Senator "Nuance" Slowly Unmasked as Elitist Socialist

Ex-Chicagoan Steve Sailer continues unmasking the artifice with which Barack Obama has concocted a personal biographical narrative based on his Afro-centric heritage. Much of this delusional construct was due to his strangely distraught and ideologically conflicted mother, whose socialist idealism was fraught with boomer contradictions. Here's a sample from Steve's April 14th piece on how Barack constructed a multiculti narrative which NYT adorer Roger Cohen swallows hook, line, and fly rod:

Stanley Ann later told Obama she hadn't heard about the scenes of slaughter during the putsch just the year before her arrival in Indonesia, and perhaps it's true -- she generally gives the impression of having a strong capacity for not paying attention to things she didn't want to notice, like Barack Sr. already being married when she let him impregnate her and then marry her. [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, one thing she very much noticed in 1967 was that Lolo at home in a pro-American capitalist country full of apathetic, corrupt incompetents wasn't as romantic as he had seemed in Honolulu as the representative of a socialist country of the non-aligned future.

Stanley Ann never really fell back in love with her second husband after their year's separation -- "something had happened between her and Lolo in the year that they had been apart" -- and she eventually abandoned him in 1972.

In the meantime, in his easygoing way, Lolo helped little Barack adjust to Indonesian culture, teaching him how to ignore beggars, how to change a flat tire, and how to fight with his fists. The last was necessary because, as Chicago Tribune reporters who interviewed his schoolmates discovered, Obama was routinely subjected to racist violence by Indonesian lads: "All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood--primarily because he was so different in appearance." He was frequently attacked by three Indonesian kids at once, and one time they threw him in a swamp. "Luckily he could swim."

(Obama doesn't mention in his voluminous autobiography the racism of Indonesians toward him, although he recounts in microscopic detail every hint of white racism he believes he has endured in America, such as the palimpsest of the N-word that he claims to have discerned under coats of paint in a men's room stall at that hotbed of racism, Columbia University. He left out getting beaten up by Indonesians for being black presumably because Asian anti-black racism just doesn't fit into his black-white worldview. That's a little too nuanced for Senator Nuance.)

Obama has realized that a "fake, but true" narrative that hits liberals' sweet spot for exotic multiculti assimilation can go a long way to move boomer liberals like his mother Stanley Ann and the myriad victims of academentia to adopt a crusader mentality---so they and the USA will be well-liked around the world, spreading good-will over the planet like the Sherwin-Williams logo!

Jayson Blair and the author of "A Million Little Pieces" may have nothing on Obama's ability to confabulate whole swathes of actualization that really never happened quite as he recounts in his elaborate personal myth. In the end, Steve Sailer has used Obama's own words to demonstrate that Barack's two male role models were a bigamist alcoholic Kenyan philanderer/functionary and a ranting racist semi-black preacher who preached race hatred rather than fire and brimstone.

And interestingly enuf, his chief female influence was a nagging niggling mother with pretensions to employment in an institution of higher learning.

Hmm, sounds a bit like Omarosa-lite Michelle, if I'm not reading too much into this....

Sarkozy & Berlosconi Disturb MSM Smug Leftists

The MSM isn't agog about France's pro-American President Sarkozy and the fussy old nanny-state advocate NYT has an article tut-tutting all Nicolas's mistakes in style & politics.

Now the newspaper which is arguably the most fuddy-duddy daily compilation of liberal la-di-da anywhere must deal with Italy's voting Berlusconi back into power, a disaster for the simplistic leftist kaleidoscopic chaos that the NYT advocates in Europe.

Remember, Europe is supposed to serve as an example for America's adoption of statist dirigiste big-government socialism as soon as the MSM boosts Barack Obama, son of a "Dreams of My Father" Kenyan proto-socialist, into the White House, where he can guide the US into Euro-weenie ninnyhood.

Wasn't the Italian right and French conservatism supposed to be consigned to the "dustbin of history?"

As a result, the ANSA news agency reported that the number of parties in the lower house of Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, would drop to just 6 from 26. For the first time since World War II, there will be no one in Parliament representing the Communist Party, which has long played an important part in leftist politics here. Mr. Veltroni, in fact, started his political career as a Communist.

Experts on the left and the right said — and in some cases lamented — that the election had shown a shift toward a more American- or British-style system of two dominant middle-ground parties.

“It’s a Waterloo,” said Tuesday’s headline in the moderate left daily Il Riformista.

Its editor, Antonio Polito, a departing senator from the now-defunct Margherita Party, said, “The left is disappearing for the first time in history.” Referring to Mr. Veltroni’s party, he added, “The only party that managed to save itself after two disastrous Prodi years is a party that is modeling itself after the Democratic or Labor Parties” in the United States and Britain, respectively.

Oh, the humanity!!!

Once again, Socialist Nirvana is postponed, and the NYT puts such bad news buried somewhere in the A-teens below the fold.

Looks like Lil Pinch has another historical paradox to explain away.

Ha ha ha! Go to it and bury the bad news. Maybe it will go away?

Bakken Oil Play Puts American Oil Hypocrisy Front & Center

The Bakken Play in the Williston Basin is an area which advances in extraction technology and horizontal drilling has just been assessed at 4.3 billion bbls. of proven recoverable reserves, the largest recent play in the continental USA.

This new find & assessment will once again highlight the fact that American political efforts to restrict development of fields offshore & in ANWR is frankly frivolous & stupid. There is a Luddite agenda out there among the ultra-left Democrats & their anti-industrial & anti-internal combustion engine tree huggers.

Also, the NIMBY syndrome for refining operations has prevented new refining capacity & thereby increased the likelihood of bottlenecks & breakdowns in processing crude.

Finally, obsessive regulation by Congress hikes prices by imposing mandates on processing procedures and redundant safety precautions. Spurred by environmental busybodies, the proliferation of various grades of refined product mandated by state & other official agencies is pricing oil to a level that causes a massive economic impact.

The enemies of "big oil" are hurting the economy & stifling US industrial capacity and economic development.

I believe the ultimate target is the family car and the mobility of the nuclear American family in general---the politicians on the left believe they can turn an immense continental economy into a Euro-style mass transit economy based on rail & public transportation. The only previous continental economy where this has been attempted was the USSR. With disastrous consequences.

The entire "greening" project in its various Luddite manifestations is a recipe for economic disaster.

Is Barack Obama Ready for Prime Time?

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent clear-eyed analysis by John Fund who asks some fundamental questions. But first of all, he notes an astounding piece of evidence that perhaps Obama lives in some sort of alternative universe.

Barack Obama's San Francisco-Democrat comment last week – about how alienated working-class voters "cling to guns or religion" – is already famous. But the fact that his aides tell reporters he is privately bewildered that anybody took offense is even more remarkable.

Let's check this exotic specimen of multiculti background to see if we can discover from his biographical history why he is "privately bewildered that anyone took offense."

He was born in Honolulu of an African father and American mother. His father left the family when Obama was two. His mother remarried and at age 6 Obama moved to Indonesia where he went to school in a Muslim school until he was ten. He then returned to Honolulu and went to one of the most exclusive private prep schools west of the Mississippi, where he was a stand-out athlete. He then moved to Occidental College in LA where more Hollywood films about campus scenes are shot than any other school. After two years at this unusual school, he transferred to Columbia U. on Morningside Heights in Manhattan. Finally, he went to Harvard Law School and upon graduating, moved to Hyde Park in Chicago, a veritable hotbed of intellectual activity, with more Nobel Laureates living nearby than anywhere else in the USA, including Cambridge & Berkeley.

I have spent a week in Honolulu, a month in Indonesia [where my brother now works in a USAID project], and know LA, Columbia [as a member of its Athenaeum] and Cambridge [lwhere my brother-in-law works at Harvard Business School. I can attest that nowhere Obama has lived or has ties to, like his rustic family in Kenya, is anything remotely similar to the average life experience of an American in what liberals derisively call "fly-over country."

Like Michael Dukakis, the cosseted-from-birth son-of-a-Senator Senator Al Gore, or the elitist St. Paul's [where my brother-in-law spent a decade], Yalie Skull-and-Boneser John Kerry, the Democrats are about to choose an exotic out-of-the-box eccentric again as their presidential nominee----and of course their chattering class Nomenklatura is thrilled to be presenting another exceptional, extraordinary, and perhaps fatally-flawed candidate to the nation.

Say what you will about Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, and Bill & Hillary, plus the weird egregious Jimmy Carter. They were autochthonous Americans who did not attend elite schools like Gore's St. Alban's or Kerry's St. Paul's. Bill did undergrad at Georgetown, not an Ivy School, and even Hillary went to a Seven Sister Ivy wannabe, but as anyone who reads Carl Bernstein's excellent book will discover, Hillary Rodham was raised as a normal girl in a Chicago suburb, with strong religious connections.

Obama, in addition to his biographical hometown venue travelogue, finally chose a low-church Antinomian Evangelist in order to get street cred in South Side Chicago. For two decades, he attended a church where "normal" God-fearing fellow Americans were excoriated from time to time in incendiary sermons that sometimes reached hallucinatory intensity. The near-insane pastor married him to a wife who begrudges America for her Princeton undergrad experiences where she "felt" out of place and her Harvard Law School degree which she just may have been enabled to get through Affirmative Action preferences---perish the thought! Now this spouse complains while she garners $350K/year in a "community outreach program coordination" gig for the University of Chicago Hospital.

Obama has been discovered to have also hung around with an unrepentant mini-terrorist named Bill Ayers, whom I met in my SDS days along with his girl-friend, Diana Oughton who blew herself and several other boutique terrorists up making a bomb in a Greenwich Village basement.

This is a very interesting CV with a lot of networking connections from the political Twilight Zone. With such a weird assortment of baggage in his background, John Fund notes about Obama:

Democrats have been worrying about defending Mr. Obama's highly liberal voting record in a general election. Now they need to fret that he makes too many mistakes, from ignoring the Rev. Wright time bomb until the videotapes blew up in front of him, to his careless condescension towards salt-of-the-earth Democrats. Mr. Obama has a tendency to make such cultural miscues. Speaking to small-town voters in Iowa last year, he asked, "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?

Mr. Obama is the closest thing to a rookie candidate on the national stage since Dwight Eisenhower, who was a beloved war leader. Candidates as green as Mr. Obama make first-timer mistakes under the searing scrutiny of a national campaign. Even seasoned pols don't understand how unforgiving that scrutiny can be. Ask John Kerry, who had won five statewide elections before running for president.

Fund goes through the extremely liberal record Obama has compiled as Illinois State Senator and US Senator during his twelve years in public office. Aside from his matchless rhetorical gifts and likable personality traits, there are a lot of unanswered questions about serious issues where his political statements often are vague or conflict with other things he's said in public.

Donna Brazile, Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager and an undeclared super delegate, is worried. "With the Wright controversy still lingering and now Obama's unartful comments," she told CNN, "it will paint the picture of Obama as being 'out of sync.'"

With 81% of voters telling pollsters the country is on the "wrong track," no one disputes Democrats can win in November. Still, it should be a matter of concern to them that both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama currently trail John McCain in general-election matchups. Democrats would be wise to have more debates and sharper exchanges in the remaining primaries. It may help minimize the surprises they are likely to encounter this fall.

Hillary Clinton is going around to superdelegates telling them what Bobby Rush said in a nasty Illinois primary election in the year 2000---that Obama is "inauthentic" and may wilt under closer public scrutiny. What Obama thinks is bitterness due to material poverty affecting small-town religious "clinging to God" may actually, as Hillary says, be an indication of spiritual richness. Her mother's folks hail from around Reading PA in a coal-mining district where Welsh Methodist pastors preached love and brimstone.

No "God Damn America" and shouts from the pulpit about "chickens coming home to roost" from these God-fearing hard-working sons of toil. In that respect, Hillary has a down-home, deeply-rooted sense of who she is and where she has come from. Now if she could only stop fibbing and stretching the truth!

Carter Visit to Damascus Bolsters Hamas Terrorism

Jimmy Carter actually offered to act as an intermediary between Israel & Hamas in his ceaseless quest to become relevant---at best his meddlesome intrusiveness deserves Israeli disdain. Which it is showing him in generous portions.

At worst, offering to be an "intermediary" after having insulted Israel with baseless accusations demonstrates this has-been's complete silliness and his ridiculous drive to insert himself as though anyone were paying attention in order once again to ingratiate himself with Iran, Syria, and other terrorist organizations like Hamas & Hezbollah.

This presumptuous little failed peanut farmer [he actually went into some sort of Chapter 7 or 11, but was quietly bailed out by liberal interests not wanting him to appear to be a complete fool, a daunting task indeed] never has forgiven the smackdown he believes AIPAC administered to his re-election in 1980 by inducing Fat Teddy Kennedy to run on his left and John Anderson on his centrist right. Effectively this pincered the little fellow out of the election, which Reagan won going away.

AIPAC, if guilty, presumably didn't want this meddlesome busybody inflicting himself on Israeli national interests for four more years with his incompetent State Dept desk-level preoccupation with details that much more competent professionals should have taken care of. Like his attention to who was using the WH tennis courts, this little obsessive/compulsive simply can't let well enough alone.

One of his aides finally had enough and uttered in frustration with his bosses' granny-nanny impulses "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Nevertheless this proven incompetent continues to attempt to fix a situation that he believes can be solved by endlessly splitting things down the middle---despite the fact that one party refuses to recognize the other party's right to exist! But of course, that doesn't bother this social engineer who believes that with enough tinkering, he can manage to cut and paste a jerry-built peace accord.

However, there is only one little problem. This ex-chief-of-state no longer commands respect nor does he even do much more than make himself into a spectacle of celebritard dotage.

Which doesn't bother terrorists like Hamas or Hezbollah, who manipulate him like a ventriloquist speaks for a wooden-headed dummy.

"Bitter" Comment by Obama Won't Go Away

Real Clear Politics has an eloquent summary of just what's wrong with the Democrat world view implied by Obama's revealing remarks in a San Francisco closed fund-raiser.

About two years ago, Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker wrote a long article about Democrats in the Middle West full of insightful realities, including the disturbing fact that 35% of the country considers itself "conservative" versus 20% of the electorate who consider themselves "liberal." Loosely defined, subsequent polls have again & again repeated that basic right/left split, though the definition of "conservative" is constantly sliding slowly to the left. Goldberg's interesting piece is strongly echoed by the perceptive Real Politics link above. Mr. Kuhn elaborates:

...many liberals misperceive values politics. They so often see cultural stances for their worst manifestations while ignoring their best. Guns become tools for murder rather than occasions for fathers and sons to hunt. Abortion is always about limiting a woman's autonomy rather than differing views on life. Concerns over illegal immigration are based in xenophobia rather than, at least sometimes, a valid desire to expect future immigrants to abide by the same rules as those immigrants from the century before.

Read on......


Over the last two weeks I've been reading several books about the American Revolution and its Constitutional aftermath. What I have gleaned the most from Almost a Miracle, vy John Ferling,Washington's Secret War by Thomas Fleming, and Crossing the Delaware by David Hackett Fischer as well as Garry Wills book on Henry Adams' America was this: among the numerous difficulties the upstart rebels faced in the revolutionary & constitutional conflicts remained first, foremost, and paramount the obstacle of surmounting and sometimes rejecting deeply-ingrained European traditions and mindsets. Nowadays, fast-forwarding two hundred-plus years, that European mindset/paradigm would be the Marxist presumption of economic determinism. As Kuhn says:

Obama's perspective is the prevailing viewpoint in Democratic circles. And this is what's the matter with a party that has accepted "What's the Matter with Kansas" as gospel.

No book has more influenced Democratic thought in recent years. The premise is that because Democrats stopped representing working and middle class voters' economic concerns, "dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to wedge issues."

Obama has merely reiterated the lesson Democrats have taken from Republicans victories in seven of the last ten presidential elections. The crux of the argument is that American liberals should become more like European liberals in order to win back America. The book was a case for Democrats to convince voters to think more in terms of cash than culture. Frank argued Democrats should emulate the economic populism that failed to win any of William Jennings Bryan's three bids for the presidency.

This presumption of economic determinism remains the Democrats' chief preoccupation which might again lead to its downfall, as Kuhn goes on to say:

What is always so offensive to regular Americans is the presumption that if she is offered better tax policies she won't care any longer about abortion. And the viewpoint holds from one issue to the next: offer rural white men rhetoric that reminds them that they are working class and he'll accept that the Second Amendment only referred to militias.

Then there is the exhibited ignorance. Families who struggle financially care more about moral values because they are more likely to experience the breakdown of the family. In other words, cultural issues are not a substitute for economic concerns, as Obama argues, but inseparable from folks economic struggle.

All of this is exactly the sort of mistake Democrats have been making for decades. How many times can some leading liberals live up to the culturally elitist charge without considering that perhaps there is some electricity behind the charge?

The colonial and revolutionary eras had a sort of American exceptionalism that has been derided and minimized by academic and multiculti types who prefer the Canadian model of standardized mediocrity. America has been a Faustian country rather than an Apollonian aesthetic experience as the Europeans prefer since their two disastrous World Wars last century convinced them that they should ease back on the throttle. The Democrats are Euro-wannabes whose Atlanticism comes across as elitism, because at heart these Dems believe they are better educated and somehow more worthy than mere wage-slaves who raise families and go to church and enjoy hunting & fishing & other outdoor pastimes.

It all stems from Marx's famous remark about "the idiocy of rural life." Dem elitists have been immersed in Marxist claptrap for so long that they, and Obama is a perfect example, don't even realize that they have been indoctrinated through their "objective" higher educations. Their assumption of the inevitability of the triumph of their ideas is another Marxist trope like weeds in a garden. As a nineteenth century populist once proclaimed, "if farmers didn't raise crops, weeds would grow in a thousand American towns & cities." Ditto for oil & other subsoil riches converted to commodities.

But America was and remains an exceptional country. America is a country that silly foreigners deride as building a "Berlin Wall" to keep foreigners out! These witless ideologues forget that the original Berlin Wall kept a slave population from emigrating, while America's border fence keeps foreigners from immigrating.

That's how far off the Euro-wannabes and other foreign critics are from America's true qualities: 180 degrees! Obama is another in a long line of Democrats who Kuhn say neglect what he calls The Great Truth:

Democrats lost their majority because they lost touch with that "silent majority." Richard Nixon may have been paranoid but paranoids are not always dumb. Some of this "silent majority's" concerns were not sexist, or racist, but wholly real and as Obama himself has said, based in authentic distress.

"So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time," Obama said in his race speech.

Sadly, it appears that Obama may understand this truth intellectually, but he is far from internalizing its implications.

Terrorist-loving Clown Carter Snubbed by Israel

Israel was overly polite in allowing a terrorist-loving imbecile who was freakishly elected to the presidency during a fit of national absent-mindedness a visa.

After his "apartheid" statements, I would have let him fly directly to Damascus to meet his friends Bashar Al-Assad, a socialist dictator, and Kamal Mashaal, a terrorist.

Those are the people this meddlesome moron feels more comfortable with.

Steyn says Hicks Nix Clique's Schticks

Mark Steyn has a great take on the Firestorm over Obama's remarks that neither Pravda on the Hudson nor Izvestia on the Potomac deem worthy of publication. They wonder why their indoctrination-broadsheets are swirling downward into the porcelain memory-hole.

The whole brouhaha reminds me of Berthold Brecht's famous remark after the '53 Berlin riots when East Germans were admonished by the German Democrat Republic [an oxymoron] that the people were not worthy of Communism. Brecht said "Perhaps the GDR should select a new people."

The "fly-over" traditional values folks are not worthy of Barack's loathsome patronage, so maybe he should chose a new country in which he can become politically active.

Like Kenya or Indonesia. Maybe Michelle wouldn't be ashamed of those two countries!!! Heeeeere's Marky:

I'm about done with Obama over this mill-closures-drive-small-town-losers-to-guns-and-God business. If you're running as a glamorous blank slate on which people project their own utopian fantasies, you've got to be very careful not to give the game away - especially when the game turns out to be the usual cliched elite disdain for the great unwashed. I mention in the current issue of NR how odd it is that Michelle Obama is in many ways more condescending on the stump than Teresa Heinz Kerry. Now her husband's at it, too. As Ed Driscoll says:

Leave it to Obama to make John Kerry's Brahmin hauteur seem earnestly goofy in retrospect.

Quite. I had a ton of fun covering Kerry's awkwardness with Americans but, in fairness, it was essentially a consumerist snobbery: he preferred the Newburgh Yacht Club for lunch over the local Wendy's, he'd rather be windsurfing off Nantucket than rednecking at Nascar, etc. Obama's snobbery seems more culturally profound, and unlike Kerry he can't plead the crippling disadvantage of a priviliged childhood. Rather, Barack's condescension reveals a man out of touch with the rhythms of American life to a degree that's hard to fathom. As Michelle says, they "chose" to "leave corporate America", and Barack became a "community organizer" and she wound up a 350-grand-a-year "diversity outreach coordinator". I've no idea what either of those careers involve, and most of us seem able to get along without them. But their remoteness from the American mainstream perhaps explains why the Obamas seem to have no clue how Americans live their lives.

Once again, the forces of good are beginning to triumph over urban elitist Marxist tropes.

UPDATE Obama was obviously pandering to the Left Coast ultra-libs when he dropped his real feelings onto the table---never thinking, like George Allen with his macaca moment, that Barry [oops, Barack's] honest sentiments about Reagan democrats would get YouTube status.

He is an urban elitist who feels comfortable with Bill Ayers & a scam-artist like "Rev" Wright---both different elements of the hate America [read "fly-over country"] wing of the Democrat Party.

The two Left Coasts simply can't abide the talk radio listening hordes between NYC & LA. The absurdly-named "Fairness Doctrine" will be front-and-center on the Democrat agenda as they try to stifle free speech in the name of "Fairness."

Like they did for forty years before the FOX networks blew the nanny-state broadcast big-three to the rear of the pack.

Obama's entitlement wife Michelle reflects this arrogant attitude, with her fake job as a "community outreach coordinator" at $350K/annum. This Omarosa-lite hater didn't think a Princeton undergrad & Harvard Law freebie education were enuf---she's obviously one of those bottomless pits of needful self-righteous "I want more" types I met in Europe during my sojourn in France in the '70s.

They both reflect third-world beggar-thy-neighbor attitudes rather than real American traditions & values. Electing Obama would be a catastrophe---although he might feign just wanting to be liked, his Dem minders would push him into absurd leftist policies.

Let's elect an American for president, not a multculti con man with a racist-hater spouse.

Rice Rebukes Carter for Supporting Terrorist Hamas

Condi Rice may not only make a great VP on McCain's ticket, she also has more cojones, huevos, a set or a pair than Repubs or the Anti-Semite wing of the Democrat Party's ultra-lefties. Condi couches her bitch-slapping this serial moron in refined terms:

"I find it hard to understand what is going to be gained by having discussions with Hamas about peace when Hamas is, in fact, the impediment to peace," Rice said at a press event with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Rice was responding to a question about Carter's plans but did not mention him by name.

"Hamas is a terrorist organization," she said, repeating the Bush administration's explanation for why it will not meet with members of the group. The State Department says it twice advised Carter against meeting any representative of Hamas. A Carter-Mashaal meeting would be the first public contact in two years between a prominent American figure and Hamas officials.

Of course, Obama and the fatuous bantamweight Democrat lefties all believe to talk to a terrorist may persuade it to abandon its animal nature & subhuman ethos.

The meddlesome moron who failed as a peanut farmer believes he can talk the Hamas terrorists into halting their attacks on Israeli civilians and even jawbone them into returning the Israeli captives kidnapped by their terrorist cadres.

Besides hating Jews, the worst president in US history wants to complete the work he started of turning the US into a second-rate power by giving away the store---as he gave away the Panama Canal, now in possession of the Chinese Communists for all practical purposes. And then there was his subtle nuanced diplomacy in Iran. Plus the phoniest Nobel Peace Prize never earned.

Adding to his legacy as a featherbrain with a loo-zer mentality.

Obama's Mother and Wife HATE[D] America. What about Barack?

Obama is slowly getting his onion-skin psyche unpeeled layer by layer despite the mainstream media's absurd lack of journalistic integrity. The blogosphere and a few lonely outposts of journalism are holding forth against an avalanche of ultra-left eulogizing of Obama, whose record is so thin that anything can be said about him.

Even the increasingly fatuous ratings-hound O'Reilly keeps trying to pump up his eyeball count through defenses of Obama like "he voted against the Iraq War in an Illinois State Senate non-binding resolution." More serious pundits, including the peerless Mount Rush, unpeel those layers and find an empty core---so far. But it appears we can glean an apercu of his leanings from his angry, even Omarosa-like, spouse, who not only hates America, but evidently holds men in low regard too, as Spengler in the Asia Times relates:

No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong."

Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama's campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. "I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There's Barack Obama the phenomenon. He's an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there's the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy's a little less impressive," she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

"For some reason this guy still can't manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn't get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is." New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, "She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she'd like to meet him sometime." Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.

"Frustration" and "disappointment" have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims, subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of opportunity. Obama's choice of wife is a failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother's milk.

So Obama would be our first president raised in a single-parent family, where men were absent from the household, or playing a subsidiary role. Michelle/Omarosa believes Obama's mother a much more important influence on this young man's life, though he wrote two books based on men's [his father & the egregious Wright] influence on him.

Michelle Obama speaks with greater warmth of her mother-in-law than of her husband. "She was kind of a dreamer, his mother," Michelle Obama was quoted in the January 25 Boston Globe. "She wanted the world to be open to her and her children. And as a result of her naivete, sometimes they lived on food stamps, because sometimes dreams don't pay the rent. But as a result of her naivete, Barack got to see the world like most of us don't in this country." How strong the ideological motivation must be of a mother to raise her children on the thin fair in pursuit of a political agenda.

"Naivete" is a euphemism for Ann Dunham's motivation. Friends describe her as a "fellow traveler", that is, a communist sympathizer, from her youth, according to a March 27, 2007, Chicago Tribune report. Many Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them, twice. Ann Dunham met and married the Kenyan economics student Barack Obama, Sr, at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and in 1967 married the Indonesian student Lolo Soetero. It is unclear why Soetero's student visa was revoked in 1967 - the fact but not the cause are noted in press accounts. But it is probable that the change in government in Indonesia in 1967, in which the leftist leader Sukarno was deposed, was the motivation.

Soetero had been sponsored as a graduate student by one of the most radical of all Third World governments. Sukarno had founded the so-called Non-Aligned Movement as an anti-colonialist turn at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Before deposing him in 1967, Indonesia's military slaughtered 500,000 communists (or unfortunates who were mistaken for communists). When Ann Dunham chose to follow Lolo Soetero to Indonesia in 1967, she brought the six-year-old Barack into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage, immediate following one of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history.

Dunham's experience in Indonesia provided the material for a doctoral dissertation celebrating the hardiness of local cultures against the encroaching metropolis. It was entitled, "Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving against all odds". In this respect Dunham remained within the mainstream of her discipline. Anthropology broke into popular awareness with Margaret Mead's long-discredited Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which offered a falsified ideal of sexual liberation in the South Pacific as an alternative to the supposedly repressive West. Mead's work was one of the founding documents of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and anthropology faculties stood at the left-wing fringe of American universities.

I was interested myself in anthropology in my short academentia phase back in the '60s when religious missionaries ["liberation theoology"] and academicide victims saw themselves as agents of political change. But Spengler has an interesting perspective on how the despised academics sought revenge on the merchant & ruling elites:

In the Global South, anthropologists went into the field and took matters a step further. Peru's brutal Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerilla movement was the brainchild of the anthropologistEfrain Morote Best, who headed the University of San Cristobal of Huamanga in Ayacucho, Peru, between 1962 and 1968. Dunham's radicalism was more vicarious; she ended her career as an employee of international organizations.

Spengler is rough on Obama's motivation. I will cut him slack as I don't see him as vicious and twisted/naive as his spouse and mother were/are:

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech. America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point.

Spengler then quotes my all-time favorite American history, Albion's Seed, in a simplistic way to build the themes that end his unusual take on the USA:

Americans regard upward mobility as a God-given right. America had a double founding, as David Hackett Fischer showed in his 1989 study, Albion's Seed . Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present, but the course of the past quarter-century has made wealth-creation the sine qua non of American life. Now for the first time in a generation Americans have become poorer, and many of them have become much poorer due to the collapse of home prices. Unlike the Reagan years, when cutting the top tax rate from a punitive 70% to a more tolerable 40% was sufficient to start an economic boom, no lever of economic policy is available to fix the problem. Americans have no choice but to work harder, retire later, save more and retrench.

This reversal has provoked a national mood of existential crisis. In Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching, for richer are poorer, remain what they always have been. But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim makings of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm - "Great Awakenings" – every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen.

Yes, and no. Abraham Lincoln arose in a time of stress, and although he was an exception to hucksters like Woodrow Wilson and FDR, there remains, or at least I believe there is a residue, of the gumption, grit, and get-up-and-go left in fly-over country. Spengler appears to believe that "America" is what the MSM projects---there are two Americas, and Obama does not represent the backbone of America, and contrary to the belief of many, there is a backbone there.

Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word "hope", they instead hear, "handout". A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as "something for nothing". Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.

The George W Bush administration has squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world, and has made enemies out of countries that might have been friendly rivals, notably Russia. Americans question the premise of America's standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America's standing. It might take the country another generation to recover.

"Evil will oft evil mars", J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career.

I agree that Bush has fallen far into the handout mentality and the quick-fix mode. But reading David Hackett Fischer's more recent tome, "Washington's Crossing" as I am now, again and again "America" was disparaged by the British. Subsequently Bismarck noted "God has a special providence for drunks, madmen, and the United States of America." Goering boasted that America could only make razor blades and Khrushchev promised that "we will bury you." Spengler ends on an admonition:

Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals - and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.

Black Shake-Down Artists Hit by Hitchens

Tom Wolfe long ago wrote about a radical chic habit of masochism whereby ultra-left blacks would "mau mau the flak catchers" in elite upper west side salons in NYC. I can remember long ago being a pre-Wolfe example when I met LBJ's former SCOTUS & present USUN Ambassador Goldberg in Mary McGrory's apartment in this left-bank wannabe neighborhood in NYC. I was an anti-war activist in the McCarthy campaign and a bemused Goldberg, still loyal to LBJ, had to listen to some of the persiflage I and my "Clean for Gene" buddies distributed as far-left provender.

I met Jesse Jackson that year at the Chicago Convention streetside festivities along with a lot of other young lefties [Lanny Davis, John Podesta, Sam Brown, etc.] before the Dems descended into identity politics. Years before, at St. Louis U., I had a personal conversation with Rev. Daniel Berrigan SJ about the future of the left. Surprisingly to me [this was before Watts], DB told me it would be in the inner cities---not yet the canonical writ that this would become a decade later. I also had a front-row seat listening to Rev. Martin Luther King at SLU, a memorable experience. Back in those days, there was still a pristine purity about fighting for desegregation & the black family had not yet disintegrated into a drug-fed centrifugal explosion. I was derided by Sam Brown for joining the State Dept---after dabbling in ultra-left SDS politics [I even met Bill Ayers and Diana Oughton in an Ann Arbor leftist cabal---Columbia rad leader Mark Rudd was my houseguest during the SDS national confab led by soon-to-marry-Fonda FNU Hayden]. Diana blew herself up a year later and was identified in the Greenwich Village house rubble by her index finger found in the wreckage. Ayers is back in the news along with his ex-con wife. Hitchens does have how this all connects to Obama, the next generation of hucksters:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the recently retired pastor of Barack Obama's church in Chicago. Here is the form that the reverend's "retirement" will take: a $1.6 million home, purchased in the name of his church and consisting of more than 10,000 square feet, in a gated community in Tinley Park, a prosperous white section of the city. There used to be a secularist line about fat shepherds and thin sheep, but the joke here is not just at the expense of a man who never pretended to be much more than a hustler. The joke is on those of the "flock" who tithed themselves to achieve this level of comfort for a man who must be pinching himself when he wakes up every day.

But, then, so must the Rev. Al Sharpton, routinely described by the New York Times as "the civil rights activist," be pinching himself each morning. By evening, after all, several limos will have arrived to transport him to several studios where he will be flattered and taken seriously. And this enviable existence is watched with avaricious jealousy by more junior practitioners, like the raving Rev. James Meeks of Chicago's Salem Baptist Church, who may not yet be quite ready for prime time, and by the members of Louis Farrakhan's racist and sectarian crew, who affect to think that Christianity is a slave religion and that white people are the products of a laboratory experiment gone wrong.

The thing that this gaggle of cranks and parasites has in common is the extreme deference with which it is treated by the junior senator from Illinois. In April 2004, Barack Obama told a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times that he had three spiritual mentors or counselors: Jeremiah Wright, James Meeks, and Father Michael Pfleger—for a change of pace, a white Catholic preacher who has a close personal feeling for the man he calls (as does Obama) Minister Farrakhan. This crossover stuff is not as "inclusive" as it might be made to seem: Meeks' main political connections in the white community are with the hysterically anti-homosexual wing of the Christian right. If Obama were to be read a list of the positions that his clerical supporters take on everything from Judaism to sodomy, he would be in the smooth and silky business of "distancing" from now until November. And that is why he hopes that his Philadelphia speech, which dissociated him from everything and nothing, will be enough. He seems, indeed, to have a real gift for remaining adequately uninformed about the real beliefs of his "mentors."

Yep, instead of rhymin' and jivin', the descendant of slaveholders Barack is a smoother version of Bubba Jeff, spouse of the serial fibber still in the Dem primary race. Of course, the mainstream media is giving Obama dozens of free passes and the Dems are counting on sliming ["swiftboating" is not a pejorative, as it was testimony from men who served long tours in Vietnam in an honorable fashion, not a three-month summer sunshine soldier like John Kerry] John McCain using Soros money.

Of course, George Soros got a lot of his money shorting the English pound and more recently, the US dollar, which this socialist/communist financier is trying to talk down in world markets as he gives Media Matters turncoat Brock $40 million for a slush/slasher fund.

American politics has descended since my short participations ['64 Clay for Congress, St.L; '68 McCarthy Nat'l Staff; '80 Anderson MidEast advisor; '84 Mondale FonPol advisor where I introduced Hitchens to the Mondale people]. Hitchens finishes with a panegyric about MLK:

This is a lot sadder, and a lot more serious, than has been admitted. Four decades after the murder in Memphis of a friend of the working man—a hero who was always being denounced by the FBI for his choice of secular and socialist friends and colleagues—the national civil rights pulpit is largely occupied by second-rate shakedown artists who hope to franchise "race talk" into a fat living for themselves. Far from preaching truth and brotherhood, they trade in cheap slander and paranoia and in venomous dislike of other minorities. Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslims used to relish their meetings with Klansmen and Nazis to discuss the beauties of separatism. These riffraff, too, hang out with Farrakhan and make opportunist coalitions with the James Dobsons and Gary Bauers of the white right. This is the lovely clientele of the faith-based initiative. Who now cares to commemorate Philip Randolph or Bayard Rustin or the other giants of struggle and solidarity in whose debt we live? So amnesiac have we become, indeed, that we fall into paroxysms of adulation for a ward-heeling Chicago politician who does not complete, let alone "transcend," the work of Dr. King; who hasn't even caught up to where we were four decades ago; and who, by his chosen associations, negates and profanes the legacy that was left to all of us.

MLK was a Gandhi wannabe. Barack is a JFK wannabe. Big difference.

Camille on Hillary's Girlie-Men B-Team

Camille Paglia has readers whose questions are as perceptive as her answers are illuminating:

I would like to get your feedback on the subject of those who end up in Hillary's orbit. Can you conceive of a strong, leader-type male ever working under her? An alpha, if you will. And if the answer is no, then why do you think that is?

The men you always see under her are to a person passive-aggressive, sadistic, mean, little, petty beta-male pieces of work who would not naturally succeed in a common male-type hierarchy. By that I mean an environment that values straightforward achievement rather than the darker political arts.... Everyone knows what they would be getting into: constant war rooms, personal attacks, spin, daily damage control, a boss prone to temper tantrums, placing your own integrity out on the ledge as a shill for a fundamentally dishonest person. I would argue that nobody who hasn't already sold their soul years ago would ever want to be a part of that mess. Chris Richard CA

Camille's response is hotter than a microwaved hotplate:

You have succinctly expressed one of the most unsettling aspects of Hillary Clinton's character and modus operandi. There is a strangely static and claustrophobic quality to the fiercely loyal cult she has gathered around her since her first lady years. Postmortem analysts of this presidential campaign will have a field day ferreting out all the cringe-making blunders made by her clique of tired, aging courtiers who couldn't adjust to changing political realities. Hillary's forces have acted like the heavy, pompous galleons of the imperial Spanish Armada, outmaneuvered by the quick, bold, entrepreneurial ships of the English fleet.

I agree that the male staff who Hillary attracts are slick, geeky weasels or rancid, asexual cream puffs. (One of the latter, the insufferable Mark Penn, just got the heave-ho after he played Hillary for a patsy with the Colombian government.) If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say Hillary is reconstituting the toxic hierarchy of her childhood household, with her on top instead of her drill-sergeant father. All those seething beta males (as you so aptly describe them) are versions of her sad-sack brothers, who got the short end of the Rodham DNA stick.

The compulsive war-room mentality of both Clintons is neurosis writ large. The White House should not be a banging, rocking washer perpetually stuck on spin cycle. [MY EMPH.] Many Democrats, including myself, have come to doubt whether Hillary has any core values or even a stable sense of identity. With her outlandish fibbing and naive self-puffery, her erratic day-to-day changes of tone and message, her glassy, fixed smiles, and her leaden and embarrassingly unpresidential jokes about pop culture, she has started to seem like one of those manic, seductively vampiric patients in trashy old Hollywood hospital flicks like "The Snake Pit." How anyone could confuse Hillary's sourly cynical, male-bashing megalomania with authentic feminism is beyond me.

Wish I'd thought of that, but Camille is on a level with H.L. Mencken on steroids!!!

WHO Pimping for Big Pharma?

The World Health Organization must be in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry. If this weren't so sad, it would be funny:

Establishing a link between climate change and mental health, the World Health Organisation has said extreme weather conditions like floods, droughts and natural calamities can lead to psychiatric illnesses.

"Psychosocial illnesses are a part of the various health issues associated with climate change," Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Deputy Regional Director, WHO, said.

Anticipating that severe flooding may become more frequent due to global warming, a WHO report said that independent studies in cyclone-affected Orissa and a flooded town in England has shown that post-traumatic stress disorder syndromes of different severity in affected people even after an year.

Another area is the mental health impact of drought, a likely sequence of climate change. Drought affected farmers can undergo severe mental agony due to financial hardship from increased debt, it said.

It is difficult for farmers to plan for crops, stocking, improvements, breeding and succession. This affects other businesses, limiting their ability to expand and employ staff.

Drought affects family relationships also leading to stress, worry and an increase in the rate of suicides. It can also lead to isolation and increased workload as fewer workers take on more work, partners move off the farm for additional income or for school needs and families can no longer afford social support.

The phenomena of farmers’ suicides in India is a typical example of consequences of climatic vagaries in poor, predominantly agrarian economies," the report said.

The report goes on to say that in general population, the 12-month prevalence rate of mild and moderate common mental disorders is on an average of about 10 per cent in countries across the world.

However, this rate is likely to rise possibly to 20 per cent after exposure to severe trauma and resource loss.

In case of severe mental disorders, like psychosis, the 2-3 per cent rate in general population may be expected to go up (3-4 per cent) after exposure to severe disaster.

Following the Asian tsunami, the WHO estimated that 20-40 per cent of affected people suffered from short-lasting mild psychological distress and another 30-50 per cent experienced moderate-to-severe psychological stress.

The hurricane 'Katrina' in United States has been associated with a high prevalence of psychiatric morbidity. In a survey with a sample of 1043 affected residents, the 30-day prevalence of anxiety-mood disorders was found to be 49.1 per cent and that of PTSD 26.4 per cent, it said.

This shows that people living in poverty, those geographically vulnerable to extreme weather events, those highly dependent on agriculture for livelihood and those vulnerable to develop mental illness are at high risk, the report added.

Mark Twain famously said "Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it."

WHO now recommends a psychiatrist and lots of meds. Oh, and switch to a bicycle, to do your bit to save the world!

Tony Lake or Richard Holbrooke for SecState?

Time has a good article about Obama & Clinton's chief foreign policy gurus.

I knew both from the time I spent in the State Dept., having dined with Holbrooke and Peter Tarnoff twice in Lyon when Holbrooke came for respite from a deteriorating marriage while he was Peace Corps director in Morocco. He had just started up Foreign Policy magazine and when he asked me to subscribe, like a wiseacre I told him I'd subscribed that very day to Rolling Stone. As Holbrooke has a reputation for disliking any contrariness, when Tarnoff re-introduced me to RH twice in the State Dept. when Tarnoff was Executive Secretary, Holbrooke cut me dead. A compleat a**hole, as the article hints and many in State will resoundingly attest.

I had less to do with Tony Lake, though he came to Saudi Arabia while I was there and we rode into Jeddah from the airport together. He had heard of me from Tarnoff and was very interested in the Saudi political scene, which I as Political Officer was up to date on. Later in DC, I also talked with Tony, who as the chief of INR at the time, was interested in the Middle East and my ideas. An idea man and an idealist. Sort of like Obama.

Tony lived down the block from where my wife and I did in Wesley Heights, and we were in his house when I had to deliver a document while both he and I were out of government pay. He is a New England patrician with no pretensions, unlike the prickly pushy Holbrooke. Richard Oakley, Holbrooke's deputy when RH was AS of East Asia, habitually reprimanded him for not being up to speed on various issues, as Holbrooke's love life [Diane Sawyer, among others] and night life interfered with his professionalism.

If a Dem is elected, and either is made SecState, it will be only the second time a career FSO has been Secretary of State---Larry Eagleberger being the only example up to now.

Charlton Heston Dead at 84

Charlton Heston was a great actor with a somewhat limited range, but above all a great American. His stewardship of the NRA will be remembered long after puny lightweight losers like George Clooney, a no-close B-List thespian-wannabe who ridiculed Heston's Alzheimer's Disease.

Or creepy Ed Asner, a Bolshie nobody with political support from Norman Leer [sic].

Heroes are badly needed nowadays in an era where nasty loo-zers and academentia types disparage and deconstruct every value civilization holds dear.

We won't see his greatness any more, or not for a long while.

Cuban Crime-State Fined $253 Million

The kleptocracy/narcocratic state of Cuba has been fined again for crimes against humanity---this time for a murder in prison of one of the Chief Criminal's original American supporters.

Oh, BTW, in Cuba's new regime run by Raul, it is rumored that golf courses will reopen. All of Cuba's courses were closed by the Bearded Clown after he lost a match to Che Guevara in the very-early sixties and it became public knowledge. Criminal-in-Chief doesn't like to lose---though his life is a loss for many otherwise innocent people---and he shut down all the courses in a fit of pique---which of course became a crusade against "capitalist decadence."

Turns out Commies don't like a game where personal honor and non-cheating are the prevailing ethos.

Oh, and the Sun-Sentinel reports that toasters will be available in the people's paradise beginning in 2010, but you'd better sign up now or your place in the queue may keep you waiting until 2015! On a monthly salary of $50/average, a toaster will take up most of a month's wages.

Maybe Michael Moore should go there for liposuction and tell us of the wonders of Cuban medicine a second time---could be an Oscar waiting for him!

Mark Steyn Riffs on 3AM & the Clinton Train Wreck

<

span style="font-style:italic;">"Three o'clock in the morning
And it looks like it's gonna be another sleepless night … "

That's Crystal Gayle from the opening of her hit song, "Talking In Your Sleep," No. 1 on the Billboard Country charts in 1978. No, hang on a minute, it's Hillary Rodham Clinton's new campaign theme.

In Crystal's case, her sleepless night was caused by her husband lying next to her, talking in his sleep, moaning in ecstasy and whispering sweet nothings to some other gal. But Hillary learned to snore through that a long time ago. In the Clinton scenario, the 3 a.m. sleeplessness is caused by the presidential hot line on the nightstand, alerting her to some sudden global crisis.

In her first three-o'clock-in-the-morning ad, the phone was ringing because of a national security emergency: al-Qaida had hijacked nuclearized passenger jets or some such heading our way. Who do you want answering the 3 a.m. call? A tough experienced battle-hardened president like President Rodham Clinton, who landed by plane during a nuclear strike on the Balkans in the mid-1990s yet still managed to have a smile and personalized greeting for each of the fourth-graders there to greet her with radioactive floral bouquets? Or some callow untested youth like Barack Obama, whose experience of taking international phone calls is very limited due to the fact that in his Jakarta boyhood President Sukarno was the only guy in Indonesia with an outside line?

Well, the answer turned out to be: Neither of the above. The McCain campaign gleefully told reporters they'd be happy for Hillary to carry on running the ad for another six months: If incoming-at-three-in-the-morning is the issue, Sen. McCain's your man, and he was very grateful to the Clinton campaign for funding his most effective TV ad to date.

So Sen. Clinton has now released another electrifyingly vivid three-in-the-morning scenario:

"It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone ringing in the White House and this time the crisis is economic. Home foreclosures mounting, markets teetering.

"John McCain just said the government shouldn't take any real action on the housing crisis; he'd let the phone keep ringing. Hillary Rodham Clinton has a plan to protect our homes, create jobs.

"It's 3 a.m., time for a president who's ready."

Jeepers, will all business during this Clinton administration be transacted at 3 a.m.? Is it some union-negotiated flex-time deal? "Home foreclosures mounting"? We'd better wake the president. There are now so many foreclosures the banks can no longer foreclose on everyone they need to foreclose on during normal banking hours. "The First National Bank of Dead Skunk, Maine, has begun issuing midnight foreclosure notices, Madam President."

"OK, nuke 'em."

"Er, well, maybe this can wait till the regular afternoon meeting."

It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone ringing in the White House. And ringing and ringing and ringing. Kim Jong-il No Dong missiles are heading for every major West Coast city, but the president's not picking up because at 2:57 a.m. the Secretary for Soccer Moms called to alert her to the growing crisis caused by the lack of federally mandated children's bicycling helmets. When the powder keg goes up, who do you want in the White House? Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose customized MCI Friends & Family & European Foreign Ministers & Overseas Dictators plan allows her to receive unlimited incoming calls between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.? Or John McCain, who'd bawl out the White House operator for waking him up to take a call from the Director of the Federal Bike Path Agency?

As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, in the real dark night of the soul, it's always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. And so it goes in the real dark night of the Clinton campaign, day after day. When Hillary got into her wee spot of bother over her concoction of the corkscrew landing under enemy fire in Tuzla, she wiggled out of it by putting it down to sleep deprivation. Is she spending too many nights up at three in the morning? In the latest ad, when she picks up the phone at 3 a.m. to take the emergency foreclosure breaking-news update, she's got perfect hair and makeup, and she's immaculately dressed. Is having to get up at 2 a.m. to put her face on for the 3 a.m. campaign ad causing her to retreat into Bosnian war fantasies?

My radio pal Hugh Hewitt drew my attention the other day to a BBC report on Hillary. Asked about the candidates' experience, Sen. Clinton replied: "I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

Whoa! That's quite a line. But it's a measure of Hillary Rodham Clinton's increasing isolation that she has to use it herself. If she were running against Bush in 2000, the media would have used it for her. If she were in better shape for '08, aides and supporters would be deploying the line against Obama. Geraldine Ferraro acknowledged a simple truth about Barack – that a white guy with this thin a resume would be hooted off the stage – and instead she's the one who got hooted off the stage. Last week, Randi Rhodes, the excitable anchorette of the flailing liberal radio network Air America, dismissed Mrs. Ferraro as "David Duke in drag," and for good measure called Hillary "a big f---ing whore."

Sen. Clinton was the establishment candidate running in a party addicted to novelty (in candidates, that is; its policies remain mired in the 1960s). Hill calculated that, given the Dems' deference to identity politics, her gender would give her enough novelty to sail through. But Obama trumped that, and now it's eternally three in the morning, and the phone doesn't stop not ringing. She's like Frank Sinatra in Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's all-time great saloon song:

"It's quarter to three

There's no one in the place except you and me … "

Superdelegate Jon Corzine, governor of New Jersey and an early supporter of Hillary, now says that if she doesn't win the overall primary popular vote he'll switch to Obama. Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont says she needs to throw in the towel for the good of the party.

"Well, that's how it goes
And Joe, I know you're getting anxious to close … "

They're locking up the joint, and no matter how many nickels she drops in the jukebox it won't play "Hail to the Chief." Any minute now she'll be caught off-mike, reprising the "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy" line. But this is the way the Clinton era ends, not with a bang but a self-pitying whimper:

"We're drinking, my friend
To the end of a long episode
Make it One For My Baby
And one more for the road."

It's 3 a.m. Do you know where your campaign is?

Eugene McCarthy: Epitaph for a Strange Man

Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar Liberalism may sound like a strange title, but he embodied many of the internal contradictions that I found my twenty-plus years as a "liberal" [roughly 1960-1985] reflected inside myself. I worked on McCarthy's National Staff in 1968 in six states [Indiana, Nebraska, California, New York, Michigan, and finally the Chicago Convention in Illinois] and met him and escorted one of his daughters Chelsea Clinton style around southern California campaigning. Here is the book's synopsis & a Publisher's Weekly review:

Originally a New Deal liberal and aggressive anticommunist, Senator Eugene McCarthy famously fell out with the Democratic Party over Vietnam. His stunning challenge to Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 New Hampshire primary inspired young liberals and was one of the greatest electoral upsets in American history. But the 1968 election ultimately brought Richard Nixon and the Republican Party to power, irrevocably shifting the country's political landscape to the right for decades to come.

Dominic Sandbrook traces one of the most remarkable and significant lives in postwar politics, a career marked by both courage and arrogance. Sandbrook draws on extensive new research-including interviews with McCarthy himself-to show convincingly how Eugene McCarthy's political experience embodies the larger decline of American liberalism after World War II. These were tumultuous times in American politics, and Sandbrook vividly captures the drama and historical significance through his intimate portrait of a singularly interesting man at the heart of it all.

Publishers Weekly

Eugene McCarthy's place in history as a cynosure of the anti-Vietnam War movement is universally acknowledged. Yet McCarthy remains an enigmatic figure to supporters and opponents alike. Sandbrook's biography attempts to take the measure of the 1968 Democratic presidential candidate as a man and as a politician-and McCarthy (b. 1916) fares badly in both categories. Sandbrook, a British scholar of American history, argues that as a politician McCarthy, who served for two decades in the House and the Senate, achieved far less than contemporaries such as John F. Kennedy, Johnson or Humphrey, despite his superior intelligence and natural charisma. Specifically, Sandbrook contends that McCarthy brought no new ideas into the political arena, never won his party's presidential nomination and gave his name to no major bills. Given the rarified sphere that McCarthy occupied, and the scope and depth of the accomplishments of those to whom he is compared, it is arguable that Sandbrook's view is too harsh. But the comments by contemporaries of McCarthy's personal qualities are often damning indeed. Sandbrook quotes from a variety of McCarthy's fellow politicians, friends, family and the press to present the picture of a man who, for all his gifts, was, in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. "indolent, frivolous, cynical," or as described by Gilbert Harrison, a friend and former editor of the New Republic, "lazy," "unresponsive" and "insensitive." McCarthy's reported response to the assassination of his 1968 campaign opponent Robert Kennedy was a callous "[h]e brought it on himself." Sandbrook's biography will command attention and spark discussion about this controversial career and McCarthy's role in the end of the New Deal liberal consensus.

Although Schlesinger's critique is a good projection of his own personal foibles, Harrison may be right. I personally was put off when McCarthy dismissed the "Prague Spring" of '68 as "unimportant" or words to that effect. His refusal to support Hubert Humphrey in the post-Chicago Convention campaign was doubly destructive as Humphrey had been his political patron and mentor in Minnesota politics. [I played a backstairs role myself in the Hilton Hotel drama, having thrown some smoked fish bones and ashtrays on the police 15 floors below, as recounted on p. 309 in T.H. White's Making of the President 1968.]

Bizarrely, twenty years later in the late 1980s I found two airline tickets of McCarthy's on the floor of the dry cleaners in our Northwest Washington neighborhood. He was booked on a round-trip flight to Minneapolis. I gave the tickets to the owner to return to the ex-Senator.

I think his experience as a postulant in a Benedictine monastery had given him an other-worldly perspective. McCarthy did have a flinty integrity & a romantic Irish gene which prompted him, I am told, to recite verbatim W.B. Yeats' The Wanderings of Oisin after a few drinks---no mean feat, as the poem is close to a dozen pages long. However, I could never envision him as a sitting president, he was simply too captious and dismissive. A sort of figurehead.

As far as exemplifying postwar liberalism, the combination of Cold Warrior abroad and social engineer at home did fit, but his dreamy and aloof nature was averse to deep commitment as he was more a philosopher and bon vivant litterateur who saw deep irony in fallen human nature.

In the end, he was too much immersed in a Catholic and poetic world-view to be an effective politician---except for leading a crusade against a bloody foreign war.

David D. Newsom, Dead at 90

Ambassador Newsom was a kind gentleman. I can recall the first time I entered his office while I was Political Officer in the United Nations Office in the International Organizations Bureau in the State Dept. I needed to get his assent on a Decision Memorandum, as I recall, and as he read the memo which concerned the Middle East, he actually asked me what my opinion was of another matter! As an FSO accustomed to the apodictic dwarf Kissinger's autocratic arrogance [Henry the K REFUSED TO SHAKE MY HAND in Jeddah when I was his personal escort during a SecState visit], I found Newsom's quiet professionalism completely charming and thoughtful.

I also recall as a duty officer one weekend having to visit his home in Georgetown on some emergency matter and being entertained by his charming wife as I waited for him to return from an errand. She was as thoughtful and considerate as he was.

Also, Rocky Suddarth mentioned in the NYT article was instrumental in helping me get extra Arabic training after I met him and his kids by chance in The Jordanian National Museum in Amman. Rocky was also the epitome of a professional FSO.

Just by chance, I recently saw Jock Covey's name in an article on the United Nations, where he now is employed in a senior capacity. Amb. Newsom's quote in the NYT obit is noteworthy:

In a 2002 appearance at the University of California, he was asked what advice he would give young people.

“Set aside some time to read about and understand the world beyond our shores,” he replied in part. “We are an insular people, and we have a tendency to dismiss foreign societies as strange and difficult to comprehend.”

Better advice was never given.

"Liberal Fascist" Gene Discovered?

Israeli scientists may have discovered a gene which promotes selfish narcissistic behavior such as Al Gore and Bill Clinton exhibit on a regular basis. Other monomaniac madmen, such as Mobutu and Mugabe on the Dark Continent, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and dictator wannabes like HRClinton to give a female example also sully the human race with their total lack of self-knowledge.

It isn't clear how the length of AVPR1a affects vasopressin receptors: it is thought that rather than controlling the number of receptors, it may control where in the brain the receptors are distributed. Ebstein suggests the vasopressin receptors in the brains of people with short AVPR1a may be distributed in such a way to make them less likely to feel rewarded by the act of giving.

Though the mechanism is unclear, Ebstein says, he is fairly sure that selfish, greedy dictatorship has a genetic component. It would be easier to confirm this if history's infamous dictators conveniently had living identical twins, he says, so we could see if they were just as ruthless as each other.

And "feeling less rewarded by the act of giving" makes these maniacs grab, as Bill Clinton grabbed all the DNC money in 1996 in his vain quest to become a "majority president." Instead, this narcissistic obsessive compulsive remained a "plurality president," and the rest of the Dem Party was trounced in the House and Senate.

Gore's hilarious grab for $300 million in "Save the Planet" pseudo-scientific nonsense reflects the same inability to experience spiritual values. Given a different politico-social context, either of these has-been loo-zers could have been a Saddam or an Adolf or a Benito---but American democracy thwarted their solipsistic ambitions.

Obama Iraq Advisor Sane on US Troops

Populist morons like Gravel, Kucinich, & Ron Paul love to preach instant withdrawal from Iraq the day after they would be inaugurated. But even anti-Bush stalwarts such as Juan Cole realize that the Hollywood druggie-dreams of imbeciles like Sean Penn et al. are real [remember that Penn & other drugged-out Hollyweirdos mostly dropped out of high school.]

This is not the first time the opinion of an adviser to the Obama campaign has differed with the candidate’s stated Iraq policy. In February, Mr. Obama’s first foreign policy tutor, Samantha Power, told BBC that the senator’s current Iraq plan would likely change based on the advice of military commanders in 2009. She has since resigned her position as a formal adviser.

The political ramifications of the disclosure are yet to be seen. The perception of a harder line in Iraq could help Mr. Obama combat charges by Senator McCain in a general election that Mr. Obama favors a hasty surrender and retreat in Iraq. But it could hurt the Obama campaign with anti-war voters in the Democratic primaries. Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Clinton, has called for withdrawing troops from Iraq, but an architect of the surge has told the Sun that she has been wary of a precipitous withdrawal. In a situation with some parallels to this one, Mr. Obama suffered some political damage on the trade issue when he called publicly for a renegotiation of NAFTA while a policy adviser reportedly met with Canadian officials and downplayed the chances of a NAFTA retreat.

Even ultra-left advisors of Obama may quail at a withdrawal of US forces and the consequent diminishment of American power and influence everywhere---including oil countries where the US still has to exert power to wield influence.

In his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg points out again and again how "liberals"
in power quickly succumb to the siren song of global power. Samantha Powers and now her successor are already aware of the real world, the one liberals never seem to get a grip on despite their self-styled "reality-based community."

Axis of Weasels on Gas

The New York Times takes its usual anti-Bush stance without giving both sides of the issue on the proposed entry of Ukraine and Georgia into the MAP, or Membership Action Plan:
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Bush gave a rousing speech in which he stated his positions and declared that “the terrorist threat is real, it is deadly and defeating this enemy is the top priority of NATO,” which is not the defined goal of every member of this collective security alliance.

Referring to democratic revolutions in both Ukraine and Georgia, he said: “Welcoming them into the Membership Action Plan would send a signal to their citizens that if they continue on the path to democracy and reform they will be welcomed into the institutions of Europe. It would send a signal throughout the region” — read Russia — “that these two nations are, and will remain, sovereign and independent states.”

Some German officials described the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, as upset and even angry on Wednesday. She and Mr. Bush have talked repeatedly about the issue in the past two months. Mrs. Merkel had thought that a compromise was in the works, the officials said, with Washington supporting a warm statement welcoming the interest of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO and encouraging them to work toward entering the membership plan program.

With its usual disingenuous opacity, the NYT leaves the so-called "Friendship Pipeline" to Germany from Russia, supplying natural gas at low rates, entirely out of the article. Instead, the NYT plays its usual game of not mentioning the elephant in the living room while "earnestly" portraying major NATO allies' opposition in the best possible light:

Germany and France have said they believe that since neither Ukraine nor Georgia is stable enough to enter the program now, a membership plan would be an unnecessary offense to Russia, which firmly opposes the move. In fact, senior diplomats here said, the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, has threatened to cancel his planned first-ever visit to the NATO meeting on Friday if the two former Soviet states enter the program for eventual membership.

Mrs. Merkel visited Moscow on March 8 and met Mr. Putin and his successor, Dmitri A. Medvedev. She told them that Russia would not be allowed a veto over NATO membership. But a senior German diplomat, Wolfgang Ischinger, said that offering membership to a divided Ukraine could destabilize the new government there, and that not enough diplomacy had taken place beforehand with Russia.

Mr. Ischinger, Germany’s ambassador to London, noted that after the NATO summit meeting Mr. Bush and the two Russians would meet in Sochi, a Russian resort on the Black Sea. He said, “It’s the absence of this discussion that makes me wonder if NATO has done enough of its homework at this point on this front.”

Oh yeah, and Mr. Ischinger neglects to mention that the corrupt ex-Chancellor of Germany has assumed the CEO job of the "Friendship Pipeline" and Gerhard Schroeder plays the game of senior blackmailer in the German opposition based on Russian threats to raise the price of natural gas. Later, GWB gets damned by faint praise:

Derek Chollet, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, said Mr. Bush’s speech was “a combination of valedictory and marker-laying.” Mr. Bush will probably lose the argument on Ukraine and Georgia, Mr. Chollet said. “But he doesn’t care so much, and he believes he’s on the right side of the issue.

”
Luckily, the USA itself is lavishly blessed with coal and natural gas, as the Wall Street Journal notes in an article. Were the US to allow gas and oil exploitation of the North Slope in Alaska, which could be done with a negligible environmental footprint, the execs of Chevron and Exxon-Mobil & Shell would not be reporting to Congress which is farcically trying to blame big oil for its own silly environmental blockade of the North Slope.

The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal and its coal is high-quality anthracite rather than the awful brown coal which makes Beijing's skies a puce pallor. Coalbed methane and a lot of other technologies can lessen the already low impact American coal development will have on the environment.

Sadly, Europe remains a hostage to Russia and its own dishonest political elites in the NATO/natural gas tug of war which the NYT in its usual dishonesty neglects to mention.

Wisconsin "Tragedy" a Joke?

Wisconsin has become enmeshed in the dishonest politics of the ultra-left, as Governor Doyle complains that his appointment to the State Supreme Court was voted out of office.

Wisconsin in the last two presidential elections has had massive vote fraud as the 5000 & 10,000 vote pluralities in the 2000 & 2004 votes boosted Gore and Kerry. While the hysteric maniacs like Bobo Boxer screeched about Ohio in 2004, the media remained mum on the openly dishonest, corrupt elections in Wisconsin.

The low crimes and misdemeanors of Doyle and his leftist henchboys went unremarked by the MSM, always eager to fingerpoint on the right, and the feckless Republicans in the land of cheese and dairy products remained silent.

Someday, some Wisconsin politician will awaken and like Joe McCarthy, blow some whistles on the constant crimes of the left. Ann Coulter's analysis of Tail-gunner Joe was correct. He simply told a couple too many tall tales.

Ruining the careers of State Department leftists is fine by me, though the Dept. remains infested with endemic anti-American stooges and fellow-travelers---you name the enemy of America, they're for them, or at least cutting them slack.

Maybe Condi will cease and desist supporting the rights of terrorist organizations like Hamas to participate in elections from now on, but I doubt a Dem SecState will even bother to raise an eyebrow.
UPDATE
John Fund has a short piece in today's [04/05/08] WSJ where he describes some asses braying about elections:

In the wake of Justice Butler's defeat, some liberals have declared that elections for the state's supreme court should end, and its members be appointed by the governor. Tom Basting, president of the Wisconsin Bar, claims that "judges are different from other elected officials" and "that means some of the standards voters typically use when evaluating candidates don't apply to judges."

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the distinction between judicial and legislative elections. In expanding the political free speech rights of judicial candidates, it declared in 2002 (Republican Party of Minnesota v. White) that completely separating the judiciary from the notion of "representative government" ignores the fact that state-court judges possess the power to "make" common law as well as to shape their state constitutions. Thus it is entirely appropriate for voters to have a say in whether that "immense power," as the Supreme Court called it, will be used with restraint or abandon.

The voters should evict the silly governor as next order of business.

Hillary Fired for Lies, Unethical Behaviour From Watergate Cte.

Hillary is neck-and-neck with her hubby Bubba and Lyin' Al Gore for sidestepping, avoiding, and otherwise evading the truth. She is a liar, has been shown to be a liar, and now it appears that she was fired from her Watergate Committee job in the mid-'70s for lying and unethical behaviour.

Surprised? Not at all. The Clinton Machine has been lying ever since he "didn't inhale" and his marching against Vietnam in Moscow was covered up. She stood behind his lies with Gennifer Flowers and her subsequent dishonest, illegal, and unethical moves have been covered up, though her lyin' hubby Bubba says she's been "exonerated."

She’s never been exonerated about the cattle futures windfalls, since there was never full disclosure. And she’s never been exonerated about having her so-called health care task force operate in secret in direct violation of the law. In fact, that was confirmed.

Of course, she’s never been exonerated about any of the Castle Grande lies and overbillings - or how the missing Rose Law billing records just happened to show up near her office, conveniently, right after the statute of limitations expired. Although Bill claimed she was, she’s never been exonerated for her role in the Whitewater development…but hey, that was only a simple resort scam designed to fleece seniors.

She’s never been exonerated about her role in the disgraceful Travel Office scandal, where nonpartisan career government employees all lost their jobs to make room for her friends, nor for trying to cover it up with a fraudulent IRS audit and criminal charges against Billy Dale - charges which took a jury only minutes to laugh out of court.

And of course, the Vince Foster suicide, which had her people rummaging through his office while his body was still warm. Secret Service were not allowed to secure his office while her crone-colleagues tampered with evidence.

How about the FBI files on her political opponents, which were illegally obtained by her chosen aide, Craig Livingstone? How much of that information did she copy? How much does she still have and plan to use? Exonerated? I don’t think so.

As I recall, one of the deputy independent counsels during Whitewater even prepared a draft indictment of her for perjury, which Janet Reno quashed. That’s not exoneration either.

And the Hsu campaign donation "bundling," which hasn't really been seriously investigated. Her husband was disbarred for perjury, but so far she hasn't had to undergo Grand Jury proceedings for dozens of serious felonious charges.

The latest laffer from Tuzla happens to coincide with her non-publishing of her March contributions---no lie there, but methinks the public may have had enough of this unlikeable cackler---how about her lifelong Yankee fan remark?

But here's the smoking gun:

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?



“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”



How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.



Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.

The brief involved precedent for representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970.

“As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said.

The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee’s public files. So what did Hillary do?

“Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public,” Zeifman said. Hillary then proceeded to write a legal brief arguing there was no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding – as if the Douglas case had never occurred.

So like the Rose Law Firm files, she stole the files for a supremely important case. That would be grounds for disbarment, at a minimum.

HIllary was, is, and ever shall be a prevaricating lying dishonest jesuitical hag.

She should exit the presidential race after a decent interval.

Wonder if those journalistic paladins of the MSM will dare to touch this real story about a real legal criminal?

Hitchens on Hillary's Moral Perfidy.

Christopher Hitchens reminds us of the full extent of consummate opportunist and serial liar Hillary Clinton:

Note the date of Sen. Clinton's visit to Tuzla. She went there in March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her husband's first term. What had happened in the interim? In particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton administration?

Of course, Christopher is referring to Clinton's 1992 campaign promise to end the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, a pledge that was over-ruled by Hillary because she thought this would affect her health-care initiative. By the time she reached the airport four years later, 250 thousand Bosnians had been "cleansed."

In the event, President Bill Clinton had not found it convenient to keep this promise. Let me quote from Sally Bedell Smith's admirable book on the happy couple, For Love of Politics:

Taking the advice of Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves—the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a "perception of drift." The key factor in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have "deep misgivings" and viewed the situation as "a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform." The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people.

Hitchens keeps walking down his own memory lane, and remembers alleged wife-beater and recent DWI offender Sidney Blumenthal spreading his own atrabilious spin on the situation, along with an anecdote from the Secretary of Defense:

I can personally witness to the truth of this, too. I can remember, first, one of the Clintons' closest personal advisers—Sidney Blumenthal—referring with acid contempt to Warren Christopher as "a blend of Pontius Pilate with Ichabod Crane." I can remember, second, a meeting with Clinton's then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin at the British Embassy. When I challenged him on the sellout of the Bosnians, he drew me aside and told me that he had asked the White House for permission to land his own plane at Sarajevo airport, if only as a gesture of reassurance that the United States had not forgotten its commitments. The response from the happy couple was unambiguous: He was to do no such thing, lest it distract attention from the first lady's health care "initiative."

It's hardly necessary for me to point out that the United States did not receive national health care in return for its acquiescence in the murder of tens of thousands of European civilians. But perhaps that is the least of it. Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears for anyone but herself. In the end, and over her strenuous objections, the United States and its allies did rescue our honor and did put an end to Slobodan Milosevic and his state-supported terrorism. Yet instead of preserving a polite reticence about this, or at least an appropriate reserve, Sen. Clinton now has the obscene urge to claim the raped and slaughtered people of Bosnia as if their misery and death were somehow to be credited to her account! Words begin to fail one at this point. Is there no such thing as shame? Is there no decency at last? Let the memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House again.

Hillary, like her obnoxious spouse Billy Jeff, has no self-knowledge or moral courage. It's always all about her.

Thankfully, the landing at Tuzla has been recorded and the YouTube version watched millions of times displaying HRC and her homely daughter being greeted by a young woman in pigtails, without any attendant gunfire or sense of urgency whatsoever.

Along with the Clintons, we should all resolve that drunken driver Sidney Blumenthal should never work in or near the Whtie House again. Even if it means, God forfend, another Democrat in the Oval Office.

But McCain would have the integrity and grit that is sorely lacking in the Clinton moral makeup. Health care for Americans is not worth a quarter million lives of any foreign ethnic group. [Of course, her headstrong incompetence did not allow for US healthcare to get out of the starting gate.]