Olbermann Puff-Piece in Lib Mag

To those who switch during ads to Keith Olbermann during The Factor, often enough the stick-insect on MSNBC is ranting about Bill O'Reilly, who conversely has never mentioned this silly juvenile on his own show. One reason why may be that B O'R regularly has about four times the viewership of KO, despite the touting and boasting by NBC that KO has increased his viewership 50% [from almost nothing] in the last year. Although KO is episodically funny and often too clever by half, watching his show is pretty much an exercise of a predictable waste of time.

Keith Olbermann is a refugee sportscaster from ESPN [turns out he is the only major former ESPN sportscaster not invited to the vastly successful franchise's 25th Anniversary this Spring and if you want to know why, just read
New York Magazine for its hagiographic puff-piece on KO.] Hint: it turns out every single ESPN employee except Dan Patrick thinks KO is a nasty egocentric solipsistic cad/dork whose sharp elbows and snide remarks finally revolted every single one of his colleagues at ESPN, to one degree or another. If he returned to ESPN, KO would predictably get beaten up, which he admits happened all the time when he was a kid---because he admits that people just don't like him.

After you read the positive-spin puff-piece in New York mag linked above, you may be able to deduct just why KO is such a roundly disliked fellow by his fellow employees.

Why is Bill Richardson Changing His Tune[s]?

When I first met him [he had dated my wife while they were both at Tufts] in the early eighties, I immediately became a fan of then-Congressman Bill Richardson.

I found Bill to be a quintessential regular guy with no pretensions, proud of his Hispanic heritage [his mother lived in Mexico City at the time] and frank about his aspirations to higher office [he told me at my house in a private conversation that he wanted to be elected Senator from New Mexico]. Later, when I worked for the Oil Daily, Bill was generous with his time as a source [he was on the House Energy Cte] and even inserted one of my articles in The Congressional Record.

But Domenici and Bingaman were solidly ensconced and Bill went on to become Sec'y of Energy and US Ambassador to the UN. After the Clintons left the WH, Bill got himself elected governor to New Mex and has been a breath of fresh air---until he decided to put his hat in the ring and run for President this year.

Bill had told me in the eighties that he considered the threat to the American way of life from massive invasion by illegal aliens, almost entirely from Mexico, as the chief national security threat to the USA in the coming decades. This surprised me, since at the time the US was still in a balance of mutually assured destruction with the USSR. But Bill was adamant in his estimation of the downside of illegal immigration.

As governor of NM, he demonstrated this by calling up the National Guard to protect the state's border with Mexico. I realized that what he had said two decades ago was still important to him, and that the problem of illegals was one of his main priorities.

But then, he announced his candidacy for POTUS, and the flipping and flopping began.

Suddenly, Bill was against strict border enforcement and strong penalties for illegals and those hiring them. [Can you imagine what the MSM would do to a Republican who switched from McCainism to strict enforcement?]

And Richardson, heretofore a paragon of fair play and diplomatic niceties suddenly has no problem with the Nevada Democrats dropping FoxNEWS as moderator when serial chronic panderer John Edwards had responded to the ultra-left fringe by refusing to participate.

Funny what running for President does to a Democrat.

Does Richardson believe that he must deconstruct himself to win in the primaries?

Ann Coulter Hits a Four-Bagger

You love her and you hate her and you can't help watching and reading her because
Ann Coulter is smarter and sharper than any fever-swamp denizen on the lefty roster of the bloggerati. Read her SHOOTING ELEPHANTS IN A BARREL and get your blood pumping at the simple silliness of Sandy Bergler stealing/destroying documents which the 9/11 Commission needed to make its judgments and walking away with the drastic punishment of picking up litter in Virginia parks. Then note that a witch-hunt by a political assassin named Fitzgerald catches Libby stumbling in nonsensical memory games---after FitzFong knew the leak had been to Novak by Armitage before he started his show trial. And that Plame was not a covert agent, as Ms. Toensing points out in her lucid professional fashion. Just another Vishinsky-type purge by rabid apparatchiki of the left peddling their agitprop.

GWB is either too compliant or, in the case of last year's elections, preaching ceaselessly about Iraq when he should have been non-stop touting the best economy ever. He either gets wobbly like his Poppy or stubbornly butts his head against walls. Why doesn't he realize that the MSM will never forgive him for defeating Gore in 2000? The game is fixed, and Coulter does well to remind the ridiculous flaps about chasing DeLay while a crook like Cong. Jefferson gets appointed by Pelosi to Homeland Security, with its fungible secrets that Jefferson will trade for more cold cash to the highest bidder. Pelosi is a machine politician more crooked than DeLay ever was.

The outcome is rigged, and if Billy-Jeff can pardon a mega-criminal like Marc Rich in return for massive contributions to his library and some fleshy face-time with Marc's wife Deborah, then Libby can get pardoned for faulty memory in a kangaroo court plumped up in the media by mendacious reporters like Tim Russert. And Chris Matthews.

Hirsi Ali Irks Euro Nomenklatura

Those orchidaceous Dutch, who fervently collaborated with the Nazis against the Jews
dislike Hirsi Ali intensely, says Anne Applebaum, writer of the Pulitzer-winner Gulag and a world-ranking expert on group-think in a Slate piece.

You see, Hirsi has disturbed the Euros complacency about Islam, and brought an inconvenient truth [THAT IS ACTUALLY TRUE!] to the fore by her book Infidel, which trumpets Western values, a most unfashionable thing to do among Dutch intelligentsia and their Brit collaborators, like Timothy Garten Ash, who sneers at Hirsi Ali for her juvenile enthusiasm for democracy and liberal values.

The multiculturalists refuse to turn over the Islamic rock to investigate just what kind of life lives beneath, and condone honor killings and sharia law as some sort of commendably exotic eccentricity. However, a few Europeans actually criticize the sometimes violent and deeply reactionary culture that persists in the 45 signatory countries of "Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam."

Yes, there are many moderate Muslims in Europe who want to live a quiet life. Unfortunately, among them dwell a growing minority of aggressively violent conspirators who want to overthrow Western values, the ones that distinguished European academics and writers so often disparage with ill-concealed disdain.

How these sophisticated European polemicists square their hatred of the pope with their admiration of Islam continues to baffle this confused observer.

Rundown of The Decline of the West

I'm down with the flu, but think that Jules Crittenden is the voice of sanity in a
piece on just how messed up the situation is, with the Dems reverting to their default-mode of treacherous backstabbing, although now it's on each other when they are not stabbing American national interests in the back. Plenty of interesting and instructive links in the piece above.

The French went through just such a phase in their inglorious descent from world power to their current status as craven cowards and backstabbing feminized morons. The Decline of the West, with the Democratic Party as enabler and enthusiastic cheerleader, proceeds apace.

"Chairman" Murtha's Not-So-Hidden Agenda

The latest Soros emanation, a group called MoveCongress.org, is caught with its fly down in an on-line flier asking folks to listen to Chairman John Murtha will describe his strategy for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq,
but undermining other aspects of the president’s foreign and national security policy.

Hmmm..... That sounds like a recipe for advancing America's true national interests, an AQ mole as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee! [h/t:Mickey Kaus]

Murtha's getting more aggressive in his dotage, like the Florida geezers I see roaring around in Ferraris and Porsches thinking they have something to demonstrate. The Washington Post has an editorial today which basically uses Murtha as a demonstration that Franklin's adage "there's no fool like an old fool" is alive and well on the Armed Services Committee. When the Post thinks you're too far left, you are an old fool.

Mass Psychosis Drives Global Warming Fears

How to explain the whack-a-doodle gyrations of preposterous weather-boys like pretty-locks Sam Champion of ABC, except as deliberate satire on Max Headroom or Bob Forehead or John Edwards Breck-boy templates? Or the ultra-serious CNN clown Miles O'Brien playing "let's pretend I'm a serious scientist" about Global Warming?

Dr. Sanity examines and explains some of the borderline mental disorders affecting the liberal mindset from her Ann Arbor perch, a very good neighborhood to observe whackiness about the weather at close hand. Dr. Sanity is a member of Pajamas Media "Sanity Squad" which debunks the hysteric ravings that pass for journalism and analysis by leftist political commissars:

[Recently] the [Sanity] Squad debunked a Psychology Today article asserting that conservatives are motivated by fear, while the liberal left has cornered the market on rationality and reason. Obviously, the author of that "scientific" article didn't take into account the left's preaching about the coming environmental apocalypse.

If you want to observe the abandonment of reason and the manipulation of fear, simply cconsider the incredible histrionics being exhibited by the left about global warming. Their fear-filled predictions of imminent doom and catastrophe have been going on for five decades now.

First we were going to be wiped out by Erlich's population explosion ; then the planet was definitely doomed by nuclear winter; and--was it only a few short years ago?--they were going on about global....cooling.

And how could we forget to the inevitable end of civilization as we knew it from Y2K (at least according to the United Nations Report on the matter) ?

Each of these "imminent" doomsday scenarios were described in their time as the "greatest threat that human civilization has ever known." Each amounted to absolutely nothing of consequence. Zip, Zilch, Nada.

Thankfully, none of the proposed draconian measures suggested to prevent these disasters were ever implemented. See here for a fascinating look back on the hysteria; plus a discussion about what happens when you mess around with complex systems--systems like the earth's climate, for example.

In all of these instances, the proposed solutions were always the same: BIG--really really big--GOVERNMENT. Government would rescue us! New laws would save the day and keep all of us pathetic human beings and our environmentally destructive behavior in check. Unbelievably harsh measures were always suggested--up to and including the deliberate elimination of large numbers of humans in order to accommodate the agenda of the eco-tyrants.

As Mark Twain once said, "I’ve seen a heap of trouble in my life, and most of it never came to pass."

Read the whole post and an interesting previous posting on Iraq by John Burns. Dr. Santy is my guru on the aberrations foisted on the American public by MSM and Hollyweird illusionists. She's a good antidote to the delirium on daily news concerning just about every subject.

Groundhog Punxatawny Phil Versus UN IRGC: Phil Wins!

It's Groundhog Day and the movie with endless iterations reminds us that the Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is still working overtime, as global freezing in the '70s morphs into global warming as the latest Chicken Little delirium tremens the MSM and UN scammers are foisting upon a besotted public opinion.

The attached article has the Methusaleh Groundhog evidently living since before 1886, but this old specimen of Pennsylvania Dutch folklore will almost certainly be more
accurate
than the hilarious pontifications of a super-special 113-country UN study which blames it all, like the Time Man/Person of the Year, on YOU!

So start feeling bad right now, sell the SUV, and ride a bike to the local grocery [I Tactually have two Taiwanese e-go electric bikes which I and spouse ride to the foodstore with, except both now have flat tires which are virtually impossible to re-inflate---just another design flaw]. My thoughts on Phil's commonsensical accuracy were pre-empted by Argggh! from the freezing Iraqi hinterlands. I will plagiarize myself from January 4th here:

may have ended up in the dustbin of history, but the tradition of political commissars has not ended. One with the ludicrous name of Rockefeller and the other a transgendered Republican have sent Exxon a threatening letter saying that the debate on Global Warming is hereby over.

The High Church of GW does not permit latitudinarian dalliances with the scientific method. The Holy Curia of the Royal Academicides and pseudo-scientists like the inventor of the Information Highway and also the Lockbox, Earthtones Al Bore, have declared ex cathedra that whomsoever shall disagree with their exalted opinionations shall be subject to Inquisition and even "Windfall Taxes."

What used to be a democracy in DC is now evolving into a populist revival along the lines of Malthusian prophecies, Luddite wrecking crews, etc, as the WSJ opines:

environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.

Often wrong but never in doubt, say the IPCC doctrinal heirs to political commissar Suslov in the old USSR and Cardinal Ottaviani in the ancient College of Cardinals. Or as the Wahhabis like to put it, ijtihad, their greatest enemy, as it is the Islamic struggle for the truth outside rigid categories defined by rigid strictures on independent thinking.

Actually, Canadian Prime Minister Harper may have the goods on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the science by majority, in this case a tyrannical majority, which is comprised of go-along-to-get-along "climatologists" and other bureaucrats and petty functionaries of the mind. The rest of the world, Harper divined back in 2002, hates the USA for its continuous economic ascendancy and wants to drag it back down into the pitiful Keynesian nitwittery paint-by-numbers economies in their own squalid backyards.

Free markets ala Milton Friedman would deprive these functionaries of their raison d'etre. Their government meddling and taxes are what pays them and their scientific panels to measure, calibrate and subsequently cry out that the sky is falling!

Even non-socialist crony-capitalism countries fear truly free markets. The economic growth of the USA, which is perhaps 23% of the entire world economy, is what galls the Davos crowd [h/t: Dennis Mangan] and other senior functionaries from getting their meat-claws on American assets in order to tax the squat out of them. The IPCC reminds me of the "North-South Dialogue" of the seventies, which had whinging poor countries in the southern hemisphere guilt-tripping the industrial north for all sorts of freebies and emoluments.

The other night I watched Sens. Boxer and Inhofe on Larry King and Inhofe kept referring to statistics while Boxer referred constantly to drowning polar bears and King's Man-on-the-Street outtakes had people telling the camera "how bad they feel" that Katrina was the result of AGW.

Thoughts beat feelings, and while the MSM will act as cheerleaders for the ultra-left socialist agitpreppies at Davos, Paris, and other chic Comintern gatherings, I will bet against Sens. Snowe and Rockefeller and put my money on Punxatawny Phil.

Read Consilience, by Edward O. Wilson, for why I myself am a contrarian on AGW to the "consensus" of a tyrannical majority of "scientists."

Just a feeeeling I've got!!!

David Gregory a Liar?

We know that Mr. Gregory is bucking for a battlefield commission in NBC's war against the Bush Administration, but the silly Libby snipe hunt reveals how far this ambitious
Kerry-clone [he married well to use as a springboard to higher pay grades] might have gone in a Tom Maguire vignette [h/t: Mickey Kaus].

Hitchens Makes Mincemeat of Old Left Radicals

The Perfessoriat, the BBC, and George Galloway all come under the withering fire of the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Nick Cohen's book, What's Left? How the Liberals Lost Their Way. CH as usual eviscerates with a sharp scalpel all the frauds on the far left who still love to hate Bush/Blair/democracy.

Some choice cuts:

...there are thousands and thousands of middle-aged lefties for whom their once-revolutionary "credentials"” are all they have left to show for a lifetime of "activism," and who could not face their friends — or, perhaps, their students — if they found themselves endorsing a war fought by British or American soldiers. (I myself remember repressing a twinge of annoyance at the idea that the assault on civilisation represented by the 9/11 attacks would drive my anti-Kissinger book from the front page where I still believe it belonged.) But Cohen goes further: "I wanted anything associated with Tony Blair to fail, because that would allow me to return to the easy life of attacking him."”

It is this sentence, and its implications, that make his book an exceptional and necessary one. Cohen has no problem with those who are upset about state-sponsored exaggerations of the causes of war, or furious about the bungled occupation of Iraq that has ensued. People who think this is the problem are not his problem. Here’s his problem: the people who would die before they would applaud the squaddies and grunts who removed hideous regimes from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet who happily describe Islamist video-butchers and suicide-murderers as a “resistance”. Those who do this are not “anti-war” at all, but are shadily taking the other side in a conflict where the moral and civilisational stakes are extremely high.

Treason on the left is not new, but has become the media shibboleth with Dysfunctional-Bush-Hatred and Global Warming the new armaments in the long leftist war against free enterprise and political freedom. Of course, no one dissects these walking talking cadavers better than Hitchens, himself a veteran Man of the Left.

It’s all here: from the pseudo-radicals who said there was nothing to choose between Nazi imperialism in Europe and British rule in India, through the supporters of the Hitler-Stalin pact, all the way to those who defended Slobodan Milosevic as a socialist and those who took, quite literally took, money from the bloody hands of Saddam Hussein. Just in the past decade or so, had this “anti-war” rabble had its way, we would have seen Kuwait stay part of Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo cleansed and annexed by “Greater” Serbia, and the Taliban retaining control of Afghanistan. You might think that such a record would lead its adherents to be dismissed as a silly and sinister fringe, but instead it is they who pose as the principled radicals and their opponents who are treated with unconcealed disdain in the universities and on the BBC.

This betrayal (because there is no other word for it) has been made possible in part by a degraded version of multiculturalism. The hard left has junked its historic secularism, to say nothing of its principles of equality for females and homosexuals, to make common cause with Muslim outfits some of which are associated in other countries with the extreme right. It has done this by the use of nonsense terms such as “Islamophobia”, which are designed to give the no-less nonsensical impression that Islam is some kind of persecuted ethnicity. But the vile attacks by Islamists on the Jews (Britain’s oldest minority) and on India (Britain’s most important democratic ally after the United States) show the truly reactionary and hateful character of the opportunist alliance between failed ex-Stalinists and fanatical theocrats. For Cohen, as for some others of us, this is no longer a difference of emphasis within the family of the left. It is the adamant line of division in a bitter fight against a new form of fascism, at home no less than abroad.

I think he is right to identify the opening of this crisis with the events in Bosnia and Kosovo, because in that instance it was America (pushed by the supposed “poodle” Blair) that used force to prevent the annihilation of a Muslim community. Those who opposed that rescue operation, and who yet denounce the fight against Bin-Ladenism and its allies as “targeting” Muslims, have given the game away and shown that they hate only Anglo-American policy, to a degree that results in blindness. Meanwhile, Israel is always and everywhere to be denounced (and not always wrongly) while the other product of British partition policy during 1947-48, the part-rogue and part-failed state named Pakistan, is never indicted in the same way for its numberless bigotries and aggressions. This is bad faith, and needs to be unmasked as such. Cohen’s book is an admirable example of self- criticism and self-examination, using intellectual honesty as a means of illuminating a much wider canvas.

Like St. Paul who was a sort of one-man Mossad for the Orthodox Jewry of his day, CH has had the scales fall from his eyes and recognizes the shallow, superficial twaddle purveyed by the High Priests of the Liberal Left, be it useful idiots like Gore on GW or former-rightie opportunists like Arianna Puffington and her attendant Host twittering at the moon as they flutter skyward above the darkling plain.

CH ends with a recommendation to read another book:

Do not feel that you have to be a leftist or liberal to read it, because it engages with an argument that is crucial for all of us, and for our time.

Read on... books:
Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman (Norton £9.99)
A huge influence on Cohen’s ideas

The long demise of a defunct intelligentsia continues, but as their moral authority erodes, the shrill hysteria increases, so leftists are left to tabloid issues like the Plame fiasco or pseudo-heroism by barely literate actors and other showmen.

NIMBY: SF Libs Show true humanism toward Habitat for Humanity

"We're humanists. Stay away!"

Check out the link to see how the languourous lotus-eaters of
Marin County, home of renowned social activist Barbara Boxer, northern Cal's answer to Streisand, regard Habitat for Humanity. What if Condi Rice moved in to the four-unit project? Wonder if Barbara would start slinging her fecal material in Condi's direction.