What did Nancy Know and When did She Know It?

The Hindenburg approaching that New Jersey landing strip is what Nancy Pelosi appears to resemble. She keeps pouring gasoline on a fire that she's trying to put out and pretty soon the entire episode what is left of her credibility as a political actor with any real suasion on the Hill.

Her strong-arm Queen Bee-nery assault on Jane Harman, her much more competent successor as Ranking Member on the Intelligence Cte, a job which she herself is now revealing that she fouled up, as her increasingly flustered interpretations of what she was told, when she was told it, and so on are suddenly turned into accusations that the CIA "lied" to her.

Only a serious case of PMS can account for this woman's increasing ineptitude, or perhaps it derives from a big-city hack being put in a sensitive position with international responsibilities. Jane Harman should have been the Chair of the Intel Cte in 2006, but the B-List mind of Pelosi couldn't handle having a much smarter female in a job she herself flubbed up. So a barely literate ESL hack named Reyes was named, and Silvestre couldn't even tell what a Sunni or a Shia was despite many years on the Intel Cte.

Maybe Steny Hoyer should take over. The Speaker's job isn't one for amateur second-raters.

"Religion of Peace" and Stoning Women

The Stoning of Soraya M opens in 10 cities in June and my bet is that froth-at-the-mouth jihadists will righteously make death threats that will cow many theater owners into thinking twice about showing such a graphic film.

The article linked above describes the film and more recent stonings, including one of a 13-year old Somali girl just last year.

Clockwork Orange as the Droogs Take Over England's Streets

Claire Berlinski has a column on British crime that should serve as an admonitory signal to the US as it slouches toward Socialism. The British Ministry of Justice trumpets that statistically crime is decreasing in England and Wales, while the media and the public report anecdotally that British streets are not safe, especially in the public housing tracts that spawned The Droogs in Clockwork Orange, the famous novel and movie about post-socialist England written in the '70s and immortalized by Stanley Kubrick's stunning film classic starring Malcolm McDowell as a very convincing juvenile delinquent gangsta leader.

Berlinski compares today's London to 1980's New York City, which I visited on a monthly basis for weeks at a time during the period and well remember the lawless grunge that Democrat administrations had permitted ever since Kitty Genovese famously bled to death in Kew Gardens because fifty-odd neighbors refused to call the police. Rudy Giuliani was elected, busted subway and broken window cheats and suddenly found that most crimes were committed by very young hooligans who never before were challenged by flaccid, soft-on-crime Democrat administrations since Lindsay in the sixties. Berlinski takes the feckless Jacqui Smith, the fatuous Minister of Justice and her criminal-pampering colleagues in law enforcement to task in the article attached. First, CB proves the old adage, "lies, damned lies, and statistics," is particularly true with crime stats.

To understand why the dark figure of crime escapes exact measurement, realize that for a crime to be officially recorded, three things must happen: someone must be aware that a crime has been committed; someone must report that crime; and the police must accept that a law has been violated. But each link in the chain is easily broken. People may be unaware that a crime has been committed because they view it as normal or trivial behavior: in some neighborhoods, it would seem perfectly natural to settle a dispute with a good brawl, while in others, this would be seen as assault. Other crimes may go unrecognized because the victims are unaware that they have been victimized—either because of the nature of the crime, such as fraud, or because the victims are drunk, mentally ill, or otherwise incapable of understanding what has happened.

But that is only the beginning of the cascade of conditions which prevent crimes from being reported. CB ticks off a long list of reasons that even when victims recognize a crime has been committed, crime goes unreported.

immigrants who don’t speak the language well enough to explain what happened to them. Rapes can go unreported because the victims are ashamed. So-called victimless crimes involving sex and drugs also go unreported, of course, because the criminals have no motivation to inform the police that they are hiring prostitutes or shooting up. Crimes can also go unreported because victims fear reprisals. Above all, crimes can go unreported because victims feel no confidence in the police and see reporting a crime as pointless. Even if a crime is reported, it will not necessarily be added to the official statistics. The police may conclude, for example, that there is insufficient evidence to believe the report. Moreover, poorly performing police departments have an incentive to stop recording crimes: it makes them look more successful than they are. For these reasons and many more, criminologists commonly posit that the dark figure of crime is far larger than the official figure—perhaps by as much as an order of magnitude. And there is good reason to believe that in Britain, the dark figure is unusually high.

Berlinski points out the silliness behind the rosy stats Jacqui advances to justify her competence, which most observers believe is lacking in all sorts of areas due to her loony Janet-from-another-Planet Napolitano stance toward political dissidents. [Patriots are a threat because they wish to defend the country from Islamist terrorists---ala Napolitano.] Smith's MoJ policy of not prosecuting serial offenders or letting them off with token "fines" which are never paid has resulted in a great leap of violent crime and a reluctance to report petty crime by Londoners and others due to slack enforcement practices:

[Note] the even grimmer picture painted by police records of violent crime. Sure enough, when the rules changed in 1998, the total number of violent crimes recorded jumped from 231,000 to 503,000. But then, even after the switch, it continued to rise sharply, hitting a peak of 1.06 million in 2006. That number has since declined only slightly: in 2008, the number of police-recorded violent crimes stood at 961,000. When it comes to violence, in other words, Police Recorded Crime actually confirms the public’s general view.

Further, the recent decline to 4.95 million total crimes recorded could well mean that the public has lost faith in the criminal-justice system and no longer believes that reporting crimes will result in the punishment of the perpetrators. Support for this hypothesis comes from a British Federation of Small Businesses poll indicating that 60 percent of businesses in London had been victims of crime in the past year. But proprietors reported to the police only half of the burglaries, vehicle thefts, and assaults that they suffered—and not a single case of arson. They didn’t think that the offenders would be caught and punished, they explained. Going to the police just wasn’t worth their time.

And the methodology of the British Crime Survey is severely flawed in that respondents are selected from among homeowners, and not renters, skewing the statistical base away from poorer neighborhoods where crimes usually take place. One of the designers of the BCS, a "criminologist" named Hough, exemplifies the unaccountable nature of the small-time bureaucrats who shrug their shoulders at the fact that the BCS overlooks the vast majority [only 5 million of 26 million crimes are reported] by the classic rejoinder of "triviality," suely the time-honored favorite dodge of the bureaucrat.

"Are the revised crime estimates significant? It is “true but trivial,” says Mike Hough, a criminologist at King’s College London who has helped design the BCS since it began in 1981, that if you include all crimes, “an astronomical amount of crime is committed.” Surely nobody is really in a panic about petty crimes, he adds."

But this may be false logic, or a sort of deliberate avoidance of the basic problems facing enforcement---a feeling among petty criminals that even if they get caught, they get off with a slap on the wrist.

But not all the repeat crime is petty: according to Farrell and Pease’s study, if calculated correctly, violent crime would be 82 percent higher. The BCS figures, on their own terms, show substantial drops since 1995 in “acquaintance” and “domestic” violence, but “stranger” violence and muggings—the kind of violent crime that really terrifies people—remain at their extraordinarily high mid-nineties levels.

The limp-wristed excuses of the smug petty functionaries in the MoJ and their academic co-conspirators contradict the incessant complaints of law enforcement police on the beat:

Officials at every level of the British criminal-justice system—detectives, judges, prison officials, probation officers—complain that too few criminals are caught and that those who are caught rarely receive sentences that will function as a deterrent. Lack of resources and a massive bureaucracy hamper police efforts: the average time to process an arrest in London is over ten hours, and the number of forms that must be filled out averages about 35, according to various analyses. Home Office figures released in 2007 show that police officers in England and Wales spend only about 13 percent of their time on patrol—and 20 percent on paperwork.

One London cop in the Criminal Investigation Division blames the police’s ineffectiveness on the unintended effects of community policing. “There was a perception that there weren’t enough beat cops—people who knew the local area,” he remembers, which led to sending extra cops to problem spots. “But in practice, they ended up going to community meetings and liaison. They’re not actually dealing with minor crimes. If they were answering emergency calls and dealing with minor crimes instead of doing community liaison, that would indeed take a huge load off the system, but they’re not. So in practice, what this means is that when I started working as a police officer, there were 25 people on staff answering 999 calls”—the British equivalent of 911. “Now there are 15.”

Perhaps as a consequence, more than two-thirds of burglaries reported to the London police are never investigated, according to police figures released under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained by the Daily Telegraph. Under 10 percent result in an arrest. And even if an arrest leads to a conviction, it’s unlikely to include real punishment. The London policeman adds that it’s common for a burglar to be arrested 30 times a year, taken to court 20 times a year, and punished with nothing more than a fine—“which is meaningless, because they can’t pay. There’s no chance that with minor-level crimes you’ll go to prison.” A London magistrate clarifies: “It’s not that they can’t pay, it’s that they won’t—and the system doesn’t push the point.” Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor of City Journal and a former prison doctor, tells me that he recently met a burglar on his 57th conviction. The burglar was fined 50 pounds, to be paid in five-pound installments—considerably less than someone in a legitimate business, making a comparable amount of money, would pay in taxes.

Dalrymple is a medical doctor who has served in the British Public Health Service and in WHO around the world. He has written a number of books on the seedy underworld of the socialist nightmare infested by criminals and politicians who tax the rich to in effect subsidize and aid/abet the crimes of the poor. As Berlinski notes, the habitual underreporting of crime, the lackadaisical policework following a crime and the general hopelessness concerning less-than-serious crimes has produced a clone of New York City before Giuliani applied tough love to clean up the streets:

The situation in Britain, then, resembles that of 1980s New York, whose crime problems were routinely called insoluble. What the British government fails to understand is that the majority of serious crimes are committed by a small cadre of criminals, who are also, disproportionately, the authors of minor crimes. If you lock these criminals up—reliably, and for a long time—crime will drop precipitously. The reason Broken Windows policing works is not that it is inherently important to jail every petty thug who breaks a window; it is that the window-breakers tend to be muggers, rapists, burglars, and murderers as well. If you get them off the streets, the rate of serious crime will fall. To dismiss as “true but trivial” the finding that “an astronomical amount of crime is committed” in Britain is only half right. The British people know this full well, even if their government does not.

The rise in hooliganism and violent crime might be obscured by statistical hocus pocus wielded by self-serving functionaries wishing to obscure colossal failure of a social model for political reasons. But hopefully, the historic common sense of the British people will overcome the preposterous rubbish their government attempts to peddle in order to re-elect a Labour Party gone seriously off the rails.

Holbrooke and Haqqani, a Matched Pair?

The NYT's "Saturday Profile" of Pakistan's Ambassador Haqqani gives a glimpse into the weird and bizarre world of Pakistan, a country which I worked on as a registered foreign agent in the '80s, even getting an anonymous nod in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War." Back then I was familiar with Jamshid Marker, another Pak ambassador fluent in English, though with a toney British accent and rather elegant continental style.

Haqqani has the distinction of being kidnapped by his own country's intelligence agency [or, rather, agents thereof, who could have been working for anyone!]

But the NYT's vapid journalism reveals its underside when the source of the article, the NYT's own paladin Richard Holbrooke, makes the front page for the umpteenth time in a laudatory mode.

[Haqqani] speaks several times a week with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who calls him “one of the most skilled ambassadors I have ever seen.” He figures he has met with 90 members of Congress. And he is a fixture on CNN, the op-ed pages of newspapers and at research groups around Washington.

But critics say Mr. Haqqani is a quick-change artist who cozies up to whoever is in power. Before he left Pakistan in 2002, after falling out with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, he had worked for both his country’s leading political figures — Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto — switching from one to the other with dispatch, depending on whose fortunes were rising.

Which reminds me of the funniest Holbrooke story I've ever heard. Seems that staunch Democrat Holbrooke was seen in Henry Kissinger's parlor up in NYC skulking and slinking about when Henry the K was John Connally's chief foreign policy honcho [and Connally was a "shoo-in" for the Republican nomination that Reagan finally won] and Kissinger was left to pursue his private sector goals while Richard, "a quick-change artist who cozies up to whoever is in power," had an unsuccessful attempt to switch parties go awry.

Holbrooke was still parking his motorcycle in the guest quarters of Averill Harriman in the '80s on N St., N.W. in Georgetown, perhaps servicing nympho Pamela while the old Crocodile, Stalin's nickname for the US Amb to the USSR during WWII, was dozing in senectitude in his sumptuous living quarters nearby. Pam was working a scam called "Democrats for the Eighties" while Ronald Reagan was winning over the hapless Carter. RH also had visitors Diane Sawyer and WSJ Editor Karen Elliot House tiptoeing over to Holbrooke's N Street pad to "strap their thighs around his engine." Among other groupies.... [I admit I'm jealous!]

But if Holbrooke can pull off a Paki rescue mission, he does deserve a great deal of kudos. His goal of becoming the second FSO [Larry Eagleburger was first] to attain the cabinet post of Sec'y of State might be attainable were Hillary to ever make it to the White House or something happen to Obama. Holbrooke has legions of enemies [myself the very least among them, dating back to a couple of lunches in Lyon France while I was Vice Consul under Peter Tarnoff & Holbrooke Moroccan Peace Corps chief in the midst of a messy marriage break-up].

My own half-dozen stays in Pakistan date to the eighties and the country is simply almost impossible to not rend itself asunder due to what are always called "fissiparous tendencies" in the jargon of diplomats. In other words, half the Pakis hate the other half, or various slices of the demographic pie are wanting to peel off into Iran [Benazir Bhutto's mother was Iranian and the Baluchis consider themselves Iranian rather than Pakis] or in the Punjab, get away from Sindhi influences like the PPP of Bhutto and Zardari. Singh's ardent opposition is as much Punjabi localism as anything else. Lahore is more part of India than many Moghul fort cities elsewhere.

And Pakistan's American allies, including Chris Dodd and John Kerry, both of whom voted with the Republicans for a huge arms increase to Pakistan in the '80s [re: Charlie Wilson's War], prodded by Denis Neal's donations to the Democratic Senate Campaign Cte,, will dutifully remain watching which way the wind blows, with their palms outward for more baksheesh.

Human Louse Rudd gets book reviewed in NYTimes

The NYT Sunday Book Review won't give bestsellers like O'Reilly and Mark Levin reviews even though they have been best sellers for weeks. Mark Rudd's effort is destined for the remainder bin, but gets a full-fledged summary in the zampolit broadsheet telling Upper West Side halfwits what to read. Here is a piece I wrote a while back about the former Columbia BS artist [I wonder who ghosted the book?]:

I had the dishonor of hosting one of the miscreants, a fellow named Mark Rudd, back in 1969 in my apartment in Ann Arbor, where he smoked all my ganga while dropping nuggets like "No fault on the left," and "Dare to cheat, Dare to win." Later, I went to Cornell at the invitation of Chip Marshall to organize for SDS & was there for two weeks before I realized that these dudes were total cons whose reason for inviting me was to get possession of my VW microbus. They wanted me to work in a factory in Syracuse while they cavorted around the state of New York. But I digress.
The Columbia protests were led by Mark Rudd, whose idea of a bon mot was "Up against the wall, motherf-----!" From Columbia's relationship to a Pentagon-affiliated think tank and its plan to build a gym on a city park, Rudd's compatriots concluded that the school was irredeemably militaristic and racist. They occupied university buildings and took a dean hostage before being cleared out (none too gently) by the cops.

Elsewhere, university officials gave in to their tormenters, most notoriously at Cornell a year later. When black students occupied a university building - ostentatiously arming themselves - and demanded that disciplinary action against three black students be dropped, the faculty initially stood its ground. When the students escalated their threats, the faculty reversed itself in a signal act of cowardice.

The parents against which the students rebelled - as represented by the college administrations - buckled. College presidents who were the finest flowering of post-World War II liberalism gave in to the radicalism, politicizing American higher education and trashing its standards. "The maturation of the student protest movement turned out to be part of the infantilization of the American intelligentsia," Kimball writes.

The freedoms fought for in the student revolt soon curdled into the opposite: free speech became speech codes; sexual liberation became the regime of sexual harassment; civil rights became quotas. Meanwhile, Mark Rudd and a fringe of the New Left spun off into the Weather Underground, which took the destructive spirit of the campus protests to its logical conclusion in a campaign of terrorist bombings. Jonah Goldberg reminds us in his book "Liberal Fascism" that the radical left committed roughly 250 attacks from September 1969 to May 1970.

The victims of academicide pile up year after year and matriculate bearing delusions indoctinated into their uncritical minds by spurious purveyors of academentia. But after the mayhem not reported by the compliant leftist electronic and print media, there was and remains a happy ending:
If the academics gave in, another segment of the parents resisted. They were the Nixon voters, reacting against the disorder and cultural radicalism with which liberalism became identified. Republicans held the White House for 28 of the next 40 years, and the alternative history of the 1960s is the rise of the right. Even now, with Barack Obama dogged by his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the Democratic Party's challenge is to free itself from the taint of 1968.

And while I dabbled in SDS, I also met Ayers and his beautiful consort Diana Oughton, who shortly thereafter immolated herself in a Greenwich Village basement making a bomb to attack Fort Dix across the Hudson. He was a dork-wad, she didn't deserve a wretch like him who now prospers purveying academicide nostrums to unsuspecting victims at UofIllinois Chicago. My friend Rashid Khalidi got me an Academic Associate Card at the University of Chicago, a respectable institution. But whether they are genuine humanists like Rashid or loathsome loo-zer parasites like Ayers, the left remains slouching toward Bethlehem.

Rudd and Ayers survive because the Left, though wrong throughout the twentieth century, does not have any principles except as cheap slogans such as "No Fault on the Left" and "Dare to Cheat, Dare to Win."

A gangsta culture for middle-class sissies.

"Moderate" Taliban

The NYT Op-Ed today has an interesting article on the Taliban in Afghanistan. It's hard nowadays to remember way back in the fifties and sixties when Afghanistan was developing in a rapid manner in modernizing the country, giving equal rights and education to women. Almost fifty years later, it seems like the country has moved five centuries backwards.

The Op-Ed piece by Hassina Sherjan notes Obama's fatuous search for "moderate" Taliban thusly:

shortly after Mr. Obama raised the subject of reconciliation, the Taliban rejected his proposal, stating there were no extremists or moderate groups within their ranks. On this point at least, the Taliban are right. Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, put it very clearly: “The Taliban were united under the leadership of Mullah Muhammad Omar. All the fighters follow and obey orders of one central command. The existence of moderates and extremist elements within the rank and file of Taliban is wishful thinking of the West and the Afghan government.”

What can be the purpose of talks with the Taliban? These men deprive women of their rights, throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, reject religious freedom and oppose constitutional democracy. They also threaten to kill any Afghans who have worked with Western militaries and nongovernmental groups or had other contact with foreigners.

Is it possible, as some have said, that the Taliban have mellowed since being toppled in 2001? Muhammad Ibrahim Hanafi, a top Taliban commander, answered that question in an interview in March with CNN: “Our law is still the same old law which was in place during our rule in Afghanistan.”

This attitude also holds true, mutatis mutandis, for neighboring Pakistan and Pres. Zardari's sad attempts to meet the Taliban halfway in the Swat Valley, which will simply be regarded as a sign of weakness and engender further pushes toward Islamabad. The Taliban know that if they keep pushing and using local terror tactics, the old New York bargaining mode of "what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable" will deliver more chunks of territory into their hands. Pattycake diplomacy will not work, and Richard Holbrooke may not be tough enough to get the Paki government to do the necessary.

The naive, childlike projection by Obama of his own good intentions onto the vicious, medieval mindset of the Taliban would be laughable, were it not so pitiful. These are the criminals who aided and abetted Osama bin Laden in his attacks on the WTC and Washington, DC, which the liberal intelligentsia are trying to erase from our national memory. The Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan & Pakistan find a western echo in Hamas in the Gaza Strip and their Shi'ite counterparts in Hezbollah and Iran are just as remorseless, relentless, and single-minded.

Ms. Sherfan raises her voice, but it is unlikely that the Upper West Side readership of the NYT will find her admonitions welcome. They are ostrich-like in avoiding any confrontation with evil and the wishful thinking of the liberal mindset simply does not operate in the Islamic World. Her final plea is heartfelt, but likely to be ignored:

The only “reconciliation” strategy that is going to work is one between the Kabul government and the Afghan people. The key is making changes at the community level. Many local mullahs and citizens who have tolerated the Taliban in the past are open to working with a government that can protect them and help them find livelihoods. The government and its allies can best weaken the insurgency by better protecting the population, organizing local citizens’ groups to cooperate on economic development, and hiring more people from every part of the country into the growing Afghan Army and police force.

This is the only way that the reconcilables will be separated from the irreconcilables. We need to understand where Afghanistan’s true moderates are to be found, and not look for them in leadership positions of one of the most repressive organizations on earth.

Ditto for the Taliban in Pakistan, and their Shi'ite counterparts in Iran.

Gallup Chief Notes Gore's AGW Hoax Sinking into the Ooze of Quicksand

Gallup Poll Editor Frank Newport notes the mega-hoax of Anthropogenic Global Warming is simply losing any credibility among the public:

Newport says that some 41 percent believe global warming claims are exaggerated, and "that's the highest we've seen." Ask people to name their biggest concerns, and just 1 percent to 2 percent cite the environment. "The environment doesn't show up at all," says Newport.

Although the Chicken Little Crowd will froth at their howling mouths, the fact is that despite a bunch of UN Political Commissars' attempt to impose ecological and environmental caps on HIGHLY ADVANCED WESTERN ECONOMIES to give the General Assembly and its sweltering hellhole denizens some sort of "comparative advantage," the political common sense residing in the sucker countries who would be fleeced in this gigantic con is far higher than the "beggar thy neighbor" jeolousies of retarded socialist entities like Nicaragua and Venezuela, who wouldn't be penalized for the silly sanctions imposed by the UN. Nor would the two largest polluters on the planet, China and India.

Now, the new SCOTUS nominee might support international law over US legalities on this issue, but she would still remain in the minority. And also, Richard Feynman's Cargo Cult Science will remain one of the wisest Nobel Prize winners' admonitions. And of course, so will Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," a book demonstrating that Victorian common sense is still stronger than fuzzy-wuzzy mumbo jumbo.

Jesuitical Thinking at its Worst

James Taranto points out the hypocrisy of a Boston College Theology Professor who criticizes a Harvard Law Professor being awarded a medal at Notre Dame. Mary Ann Glendon declined the honor because she would be on the podium with Obama, prompting morality-muddled moron Kenneth Himes, the chair of the BC theology dept., to declaim:

"There are some well-meaning people who think Notre Dame has given away its Catholic identity, because they have been caught up in the gamesmanship of American higher education, bringing in a star commencement speaker even if that means sacrificing their values, and that accounts for some of this," said the Rev. Kenneth Himes, chairman of theology department at Boston College. "But one also has to say that there is a political game going on here, and part of that is that you demonize the people who disagree with you, you question their integrity, you challenge their character, and you brand these people as moral poison. Some people have simply reduced Catholicism to the abortion issue, and, consequently, they have simply launched a crusade to bar anything from Catholic institutions that smacks of any sort of open conversation."

But there is another side to this forked-tongue Jesuitical thinker's mouth:

Nearly 100 faculty members at Boston College have signed a letter objecting to the college's decision to award Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice an honorary degree.
The letter entitled "Condoleezza Rice Does Not Deserve a Boston College Honorary Degree," was written by the Rev. Kenneth Himes. . . .
"On the levels of both moral principle and practical moral judgment, Secretary Rice's approach to international affairs is in fundamental conflict with Boston College's commitment to the values of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions and is inconsistent with the humanistic values that inspire the university's work," the letter said.

Looks like Rev. Himes flunked Moral Theology on his way to getting the dubious post of chairing the BC Theology Dept. Or maybe he's just a shallow, jesuitical thinker. And as a final fillip, the following sentence was in the AP article concerning the Condy Rice article:

The theology department said nearly 100 have signed it, but declined to release their names, The Boston Globe reported Wednesday.

Given Himes' transparent insincerity and lack of moral principle, should we take it on his word that "nearly 100 have signed it?"

Kowtowing Nets Carry Obama Live---Except for FOX!

ABC, CBS, & NBC [Pravda, Isvestia, & TASS for the Uninitiated] will predictably froth at the mouth as FOX not only becomes the top cable news network, but the top entertainment channel as well. Hilariously, FOX will carry a TV fiction show called "Lie to Me" while the other three carry a reality-show version of the same thing, a live Obama news conference.

My guess is that FOX will top the combined net audience just as FOXNews tops the combined audience of CNN & MSNBC.

Botox Smiling Pelosi Lying to America---Again.

"Liberal Amnesia" is what a polite WSJ columnist calls Nancy Pelosi's lies about her not being told about waterboarding when she was Ranking Minority Member of the House Intell Cte [putting a lying cretinette in that position defines Democratic perv politics] and one of four members of Congress given a briefing:

"For more than an hour," the Washington Post reported in 2007, "the bipartisan group . . . was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

"Among the techniques described," the story continued, "was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder."

Don't expect the dying dead-tree libtards to call the brain-defective and morally retarded Speaker on this issue, just as Harry Reid hasn't been reprimanded for saying two years ago, during a time of great moral hazard to our soldiers as the surge kicked in: "The surge has failed, the war is lost."

Now a hair-plug morally retarded carpetbagger in Pennsylvania is switching parties because he would fail to get the Republican nomination for Senate next year. At least one party in the US has some sense of accountability in choosing its members. As for Specter, good riddance to bad rubbish.

Gore's Sci-Fi Comedy Show to Congress

Cowardly Democrats refused to let Lord Monckton, a distinguished climate expert, testify for the Republicans on Capitol Hill Friday, after a surprise 'celebrity' witness by the Dems named Gore-bot.

Obviously, a learned climate expert like Monckton would make the D+ Science Student Albert the Bore look even sillier than he normally does. Instead, Newt Gingrich will do some grandstanding.

JournoListers Align to Support "Internet Neutrality" as Run-Up to "Fairness Doctrine"

Brad O'Leary will be on Glenn Beck Monday at 5PM to talk about the Obamaniacs' Plan, aided and abetted & supported by Obama's friend from Harvard Law named Julius Genachowsk, to impose Internet Neutrality, the launching pad for a Stealth Plan to impose the Fairness Doctrine, quick-like-a-bunny, before the Republicans can profit by the backlash of real Americans in 2010 and elect a GOP House & Senate. With Dem leadership vacuums like Pelosi & Reid, this is entirely possible, but in the interim, the Dems are going to ape Leftist Parties the world over---Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is the most recent example---and attempt to hamstring or even eliminate the opposition.

The takeover of the Dem Party by feverish apparatchiki and cadres such JournoList tyros & MSNBC sports-of-nature betokens a strong Putsch against the US Constitution's Checks and Balances carefully written into law by Madison, Jefferson, Adams and presided over by Washington to ensure that a band of desperadoes do not attempt a coup de pouce or "micro-coup d'etat" because of a temporary ascendancy due to MSM hysterics and BHO opaqueness.

We have elected a pig-in-a-poke POTUS and now must defend the Constitution from elected Fifth Columns in the House and Senate.

Stopping "net neutrality" hocus pocus is the first order of business in retaining the First Amendment rights the Left so dearly wants to deprive us of.

Noonan Nitwittery Continues

Bland Affluence is the title of Noonan's latest excursion outside her Golden Ghetto in mid-town Manhattan & the Upper West Side Fantasyland the NYT aims its delusional screeds. Noonan is more a West Sider than ever, and she projects a sort of White Noise silliness in explaining how "All shall be well" in T.S. Eliot tones.

Noonan is an anecdotal fabulist, not a rational analyst, and like the funhouse mirrors that appear to surround Manhattan when it gazes westward, her mind is bent, twisted into grotesque curlicues and downright AWOL whenever she ruminates outside the asphalt & concrete sidewalks of New York City.

Noonan actually romanticizes the Boomer Generation, a collection of sodholes whose entitlement frenzies have bankrupted the US fiscally and morally. These feckless pursuers of material wealth while pretending to be on a spiritual quest are unintentionally satirized by this fulsome rubbish:

The baby boomers who for 40 years, from 1968 through 2008, did the grunt work of the great abundance—work was always a long-haul trip for them, they were the first in the office in 1975 and are the last to leave the office to this day—know the era they built is over, that something new is beginning, something more subdued and altogether more mysterious. The old markers of success—money, status, power—will not quite apply as they have. They watch and work as the future emerges.

Yeah, after Stalin was denounced in 1956 by Khrushchev, "the era they built" began to fade and "something new" began, but not "something more subdued and altogether more mysterious."

Noonan of course has it all wrong. The Greatest Generation did the grunt work and giants like George Kennan and Angus Deming and McCloy and others strategized the PostWar resistance to tyranny. This airhead has forgotten that what the Boomers did from 1968 to today was undermine authority and seek compromises which her former boss, Ronald Wilson Reagan, indulged in only when they fit into his all-in poker game to win the entire pot. The Russians and leftist Democrats who use the USSR as a template for their cultural overthrow of Western Civilization like to play chess. They hate it when GWB changed the rules on them and used their Stalinist organs to suppress his name and blacken the reputation of the USA.

Noonan is oblivious and clueless about all this, and had to get a piece in by deadline, which she did. I'm going out today to buy Liberty and Tyranny, a book which isn't a waste of dead trees like Patriotic Grace.

J. Edgar Napolitano Sweeps Aside Constitution to Protect Big Govt

Don Surber has a great list of how to identify a DHS "right-wing radical:"

But the more indicators a person has, the more likely that person is a member of the VRWC.

1. Pays his or her taxes on time and in full.

2. Meets his or her mortgage payment each month on time and in full.

3. Displays the flag.

4. Respects the U.S. military.

5. Stands up when the “Star Spangled Banner” is played.

6. Considered John McCain to be a moderate.

7. Never had tofu.

8. Thinks the Constitution protects the people, and not the government.

9. Thinks the Constitution protects Americans, not foreigners who attack our soldiers.

10. Thinks gun ownership is guaranteed by the Constitution.

As a commenter from The American Conservative Party notes, the Alien & Sedition Acts tried to limit criticism of the government and the SCOTUS almost let the First Amendment get fried. Obama's mindless myrmidons in the vast Fed Govt may soon want to make us carry IDs and will forbid politics if it isn't within the narrow socialist guidelines set forth by the Won & Nancy/Harry's numbnut brigades.

The zampolit are close to closing down dialogue. Restrictions on Talk Radio & limitations on free speech [What is "hate speech?] are already growing.

Salon Buttboy Greenwald Biyotch-slapped by WSJ

Faux-News Blogger Greenwald is the Jewish gay counterpart to Gentile Goyish hysteric hyperventilator Excitable Andy in making hilariously silly "comparsions" and illiterate falsehoods about their political opponents. Now the Brazilian boy-toy Glenn G. is taking on Obama as well, as he loves to load both his GI-tract orifices with cannon fodder. Here is Taranto's compleat slamdown of a tedious moronic poseur with no cred & less honesty:

Salon's Glenn Greenwald is a shrill, tiresome and undisciplined writer, but every now and then he unwittingly provides some entertainment. In an interminable post faulting President Obama for failing to keep his campaign promises to terrorists, Greenwald offers the following observation:

One of the things I always found so striking about debates over Bush/Cheney executive power abuses was that Bush followers who admittedly had no substantive arguments to justify those actions would nonetheless still find reasons to defend their admired leader: Bush knows more than we do and probably has secret reasons for doing it. Bush is a good person and well-motivated and there's no reason to think he's doing bad or abusive things. Rights for Terrorists pale in comparsion [sic] to other more important issues. Republican critics of Bush are hysterics and paranoids who are only criticizing him because they want to get on TV and sell books.
As of January 20, 2009, one no longer finds those claims at National Review, Weekly Standard, right-wing blogs and the like . .

.
Although we have plenty of substantive arguments to justify our views, it gives us pleasure to stipulate the following for the record: Obama knows more than we do and probably has secret reasons for doing it. Obama is a good person and well-motivated and there's no reason to think he's doing bad or abusive things. Rights for terrorists pale in comparison to other more important issues. Democratic critics of Obama are hysterics and paranoids who are only criticizing him because they want to get on TV and sell books.

More people read the WSJ than Salon, and when you factor in the fact that the readers of WSJ can read, think, and spell clearly about ten to one for the Salon dilettantes, then you know Glenn G. has bricked himself into his own little death niche, ala The Cask of Amontillado.

Palmerston Was Right---Go For the Hornet's Nest

The Beeb isn't always a supporter of feckless UN incompetence. Failed-state Somalia is rapidly becoming an HQ for Al Qaeda networking through pirates, including a "semi-autonomous" region known as "Puntland" on the tip of the Horn of Africa. Somali "political" types appear to be in cahoots with the pirates, and the witless morons of international patty-cake diplomacy [AKA Germans] are sending captured pirates to Kenya, where corrupt "politicians" and "judges" will auction the creepy terrorists back to Somalia to the highest bidders, sparking more piratical seizures to pay off the Kenyan "legal" system, infested with bigamists and drunks like Obama's feckless father.

Stop Making Sense, Say Postmodern Morons like BHO & the Billy Jeff

Randall Hoven in The American Thinker has a wonderful diagnosis of a world "where Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi are in charge, and Libya gets the UN Chair of the Human Rights Commission."

In his elegant example employing clarity and logic, Hoven gives a very short course on why and how the lunatics took over the asylum, with loony-in-chief apologizing to the Euroscum about The Marshall Plan and America's victory in The Cold War.

A must-read, as Larry King would say. Although Larry wouldn't or couldn't possibly understand it.

Sunspots Say: Global Warming Hoax at Risk of being Trumped by New Ice Age

James Marusek has a good take on the highly suspect guilt of humanity on the global climate. Anthropogenic GW may go the way of the Edsel and other one-hit wonders.

GOP Elephants Never Forget: Ohio is key.

Karl Rove famously was kept out of the McCain Campaign. McCain himself was the MSM candidate for Republican. Once he was nominated, the NYT famously turned on him with the Iseman scandal and subsequent garbage from Darfur Keller and Pinch the Grinch.

The most salient polling statistic in the '08 election is one the JournoList zampolit MSM has suppressed completely. In the final polling in Ohio, Obama won 40,000 fewer votes in '08 than JOHN KERRY WON IN '04.

This means that a large number of Ohioans never voted Republican in '08 and stayed home because the silly RINO at the top of the Repub ticket was an Obama-lite.

Karl Rove was rejected by the senile moron at the top of the ticket because the MSM hated Karl and his successful courting of The Silent Majority, which still exists at a rate of 35% conservative to 20% libtard, among a dozen polls taken over the last decade.

In other words, in '08 the US was still a center-right country, though neither candidate was close to the center, with McCain center-left at his best and only correct on Iraq.

Mousetrapped, the GOP lost when Veep-Candidate Palin was pilloried from pillar to post unfairly---and still is by certified perv Excitable Andy. Her family is under an MSM microscope while Obama's relative is being exported from Boston under a media blackout.

The JournoList band of zampolitsya batter any defectors or laggards and spew lies endlessly about FoxNEWS & the WSJ.

The rest of the media is in the hands of Democrats while Harry Reid says that income taxes are "voluntary."

Spanish Court Claims Jurisdiction in GWB Foreign Policy?

After 9/11, only Spain has suffered a major terrorist attack, and unlike the USA, responded with abject submission to the terrorists by electing a compliant socialist government a few days later which virtually declared unconditional surrender to Islamic terrorists, which now use Spain as a jumping-off point for EU terrorism.

Read The Wall Street Journal article linked above for the tissue of lies, cowardice, and the kangaroo nature of Spain's court system.

It's one thing to cower before international terrorism. It's quite another to try to stymie attempts to counter the Islamic terrorist threat.

Biden's NYT Front Page Flopper and Back Pages Reality

The NYT used to be the newspaper of record, but Pinch Sulzberger is running the family legacy into bankruptcy. As a demonstration of the schizodementia that the "Gray Lady" has fallen into, check this para on Sunday's front page, above the fold:

Officials involved in the deliberations said Mr. Biden had been influential in Mr. Obama’s development of a new approach to Afghanistan, announced Friday, arguing for a relatively limited increase of military, diplomatic and economic involvement.

Then flash BACKWARD to Saturday, March 29th, for the reality behind the Potemkin Village the Sunday Times constructed around the Veep:

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. warned against getting into a political and military quagmire, while military advisers argued that the Afghanistan war effort could be imperiled without even more troops.....The commanders in the field wanted a firmer and long-term commitment of more combat troops beyond the 17,000 that Mr. Obama had already promised to send, and a pledge that billions of dollars would be found to significantly expand the number of Afghan security forces....Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pressed for an additional 4,000 troops to be sent to Afghanistan — but only to serve as trainers.....During the debate, the senior administration officials said, Mr. Biden sought to put strict parameters on the size of the additional force deployed to Afghanistan and to ensure there was a specific mission for them. Mr. Biden also cast the debate in terms of what was achievable in Mr. Obama’s first term, administration officials said. Mr. Biden, White House officials said, was heavily influenced by the trip he took to Afghanistan and Pakistan just before the inauguration in January. He observed to Mr. Obama that if you asked 10 people on the ground what American objectives were, he would get 10 different answers. That observation, aides said, carried weight with Mr. Obama and helped to lead to his decision to narrow the American goal in Afghanistan.

The result of all of this haute politique strategizing? Guess who was left with his foreign reputation after 30 years on the SenFornRelCte in apparent disregard?

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the president’s top aide on Afghanistan and Pakistan, favored wide-ranging coordinated efforts which would concentrate on corruption in Afghanistan as well as focus on training local officials and transforming agriculture in the country away from the notorious poppy fields that have been used to fuel the Taliban insurgency....

Of course, to anyone who understands foreign policy strategy making, it appears that Clinton/Holbrooke/Gates won with the broadest committment on the table being accepted by Obama. But of course, the NYT gets and gives the opposite conclusion:

That observation, aides said, carried weight with Mr. Obama and helped to lead to his decision to narrow the American goal in Afghanistan....

And this is proved by the fact that instead of the Veep, who would have stressed the limits, Obama:

is dispatching Admiral Mullen and Mr. Holbrooke to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India next week to explain his new strategy to leaders there.

The NYT knew its pablum-piece of puffery on Biden was going to be on the front page Sunday, so its Saturday edition had to obfuscate the defeat of Biden by the Clinton/Gates junta with sheer flimflammery and misleading BS.

I suppose going on with the NYT's extolling Biden in Sunday's pathetic puff-piece on Joe with his fight on drugs:

In public, Mr. Biden is by turns self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing. “Please sit down, I’m only the vice president,” he said, pooh-poohing a standing ovation before a recent ceremony in which he introduced the new White House drug czar. He then detailed his extensive background in drug prevention. “I wrote what used to be called the Biden Crime Bill back in the ’90s,” he said.

Almost simultaneously, his pathetic daughter was having a video of her snorting cocaine at a recent party [since this buffoon's Veep inauguration] shopped around to & attempting to be buried a la John Edwards' love trysts by the "respectable" media.

Ben Franklin said it best about specimens like Biden: "There's no fool like an old fool."
UPDATE Gateway Pundit confirms the degeneration, nay, devolution of the New York Times into a pretentious version of The National Inquirer, without the TNI's fearless disregard of the consequences of publishing the truth. The tabloid NYT spiked a story in October that demonstrated that the Obama compaign was operating in close coordination with ACORN, a RICO type gang of political racketeers. Now these nutjob gangsters are doing a rent-a-mob land office business using muscle mobbing homes with residents threatened with eviction. Obama seems oblivous of the rule of law, and his time as a "constitutional law professor" appears trumped by his agitprop clientele's hold on his political loyalty.

FLASH EXCLUSIVE: Biden's daughter is as stupid as her daddy!!

A picture is worth a thousand words. How much is a video from a hidden camera worth? Maybe Ashley was the person who informed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman who actually ran for POTUS that the Hezbollah has been thrown out of Lebanon!!

Or maybe his hairplugs have become ingrown around his frontal lobes? Gotta be a reason for being so stupid. Maybe genetic.

Duh!

Reason magazine has a stunning insight into the chasm, nay abyss, separating the two genders. The last line of the article is especially insightful.....

Copenhagen Climate Hoax Conclave Generates Steam

The UN plans to take over the world economy to counter a non-existent anthropogenic climate change. It's sunspots & normal variations, but the clowns in the scientific revisionist camp who erased 400-plus years of much-warmer-than-today Middle Age warm era are now planning to turn the world economy into a bureaucratic authoritarian mess like the EU or the UN itself.

Does Obama have his eyes open?

Are honest scientists going to respond with other than bleats?

James Hansen and crooks at Stanford dreamed up this scam in the late '80s and found a buffoon named Gore-bot to drone about it while Nobels from dumb Swedes moved it forward.

I hate it when that happens....

Summers Says Krugman "Doesn't Understand" Geithner Announcement

Larry Summers fires back at Krugman's misunderstandings of the Geithner WSJ article. Hilarious!

Is Obama Generation Jones? Or Triple X?

The Boomers were narcissistic look-at-me hippies, in the sense of the individual trumps all, even when idealism & joints were passed around and shared like stds.

As technologies multiplied and proliferated, we became sorcerer's apprentices trying to keep up with faster and faster messages from every direction. As Steve Stark puts it:

"Where the Boomers naively tried to change the system and the Xers in a sense walked away from the system, my generation used the system to get what we wanted," Pontell told a reporter. "It's like the Boomers never realized they were playing the game, the Xers folded their cards, and my generation was wise to the game but said deal the cards anyway."

Spinning it all positively, a post-Baby Boomer sees a problem or opening and solves it. That's certainly a trait one would want in a president right now and Obama demonstrated he had it by "audaciously" running for the presidency at such an early stage of his career.

Then there's this generation's love of technology and "the new," forged in Andrew Thompson's words "out of a lifetime of upgrading from Atari to Nintendo to Sega to Xbox." Thompson, who writes the blog Gen-X Rising (genxrising.com), wrote perceptively of his generation (and he considers the slightly older Obama a compatriot), "We . . . were shaped by rapid technological change smack-dab in the middle of our most formative years. And that molded the way we understand the world in which we live."

Gen X is, after all, the generation that created much of our modern tech world -- YouTube, Wikipedia, and Yahoo. It's not necessarily technology that "saves the world," à la visionary Boomer Steve Jobs, but practical stuff one can really use.

So far, so good. But what people have tended to forget are some of the critiques of the cultural leanings of Obama's generation.

Long ago, former New York Times columnist Russell Baker was one of the first to notice that a generation that grows up hooked on the latest technology tends to suffer from "herky-jerky brain" -- or what others might characterize as a generation-wide case of attention deficit disorder. In their book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe also describe how other generations often find the members of this generation "frenetic," "slippery," or rather empty -- driven more by ambition than anything else. Strauss and Howe relate how the drug of choice for some of the males of this generation has been steroids -- literally a physical manifestation of all the pumped-up hype with which they surround themselves.

Steroids, like the pumped-up Axelroid & Rahm-bo, have boosted and juiced these dudes into a higher state of self-righteous practicality. Here's more:

During the campaign, we heard all about the positive aspects of generational change. Are the negative ones now coming into focus? After all, the most well-known Gen-Xers who have preceded Obama onto the world stage were notorious for their uncanny powers of self-promotion that, in the end, represented style more than substance. There was Princess Di (born the same year as Obama) or even Michael Jordan (born two years later and, now that he no longer plays basketball, known mostly for his shoes).

Like his cohort, the president also can't live without his "toys" -- his Blackberry and his teleprompter. But is his generation's tech addiction part of the reason why he has such difficulty focusing on the one great economic problem facing the nation, choosing instead to push a 27-part agenda?

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The fear is that this brand new generation in charge will Twitter and text while America faces potential catastrophe. It would truly be ironic if we all ended up longing for the old, fractious days of messianic idealism, when the Boomers were still in charge and everyone had to hear about Woodstock again and again.

Back in my own hippie days, for a while I got involved with astrology. Among my readings, the importance of the planet Neptune as a generational landmark came up in my various sources, from famous astrologers who placed the blame on the French Revolution from the planet's position in Libra when the chief protaganists were born, and on its position in Scorpio for the massive change that Bonaparte's slaughter of an entire generation of birthdates with Neptune in Scorpio serves as an example. Of course, Neptune went into Libra, the sign of intelligence & empty-headed frivolity at once, in 1943 and moved into Scorpio in the late '50s. The country certainly experienced topsy-turvy revolution [in the double sense of the gerund "revolting"] during the Summer of Love and Altamont. Luckily, the country was spared great bloodshed, probably by Reagan & Nancy's friend Jean Dixon [whom FDR & others consulted in private because of her reputation]. Of course, I'm just joking, but I'll take astrology over Paul Krugman's economic theories and Cornel West's Weltanshauung every day of the week.

The Importance of Language: Terrorists, Dissidents, and Copy Editors

Five and Twenty Years Ago I remember how I mentioned Burma Days by George Orwell to Christopher Hitchens during a long boozy afternoon at the Iron Gate across from The Middle East Institute where I was "Resident Scholar" [I neither resided there nor was much of a scholar] and he suddenly launched into Orwell's paramount theme: the decline of language equals the decadence of politics. Hence, 1984's WAR is PEACE, etc., stood for the descent of 20th c. politics into agitprop sloganeering, etc. along with its other themes that socialists/communists of the time accurately saw as aimed at themselves.

The New York Times is the chief villain in what Hitchens sees accurately as the craven cowardice and slipshod sloppiness of the journalistic culture, which has rotted to the point where the White House Press Spokesboy can insult private citizens routinely without censure by the "organs" of the Obama White House, the NYT, WaPo, LAT & the three "networks."

Hitchens' entire mini-dissertation on the difference between Irish "overwhelmingly Catholic ... dissidents" & Iraqi "homegrown terrorists" ----effectively there is none and both are murderous terrorists endorsed by the Red Cross---is worth reading.

The term [dissident] describes only attitudes and not actions, and it is most famously associated with the intellectual opposition to Soviet totalitarianism. (Prior to that usage, it was principally applied to those religious people of conscience who refused allegiance to the established Catholic and Episcopalian churches, which ironically would perhaps qualify the word dissident as being "overwhelmingly Protestant.")

Plainly, something has been lost when such a historic term of honor and respect is loosely applied to homicidal thugs who shoot a Catholic policeman in the head and use pizza delivery workers as human shields. But in a media world where Bin Laden's murderous surrogates in Iraq can be given a homely moniker, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. As a novel about the Nazi era has recently reminded us, the Furies of antiquity were so much dreaded that they were sometimes apotropaically named "the Kindly Ones," or Eumenides. If you want a quick definition of euphemism, this would do: It consists of inventing nice terms for nasty things (perhaps to make them seem less nasty) and soft words for frightening things (perhaps to make them seem less scary). We should have learned by now that this form of dishonesty is also a form of cowardice, by which some of the enemy's work is done for him. We have seen through propaganda terms like collateral damage and ethnic cleansing. Let us not put up with homegrown for something vile and alien, or the abuse of the moral term dissident for something that is both cruel and coercive.

Yes, Christopher, the MSM is a collection of cowardly quislings who help the US's enemies without and within do their work, even when they are homocidal thugs.

You see, if homocidal thuggery were criticized by the media mavens, the media might become actual targets of said thugs, and wouldn't THAT be a shame!

Watchcats Don't Bark

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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, Kroft Plays Patty-Cake w/ BHO on 60 Minutes

Obama's frantic fumblings are beginning to swirl slowly in the porcelain pipeline to where his policies belong.

Four points between Strong Approval and Strong Disapproval.

Soon to be Updated......
UPDATENo one in the "media elites" has bothered to notice that the feckless Geithner was questioned on the bonuses on C-Span by a NY Democrat Congressman on March 3, 2009. Geithner therefore mousetrapped himself in a blatant lie when he claimed two weeks later that he hadn't heard of the bonuses until March 10th. Among the softballs tossed to BHO by Kroft, this hardball would have been appropriate, but was not one of Kroft's sycophantic patty-cake questions.

The sight of Nancy P leading a lynch mob to turn around bonuses APPROVED IN THE STIMULUS bill just a fortnight before [of course, no one in Congress actually even READ the bill in the 12-hours before the vote, let alone ran it through Committee, that would be judicious & prudent] was ridiculous and an exhibition of the usual pitchfork & torches stupidity that Demo-bots revert to in a lemming-like group-think panic [and a lot of RINOs also joined the stampede]. Neither Geithner nor Obama dared display a moment of sanity in the face of this generalized craven cowardice.

I don't think a line is going to form of candidates to be the next Deputy Treasury Sec'y until Geithner's real status is ascertained.

Kroft wouldn't have mentioned a silent "tsunami" surge of outrage that has a 32% STRONG disapproval of Obama in Rasmussen might stem from failing to veto Pelosi/Reid from their 9000 earmarks & bills passed without due diligence and then posturing mindlessly [which fits their mental endowments] to tax bonuses granted two weeks before.

OTOH, Obama's STRONG APPROVAL has dwindled to 36%, four points above his STRONG DISAPPROVAL poll ratings. These two markers will be reversed VERY SOON unless some deus ex machina appears out of nowhere.
UPDATE 2 The Economist has the goods on why Obama & Co. are now into the "permanent campaign" mode that Billy Jeff made the hallmark of his reign. Obama's Court Jester Gibbs is the preeminent extension, but Axelroid & Rahm-bo are the organs of the beast.

Barack's Gaffes and Biden's Bonehead Blunders

Barry Hussein-O since his election has been on a run to surpass the total of GWB's many silly blunders and Joe Biden still hasn't shot a hunting partner by mistake, but both are surpassingly silly in public very often, though bumping one's head in the Marine Helicopter isn't a baddie in my book.

But Joe "Hairplugs" Biden has demonstrated that he is just about the dumbest Veep in the history of the USA, or at least on a path to become a Guinness Record Holder for outrageously dumb statements in public. His so-called "foreign policy expertise" has evaporated in the public mind when he opined that Hezbollah has been kicked out of Lebanon, when in fact the terrorist maniacs are taking over the country with the help of Syrian through targeted assassinations of Christian & moderate politicians and newsies---something "Plugs" Biden evidently hasn't heard about while prowling about as "Chairman" of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before being elevated to V.P.

The Telegraph has a sum-up of the most outstanding [or outrageous] goofs by all candidates during the campaign, though the MSM curiously neglected to follow up the gaffes by Barry Hussein-O and his goofy sidekick in their "slobbering" sycophancy toward the Demo-bot candidates [as Bernie Goldberg's new book describes the US media's lack of journalism.]

Biden's asking "my good friend" to "stand up" while evidently unaware that said "good friend" was a paraplegic is probably his emblematic moment as a kompleat klown. But the many ridiculous statements this voluble airhead has already made promise to make him a permanent fixture in American political lore. The statement of FDR calming the American people in '29 on TV shows he is living his dream....and commenting on said dreams out loud.

Aliyev President For Life in Azerbaijan?

Ilham Aliyev continues the Aliyev family domination of Azerbaijan almost as long as the Daley Family has had an ascendancy in Chicago politics, and using some of the same means. I had the privilege of escorting the then-30 year-old Ilham around Chicago in 1994-5 and he was kind enough to give me his tickets to a Bulls game, then a scarce or expensive commodity. His father Geidar was once an outside contender to succeed Brezhnev as head of the USSR, but it would have been difficult to see a Muslim, let alone another Caucasus native---like the Georgian Stalin---in the Kremlin calling the shots. I met the father Geidar in the Waldorf Astoria and he seemed younger than his ancient age, so my guess is that Ilham will be atop Azeri politics, barring assassination, for a long time to come.

It is important to remember that the Azeris are at war with Armenia, which has close ties with both Russia and Iran. The Azeris and their pipeline west through Georgia are an independent energy outlet to the West, outside the control of Vlad The Empoisoner Putin, who reportedly has Stalin's personal library lining the walls of his Kremlin office and frequently shows visitors the annotations Uncle Joe made in many books dealing with foreign policy.

Just in case you were wondering about lil Vlad's long-term foreign policy strategy.

UPDATE Here is a photo of said Putin purportedly posing as a tourist in Kremlin Square while Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev go out for a photo-op in the late '80s. One Russian "expert" says that Putin was busy in Dresden ruling the captive East Germans at the time, and the fellow in the photo looks suspiciously tall for the tiny 5'5" Ueberdwarf Vlad.

Leftist Listserv Cabal Revealed

Afghanistan suddenly is front and center and I'll bet the treasonous lizards at JournoList are concocting a variety of approaches to making their sudden crusade against the war right on this community blog.

Years ago, I stumbled somehow onto Bob Herbert's feeble-minded "private" listserv of double-digit IQ members of his inner posse. I didn't know how it appeared and kept it online until somehow it exited my computor. The paucity and feebleness of leftist "ideas" certainly make it necessary for these agitpreppies to band together to lessen the natural impediment of a dishonest and creepy agenda.

So Hillary was right about the VRWC, except for, as usual, the side that the conspiracy takes. It's a Vast LEFT wing conspiracy, otherwise the SecState was correct!

Afghanistan Becomes "Another Vietnam" Overnite

The Wall Street Journal notes that the political commissars are now carrying out a "corrective movement" in the Rahm-bo/Axelroid Party Line emanating from lil Emanuel's OC den just west of the Oval Office. Leslie Gelb began the rollout of the latest of a long line of betrayals the ultra-left has generated against the U.S. military and the American people in an Op-Ed piece in the NYT the other day on Friday the 13th felicitously titled "How to Leave Afghanistan. ["In the Lurch"] is understood by anyone familiar with this writer, whose name in its language of origin is appropriately "yellow." Decades of treasonous behavior have eaten his spine away. But why the sudden volte face?

What are the circumstances that define Afghanistan today? Yes, the Taliban is "resurgent," but mainly in the sense that militarily it is marginally more effective now than four years ago. Yes, much of the countryside is unsafe, but the cities, for the most part, are not unsafe.

Corruption is rampant and President Hamid Karzai is feckless, but he is legitimate and Afghanistan has seen far worse. The system of electing representatives and appointing governors is dysfunctional, but at least there's a system. NATO was much too slow in training and equipping the Afghan army and police, but now they are being trained and equipped. The poppy trade is flourishing and provides the Taliban leadership with considerable income, but they are as unpopular as ever.

And so on. The real heart of our Afghan problem lies in our expectations of what this primitive and riven country is ever likely to become. The achievement of the past seven years lies mainly in what Afghanistan has not become: To wit, a safe haven for some of the worst people on earth.

But Obama is tarred with trashing the Surge only to see it end in a resounding success, which even ABC Evening News trumpeted Monday night in a long piece by Terry McCarthy, an actual responsible member of the MSM. So now this perennially wrong young man who has wriggled out of relationships with traitors like Bill Ayers and who was against the Surge, is now going to re-rat and turn against Afghanistan? I don't think so.

So this is the traitor wing of the Demo-bot Party, again demonstrating that history repeats itself when it comes to cowardice:

Which brings us back to the left. Much will never go right in Afghanistan, but that doesn't mean things couldn't be a lot worse. For instance, Joe Biden can continue to trash Hamid Karzai, as Jack Kennedy trashed Ngo Dinh Diem. Or we could pursue a talk-and-fight approach to the Taliban, as Lyndon Johnson did with North Vietnam. Or the antiwar movement of the present could give encouragement to our enemies in the Middle East that they can bleed America into withdrawal, as a previous generation of peace activists encouraged Ho Chi Minh.

In that case, Afghanistan really will turn out to be another Vietnam and the prophesies of the left will be (self-) fulfilled. The sequel to this movie, by the way, is called "The Killing Fields."

Which the academicide wing of the Demo-bots will rewrite as "How Green Was My Valley" in the revisionist version.

Camille gives Rahm-bo and Axelroids a Beatdown

Camille Paglia sums up the entire Rush fracas very well indeed:

The orchestrated attack on radio host Rush Limbaugh, which has made the White House look like an oafish bunch of drunken frat boys...... Has the administration gone mad? This entire fracas was set off by the president himself, who lowered his office by targeting a private citizen by name. Limbaugh had every right to counterattack, which he did with gusto. Why have so many Democrats abandoned the hallowed principle of free speech? Limbaugh, like our own liberal culture hero Lenny Bruce, is a professional commentator who can be as rude and crude as he wants.

But leftists who wish to turn the USA into a bureaucratic authoritarian rule by petty functionaries, as the EU is devolving into, really cannot abide opposition, and as many people believe, this attack on the only media [talk radio] that dares to oppose their socialist agenda aims to quash talk radio and effectively monopolize the "marketplace of ideas" for Democrat ideological cant and empty posturing. Camille is not satisfied with defending Rush, but takes an oblique swipe at the recently re-fat Oprah:

Rush isn't responsible for the feebleness of Republican voices or the thinness of Republican ideas. Only ignoramuses believe that Rush speaks for the Republican Party. On the contrary, Rush as a proponent of heartland conservatism has waged open warfare with the Washington party establishment for years. And I'm sick of people impugning Rush's wealth and lifestyle, which is no different from that of another virtuoso broadcaster who hit it big -- Oprah Winfrey. Rush Limbaugh is an embodiment of the American dream: He slowly rose from obscurity to fame on the basis of his own talent and grit. Every penny Rush has earned was the result of his rapport with a vast audience who felt shut out and silenced by the liberal monopoly of major media. As a Democrat and Obama supporter, I certainly do not agree with everything Rush says or does. I was deeply upset, for example, by the sneering tone both Rush and Sean Hannity took on Inauguration Day, when partisan politics should have been set aside for a unifying celebration of American government and history. Nevertheless, I respect Rush for his independence of thought and his always provocative news analysis. He doesn't run with the elite -- he goes his own way.

The butterball queen may banish Camille from the precincts of Harpo Prod. forever for that remark. But Camille doesn't mention Chicago-style politics when she rakes over Rahm-bo and Axelroids:

President Obama should yank the reins and get his staff's noses out of slash-and-burn petty politics. His own dignity and prestige are on the line. If he wants a second term, he needs to project a calmer perspective about the eternal reality of vociferous opposition, which is built into our democratic system. Right now, the White House is starting to look like Raphael's scathing portrait of a pampered, passive Pope Leo X and his materialistic cardinals -- one of the first examples of an artist sending a secret, sardonic message to posterity. Do those shifty, beady-eyed guys needing a shave remind you of anyone? Yes, it's bare-knuckles Chicago pugilism, transplanted to Washington. The charitably well-meaning but hopelessly extravagant Leo X, by the way, managed to mishandle the birth of the Protestant Reformation, which permanently split Christianity.

Thanks, Perfess'r Paglia, for the reference, though I don't think Obama has the heft to cause a permanent break in the party system's built-in duality stateside like the schism that split the Catholic Church in the 16th century.

SCOTUS must decide if it is "Voice of God"

Slate has a good article on the corrupt West Virginia Chief Justice Brent Benjamin, a morbidly obese buffoon elected by s $3 million contribution from a corrupt coal magnate to turn around a case judging whether said corrupt magnate stole a competitor's coal company. Bloated hippo Benjamin refuses to recuse himself and nattering megalomaniac Scalia sees no problem with that, while the rest of the SCOTUS must decide on whether the widespread [and correct] public perception of a judiciary run wild and amok could eventually lead to a constitutional crisis.

Remember when Nancy [9000 earmarks] Pelosi said that SCOTUS was "the voice of God" [back when Democrats controlled it with Sandra Day O'Connor playing Hera]? Looks like the Roberts Court will be in the crosshairs of the corrupt MSM until Obama appoints a Dem to offset the current 5-4 tenuous Repub majority [though that can wobble given Kennedy's predilection to do his Danish prince imitation].

Why the NYT is Morally [and fiscally] Bankrupt, Example # 101

James Taranto administers another drubbing to the national joke now in deeeeeeep fiscal kimchee as another ridiculous example of "what's sauce for the [Repub] goose is NOT sauce for the Democrat gander" blots its editorial page. Here is Taranto's take:

Four years ago, when Republicans had a majority in the Senate and Democrats were using filibusters to block votes on President Bush's judicial nominees, the editorialists at the New York Times were aghast at the threat to "a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod." They also faulted the GOP for hypocrisy, since during the Clinton administration Republican senators had filibustered some presidential nominees (though not for the bench).

Now the Democrats are in the same position as the Republicans then: They hold the White House and a Senate majority shy of 60 votes. Predictably enough, the New York Times is now aghast that the Republicans may use a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod:

Republican senators have fired off an intemperate letter threatening--you got it--filibusters if Mr. Obama's nominees are not to their liking. Mr. Obama should not let the Republicans' saber-rattling interfere with how he chooses judges.

Arguments about procedure are often made cynically, and there are times when that is appropriate: The job of a lawyer in court, for instance, is to further the interests of his client; it is up to the judge to safeguard the integrity of the court's procedures. One could argue that the Times, as an advocate for liberal ideology, is not obliged to be overly concerned with procedure.

But imagine if a lawyer asked a judge to show favoritism toward his client in procedural rulings "because, your honor, my client is just right." Any competent judge would laugh at such a silly argument. Yet that is exactly the approach the Times takes here:

A filibuster can be an appropriate response when it is clear that a particular nominee would be a dangerous addition to the bench.

So a filibuster is fine to block a judge the Times doesn't like, but outrageous to block one it does like. There is nothing more to this argument than that the ends justify the means--in which case why bother making an obviously phony argument about the means?

The NYT is easily aghast, due to the feminized metrosexual Pinch's hysterical partisanship that is eroding the family heirloom's value down to a level that promises mortality in the next decade or so.

As Voltaire said of a more religious papacy a couple or centuries or so ago: "Ecrasez l'infame!" Crazy Pinch and his archdeacons of secular orthodoxy must go----and soon!

Foreign Ministry Putin Pal Says USA on Brink of Dissolution

Igor Panarin could be classified as just another ultra-left America-bashing delusional dude, but he more or less represents the so-called "thinking" of poisoner Vlad Putin, tiny 5'5" Prime Minister of all the Russias when he says that the USA is in imminent peril of dissolving into [at least] six rump states by 2010 [the clock is ticking!]!

Whether or not Igor has a hunchback, his mind is certainly out of synch with mainstream thinking, and he is a frequent talking head on Russian TV, now controlled by Putin, and has a job as a dean at Russia's Foreign Ministry School, akin to the US Foreign Service Institute, where I spent many a long day studying languages, consular and economic activities, etc. Evidently, the politicization of the Russian School reflects Putin's daydreams, as he works surrounded by Stalin's library, which he is said to consult frequently to check on the former Dear Leader Sr.'s annotations and other scribblings next to Karl Marx's Torah and Babylonian Talmud [Marx was the son of a rabbi, and the progeny of seven rabbis. He married well & spent most of his time in the British Library when he wasn't writing for the New York Herald Tribune, the only job he ever had.]

One of Panarin's students asked him whether Russia itself would collapse. In the apodictic way of Communist political commissars, Igor replied "The collapse of Russia will not occur."

Glad we got that sorted out.

UPDATE Almost forgot! Panarin says that Alaska will soon "revert" to Russian control in some unspecified fashion. Vlad's got it all figured out and his sock puppet Igor will continue to explicate. I for one just can't wait for the next chapter and verse.

Taranto and BDS/Iraq War hatred & Limbaugh's CPAC speech

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has a very nice piece on the usual liberal hypocrisy: it's alright for libtards to want the US to fail in Iraq [which was called "treason" until recently], but it's not alright for Rush Limbaugh to hope that Barry Hussein-O's economic policies fall on their face. [That used to be called "poiltics," but now the libtards are calling it "treason."]

Where is Harry Reid to explain why "the war is lost," just before we won the war. Now Reid claims the economy will succeed under the ultra-left socialist claptrap he and fellow libtard Pelosi are pushing. Bet his accuracy rate will continue at 0%.

UN Resolution to Criminalize anti-Islamic Speech

Christopher Hitchens has another article on the creeping Islamization that the UN is attempting to inflict on guilt-ridden soporific advanced societies under the guise of criminalizing anything the wack-job General Assembly thinks is criminal.

Sadly, Susan Rice might not be predisposed to regard this utter nonsense in the resolution [non-binding] as the edge of the wedge of much more mischief. As an indication of the "thinking" behind this resolution, 9/11 is regarded as "tragic" while the gist of the resolution is to "criminalize" bad press generated by honor killings, Shi'ite/Sunni intersectarian violence, Muslim terrorism, etc. Hitchens has a hilarious example of the brazen hypocrisy of this badly-written heap of happy horsesh*t:

Underlining the importance of increasing contacts at all levels in order to deepen dialogue and reinforce understanding among different cultures, religions, beliefs and civilizations, and welcoming in this regard the Declaration and Programme of Action adopted by the Ministerial Meeting on Human Rights and Cultural Diversity of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, held in Tehran on 3 and 4 September 2007.

which Hitchens was not allowed to get a visa to attend! All in the name of Human Rights and Cultural Diversity, of course.

Read the whole thing, not up to Hitchens' usual standards because he has to quote more drivel like the leaden lumps of illogical logorrhea [sorry!] above!

Snowstorm Hinders Global Warming Hoax Devotees

George W. Bush, as in so many other matters, was too gutless and feckless to fire this NASA Chief Climate Moron. Or maybe GWB was a one-trick pony, good at the Surge in his last year in office but shell-shocked into inert impotent incompetence everywhere else in his dying administration.
Hansen...has likened coal-fired power plants to "factories of death" and claims he was muzzled by the Bush administration when he warned of drastic climate changes. Behold the moron in full hue and cry:

"What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet. The only practical way to solve the problem is to phase out the biggest source of carbon — and that's coal."

Of course, the USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal and new methane [coal-bed methane] and other natural gas extraction techniques have eliminated pollution from the hysterical cartoon the clueless mad scientist who should have been fired [there is no evidence of muzzling for this wacko to make such charges] makes to a gullible crowd of Leftist Luddites who would love us to revert to some classless society not based on capitalism. Henry Waxman, the Pinocchio nose in charge of energy in the House, thanks to a palace coup supported by the equally stupid Piglosi, is sure to support Hansen in his fraudulent quest to ruin the American economy.

"Oh my goodness," one of Hansen's former supervisors, Dr. John Theon, told FOXNews.com when informed of the video. "I'm not surprised ... The fact that Jim Hansen has gone off the deep end here is sad because he's a good fellow."

Theon, a former senior NASA atmospheric scientist, rebuked Hansen last month in a letter to the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, saying Hansen had violated NASA's official position on climate forecasting without sufficient evidence and embarrassed the agency by airing his claims before Congress in 1988.

"Why he has not been fired I do not understand," Theon said. "As a civil servant, you can't participate in calling for a public demonstration. You may be able to participate as a private citizen, but when you go on the Internet and call for people to break the law, that's a problem."

Tut tut and oh my goodness indeed.... Tsk, tsk, as the Hatch Act lawyers claim that Hansen can't be fired. Interesting that the quaint value system of Dr. Theon judges Hansen to be a "good fellow" even though he is disruptive and possibly criminally insane. In any event, Hansen fits Richard Feynman's definition of Cargo Cult Science concerning "theories that don't work and science that isn't science." Of course, when Hansen's theories don't work, he just switches the facts, including eliminating the Middle Age Warming period in order to create a "hockey stick graph" which overlooks four hundred years of climate much warmer in Europe than the continent is currently experiencing. Small matter for frauds like Hansen and impostors like Al Gore:

...Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., urged Hansen to rethink his plans.

"If he wants to have a demonstration concerning global warming, coming to the Capitol is not a right choice," Rohrabacher told FOXNews.com. "The bottom line is if Hansen wants to protest global warming, he should go to the National Cathedral and take it up with God rather than going to Capitol Hill."

Rohrabacher, a member of the House's Committee on Science and Technology, called on Hansen to "step out" of his role.

"He obviously doesn't feel comfortable with the restraints that come with being a scientist rather than a political activist," Rohrabacher said. "Most of us have always thought he has been hiding behind a scientific facade, and really, he was a political activist all along."

Chris Horner, author of "Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed," also denounced Hansen's latest call to arms against climate change.

"He's providing ample cause to question his employment on the taxpayer dime," Horner told FOXNews.com. "He's clearly abused his platform provided to him by the taxpayer, principally by the way he's been exposed of manipulating and revising data with the strange coincidence of him always found on the side of exaggerating the warming."

Horner claimed that Hansen doctored temperature data on two occasions in 2001 and once in 2007 in attempts to show an impending climate catastrophe.

"He's creating an upward slope that really wasn't there," Horner said. "At some point you have to say these aren't mistakes."

Perhaps leading a march advocating Global Warming in the midst of a snowstorm might provide a clue even clueless Luddites might understand.

But they are pretty think and on second thought, the deep enders and round the benders have no cognitive or rational powers worthy of the name. Waxboy and Barry Hussein-O included.

Alexander Hamilton: Our Greatest Forefather

George Washington was obviously the Father of The Country and in my mind, greater even than Abraham Lincoln. It is a travesty that until recently, historians had rated the charming impostor and chameleon-on-plaid fourflusher FDR as above Washington on the greatest presidents' list.

I am reading at the moment the incredible biography Ron Chernow has penned on Hamilton, and am now convinced that he exceeded John Adams and certainly Thomas Jefferson, that skulker [during the early Revolution when he fled Richmond and hid at Monticello] and lifelong slaver who sold his slaves, unlike Washington who gave them manumission in his will. His second term is worse than GWB's second term, and his embargo was aptly described as "a man cutting his own throat to stop his nosebleed." But the relentless dilettante Jefferson lucked out with the Louisiana Purchase and so resembles most moral lepers like liberal Democrats that he got his own monument on the mall [from fellow horrific second-term POTUS FDR no less]. Madison managed to get the White House and DC incinerated with his feckless policies and Andrew Jackson shredded the Constitution and committed genocide, only to become a hero to the Dems along with slaver Jefferson. This article is about The Grange, now taken over by The National Park Service, which Magnet ends thusly:

As a result, his villa—the only house he ever owned—got moved not once but twice. In 1889, as his country landscape became urban, a developer bought part of his 35 acres to build row houses, and offered Hamilton Grange, as the house was called, to anyone who would move it. An Episcopal church rolled it two blocks from its original site at 143rd Street and Convent Avenue down to 141st Street, to use as a rectory, wedging the house in sideways to fit the space, moving the front door to the side, and shearing off the verandas. And now, moved again to a site where its porches can be restored, its front door put back, it still stands on Hamilton’s land, next to City College, where another generation of ambitious immigrants prepares itself to plunge into Hamilton’s opportunity America.

The National Parks Service, the house’s owner, is gradually restoring it. Already the architects have scraped away dozens of layers of paint to discover the original pale yellow of the drawing-room walls, and they’ve discovered, by taking down plaster, that early descriptions of the room, with three mirrored doors echoing the tall bow window at the room’s other end and reflecting its view, are correct. They’ve even found the doors.

I’m hoping they’ll find the original furniture: the piano that Angelica Hamilton used to play, I know, is stored in a warehouse somewhere. But most of all, I hope Hamilton’s silver ice bucket turns up.

It arrived at his door when the scandal over the Maria Reynolds affair was at its height and he badly needed some support. In the box, he found this note: “Not for any intrinsic value the thing possesses, but as a token of my sincere regards and friendship for you and as a rememberance of me; I pray you to accept a Wine cooler for four bottles. . . . It is one of four I imported in the early part of my late administration of the Government; two only of which were ever used. I pray you to present my best wishes, in which Mrs. Washington joins me, to Mrs. Hamilton & the family; and that you would be persuaded, that with every sentiment of the highest regard, I remain your sincere friend and affectionate Hble. Servant. Go: Washington.”

The sad story of Hamilton's untimely demise at the hands of a cur named Aaron Burr, hero-worshipped by another cur named Vidal, is sad beyond retelling. But Hamilton's numerous acts of outstanding heroism are matched only in reverse by the cowardly cur Burr, who skulked off to save his mangy hide during the War of Independence.

Every time I visit New York City, I walk by his grave close to the sidewalk next to Trinity Church. I pull out a $10 bill and say a prayer for brave little Alex, who built the modern America we are still fighting to save from the modern Jeffersons and Burrs who afflict it at the moment.

Thomas Fleming on GWB & "Worst" Presidents

Semi-literate "historians" like Brinkley and Dallek are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the DNC. See what a truly great historian has to say about other presidents, including the "chameleon on plaid" and the ineffable J.E.C.:

Is Mr. Bush worse than Roosevelt in his second term? Re-elected by a massive majority, FDR wanted to pack the Supreme Court with Democrats. Congress, dominated by members of his own party, wasted a year wrangling over the bill and ultimately rejected it. Meanwhile, FDR's intemperate remarks about greedy businessmen wrecked confidence and triggered a semireplay of the Great Depression in 1937. The Republicans made massive gains in the 1938 midterm elections. FDR was rescued from an exit even more humiliating than Jefferson's by World War II, which he used as an excuse to run for a third term.

Worse than Jimmy Carter, the self- proclaimed Washington "outsider" who presided over the most horrendous stagflation in our history? As his poll numbers sank, Mr. Carter had the temerity to lecture citizens on their "crisis of spirit." His approval rating had plummeted to 22% when Ronald Reagan defeated him. Let us skip Bill Clinton. He and Bush are too contiguous; proximity makes comparisons inevitably rancorous.

Fleming does go on to give the positive achievements of many of the presidents including FDR:

FDR's masterful confrontation with the fear created by the Great Depression made his first term an unforgettable achievement.

But the busted-flush peanut farmer will remain for most Americans who lived through his horrendous mismanagement of EVERY aspect of governance down there with Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren B. Harding.