell with it.'"

Chap 3: "The grave error of multiculturalism is the assumption that reason can modify a process which has taken place without reason, and with inputs astronomically greater than those reason might provide."

Chap 4: "College, while it may theoretically teach skills, also serves to delay the matriculation of the adolescent into society."

Chap 5: "No, the luckless product of our Liberal Universities, skill-less, will not touch that item his culture named taboo: work. So we see the proliferation, in the Liberal Communities, of counselors, advisors, life coaches, consultants, feng shui 'experts,' as the undereducated chickens come home to roost."

Chap 6: "A subjective system can never be shown to have failed. If its goals are indeterminate, general, and its progress incapable of measurement, how can its performance be faulted?"

Chap 7: "From the Left's point of view one need not work, and may not only Hope to be provided for, by this government, but may insist upon it."

Chap 8: "A Slave is not permitted to make these distinctions. Al of his behavior is circumscribed by the will of his master. The necessity of making distinctions is the essence of freedom, where one not only can but must choose...The essence of freedom was and is choice."

Chap 9: "...I was from Chicago. It was a rough city, ruled by Machine Politics, which ruled the state, and currently rules the country."

And that's just the first nine essays, in which I've highlighted many paragraphs. Mamet is essential reading for thoughtful conservatives and libertarians, and anyone else willing to stand the challenge of examining unchallenged assumptions. A tour de force. Thank you, David.

Another quote from the Publisher that stands out:

The problems facing us, faced by all mankind engaged in Democracy, may seem complex, or indeed insolvable, and we, in despair, may revert to a state of wish fulfillment-a state of "belief" in the power of the various experts presenting themselves as a cure for our indecision. But this is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. Here, the captives, unable to bear the anxiety occasioned by their powerlessness, suppress it by identifying with their captors.

This is the essence of Leftist thought. It is a devolution from reason to "belief," in an effort to stave off a feeling of powerlessness. And if government is Good, it is a logical elaboration that more government power is Better. But the opposite is apparent both to anyone who has ever had to deal with Government and, I think, to any dispassionate observer.

It is in sympathy with the first and in the hope of enlarging the second group that I have written this book.

Because of Mamet's interview which described Jon Voight's giving him Whittaker Chambers' masterpiece Witness, I am now reading that page-turner of an autobiography.

The Disappearing Recovery

Robert Lucas poses the question: 'is a weak recover the only recovery we're going to get?"
Read the following and weep for America, enthralled by a black tyrant:

Barack Obama, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have been performing an intricate scorpion dance over spending, taxes and the debt ceiling, premised on the belief that this is the deal that would ignite the recovery.

But what if it's too late? What if that first-quarter growth rate of 1.8% is a portent of the U.S.'s long-term future? What if below-normal U.S. GDP is, as the Obama folks like to say, the new normal?

Robert Lucas, the 1995 Nobel laureate in economics, has spent his career thinking about why economies grow, and in particular about the effect of policy making on growth. From his office at the University of Chicago, Prof. Lucas has been wondering, like the rest of us, why, if the recession officially ended in the first half of 2009, there hasn't been more growth in the U.S. economy. He's also been wondering why this delayed recovery resembles the long non-recovery years of the 1930s. And he has been thinking about the U.S. and Europe.

In May, Bob Lucas pulled his thoughts together and delivered them as the Milliman Lecture at the University of Washington, an exercise he described to me this week as "intelligent speculation."

Here is the lecture's provocative final thought: "Is it possible that by imitating European policies on labor markets, welfare and taxes, the U.S. has chosen a new, lower GDP trend? If so, it may be that the weak recovery we have had so far is all the recovery we will get."

The Obama-will-turn-us-into-Europe argument is a staple of the administration's critics. Prof. Lucas's intelligent speculation, however, carries the case beyond dinner-party carping.

The baseline reality for any discussion of where we're headed is that from 1870 to 2008, the U.S. economy has had average GDP productivity growth of about 3% and about 2% on a per-person basis. Despite displacements—wars, depressions—we've always returned to this solid upward trend. From 1870 till recently, real income per person has increased by a factor of 12—"an ongoing miracle," Prof. Lucas notes, "mainly due to free-market capitalism."

The Obama economists like to argue that this recession was the greatest meltdown since the Depression. Prof. Lucas agrees. Most recessions, he says, are not very important events. This one, though, has taken U.S. GDP almost 10% off its long-term growth trend. The only downturn comparable to this in the past century is the more than 30% decline during the Depression.

Barbara Kelley
What discomfits him is the similarities in the policy choices that accompanied both delayed recoveries. By 1934, the Depression's banking crisis had been resolved, "yet full recovery was still seven years away," he said in the Milliman lecture. GDP stayed more than 10% below trend. "Why?" The answer, he says, was growth-suppressing policies, such as the Smoot-Hawley tariff, cartelization, unionization and, "most important but hardest to measure, FDR's demonization of business."

By the end of 2008, he notes, the primary storm of the financial panic was essentially over. We did get spending declines in GDP in that year's last quarter and in the first quarter of 2009. "But there is a world of difference," he says, "between two quarters of production declines and four years!" The persistence of growth 10 percentage points below its long-term trend line is troubling.

He credits the current Federal Reserve with avoiding the mistakes of the Depression, properly acting this time as the lender of last resort. With the financial side essentially in order and the recovery stalled, Prof. Lucas sees public-policy analogies to the 1930s: "The likelihood of much higher taxes, focused on 'the rich'; medical legislation that promises a large increase in the role of government; financial legislation that assigns vast, poorly defined responsibilities to the Fed and others."

The consensus assumption, however, is that the U.S. economy will return to its century-long growth trend. Prof. Lucas asks: "Is this really the case?"

Forgotten in most discussions of the U.S.-Europe comparison is that for the first 70 years of the 20th century, continental Europe's growth rose alongside that of the world-leading U.S. and U.K., especially after World War II. Through the 1960s, he says, there was every reason to expect a common, high living standard for all of us. Then, "in the 1970s, their catch-up stalled."

A 20% to 40% gap in income levels emerged between the U.S. and Europe, reflecting a lowered European work effort. In Prof. Lucas's view, that gap represents the cost (largely taxes) of financing a larger welfare state from 1970 onward. Other economists, he says, have cited a 30% loss in GDP per person in Western Europe since the 1970s.

The U.S.'s projected long-term welfare costs, including the new health-care law, are the justification the Obama economists give for pushing spending to 25% or more of GDP. The tax increase the president is fairly shrieking for this week isn't for the August debt limit. It's for the next 25 years.

"If we're going to move to a European welfare state," says Prof. Lucas, "we're going to have to pay a European price." And that price could be a permanently lower level of GDP per person. The U.S.'s amazing 100-year ride would slow.

Among the many things any such drop in GDP will siphon away is America's relentless productive vitality. "So much new happens in the United States," Prof. Lucas says. But will it still?

This is the question of the decade Will America imitate its trendy Eurotrash inferior economic model or go with over 100 years of world dominance as the greatest economy [since 1880, when it surpassed both the British and German economies because of Grant's laissez-faire government policies [nowadays you only read about U.S. Grant's indiscretions. FDR was a far WORSE manager of the economy.]

A Great Description of The First Creep

New York Magazine follows in the NYT's path to refute Obama's campaign lies about his mother's deathbed insurance problems. Here's a gpod letter to the piece:

There is a very interesting piece in The Claremont Review of Books, which reviews a half dozen books about Obama, the mystery man, the least known quantity to ever be elected President. Here is a bit of it. It explains oh so much.

"In sum, Barack Obama grew intertwined with the narrow, self-referential left side of the American Left. They helped one another believe they had come up the hard way, as underprivileged but brilliant, square-jawed tribunes of the common man. Their common problem, however, is that their agendas are antagonistic to people unlike themselves, and that they cannot keep from showing their contempt for the common folk in whose name they would ride to power....

Obama is as close as one could imagine to a made-to-order front man for contemporary, upscale, shy-about-itself, nouveau socialism. From his earliest age, he shaped his dreams about himself to act out a character wholly fictitious, namely a black American from a humble background who rose up out of brilliance and merit, and who yearns to draw all of America’s low-born (plus the rest of mankind) up through the same paths. But he is none of that. Equally imaginary is his vaunted understanding of and sympathy for foreign cultures. A typical multiculturalist, Obama speaks no language other than a peculiar version of English. His native language, loves, and hates are common to some of the most leftist elements of the current American ruling class.

That class knows about America only that it must be changed, and looks at the vast majority of Americans the way carpenters look at warped pieces of lumber. Barack Obama is neither more nor less than its product and agent."

Obama Warns Cantor 'Don't Call My Bluff' As Debt Talks Stall

So Wham-Bam the Bungler lost it after a couple of hours. Looks like he took his marbles and left the playground while Cantor sat and watched him muttering imprecatio­ns. Plouffe & Co. took a few nanosecond­s to gild that episode with the Demonrat righteousn­ess that might forgive a momentary lapse of sanity on the Bammer and now the canonical version is a 'stern' admonition that there is a Friday deadline on the table.



This is Kabuki theater when you have a showman who keeps talking about corporate jets being exempt from taxes at the same time his silly stimulus extravagan­za kept the loophole in 2009 in order to stimulate American business travel. What a bogus dude we have as POTUS...!
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Soros Executive Director tries and fails to Exonerate Alger Hiss

The Nation is the place where treasonous half-wits usually try to BS their way back into respectability. This issue dates from way back in 1993, but is still timely because it demonstrates that traitor/criminal George Soros has been busy for decades trying to justify his Marxist twaddle. A hack named Ethan Klingsberg scribbled this in an article on how Alger Hiss had NOT been outed by the disclosures of newly-opened ex-Commie archives. A fellow named Noel Field had been named by Whittaker Chambers as one of Alger Hiss's friends and colleagues. Here is what hack Klingsberg says about Field and his testimony:

Two reports by the Hungarian secret police on Field's statements and one Hungarian translation of Field's "autobiography," all dated during the last two years of his confinement, convey the same tale of relations with Hiss:

We [Field and his wife] made friends with Alger Hiss – an official of the "New Deal" brought about by Roosevelt – and his wife. After a couple of meetings we mutually realized we were Communists. Around the summer of 1935 Alger Hiss tried to induce me to do service for the Soviets. I was indiscreet enough to tell him he had come too late. Naturally I didn't say a word about the Massings.

In the same statements Field says Hede Massing was the Soviet agent to whom Field turned over State Department documents in the 1930s. The statements are consistent with Chambers' and Massing's testimony. In two other prison "autobiographies" Field refers to Hiss only as a colleague who knew that Field "was a Communist." But in those statements, Field goes on to note that Hiss, while aware that Field was a Communist, was a strong supporter of Field at the State Department and even tried to help him obtain a job as a State Department adviser in the Philippines in 1940.

To most honest historians, this evidence would be overwhelming that Hiss was a Soviet agent, but hack Klingsberg spends the rest of the article twlling us poor unenlightened readers that, no, Field's testimony is to be disregarded.

Read it for laughs.

Here is the Nation's description of hack Klingsberg:
Ethan Klingsberg, an attorney, is the former executive director of the Soros Foundation's Institute for Constitutionalism and Legislative Policy. Research for this article was supported by The Nation Institute's Cold War Archives project.

We can only wonder what other baubles The Nation's "Cold War Archives Project" are feverishly being disregarded and twisted to fit the sick paraphiliacs at that zero-credibility publication.

Wasn't The Nation-owner Victor Navasky also chairing the Pulitzer committee for the Columbia School of Journalism recently? What a joke!

Whittaker Chambers---Again an Apostle for the Apocalype?

NRO has Andrew Bostom's article on Whittaker Chamber's importance to America. I just found the book at my in-laws' Residence Home and brought it home. I was going to the pool to read it when I saw Bostom's article which is as true today as it was in 1952 when Chambers wrote the wonderful tragedy of our times.

When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time.

Other ages have had their individual traitors — men who from faintheartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, men banded together by millions, in movements like fascism and communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.

Modern man was challenged to choose between the traditions of a 2,000-year-old Christian civilization and the new totalitarian systems which, in the name of social progress, contended for the allegiance of man’s secular mind. The promise of the new ideas was as old as that serpentine whisper heard in the dawn of the Creation: “You shall become as gods” — for the first traitor was the first man.

Read Bostom's piece to see how the same Fifth Column is trying to use terrorist Islam to leverage common sense out of the "marketplace of ideas."

Leit Motif for a Light Bulb---Choo Choo Chu Must Go

Mark Steyn is a humorist and a humanist of the first water. Secretary of Energy Chu is running neck and neck with a few of his Cabinet Comrades, but is right now the stupidest Cabinet member since the Carter Administration.

I think we ought to be harder when minor functionaries of a failed leviathan reveal themselves to have a defective understanding of the role of government in free societies. Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary who came into office saying “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe“, has now offered up another soundbite for our times. On Friday, he defended the ban on Edison’s iconic incandescent in economic terms:

We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.

So what? I waste my own money on all kinds of things. If I wanted Steven Chu to have a say in it, I’d get Parson Bloomberg to marry us at Gracie Mansion.

More to the point, I wonder if Secretary Chu has any idea how stupid this argument sounds from an administration that has wasted more of other people’s money than anybody else on the planet. Secretary Chu and his colleagues took a trillion dollars of “stimulus” and, for all the stimulating it did, might as well have given it in large bills to Charlie Sheen to snort coke off his hookers’ bellies with. (In my weekend column, I touch on only the most lurid and outrageous of the government’s many smart investment decisions: its use of stimulus dollars to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry.)

The media are loyally doing their best for the Flatline Administration by insisting that the dead parrot economy is not deceased but merely resting for an ”unexpectedly” longer period of time than had been expected. Nevertheless, having nothing to show for blowing a trillion dollars of other people’s money does at least make the point in a fairly spectacular way: the distinguishing feature of the west at twilight from Sacramento to Albany to Brussells to Athens is the failure of the Chu class – the People Who Know What’s Best For Us. Technocracy is a delusion, and for some developed nations it may yet prove a fatal one. There’s a limit to the amount of damage I can do wasting my own money. There are no limits to the damage Chu & Co can do wasting my money. Maybe they should give up the car keys first.

Steyn sensibly ends up his short piece by looking for a candidate to abolish the Department of Energy. Newt Gingrich wanted to ax the EPA, but Newt is missing several toes by multiple self-inflicted foot-shootings.

Government of Sociopaths---Sultan Knish

Sultan Knish gives a concise rundown of the various symptoms that the Obama Administration's Cabinet is exhibiting that indicate a severe case of disconnection with everyday reality. 'Lack of Affect' is what the shrinks might call it. Callous disregard for other's real needs and feelings is the basis for it:

...Sociopaths are often quite bright, but it is the company of other people that makes us fully human. Sociopaths are too detached from other people to be able to rationally calculate long term consequences in a social context. They understand rules in an abstract fashion, but they don't internalize them. Because rules are socially internalized and given priority as higher truths over personal feelings only by an ego that has learned it is not master of the universe. A sociopath may be a physics professor, but if an impulse pushes him into a situation where the laws of physics are in his way, then they will be less valid to him than that impulse. The same goes for mathematics. The sociopath is irresponsibility taken to the extreme, but there is a long gradation on the way there.

What does a country run by sociopaths look like? It looks a lot like our own actually. Lots of short term fixes. Lots of 'keep this thing running' pragmatism. Short attention spans. No sense of responsibility. And no thought for the future.

This is the problem with filling a cabinet full of bright people who don't understand responsibility or long term thinking. While their intelligence should allow them to solve most problems, the situations they are confronted with are social, not abstract. And they lack empathy for the people involved, any sense of them as individuals, and any real understanding that they will also have to live with the long term consequences of those decisions.

To the Sociopath, most situations come down to, "How Do I Make Person X Do What I Want." This sounds a lot like the Cass Sunstein theory of 'Nudges'. The government acting as manipulator getting people to do what they're being told, while making them think it's their own idea is exactly what a sociopath would think of as a brilliant solution. It is a perfect illustration of a mind that is intellectually aware that people are individuals, but does not understand or empathize with it as a gut level.

Of course we're not actually a country run by sociopaths. For the most part. But it is run by men and women who display similar traits and blind spots.

Let's take a brief look at some of the behaviors and attributes used to identify a sociopath.

Are they cavalier about the truth, and capable of telling lies to your face?

Have they no apparent sense of remorse, shame or guilt?

Is their charm superficial, and capable of being switched on to suit immediate ends?

Do they enjoy taking risks, and acting on reckless impulse?

Are they quick to blame others for their mistakes?

Do they have no qualms about sponging off others?

Are they sexually promiscuous?

Would you regard them as essentially irresponsible?

Put bluntly, the behaviors which are common to politicians are also common to sociopaths. But the worst of these is irresponsibility. Without responsibility, there is no self-correcting mechanism. The experience of negative consequences does not lead to avoidance of the same behavior.

Daniel Greenfield, AKA Sultan Knish, sums it up pretty well.

In the late 20th century, an economic system built on hard work and inventiveness, was replaced with one built on temporary bubbles and salesmanship. A culture with thousands of years of moral and intellectual tradition, was forced to make way for one built on egotism and instant impulse satiation. A nation of few laws and many mores, was replaced with a nation of a million laws and few mores. Which economic system and culture looks more like a sociopath habitat, the one we had before or the one we have now?

That isn't to say that we are sociopaths-- but our political and economic systems, and culture are being transformed to accommodate them.

The medically diagnosed sociopath who lacks empathy and only manipulates people represents an extreme. But a society becomes untethered from its codes, it loses the ability to meaningfully socialize its own children. The breakdown of moral codes eventually leads to a breakdown in empathy. In a multicultural society where there are fewer kinship ties, this is even more devastating.

Feelings of hollowness abound. Anhedonia becomes a common complaint. Many people feel that they should be helping others, but they're not sure how to go about it. A vague sense of guilt drifts over them. Unlike a sociopath, they experience the detachment, but their attempts to compensate for it by getting beyond their egos and meaningfully connecting with others is limited by a larger social breakdown.

Worsening symptoms leave them even more detached. They use "I" often. Everything that happens is processed through their own experience. Everything becomes about themselves. Celebrity becomes a consuming craze. They feel driven to be witnessed by other people, otherwise they feel unreal. The truth becomes a mutable thing to them. They recreate it at every turn and forget that they have done it. Nothing is their fault anymore. Nothing at all.

Finally there is a stage so near that of the sociopath that it hardly makes any difference anymore. Long term consequences vanish. Everything takes place in the present. Reality is infinitely mutable. They have no patience for obstacles. Life to them is a game. And they are determined to win it. The answers to everything seem clear, and do not require any reality testing. Everything either exists to accommodate them, or it shouldn't be allowed to exist at all.

This a progression of detachment. It is what happens when a culture begins to come apart. And it's all around us. It is why we lack leadership so badly. An imploding culture adamantly hates and opposes the virtues of leadership. When it sees them, it tries to destroy them. True leadership derives from understanding people and relying on them to respond to the implicit code by which the leader acts. The leadership of a government of sociopaths on the other hand is impulsive, it prides itself on juggling rules to avoid being caught by them. It thinks that principles and those who hold them are dangerous. And it views long term thinking as an obstacle in the way of its bright and beautiful plans.

The whole article is quite informative and the major sub-theme is that the sociopathic leader does whatever he/she can that he thinks he can get away with. Damn the consequences, let's do another stimulus.

Daniel doesn't mention this at length, but I've noticed that a corollary of sociopathy is a correlative lack of remorse when the fit hits the shan. Sometimes there are few to no excuses, and 'it seemed like a good idea at the time' is about the closest that any Demonrat I know ever comes to penitence.

Dems Trying to mau mau the GOP

James
Taranto writes in the WSJ scathingly of the silly scare tactics and extreme rhetoric the Dems are employing, from 'bit of a dick' Obama down through 'suicide bomber' Tina Brown all the way to 'Wahhabis' Chris [Tweety Bird] Matthews.

...asking people if they're "liberal," "moderate" or "conservative" is like asking if they're happy or unhappy. For one thing, it's completely subjective. In our experience, for instance, when someone describes himself as "moderate" (or "fiscally conservative and socially liberal"), that usually means he's insanely and intolerantly left-wing on abortion and homosexuality and pretty much apolitical otherwise. But we suspect this does not match the experience of people who spent most of their time in the Midwest, or even Brooklyn.

People can also be fickle about how they describe themselves. We'll bet a lot of voters who described themselves as "moderates" in 2008 had become "conservatives" by 2010 in reaction to President Obama's overreach. And the "liberal" label has been damaged for decades. Using "progressive" instead might smoke out some of the "moderates" who actually lean left.

Today's lesson: Always treat analyses of poll results with a critical eye (including when you read them in this column). We have no reason to doubt the good faith of Wehner's and Silver's analyses, in contrast with some others. But it's very easy to read too much into the numbers and draw unwarranted conclusions that reinforce one's own prejudices, hopes or fears.

Read the whole article for a sane and balanced take on the deranged collection of inverts, paraphiliacs and raving lunatics on the Left, analyzed lucidly by a mature analyst.

Obungler the Absurd and His Corporate Jettification

I'm King George's Successor

Mark Steyn sums up the colossal fool in the White House at this moment:

Dozens of countries have “Independence Days.” November 25th, for example: Independence Day in Suriname. In that instance as in most others, the designation signifies nothing more than transfer of de jure sovereignty and de facto operational control from a distant European capital to a more local regime. 1975 in Suriname’s case. They had the first military coup seven years later.

But in America “Independence” seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet. They demanded “independence” not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government. Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. “Independence” is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.

Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he’s history — as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim. What’s left of that founding vision on this less than Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History? “You go talk to your constituents,” President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, “and ask them, are they willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate-jet owner continues to get a tax break?”
In the Republic of Brokistan, that’s the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate-jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” — i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic-party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama–Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an “economic forum.”

Charles Krauthammer did the math. If you eliminate the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Corporate Jet Tax Break, you would save so much dough that, after 5,000 years, you would have clawed back enough money to cover one year of Obama’s debt. Five thousand years is the year 7011. Boy, our kids’ll really be safe by then. I see some leftie at MSNBC has just been suspended for characterizing the president’s performance on Wednesday as that of a demotic synonym for the male reproductive organ. So I shall be more circumspect and say only that even being a hollow unprincipled demagogue requires a certain lightness of touch Obama can’t seem to find.

Speaking of corporate jets, did the president fly commercial to Denver? Oh, but that’s different! He’s in “public service.” A couple of weeks before he flew Air Force One to Denver, he flew Air Force One to Williamsburg, Va. From the White House (well, via Andrews Air Force Base). That’s 150 miles, a 30-minute flight. He took a 747, a wide-bodied jet designed to carry 500 people to the other side of the planet, for a puddle-jump across the Potomac.

Why is it some of the most clear-eyed observers of America are born abroad, as Steyn was, in Belgium, I believe?

Oh, but it was for another “economic forum.” This time with House Democrats — the ones who voted for the Obama Corporate Jet Tax Break. “Economic forums” are what we have instead of an economy these days.

Aside from the Sultan of Brunei and one or two similar potentates, no other head of state goes around like this. In a self-governing republic, it ought to be unbecoming. But in the Brokest Nation in History it’s ridiculous. And the least the beneficiary of such decadence could do is not condescendingly lecture those who pay for their own transportation. America’s debt is an existential crisis, and playing shell games with shriveled peas of demonizable irrelevancies only advertises your contempt for the citizenry.

By the way, one way to cut back on corporate jettage would be to restore civilized standards of behavior in American commercial flight. Two weeks ago, a wheelchair-bound 95-year-old woman at Northwest Florida Regional Airport flying to Michigan to be with her family for the final stage of her terminal leukemia was made to remove her adult diaper by the crack agents of the Transport Stupidity Administration. George III wouldn’t have done this to her.
Oh, c’mon, do you want to compromise your kids’ safety in order to give grope breaks to dying nonagenarians? A spokesgroper for the Transport Stupidity Administration explained that security procedures have to be “the same for everyone” — because it would be totally unreasonable to expect timeserving government bureaucrats to exercise individual human judgment. Oddly enough, it’s not “the same for everyone” if you’re Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi from Nigeria, who on June 24 got on a flight at JFK with a college ID and an expired boarding pass in somebody else’s name. Why, that slippery devil! If only he’d been three-quarters of a century older, in a wheelchair, and dying of leukemia, we’d have got him! He was arrested upon landing at LAX, and we’re now going to spend millions of dollars prosecuting him. Why? We should thank him for his invaluable exposé of America’s revolting security theater, and make him head of the TSA.

What else isn’t “the same for everyone”? A lot of things, these days. The president has a point about “tax breaks.” We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that’s a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies — equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he’s issued — what is it now? — over a thousand “waivers” for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn’t, tough.

But that’s the point. Big Government on America’s unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful (as on that Williamsburg flight), stupid (as at the TSA), and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it’s not republican in any sense the Founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you’re a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today’s Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives — if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin American–style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass. On Independence Day 2011, debt-ridden America is now dependent, not on far-off kings but on global bond and currency markets, which fulfill the same role the cliff edge does in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. At some point, Wile looks down and realizes he’s outrun solid ground. You know what happens next.

That’s all, folks!

Yes. the cafe-au-lait way to go...!