Obama Value Meal: You order a couple of burgers & fries & drinks---The guy behind you pays for it!

Michael Barone expands a bit on the Conan O'Brien joke in the headline:

What is there to say about Barack Obama's speech to Congress Thursday night and the so-called American Jobs Act he said Congress must pass? Several thoughts occur, all starting with P.

Projection. That's psychologist-speak term for projecting your own faults on others. "This isn't political grandstanding," Obama told members of Congress, as Republicans snickered (but thankfully resisted the temptation to shout, "You lie!"). "This isn't class warfare."

These sentences came four paragraphs after Obama insisted that "the most affluent citizens and corporations" should pay more taxes (which spurs job creation how?) and not long before he promised to "take that message to every corner of the country."

Lest there be any doubt about Obama's real intentions, consider that his speech was obviously modeled on Harry Truman's call for a special session of the Republican Congress in the summer of 1948 so he could campaign against it. And consider that Obama pointedly refused to rebuke Jim Hoffa's "let's take these sons of bitches out" -- meaning Republicans -- when he introduced him last Monday in Detroit.

Pragmatism. Perceptive writers like David Brooks of the New York Times told us in 2008 that Obama was basically a pragmatist, a slave to no ideology but simply a student of what works. Brooks was apparently impressed by Obama's mention of Edmund Burke and the sharp crease in his pants.

But a pragmatist would probably not choose to call for more of the policies that plainly haven't worked. Infrastructure spending (shovel ready, anyone?), subsidies of teachers' salaries, fixing roofs and windows on schools: These were all in the 2009 stimulus package, which has led to the stagnant economy we have today.

A pragmatist doesn't keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn't open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what's wrong.

Paid for. "Everything in this bill," Obama said in his eighth paragraph, "will be paid for. Everything."

By whom? Well, in the 24th paragraph he tells us that he is asking the 12-member supercommittee Congress set up under the debt ceiling bill to add another $450,000,000,000 or so to the $1,500,000,000,000 in savings it is charged to come up with. The roving camera showed the ordinarily hardy supercommittee member Sen. Jon Kyl looking queasy.

Obama is like the guy in the bar who says, "I'll stand drinks for everyone in the house," and then adds, "Those guys over there are going to pay for them."

What's fascinating here is that once again the supposedly pragmatic and sometimes professorial president is not making use of the first class professionals in the Office of Management and Budget to come up with specifics, but is leaving that to members of Congress, maybe in a midnight marathon session with deadlines pending. Same as on the stimulus package and Obamacare.

Pathetic promises. Perhaps he hoped people wouldn't notice, but Obama did put in two words -- "faster trains" -- as a plug for his pet project of high-speed rail. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum calls California's HSR project, the largest in the nation, "a fantastic boondoggle," likely to cost three or four times estimates and with ridership estimates that are "fantasies." "We have way better uses for this dough," Drum concludes.

Political payoffs. Nearly one-quarter of this latest stimulus package -- sorry, American Jobs Act -- is aid to state and local government, to keep teachers and other public employee union members on the job and paying dues to the unions. Altogether unions gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. Pretty good return on their "investment," eh?

Pettifoggery. Obama impressed many conservative writers in 2008 with his ability to state their positions in fair terms -- which led some to think that surely he must agree with them. But he seems to have lost this knack.

Conservatives, according to this speech, want to "wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades" and "simply cut most government spending and eliminate most government regulations."

"Most" means more than 50 percent. Does the White House have documentation for the claim that Republicans want to cut government spending by more than 50 percent? And what "basic protections" do they want to "wipe out"?

Obama seemed like an unhappy warrior Thursday night, still unreconciled to the results of the 2010 elections, "seeming desperate and condescending at the same time," in the words of maverick liberal blogger Mickey Kaus. That darn garage door just won't open!

Mark Steyn on The Post-Postmodern 9/11 Contextualization Frenzy

Mark was born in Belgium and that alone explains how he understands a post-postmodern mentality. In the Nati0onal Review, he shows how living in Australia, then Canada, and finally New Hampshire has given him the most "diverse" POV possible. The whole article is rife with the insanity promulgated by NPR, PBS, "artistes" and bien-pensant victims of their own chronic serial brainfarts. Here is a small sample, but read the entire piece entitled "Let's Roll Over":

We retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation of 9/11.

Waiting to be interviewed on the radio the other day, I found myself on hold listening to a public-service message exhorting listeners to go to 911day.org and tell their fellow citizens how they would be observing the tenth anniversary of the, ah, “tragic events.” There followed a sound bite of a lady explaining that she would be paying tribute by going and cleaning up an area of the beach.

Great! Who could object to that? Anything else? Well, another lady pledged that she “will continue to discuss anti-bullying tactics with my grandson.”

Marvelous. Because studies show that many middle-school bullies graduate to hijacking passenger jets and flying them into tall buildings?
Whoa, ease up on the old judgmentalism there, pal. In New Jersey, many of whose residents were among the dead, middle-schoolers will mark the anniversary with a special 9/11 curriculum that will “analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history.” And, if the “9/11 Peace Story Quilt” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art teaches us anything, it’s that the “tragic events” only underline the “importance of respect.” And “understanding.” As one of the quilt panels puts it:

You should never feel left out

You are a piece of a puzzle

And without you

The whole picture can’t be seen

.

And if that message of “healing and unity” doesn’t sum up what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, what does? A painting of a plane flying into a building? A sculpture of bodies falling from a skyscraper? Oh, don’t be so drearily literal. “It is still too soon,” says Midori Yashimoto, director of the New Jersey City University Visual Arts Gallery, whose exhibition “Afterwards & Forward” is intended to “promote dialogue, deeper reflection, meditation, and contextualization.” So, instead of planes and skyscrapers, it has Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” on which you can hang little tags with your ideas for world peace.

Mark sets us up for a condemnation of the nanny or is it ninny who masquerades in a transvestite mode as Mayor of NYC. The egregious Bloomberg has made the ultimate fool of himself, though you won't know that by listening to girly-men like Fareed Zakaria and even that doughty isolationist Pat Buchanan, who really don't know what IS missing from the ten-year anniversary:

What’s missing from these commemorations?
Firemen?

Oh, please. There are some pieces of the puzzle we have to leave out. As Mayor Bloomberg’s office has patiently explained, there’s “not enough room” at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen. “Which is kind of weird,” wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, “since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space ten years ago.” On a day when all the fancypants money-no-object federal acronyms comprehensively failed — CIA, FBI, FAA, INS — the only bit of government that worked was the low-level unglamorous municipal government represented by the Fire Department of New York. When they arrived at the World Trade Center the air was thick with falling bodies — ordinary men and women trapped on high floors above where the planes had hit, who chose to spend their last seconds in one last gulp of open air rather than die in an inferno of jet fuel. Far “too soon” for any of that at New Jersey City University, but perhaps you could reenact the moment by filling out a peace tag for Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree” and then letting it flutter to the ground.

Upon arrival at the foot of the towers, two firemen were hit by falling bodies. “There is no other way to put it,” one of their colleagues explained. “They exploded.”

Any room for that on the Metropolitan Museum’s “Peace Quilt”? Sadly not. We’re all out of squares.

What else is missing from these commemorations?

“Let’s Roll”?

This quote is from a Mr. Beamer who led the charge to the cockpit of Flight 93 to prevent the aircraft from crashing into either the US Capitol Bldg or the White House, and demonstrated that America still has REAL MALE GONADS among the sissified old biddies teaching their grandchildren anti-bullying happy horseshit. Mark answers his own question with the irony that is the only reaction to the vapid silliness that the NPRs of the Anglo-Saxon world are subsidized by cowards and LGBTs to propagate.

What’s that — a quilting technique?

No, what’s missing from these commemorations is more Muslims. The other day I bumped into an old BBC pal who’s flying in for the anniversary to file a dispatch on why you see fewer women on the streets of New York wearing niqabs and burqas than you do on the streets of London. She thought this was a telling indictment of the post-9/11 climate of “Islamophobia.” I pointed out that, due to basic differences in immigration sources, there are far fewer Muslims in New York than in London. It would be like me flying into Stratford-on-Avon and reporting on the lack of Hispanics. But the suits had already approved the trip, so she was in no mood to call it off.

Of course, anyone who follows the BBC, which has completely morphed since I used to listen to it broadcasting from Cyprus forty years ago when I lived in Beirut. Back then, it was the only voice of sanity in a region full of whack-jobs. Now the BBC has morphed into a menagerie of moronic mindlessness---suitable for a nation like the UK which cannot stop Muslims from rioting and taking over whole parts of the capitol city of London, which mindless pussy-behavior will probably NOT prevent Old London Towne from being viciously attacked by Islamic goons, thugs and murderous morons much like America is being attacked by SEIU foreign-born union members attacking REAL Americans for standing by their constitutional rights.

Here are some more examples of the arrant stupidity of people in Canada, Australia [the Land of Oz is full of flying monkeys, mostly sitting on court benches as judges], and other "allies" who fear being mean to Muslims:

How are America’s allies remembering the real victims of 9/11? “Muslim Canucks Deal with Stereotypes Ten Years After 9/11,” reports CTV in Canada. And it’s a short step from stereotyping to criminalizing. “How the Fear of Being Criminalized Has Forced Muslims into Silence,” reports the Guardian in Britain. In Australia, a Muslim terrorism suspect was so fearful of being criminalized and stereotyped in the post-9/11 epidemic of paranoia that he pulled a Browning pistol out of his pants and hit Sgt. Adam Wolsey of the Sydney constabulary. Fortunately, Judge Leonie Flannery acquitted him of shooting with intent to harm on the grounds that “‘anti-Muslim sentiment’ made him fear for his safety,” as Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported on Friday. That’s such a heartwarming story for this 9/11 anniversary they should add an extra panel to the peace quilt, perhaps showing a terror suspect opening fire on a judge as she’s pronouncing him not guilty and then shrugging off the light shoulder wound as a useful exercise in healing and unity.

Judge Flannery might just be another Irish drunk [I'm Irish, so I know the type] whose judgment has been fatally impaired by all sorts of liquid or pharmaceutical swallowings. But let's get back to real heroes [Todd Beamer] and really craven cowardly half-witted imbeciles [Mayor Bloomberg]:

What of the 23rd Psalm? It was recited by Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer and the telephone operator Lisa Jefferson in the final moments of his life before he cried, “Let’s roll!” and rushed the hijackers.
No, sorry. Aside from firemen, Mayor Bloomberg’s official commemoration hasn’t got any room for clergy, either, what with all the Executive Deputy Assistant Directors of Healing and Outreach who’ll be there. One reason why there’s so little room at Ground Zero is because it’s still a building site. As I write in my new book, 9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us; the ten-year hole is something we did to ourselves — and in its way, the interminable bureaucratic sloth is surely as eloquent as anything Nanny Bloomberg will say in his remarks.

In Shanksville, Pa., the zoning and permitting processes are presumably less arthritic than in Lower Manhattan, but the Flight 93 memorial has still not been completed. There were objections to the proposed “Crescent of Embrace” on the grounds that it looked like an Islamic crescent pointing towards Mecca. The defense of its designers was that, au contraire, it’s just the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush. It doesn’t really matter which of these interpretations is correct, since neither of them has anything to do with what the passengers of Flight 93 actually did a decade ago. 9/11 was both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid rolled into one, and the fourth flight was the only good news of the day, when citizen volunteers formed themselves into an ad hoc militia and denied Osama bin Laden what might have been his most spectacular victory. A few brave individuals figured out what was going on and pushed back within half an hour. But we can’t memorialize their sacrifice within a decade. And when the architect gets the memorial brief, he naturally assumes that there’s been a typing error and that “Let’s roll!” should really be “Let’s roll over!”

Sometimes it takes a foreigner to judge a culture best---the guy from Belgium/Australia/'Canada can now sit in N.H. and see us for what we have become---a nation with an armed forces that refuses to admit that a Major Mohammed in Fort Bliss wasn't an Islamic firebrand, but only felt left out because nobody, like Priya's pitiful Indian brother on The Big Bang Theory, would date this pitiful pile of stinking moral toxic sewage. Mark Steyn is the antidote to stinking piles of toxic waste like Fareed Zakaria or Chriastiane Amanpour, who hate America because it is great and strong and they come from cultures full of moral lepers......
Mark ends up with a coda castigating the bureaucratic lassitude and litigious lunacy that makes America into a dying flame, despite the Todd Beamers and millions of REAL AMERICANS in this country worthy of our respect. Mark talks some final smack about the pussy-brained fraudulent public office-holders who shrink from representing America as the most dynamic and influential culture in the last two-hundred years----no matter what Euroweenies have been whining about endlessly in their feminized loo-zer mentality:

And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask, “Why do they hate us?” A better question is: “Why do they despise us?” And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.

Ayman al-Zawahri Ordered Attacks Against USA On 9/11 Anniversary To Avenge Bin Laden

This twisted psychotic actually trained as a medical doctor until he switched in mid-life from saving lives to taking them---as many as possible. Dr. Al-Zawahir­i is actually a sort of proactive Dr. Kevorkian and represents a very large swathe of what in the Muslim world passes for "poltical thinking." I'm hoping one of our drones can find this specimen of updated-SS Hauptfuhre­r and send him to the flames of his final destinatio­n with no detour toward 72 Virgins or any other stop on his downward spiral into eternal torment.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Packer/Saints Game Biggest Primetime NFL TV Game since Last Century!!!

The Hollywood Reporter demonstrated afain the popularity of pro football in the Americaqn pantheon of pastimes.

Over 25 million Americns watched the game & Thursday nite, 18 million watched the musical inauguration of the season.

Attempts by the statist mafiosi to hamper and hamstring the game are doomed, as are other elements of their feminizing agenda.

This February's Super Bowl drew 120 million viewers, most EVER for any TV broadcast about anything===and 165 million reportedly stayed watching to boost the Super Bowl Packer victory as THE MOST WATCHED EVENT LIVE IN US TV HISTORY......!!!!!!l
UPDATE TV by the Numbers has the latest stats [27.2 million viewers] & it appears the NFL is getting more popular every year.

Interesting contrast: O'Bozo had around 31 million libtards watching this moronic finger-wagging dunce yelling "pass this bill now...." while White House aides admitted that the bill in its final form won't be ready to pass for at least a week or maybe more.

I don't know whether the Keystone Kops or the Three Stooges would even accept a dunce as dumb as Obungler if he can keep repeating he wants the bill passed "now" when it'll take another week to lick into shape.

Sorta reminds you of the Botox Queen telling us peons that "you'll know what's in the bill after we pass it."

Remember when O'Bozo promised to have the most "transparent" administration in US history? I guess that meant that you can look in one of those oversized ears and see daylight right through on the other side...!

Thirty-one million on eleven cable and network channels versus 27.2 on NBC all by itself. Kinda tells everybody except the hopeless libtards just how credible the First Dunce is in the eyes of the American people.

Judith Miller on the NYPD's Counterterrorism Successes

Judith Miller is a very strange and brilliant reporter whom I have met several times, always overseas and during the period when she was the chief NYT reporter/analyst for the Middle East. I even met her parents whom she was dining with during the World Economic Forum's meeting in Casablanca in 1995. Her book God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East is a useful tour d'horizon of the region in the mid-'90s. Her famous "free speech" jailing brought her front and center to the nation's headlines over the infamous scapgegoating of Scooter Libby, whose arrest and conviction on a technicalities remain blots on the history of American law enforcement.

In today's edition of the Wall Street Journal, her wonderful analysis of the NYPD's record as the nation's premier counterintelligence organization, better than the factionalized FBI & CIA whose internecine strife has almost paralyzed their cooperation in protecting the country at home & abroad ever since the treasonous Jamie Gorelick instituted the infamous "Chinese Firewall" to hamper America's international efforts to combat and prevent terrorist acts at home & abroad;
A useful book to read in conjunction with the NYPD's efforts is Andy McCarthy's The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, a top federal prosecutor up until 2003 whose encyclopedic knowledge of the Mephisophelian transaction between the statists and Islamists undertaking a civilizational war on the US Constitution and our entire concept of the liberties enshrined in The Bill of Rights:

A specter has haunted the New York Police Department during this week's torrent of 10th anniversary commemorations of 9/11—the 13 terrorist plots against the city in the past decade that have failed or been thwarted thanks partly to NYPD counterterrorism efforts.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and his 50,000-strong department know that the 9/11 gatherings are an occasion not only to reflect on that terrible day. They're also a prime target for al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists who long to convince the world, and perhaps themselves, that they're still capable of killing in the name of their perverse interpretation of Islam.

Commissioner Kelly allocates some $330 million of his $4.6 billion annual budget and 1,200 of his staff to counterterrorism. He and his staff, not surprisingly, spent the week bolstering security at the remembrance gatherings throughout the city. On Wednesday, he came to the Manhattan Institute to tout the NYPD's counterterrorism record and defend his department against press allegations that his intelligence division has been spying illegally on Muslims and infringing on their privacy and civil rights.

The Muslim Brotherhood's political and legal adjunct in the US, CAIR. has influence far beyond its limited membership. The old Comintern Left conspiracy against the USA & its national interests has now shifted loyalties to the Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood founded by Hassan al-Banna in the twenties along the lines of Jabotinsky's Likud and Mussolini's Fascists and Hitler's National Socialists. Hamas is the most "successful" of these organizations founded as offshoots of Al-Banna's Ikhwan, but CAIR is another group of fellow travellers in this seedy crowd. Judith Miller elaborates:

The police have to factor terrorism into "everything we do," Mr. Kelly said. If that means following leads that take NYPD undercover detectives into mosques, Islamic bookstores, Muslim student associations, cafes and nightclubs, so be it. Mr. Kelly vowed to continue stationing liaisons in 11 cities abroad to "ask the New York question"—much to the occasional chagrin of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA.

It was an undercover officer in an Islamic bookstore who helped stop Shahawar Matin Siraj, a homegrown Muslim extremist and self-professed al Qaeda admirer, from bombing the Herald Square subway station during the 2004 Republican convention, Mr. Kelly said. Another undercover officer prevented homegrown terrorists Ahmed Ferhani, 26, and Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, from bombing a Manhattan synagogue and trying to "take out the entire building."

Would he continue sending NYPD officers across the Hudson into deepest, darkest New Jersey? Yes, he declared, if that was what was needed to keep tabs on the likes of Carlos Almonte and Mohammed Alessa—al Qaeda sympathizers arrested en route to Somalia at JFK Airport in 2010 "who were determined to receive terrorist training abroad only to return home to kill us here."

Michael Sheehan, a former NYPD deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, says that the NYPD has succeeded thanks to its collection and sharing of domestic and foreign intelligence through "humint" (human sources) and "sigint" (signals intelligence) such as electronic intercepts and the monitoring of Internet, cellphone and other communications. Tip-offs from concerned family or community members have also been vital.

The successes of the NYPD often fly under the radar of the sensationalist tabloids, or are forgotten after a day of blaring publicity which is the diverted to the NEXT BIG THING in our society of "divertissements." A singular success in NYPD's Sigint was the 2006 "Liquid Bomb Plot":

Sigint was key in disrupting at least two of the most serious al Qaeda plots targeting New York since 9/11: the 2006 "Liquid Bomb Plot," or "Operation Overt," in which 25 British citizens of Pakistani descent targeted some seven transatlantic commercial flights from London to North America; and Operation Highrise, an attempt to use suicide bombers to blow up New York City subways in 2009.

The homegrown Islamist in that plot was Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant with al Qaeda ties who grew up in New York City and staged his operation from there and Colorado. In Zazi's case, investigators say, officials were initially tipped off by the intercept of an email he sent from Colorado to an address in Pakistan that was associated with another group of terrorists who had been arrested earlier that year in Manchester, England.

The "link man," or coordinator in Pakistan, writes Mitchell D. Silber, director of Intelligence Analysis for the New York Police Department, in his forthcoming book, "The Al Qaeda Factor," was corresponding with operatives in three different al Qaeda plots. Zazi's New York subway plot took off only after he contacted the coordinator, identified only as "Ahmad," and informed him that the "wedding," or suicide operation, "was ready to proceed," writes Mr. Silber.

Miller lists more successes by Internet intercepts:

Another serious plot that was disrupted thanks to Internet intercepts was a 2006 scheme by Assem Hammoud, a 31-year-old Lebanese al Qaeda member, and several other still unnamed Islamists—all overseas—to flood Lower Manhattan by setting off explosives in the PATH railway tunnels under the Hudson River. While no arrests in America were made, several suspects have been detained in Lebanon and other Arab states.

Mr. Silber argues that humint has proven even more valuable than sigint in detecting and thwarting homegrown threats—the fastest-growing category of militant Islamist terror. This explains Mr. Kelly's determination to preserve the NYPD's vast intelligence capabilities, even if he's forced to scale back elsewhere in the department due to budget cuts.

With Osama bin Laden dead and al Qaeda under pressure, some terrorism experts argue, as does Peter Bergen, author of the book "The Longest War," that al Qaeda, or at least its "core," "no longer poses a national security threat" to America "that could result in a mass-casualty attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11."

Mr. Kelly isn't buying it. He's fixated on the recent jump in homegrown extremist plots throughout the country—to 10 in 2009 and 12 in 2010 from four in 2007 and just one in 2005. The increase, says John Miller, a former deputy director for analysis for the Director of National Intelligence, is most likely due to the influence of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric now hiding in Yemen whose stirring Internet sermons have inspired many of the would-be jihadis detained in recent plots.

Mr. Kelly also knows that in too many cases, New York has been lucky. Faisal Shazad, a middle-class Pakistani–American resident of Connecticut, failed last year to detonate a bomb in Times Square only because he received too little training in Pakistan.

Mr. Kelly calls the killing of bin Laden "success with complications." Those include the numerous references to New York found in his documents in Abbottabad, all of which suggest that bin Laden never abandoned his dream of striking the city again. The discovery on Thursday night of a specific and "credible" al Qaeda linked plot tied to the 9/11 commemorations suggests that Mr. Kelly's concern is justified.

Vigilance by the NYPD and thoughtful and alert political actors like Raymond Kelly are necessary to continue the combination of luck [the Pakistani schmuck was caught in a First Class seat moments before takeoff when his Times Square SUV failed to explode on cue] and applied skill sets hard-won in the fight on terror over the last several decades are required to head off Awlaki in Sana'a and the Fifth Column outlined by Andy McCarthy in The Grand Jihad.

Detroit and St. Louis Numbers One & Two in Crime

1964-1965 were the two years I lived in St. Louis and had the opportunity to work in the old Pruitt-Igoe complex of public high-rise housing for a Demonrat black "insurgent" congressional candidate whose son still holds the seat and is among the most corrupt members of the Black Caucus, itself the most corrupt segment of the Demonrat Party of Corruption currently raping our economy and poised to do so again under a totally inept affirmative-action schoolboy.

Detroit was my homebase in the later sixties when I lived in Ann Arbor and went there often---to see Lucien Nedzi, a Congressman whose name I actually want to repeat because he had a minimum of moral fiber in his political stature---I went to the Old Palladium when it was still safe to do so and saw Van Morrison and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, among many memories. I even met Bill Ayers and his soon-to-be-dead girl friend Diana Oughton at Detroit Airport when Mark Rudd, recently on the cover of Time Magazine for leading a student "insurrection" at Columbia U., where the current affirmative-action POTUS went to school and where his GPA and senior thesis have "disappeared," without a peep from the lamestream MSM, afraid to be called "racist." Rick Perry released his grades from Texas A&M, and immediately met with a wall of ridicule from the lamestreamers----who would never dare to ask for Obungler's transcripts. Even his Harvard Law Review Election was another exercise in affirmative action, as the Clown-in-Chief never wrote anything and the role of "President" is simply a popularity contest---he couldn't even write his own autobiography, Dreams of My Father, without asking serial bungler Bill Ayers, who killed his own girlfriend back in 1970 with faulty bomb-making instructions and blew up a Greenwich Village townhouse in the process, to do the heavy lifting.

When Obama talks about "fixing" Detroit, he means throwing more taxpayer or quantitative easing money at the problem, which might ensure his political popularity and buy off a few more corrupt public officials and union goons, but ain't gonna "fix" anything---a momentary fix like one from a heroin needle.

Hoffa describes the combatants in his "war" as "workers" on the one hand and "the Tea Party" on the other. But of course he isn't interested in workers in general, only those who belong to unions--a group that, after decades of private-sector union decline, largely consists of employees of government, government contractors and government bailout beneficiaries such as General Motors and Chrysler. "The Tea Party," meanwhile, is a dysphemism for taxpayers.

"Despite President Obama's repeated claims to change the tone in Washington, the White House had no comment this afternoon" on Hoffa's highly uncivil rhetoric, ABC News reports. Hey, give Hoffa credit. It isn't easy to stop this president from talking.

In his own speech, the president made clear that he agreed with the substance if not the tone of Hoffa's remarks. But turning America into Detroit may not be easy. After all, once Detroiters moved past Eight Mile Road, they were no longer able to vote against Coleman Young. Obama can't shrink the electorate he will have to face next year.

The Republic of the United States of America is still based on voting for its president, and all the corrupt union thugs and goons and feckless POTUS BS isn't going to change that fact.

If the most recent polls are any indication, the presidency is the GOP's to win in 2012, despite every effort from a corrupt biased media led by the flagship of moral sewage, NBC and its ridiculous agitprop outlet mall, PMSNBC.

Fouad Ajami in the Decade from 9/11/01 Until Today

Fouad Ajami became my friend soon after he moved to teach at SAIS in DC in 1980 and stayed as a houseguest in my condo in DuPont Circle for two weeks while reading the Raj Trilogy & Sigmund Freud's basic works. After my marriage made my condo available, he moved in as my reduced-rent houseguest full-time, while dating the female sec'y of the Saudi Ambassador---making this article in today's WSJ doubly interesting to me, as I had given him some contacts in Jeddah where I'd lived for three years myself. [Ed's note: while I was his landlord, he was almost invariably late with the rent check, making him a true representative of the Arab world....!]

The Arabic word shamata has its own power. The closest approximation to it is the German schadenfreude—glee at another's misfortune. And when the Twin Towers fell 10 years ago this week, there was plenty of glee in Arab lands—a sense of wonder, bordering on pride, that a band of young Arabs had brought soot and ruin onto American soil.

The symbols of this mighty American republic—the commercial empire in New York, the military power embodied by the Pentagon—had been hit. Sweets were handed out in East Jerusalem, there were no tears shed in Cairo for the Americans, more than three decades of U.S. aid notwithstanding. Everywhere in that Arab world—among the Western-educated elite as among the Islamists—there was unmistakable satisfaction that the Americans had gotten their comeuppance.

There were sympathetic vigils in Iran—America's most determined enemy in the region—and anti-American belligerence in the Arab countries most closely allied with the United States. This occasioned the observation of the noted historian Bernard Lewis that there were pro-American regimes with anti-American populations, and anti-American regimes with pro-American populations.

I traveled to Jeddah and Cairo in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In the splendid homes of wealthy American-educated businessmen, in the salons of perfectly polished men and women of letters, there was no small measure of admiration for Osama bin Laden. He was the avenger, the Arabs had been at the receiving end of Western power, and now the scales were righted. "Yes, but . . . ," said the Arab intellectual class, almost in unison. Those death pilots may have been zealous, but now the Americans know, and for the first time, what it means to be at the receiving end of power.

Very few Arabs believed that the landscape all around them—the tyrannical states, the growing poverty, the destruction of what little grace their old cities once possessed, the war across the generations between secular fathers and Islamist children—was the harvest of their own history. It was easier to believe that the Americans had willed those outcomes.

The two paragraph's emphasized above epitomize the plight of the Arab and the Muslims in the region. Last night, a second-rate libtard named Robin Wright was on Jon Stewart's Daily Show reciting the usual lying mantras of the Hollyweird/Academicide/Demonrat catechism of how and why the 9/11 debacle was somehow America's fault. The second paragraph emphasized above in bold is the typical whinging of second- and third-rate powers and of people who prefer hanging onto their victimhood. The Japanese and Chinese and S. Koreans have largely avoided this. They are First Class cultures that abhor the fingerpointing and female "it's his fault" blame culture of the very underdeveloped Arab and Muslim state of mind. Only the Arab world has had THREE [3] UN-sponsored Special Studies, the last two by Arab economists, intellectuals, and businesspeople themselves that have condemned the backwardness of Arab dictators. And the easy and lazy Arab conclusion always seems to be that, because the Americans work with Arab strongmen and Iranian Shahs in order to facilitate access to America's energy appetite, we are therefore totally and completely responsible for their plight.

Arabs and other Muslims [though not so much the Iranians] appear all too ready to blame America, the French, the British, anyone but themselves for the fact that they are a second-rate culture and a third-rate economic power, based on rentier income and persistent lapses in moral and ethical probity on any and all important issues concerning their own fate and destiny---to borrow another German word with resonant meaning, Shicksal. Fouad hesitates to use the word craven cowardice, but the patriarchal braggadocio of Arab males couldn't accept that in the last thousand years, they had only conquered their own women---the Turks had largely done the fighting and the leading in the Second Millenium for the so-called caliphate. Ajami proceeds to fill in the blanks:

In truth, in the decade prior to 9/11, America had paid the Arab world scant attention. We had taken a holiday from history's exertions. But the Arabs had hung onto their belief that a willful America disposed of their fate. The Arab regimes possessed their own sources of power—fearsome security apparatuses, money in the oil states, official custodians of religion who gave repression their seal of approval.

But it was more convenient to trace the trail across the ocean, to the United States. Mohammed Atta, who led the death pilots, was a child of the Egyptian middle class, a lawyer's son, formed by the disappointments of Egypt and its inequities. But there was little of him said in Egypt. The official press looked away.

There was to be no way of getting politically conscious Arabs to accept responsibility for what had taken place on 9/11. Set aside those steeped in conspiracy who thought that these attacks were the work of Americans themselves, that thousands of Jews had not shown up at work in the Twin Towers on 9/11. The pathology that mattered was that of otherwise reasonable men and women who were glad for America's torment. The Americans had might, but were far away. Now the terrorism, like a magnet, drew them into Arab and Muslim lands. Now they were near, and they would be entangled in the great civil war raging over the course of Arab and Muslim history.

The masters and preachers of terror had told their foot soldiers, and the great mass on the fence, that the Americans would make a run for it—as they had in Lebanon and Somalia, that they didn't have the stomach for a fight. The Arabs barely took notice when America struck the Taliban in Kabul. What was Afghanistan to them? It was a blighted and miserable land at a safe distance.

But when Cobra II rolled into Baghdad after only desultory resistance and less than a month's fighting, the Arabs had to resort, with their Western enablers like Robin Wright and a thousand other lamestream MSMers, Hollyweirdos, Academicide nobodies, and corrupt Demonrat pols, to the old games of "stab in the back." The WMD had been destroyed or shipped to Syria by the paranoid monster Saddam before the war over a period of a couple of years and George Tenet's "slam dunk" was ridiculed by the castrati and crone-hives of the institutional surrender apparatus of the American left. The basic lack of backbone and moral probity at the heart of Arab politics surfaced with a third-rate mediocrity in the Iraqi Al-Maliki and had Petraeus and GWB not done the Surge in '06, the Demonrats would have inflicted another self-administered defeat on the US military---which seems to be their long-term goal: The fact that a hateful demon like Saddam could symbolize much that the Arabs admired in themselves says more than anything else about the backwardness of that part of the world.

....the American war, and the sense of righteous violation, soon hit the Arab world itself. Saddam Hussein may not have been the Arab idol he was a decade earlier, but he was still a favored son of that Arab nation, its self-appointed defender. The toppling of his regime, some 18 months or so after 9/11, had brought the war closer to the Arabs. The spectacle of the Iraqi despot flushed out of his spider hole by American soldiers was a lesson to the Arabs as to the falseness and futility of radicalism.

It is said that "the east" is a land given to long memory, that there the past is never forgotten. But a decade on, the Arab world has little to say about 9/11—at least not directly. In the course of that Arab Spring, young people in Tunisia and Egypt brought down the dreaded dictators. And in Libya, there is the thrill of liberty, delivered, in part, by Western powers. In the slaughter-grounds of Syria, the rage is not directed against foreign demons, but against the cruel rulers who have robbed that population of a chance at a decent life.

America held the line in the aftermath of 9/11. It wasn't brilliant at everything it attempted in Arab lands. But a chance was given the Arabs to come face to face, and truly for the first time, with the harvest of their own history. Now their world is what they make of it.

Indeed, though it has taken a decade to shake off the silly tropes the Arabs loved to repeat about "violation" by the Americans, when they themselves had a dictator in Saddam who had his own rape rooms to sodomize the wives of citizens who wished to meet their strongman in a family setting---just one example of the total loo-zer status of this culture---the feckless Palestinians are now once again begging for nationhood status after doing little to earn it on its own. Even though the West Bank Palestinians are willing to turn over an Israeli soldier held hostage---typical Arab perfidy and cowardice in action by their HAMAS brothers supported by CAIR, their treasonous Fifth Column now working "legally" in the USA to undermine any sense of Palestinian self-respect---the USA should not and must not blindly support Palestinian membership in the UN as long as they violate every tenet of human rights and civilized behavior by continuing to hold a relatively innocent Israeli soldier hostage.

I doubt this temporizing victim of leftist doctrine in our White House can rise to the occasion and demand that Israel at least get back its Corporal Shalit before giving the murderous thugs in Gaza any membership among nations that practice a bare minimum of humanitarian fairness and don't persist in self-defeating narratives of national suicide. Leave that to the North Koreans and take at least one tiny step to demonstrate that you are not all the cowardly loo-zers that history has shown you to be----with occasional exceptions under the right circumstances---ever since the end of the Abbasid Caliphate moved its capital to Iraq and then was destroyed by the Mongol Horde of Helagu in 1258.

Try pulling yourselves up by your socks and not simply succumb to cutting corners and fingerpointing---that will only keep the rest of the world's secret opinion that the Arab's are constitutionally unable to run any kind of democratic and representative society which takes into account the role of its own heterodox minorities such as Coptic & Greek Christians and Druzi and Alevis and several in Pakistan and other heterodoxies such as Shi'ism. Perhaps following a path such as the great subcontinental experiment of India is attempting to do so could serve as a move in the right direction.

Cosmic Rays Vie With Sunspots as Extraterrestrial Climate Changers

CERN is a huge European equivalent [actually larger than] the huge FermiLab & Brookhaven & CalTech science centers which do cutting edge research on stuff as varied as the Higgs Boson, the invention by a British research scientist of html, and now, using the largest electron accelerator in the world, looking for the effect of cosmic rays and solar wind on long-term climate changes on Planet Earth.

Don't look to Al Gore, who is making millions in his financial stake in "carbon credits," a fiscal hoax that may rival Bernie Madoff in its Ponzi possibilities. He's gonna stick with man-made climate change no matter what the science says, since this D+ science student [his only grade at Vanderbilt on the subject in his very stilted college career]. It should be noted that he was going to Divinity School at the time since he was unable to complete his undergrad studies at Harvard due to mental illness [as well as clinical stupidity]. No law school would accept him even though his Senator daddy tried hard to get him in.

I've written often in this blog about the effect of the long-term sunspot cycle and the Middle Age Warming period, attested by historical sources across Europe from about 1000-1500 AD and the subsequent Little Ice Age [circa 1645-1715AD]. The so-called Maunder Minimum is the period of around 120 years of the Little Ice Age when telescopes were unable to discern many sunspots on the Sun, causing a cooling of the Earth's climate which occurred at the same time.

Currently, the sun is in the midst of the period designated as Cycle 24 and is ramping up toward the cycle's period of maximum activity. However, the recent findings indicate that the activity in the next 11-year solar cycle, Cycle 25, could be greatly reduced. In fact, some scientists are questioning whether this drop in activity could lead to a second Maunder Minimum, which was a 70-year period from 1645 to 1715 when the sun showed virtually no sunspots.

The fact that a serious scientific institution like CERN is willing to consider cosmic ray variations as another, or perhaps concomitant, cause of Global Warming and Cooling entirely independent of human industrial activity spells a serious threat from the serial dunce Al Gore and GOP candidate for POTUS Jon Huntsman, a true cat's-paw for the Obamandias Administration he served so faithfully and well as US Ambassador to China.

Perhaps the Manchurian Candidate in the White House has another Manchurian, or perhaps Han/Morman, candidate waiting in the Republican Party's leftward wing as a possible successor!?! Huntsman appears as vapid and insincere as Obama during the GOP debates at the Reagan Library last nite.

Some Humor From Unusual Places

I found these gems on a site at Real Politics:

America needs Obama-care like Nancy Pelosi needs a Halloween mask. --Jay Leno

Q: Have you heard about McDonald's'new Obama Value Meal?

A: Order anything you likeand the guy behind you has to pay for it. --Conan O'Brien


Q: What does Barack Obama call lunch with a convicted felon?

A: A fund raiser. --Jay Leno

Q:
What's the difference betweenObama's cabinet and a penitentiary?

A: One
is filled with tax evaders, blackmailers, and threats to society.

The other is for housing prisoners. --David Letterman


Q:
If Nancy Pelosi and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the ocean and
it started to sink,who would be saved?

A: America ! --Jimmy Fallon

Q: What's the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?

A: Bo has papers. --Jimmy Kimmel

Q: What was the most positive result ofthe "Cash for Clunkers" program?

A: It took 95% of theObama bumper stickers off the road. --David Letterman

Victor Davis Hanson: Assessment of the Decade after 9/11

VDH has some select slices of wisdom in a short piece in The City Journal:

On October 7, just 26 days after the attacks, the United States went after both al-Qaida and its Taliban sponsors when it invaded Afghanistan, removing the Islamists from that nation’s major cities in little more than two months. By early 2002, the “graveyard of empires” had a UN-approved constitutional government—despite earlier warnings of Western failure and a Soviet- or British-like disaster. We forget now the national euphoria over Donald Rumsfeld’s “light footprint” and a new way of war characterized by a few Special Forces troops with laptops who guided volleys of GPS munitions from jets circling above.

The subsequent decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 ended entirely the fragile national consensus about retaliation that had followed 9/11. When the Bush administration hyped WMD as the real casus belli—and subsequently found none in Iraq—most forgot that Congress had, in bipartisan fashion, voted for war on over 20 other counts as well, all legitimate and unquestioned. But the postwar insurgency took over 4,000 American lives and tore Iraq apart, and the war would be written off as misguided, unnecessary, and “lost.” Suddenly too few troops was the charge. Traditional army divisions once again replaced Special Forces as the conventional wisdom.

Few thought, in the dark days of December 2006, that General David Petraeus and his Surge would save Iraq. But the U.S. military met the Islamists’ call for thousands of terrorists to flock to Anbar Province—defeating them, killing thousands, and thereby weakening the global jihadist cause. Soon Iraq, the “bad” war theater, would grow relatively quiet, while the once “good” effort in Afghanistan went bad. Over 100,000 Western NATO and American troops are still fighting a resurgent Taliban in a decade-long effort to prop up the government of Hamid Karzai.

Osama bin Laden had bet that the entire Arab world might erupt in turmoil after the U.S. response to 9/11. It did, but not until a decade later—and neither in anger at the United States, Europe, or Israel, nor at the urging of a reclusive bin Laden in the final months of his life. The more pundits sternly lectured that the “Arab-Israeli” conflict was at the heart of 9/11-generated Islamic anger at the West, the more that conflict seemed irrelevant to the violence that swept the Arab world from Tunisia to Syria. Bashar Assad is now shooting hundreds on sight—his own people, not soldiers of the IDF.

In a sense that VDH doesn't address, the two wars and other fiscal and monetary demands put a strain on the US economy that has led us to a debacle based on real estate values, much like that which pulverized Japan in 1990 and thereafter. Despite the misguided idealism of the CRA of Jimmy Carter & Bill Clinton, and the Dobbs-Frank and FanFred sidebars which caused home values to plummet, another iron bar in the American economic house of cards was the immense defense expenditures 9/11 caused the USA to undertake to confront radical Salafist Islam, much of its motivation and money emanating from erstwhile and still putative ally Saudi Arabia. VDH sees this in a different light, but we basically agree:

Conventional wisdom following 9/11 insisted that we would soon find bin Laden but that his insidious terror gang would probably remain a permanent existential threat that could repeat the September attack almost whenever it wished. A near-decade after the fall of the Twin Towers, bin Laden was finally killed by the United States, right under the nose of his Pakistani hosts. His radical Islamic terrorist organization is in disarray, without popular support, without the old covert subsidies from the oil sheikdoms, and without the infrastructure and networks that it would need to repeat its 9/11 attacks. The old post-9/11 warning of “not if, but when”—referring to the inevitability of more terrorism here—has not panned out so far, mostly because of heightened security at home and the projection of U.S. force abroad.

Following 2001, two additional and unforeseen shifts split America asunder, and—in equally unexpected fashion—are now bringing it back together again. Few initially objected to the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay, renditions, military tribunals, preventive detention, or the use of targeted assassinations via Predator drone. Even enhanced interrogations did not provoke polarizing national debate, given the extraordinary popularity of George W. Bush until 2003 and the widespread fear of more hijacked jetliners. But the unexpected violence in postwar Iraq, the partisan campaigning of the 2004 presidential election, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the absence of more attacks politicized the war on terror, and the popular media reduced the Bush-Cheney administration nearly to the status of war criminals, people who had trumped up nonexistent threats in service to a police state desperate to invent enemies.

VDH ends with the unsurprising view that despite other shortcomings, POTUS Obama has done one thing right:

What happened next was even more bizarre. In his first year in the White House, Barack Obama, a war critic and foe of the Bush-Cheney protocols, embraced or expanded almost all of the measures that he and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had long derided—apparently because what had seemed superfluous to a candidate proved essential to a president with responsibility for the safety of 300 million people. In lockstep, his supporters ceased their outcries about lost civil liberties. What had not long ago been decried as either unconstitutional or useless was suddenly assumed to be both legal and necessary—and surely not controversial enough to prompt questioning of the Obama administration, now the steward of the decade-old protocols.

And so, on the fifth anniversary of September 11 in 2006, the country had become split apart over Iraq, mostly amnesiac about Afghanistan, and receptive to the liberal narrative that the terrorists had won by scaring us into abandoning our values. In contrast, on the tenth anniversary, Americans have come nearly full circle: anxious about renewed violence in Afghanistan, increasingly unconcerned with Iraq, and relieved that postwar homeland security measures have kept them safe.

Finally, VDH comes to the conclusion that there is one thing that unites all Americans, whatever the many issues that continue to divide us:

The common denominator in these ten years? American life under its hypercritical, volatile, and mercurial democracy proves resilient; the Islamic terrorists and their authoritarian sponsors who would destroy it do not. And even after a decade of acrimony, partisan rancor, and stasis, Americans continue to be horrified—and angry—over those who were murdered on September 11. We’ve done our best for ten years to ensure that it cannot happen again.

And as noted by one column in the WSJ, on December 7th, 1951, the event "which will live on in infamy" had an almost non-existent anniversary. However, in the past decade, we have learned anew just how vulnerable America is both militarily and economically, and our response up to this point demonstrates that we may still, despite acrimony and recriminations on both sides of the political spectrum, continue to learn this lesson.

Hollyweird Hates Conservatives Due to A Malady Called Moral Degeneration

Andrew Klavan makes sense of the inane recent statement by George Clooney that he doesn't want to get into politics because "we already have such a capable man at the helm" or gibberish to that effect:

Hollywood’s lockstep leftist filmmakers have long busied themselves with a range of shameful enterprises. They have peddled and celebrated a wholly distorted and negative vision of American manners in dishonest films epitomized by American Beauty (1999). They have sold the self-contradicting nonsense of moral relativism in films such as The Reader (2008). They have routinely depicted the U.S. government and U.S. corporations as bad actors in world events, as in The Bourne Ultimatum. And—in what some observers consider a conscious scheme by a likeminded filmland clique—they have maintained a small but steady effort to normalize the sexual abuse of children in films like Little Children, The Woodsman, Towelhead, and more.

But when it comes to sheer shamefulness, the conformist “radicals” of Hollywood outdid themselves in the years after the Islamofascist attacks on 9/11. When the United States responded to these atrocities by attempting to destroy the terrorist staging grounds in Afghanistan and establish a beachhead of Middle Eastern democracy in Iraq, Hollywood reacted by churning out propaganda movies that could only demoralize our allies and bolster our low and savage enemies: Syriana, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, Redacted, Lions for Lambs, Green Zone, Body of Lies, Stop Loss, and on and on. Many of these films portrayed our soldiers and intelligence officers as rapists, murderers, torturers, or noble fools manipulated by conniving Republicans. Not one of them (including the excellent HBO film Taking Chance and the flawed but powerful Hurt Locker, which at least showed our troops in a positive light) depicted the wars themselves as good or noble endeavors. Besides Chance and Locker, these films were bad and they were bombs, showing that ideology, not art or commerce, dictated their content. It was the dark mirror image of Hollywood’s patriotic response to Pearl Harbor in the 1940s, a living diagram of what the Left has wrought in our cultural lives since then.

Now there is talk of a film memorializing the killing of bin Laden, and soldiers and veterans are beginning to show up as heroes in pictures like Source Code. But the fact that film depictions of the military may change somewhat now that a Democratic president has taken over and expanded on the war policies put in place by his Republican predecessor provides no excuse for what happened. When America really needed them, our filmmakers betrayed her. And because their unpatriotic products were made while our troops were under fire in the field, they constitute, when considered together, an unprecedentedly wicked action by an industry that rose to success and power through celebrating the nation and values that it now mindlessly attacks.

But while wealthy, coddled, and arrogant movie-world fat cats are easy targets for rebuke—and while everyone involved in this moral debacle deserves a thrashing—they are, as it were, only the bubbles at the surface of the boiling cauldron of America’s intellectual dysfunction. The majority of artists are not deep or original thinkers. They are merely people gifted with the ability to give “a local habitation and a name” to the ideas their intellectual guides and mentors find fashionable. The Left is still ascendant in our academies and media. More than that, it is committed to strangling, through blacklists and unfounded charges of racism and bigotry, the intellectual diversity that might challenge their primacy. As a result, many of our artists’ minds have become straitjacketed by “progressive” and relativist notions that had their heyday among honest thinkers 50 years ago and have been crashing and burning in the real world ever since.

It’s no surprise, then, that most of our creative types have failed to formulate a forthright response to the ongoing Islamist threat—the dual threat of open violence and Sharia imperialism. That response requires the death of nonsensical relativism and the rebirth of foundational values. Post-postmodern intellectuals need to understand that, just as the grand and reasoned structure of mathematics stands on the rock of unshakeable axioms, so the cathedral of human morality is built on certain truths. These truths that we hold to be self-evident—that people are endowed not by governments but by their Creator with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are not good for some people sometimes but for all people eternally. As such, they are not only a humane basis for opposition to Islamism, but the very stuff and soul of art—the beginning of a reclamation from its current degeneracy and shame.

Since "Post-postmodern intellectuals" refuse to raise themselves out of their cloacal mindsets to the extent even to recognize that a concept such as "truth" exists, Mr. Klavan won't convince many of them. However, Jon Voight's recent conversion of David Mamet to sanity by giving him the wonderful assessment of America contained in Witness, by Whittaker Chambers, there is hope that some, like John Kenneth Galbraith, who called Chambers perhaps America's greatest intellectual of the twentieth century, might use their minds instead of following that herd-instinct bred into the "useful idiots" that Lenin despised so much.

Arthur Koestler: My Favorite Author

Darkness at Noon was famously blocked from becoming a Hollyweird movie by Clifford Odets, a Commie who deserved blacklisting and frankly, much harsher punishment than that, for keeping the literary masterpiece from the screen. Gramsci's philosophy still works overtime ln its corraling media, academicide and union thuggery into a Marxist killing floor. Koestler saw the evils of Communism when suddemly he found his Marxist comrades in Spain, after escaping Franco's firing squads, killing Trotskyites in their ranks. It was the light bulb going on in the brain of a brainwashed intellectual, a member of the "intelligentsia," always the easiest herd to drive over a cliff in a stampede of political correctness...!!! Kronstadt in 1921 proved Lenin & Trotskyite Bolshevism were a variant of fascism, Stalin was the logical end-product, an administrative genius with a ruthless brutality that made a lot of Nazis look like altar boys. The Communists opposed the Social Democrats in the 1933 German elections that brought a Nazi plurality to power and this act of perfidy made the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between Ribbentrop and Molotov a mere coda to an alliance very similar to that of Hitler and Mussolini. The Soviets immediately began handing over to the Germans the fruits of their spy ring in DC and NY, including the Norden Bomb Site which increased the accuracy of high-level bombers immensely. This is all pointed out in Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers, which didn't win a Pulitzer because Victor Navasky and his Hiss-loving skank-princess Katrina Van Den Heuvel, put down their cloven hooves in protest. Like any mad genius, Koestler had his moral pockmarks, mostly of a sexual nature that would make Woody Allen look like a Trappist Monk. Here's the end of Christopher Caldwell's summary of "Koestler - The Political and Literary Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic" in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, edited and run by none other than Sam Tanenhaus himself:

Scammell’s is an authorized biography and a sympathetic one. But the Koestler he depicts is consistently repugnant — humorless, megalomaniac, violent. Like many people concerned about “humanity,” he was contemptuous of actual humans. He ignored and snubbed his mother (who had pawned her last diamond to pay for his passage to Palestine), and he rebuffed every attempt to arrange a meeting between him and his illegitimate daughter. What made him such a creep? Perhaps alcohol — Koestler threw tables in restaurants and was arrested for drunken driving on many occasions. Perhaps insecurity — he was tormented by his shortness (barely 5 feet 6 inches) and used to stand on tippy-toe at cocktail parties. “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes,” Koestler’s Communist editor Otto Katz once told him. “But yours isn’t a complex — it’s a cathedral.”

In the late 1990s, Jill Craigie, the wife of the Labour politician Michael Foot, told Cesarani that Koestler had raped her decades earlier. The scandal that resulted when Cesarani’s own Koestler biography was published embroiled Scammell, who had defended Koestler in 1995 against an allegation of attempted rape made by Foot. Scammell argues here that “the exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction wasn’t exactly uncommon at that time” and that “Craigie’s story and Cesarani’s embellishment of it have left a stain on Koestler’s reputation far larger than he deserves.”

He is wrong. Posterity has let Koestler off lightly. Every scrap of evidence that Scammell himself has so impartially gathered argues in favor of crediting Craigie’s story. Bertrand Russell’s wife claimed Koestler tried to rape her, too. “Without an element of initial rape,” Koestler wrote the woman who would be his second wife, “there is no delight.” One girlfriend called him “an odd mixture of consideration, thoughtfulness and extraordinary brutality.” Certain aspects of Koestler’s sexism — in particular, his expectation that his girlfriends serve him as stenographers and maids — are indeed mitigated by the era in which he lived. His pattern of predation and violence, though, is a vice of a different order. It shocked those who encountered it.

Cyril Connolly was right to see Koestler as a journalist of genius. In this Koestler can be likened to the three contemporaries — Albert Camus, Whittaker Chambers and George Orwell — who were his closest allies. If Koestler had a wider intellectual range than they, however, he had a narrower artistic one. It is a strange thing that this person known to the world primarily as a novelist can fairly be said not to have had a literary bone in his body. The critic Leslie Fiedler once remarked that “Promise and Fulfillment,” Koestler’s 1949 book about Israel, should be filed “under K for Koestler, not I for Israel.” The point can be made more generally: In print as in life, he was driven by ego, not principle. His subject was himself. And yet, at a moment when the ghastliness of Soviet Communism was still invisible to a lot of thinking people, this apparently conscienceless man awakened the conscience of the West.

Markets are More Efficient and Accountable than Govts.

No means testing (as in Rep. Paul Ryan's budget roadmap) will be introduced to determine eligibility for full Medicare benefits, and most Social Security benefits will continue to start for individuals at age 65 or younger.

In a nutshell, there is little political will to reduce spending on entitlements by limiting them mainly to persons in need.

State and local governments also greatly increased their spending as tax revenues rolled in during the good economic times that preceded the collapse in 2008. This spending included extensive commitments to deferred benefits that could not be easily reduced after the recession hit, especially pensions and health-care benefits to retired government workers.

Unless states like California and Illinois, and cities like Chicago, take drastic steps to reduce their deferred spending, their problems will multiply as this spending grows over time. A few newly elected governors, such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin, have pushed through reforms to curtail the power of unionized state employees. But most other governors have been afraid to take on the unions and their political supporters.
Political cowardice reigns and small businessmen---the sturdy backbone of American capitalism---are being slowly destroyed by attrition as surely as the kulaks in the happily-defunct USSR were destroyed by relocation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In America, we destroy our true national treasures, those with the imagination, habits of diligence and foresight, access tp spo,e cap[tal and the courageous risk-taking attitude that make a small business start, grow and hopefully if things work out, prosper. The rest of the world is in just as bad a predicament:

Numerous examples illustrate government failure in other countries as well. Highly publicized are the troubles facing Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain that are mainly due to the growth in spending and debt of their governments prior to the 2008 crisis. Perhaps the governments of these countries, and the banks that bought their debt, expected Germany and other rich members of the European Union to bail them out if they got into trouble. Whatever the explanation, the reckless behavior by these governments will greatly harm businesses and consumers in their countries along with taxpayers of countries coming to their rescue.

The traditional case for private competitive markets goes back to Adam Smith (and even earlier writers). It is mainly based on abundant evidence that most of the time competitive markets work quite well, usually much better than government alternatives. The main reason is not that individuals in the private sector are intrinsically better than government bureaucrats and politicians, but rather that competitive pressures discipline market behavior much more effectively than government actions.

The lesson is that it is crucial to consider whether government regulations and laws are likely to improve rather than worsen the performance of private markets. In an article "Competition and Democracy" published more than 50 years ago, I said "monopoly and other imperfections are at least as important, and perhaps substantially more so, in the political sector as in the marketplace. . . . Does the existence of market imperfections justify government intervention? The answer would be no, if the imperfections in government behavior were greater than those in the market."

The widespread demand after the financial crisis for radical modifications to capitalism typically paid little attention to whether in fact proposed government substitutes would do better, rather than worse, than markets.

Government regulations and laws are obviously essential to any well-functioning economy. Still, when the performance of markets is compared systematically to government alternatives, markets usually come out looking pretty darn good.

Gary Becker is right when he points out that more laissez-faire rather than hypothetically government-sponsored "programs" to "retrain" employees in mid-life for another skill set----or whatever the other do-gooder well-meaning bienpensant chicanery that the Obungler crowd is cooking up. In reality, there are hundreds of overlapping programs on the books that are already overfunded and underproductive that simply adding dozens more legislative schemes in order to point to one's good faith is becoming farcical.

Plus the hard-headed GOP crowd in Congress is much less susceptible to botox poisoning of the brain, leading to fatuous futility, than Queen Bee Pelosi's collection of sideshow feminista types [thinking of DeLauro & Wassermann-Schultz] and their Bravo Channel male ilk, which means that despite this O'Bozo attempt to invite himself to address Congress---happily conflicting with the Packer/Saints game which will draw two dozen viewers for every Obama watcher next Thursday night, is due for abject failure---much like the Stimulus/Porkulus union-building charade already has done.

I wonder if the GOP will even ask for facetime to rebut O'Bozo's teleprompter twaddle next Thursday, or will they be more interested in serious pastimes like an NFL contest between the last two Super Bowl Champs?

Cheney Reflects in his book "In My Time."

Dick Cheney is a singular public servant. He took the job as Veep after GWB appointed him head of a group to look for a likely candidate in the election campaign and then Bush 43 decided to choose Cheney, OVER CHENEY'S OWN OBJECTIONS. Of course, Dick Cheney could have made a Shermanesque, "If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve" statement, but his sense of public duty called him into what he calls "this business" even after six or so cardiac events, the first before he was forty years old. He expected, I suspect, to have another one in office. He deserves credit for accepting a task he may have thought fatal.

I didn't like Dick Cheney very much as his operational style did not exude much personal charm, and I would guess this might be because of his laconic Wyoming roots. My only memory of Wyoming is running out of gasoline there once and trying to hitch a ride to the nearest gas station, with more than an hour going by before one of the many cars picked me up to take me the twenty miles to get a jerrycan of gas. It is generally a harsh and very windy place, except for a few idyllic spots like Jackson Hole. Cheney is perhaps more of a "cowboy" than Yalie GWB ever was. Here's a representative set of paragraphs from Dan Henninger's excellent interview:

Foremost were the "wiretapping" controversies over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which the administration expanded to monitor phone calls from foreign terrorists into the U.S. After its approval, the program required presidential reauthorization every 30 to 45 days. Mr. Cheney described for me the briefings on the program by CIA Director Michael Hayden to the congressional leadership. "The Big Nine, we called them," Mr. Cheney says. They included Nancy Pelosi, then a member of the House intelligence committee. No one, he says, objected to the program.

The FISA program worked until 2004. Then the administration's internal unity fell apart. White House aides who had gone to have the authorization renewal signed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in George Washington hospital, found the recently appointed deputy attorney general, James Comey, was already there.

Before the aides had left the White House, Mr. Cheney told me, "it's my understanding that Ashcroft said fine, send them over and he'd sign. Between the time of the phone call and the time when they got there, he'd done a 180 and Comey was in the room." Mr. Ashcroft refused to sign. Mr. Cheney relates in his book that Mr. Comey also convinced FBI Director Robert Mueller to withdraw support.

"There clearly was a development inside the Justice Department that led Comey and Mueller to express their disapproval (of the surveillance authority) after it had been approved 20 times," Mr. Cheney said. With resignations threatened, President Bush altered the program, despite assurances of its constitutionality.

Now that even a truthful public servant like Leon Panetta admitted after Bin Laden's death that waterboarding had provided key info after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began to sing like a birdie after several session, the FISA and other programs protecting the USA are seen in a new light. The April 2002 international conference on Israel and Palestine supported by Powell and his deputy Armitage was probably a bad idea, but in hindsight may have prevented the 2006 elections from allowing a Hamas takeover of Gaza. Then again, given the way the Second Law of Thermodynamics [entropy] works in the region, probably not. Too many cooks always ruin any grand buffet prepared under UN auspices.

On another subject, Cheney has a point in his disagreement with Rice & Christopher Hill about the North Korean wild goose chase, started by the insufferable ineffable do-gooder Jimmy Carter when he famously [though it's covered up in the liberal canonical narrative even to this day] made an "illegal" trip violating the Logan Act in 1994 to Pyongyang over Bill Clinton's strenuous objections. The effort by the failed peanut farmer was followed up by Madeleine Albright and the net result was that from one-to-two million North Koreans died of starvation while the US bribed the Norks with over a billion dollars to inspect a nuke facility which the invidious Norks used to build and continue their program, despite "promising" to stop their program. Net result: a stronger hold by the hopelessly fascist Communist regime over its enslaved populace. And to this day, political prisoners are flayed alive, people are starving to death in the outer provinces, and people like Condi Rice and Christopher Hill are trying to employ smoke, mirrors and mental opiates to achieve an illusion of some sort of "progress."

I saw Condi Rice on the latest 30Rock with classless asshole Alec Baldwin where AB's TV wife is kidnapped by the North Koreans and forced to marry Kim Jung-Il's retarded successor-son. She played some dynamite piano and the conceit that AB had broken up with her in a previous engagement by email was the high point of a tasteless, but funny vignette. I wonder if she reflected on her own fecklessness----of which North Korean hallucinations take place to the insistence by Condi that Hamas participate in January. '06 elections that resulted in a confrontation state in the insanely overcrowded Gaza Strip---a territory so hopeless that Egypt refused to take it back after the '67 War ended and Israel wanted it off its hands. Another thing you never read about---Condi's idealism is laudable, but it only gets her comic bits on 30Rock, not a substantive record for achievement.

The most interesting anecdote is about the Surge, where Cheney discovers that leaks about doubts concerning the Surge's viability are inveighed against by Dick, only to be told by NSC advisor Steve Hadley that POTUS GWB himself instructed Steve to make the leaks---Machiavellian maneuvering by the widely-read Bush, whose interest in history was sincere and far deeper than the understanding of the present occupant of the White House.



Powell's pettinss and Armitage's outright dishonesty and cowardice and ultimately, Armitage's loyalty, are all of a piece with the Armitage strategy of not revealing that he was the source of the Valerie Plame leaks, leading Scooter Libby to twist slowly in the wind while Prosecutor Fitzgerald, who already knew of Armitage's perfidy, went through a Kabuki charade and got Plame and Wilson on the cover of Vanity Fair, a dubious achievement and worthy of the Powell/Armitage gravitas quotient in foreign policy and inside-the-Beltway chicanery.

Powell is now imitating Winston Churchill in abandoning Barack Obama as he flails and flounders and even the lamestream MSM can't cover for the Manchurian Candidate or divert attention from the incompetent POTUS to John Boehner, as a serial dwarf named Mark Shields tried to do on his weekly over-the-hill agitprop session with the simpering slimeball David Brooks on the Friday evening follies on The Lehrer Report.

I find it a bit sad that David Petraeus has tarnished a brilliant career, far more impressive than the somewhat politicized ascent of Colin Powell to the highest levels of government, by accepting the CIA position, although Panetta has shown that one can retain his integrity [thought not the support of the treasonous lamestreamers and their lackeys] in that exalted stratosphere.

What is left unsaid in Cheney's general praise of his boss for political courage and, in the case of the Surge, absolute brilliant Texas-Hold-'Em pulling hot chestnuts out of a fire that a traitor playing the role of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in the midst of a wartime situation enunciated that "The war is lost" is somewhat counterbalanced by GWB's own machinations and too-clever-by-half chessboard moves, if I can dignify the authorized leaks against the Surge as such.

The sad problem in the rapidly deteriorating public "marketplace of ideas" lies in the constant mantras advanced by a completely discredited and repudiated "intelligentsia" which claims that any American elected offical who attempts to defend or advance our national interests is "stupid" such as Ronald Reagan was when he brought down the Soviet "Evil Empire," an apt description as I am in the middle of finally reading The Gulag Archipelago.

Cheney himself --- like his somewhat RINO boss GWB --- not only faced charges of lack of intelligence, but mendacity and venal moneymaking schemes through Halliburton's contracting activities in Iraq.

Now that we see the White House and Energy Dept actively implicated in the Solodyne panel dispute to the tune of $535 million, we shall see if the usual hypocrisy of the Demonrats comes forward with idiotic excuses. It has taken almost a year for Cong. Issa to pry open the Fast-and-Furious fiasco enough to reveal DOJ and Homeland Security stonewalling. Let's see if the WaPo and NYT display ANY signs of integrity on the real and persistent lack of cohesion and coherence in this administration, which is threatening to make Jimmy Carter's look "honest and sincere," if that can be taken as a compliment among the cynics living on the two Left Coasts, in comparison.

All in all, Dick Cheney has proven to be a better Veep than his incompetent predecessor, the ineffably venal and stupid and dishonest Al Gore as well as his ridiculous and outright silly successor, the Irish blathermonger and unending foot-in-the-mouth gaffer Joe Biden.

That's being damned by faint praise, but I'm going to finally buy the Cheney book, as well as David Mamet's sonderful "Secret Knowledge."

All this while reading Tony Judt's Postwar and his other great book Reappraisals while working through The Gulag Archipelago and Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers.

As for the Chambers bio, there is absolutely nothing new about a slanderous and even treasonous MSM in the USA. From the very first inkling of treason on the left, the MSM aligned with the enemies of the United States and gave aid and support to Hiss while slandering Chambers to a degree that shames the left to this day. The Left's insistent agenda to destroy any semblance of fair play or balanced judgment remains constant. The head of Harvard's Psychiatry Department announced that Chambers was victim of all sorts of delusional behavior, despite never having analyzed him in a conversation, as is required [Shades of 1000 shrinks calling Goldwater mentally ill, none of whom had ever talked to Barry face-to-face]. And the press actually made fun of the fact that Chambers' brother Dick had committed suicide, despite the fact that Hiss's father and sister both killed themselves [and another brother of Hiss died at thirty, a hopeless alcoholic]. To this day, the traitor Victor Navasky, or what's left of him, insists that Alger Hiss was not a spy and did not perjure himself, despite copious evidence from the now-unsealed East Bloc intelligence archives. The left's inability to advance its arguments by any means except subversion and dissembling double talk remain unchanged over the last one hundred years. Luckily, Chambers' friends at Columbia like Jacques Barzun [still alive at 105] & Mark Van Doren & others like Lionel Trilling, Louis Zukofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and other contemporaries did attest to Chambers' absolute brilliance, whenever he put his strange, shambolic, bizarre personality in order. Whittaker Chambers was a strange tormented man who wrote the best autobiography of the twentieth century. Alger Hiss went to his grave an unrepentent traitor. At least Bill Ayers admits his perfidy and now hints his authorship of Dreams of My Father. Gotta give Bill at least that benefit, the guy can write, though not as well as Chambers, and he's honest enough to admit his treason.

But as for Navasky and a horde of liars like Jonathan Alter and Eric Altermann, there are no minds more dishonest and more closed than those on the ideological left.

NRO on Steve Jobs as the Greatest Failure in the History of Business

Nick Schulz is an AEI Fellow who hits the nail on the head with this article about how often the guy who changed the entire planet's way of life by introducing us all to things we DIDN'T know we needed or wanted committed epic fail after epic fail.

Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails.
Everyone today thinks of Jobs as the genius who gave us the iPod, MacBooks, the iTunes store, the iPhone, the iPad, and so on. Yes, he transformed personal computing and multimedia. But let’s not forget what else Jobs did.

Jobs (along with Steve Wozniak) brought us the Apple I and Apple II computers, early iterations of which sold in the mere hundreds and were complete failures. Not until the floppy disk was introduced and sufficient RAM added did the Apple II take off as a successful product.

The list goes on and on and on......

Jobs was the architect of Lisa, introduced in the early 1980s. You remember Lisa, don’t you? Of course you don’t. But this computer — which cost tens of millions of dollars to develop — was another epic fail. Shortly after Lisa, Apple had a success with its Macintosh computer. But Jobs was out of a job by then, having been tossed aside thanks to the Lisa fiasco.

Jobs went on to found NeXT Computer, which was a big nothing-burger of a company. Its greatest success was that it was purchased by Apple — paving the way for the serial failure Jobs to return to his natural home. Jobs’s greatest successes were to come later — iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and more

Schulz left out Newton, the forerunner of iPad and who wouldda thunk that Jobs would return to the concept of a small handheld tablet after getting scorched on that particular venture into fiscal futility...? But Steve did. He had that indefinable and almost extinct genius that Thomas Edison and Henry Ford had, the ability to make our lives different through dozens of inventions [with Edison the light bulb and stock ticker and movie projector etc & with Ford the assembly line enabling everyman to own a cheap automobile], things we never really knew we needed until they came to us in cheap & BRILLIANTLY ENGINEERED & DESIGNED & AFFORDABLE forms that suddenly captured the country and then the entire planet by storm.

Jobs is a great entrepreneur for another reason. Lots of ninnies can give customers products they want. Jobs gave people products they didn’t know they wanted, and then made those products indispensable to their lives.

I didn’t know I needed the ability to read the Wall Street Journal and The Corner on a handsome handheld device at my breakfast table, on the Metro, on the Acela, or in any Starbucks I entered. But Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted to mix and match my music collection on a computer and take it with me wherever I went, but Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted a portable multimedia platform that would permit me and my kids to hurl angry birds out of a slingshot at thieving pigs. But Steve Jobs did.

All those successes were made possible by failure after failure after failure and the lessons learned from those failures.

Of course, Schulz put the moral of the story front and center:

There’s a moral here for a Washington culture that fears failure too much. In today’s Washington, large banks aren’t permitted to fail; nor are large auto firms. Next up will be too-big-to-fail hospital systems. Steve Jobs is a reminder that failure is a good and necessary thing. And that sometimes the greatest glories are born of catastrophe.

Nowadays, kids are given pass/fail courses in school and every participant in every sports league gets a trophy. The idea of competition is now being suppressed and the fear of psychologically harming youngsters who may lose in a hard-fought contest actually is now being used to lessen the spirit of Vince Lombardi, for instance, when he proclaimed "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

[WARNING: Long Slightly Off-Topic Autobiographical Excursion Follows:]
All of which reminded me of an episode in my life which is a tiny vignette: I was about to be interviewed for a very good and prestigious position at the Woodrow Wilson Institute in the Old Iconic Smithsonian HQ Building with the turrets and parapets looming over the south side of the Mall before a small panel of four or five Wilson Center graybeards and their female colleagues, if memory serves, but happened to overhear a sort of pre-briefing on my qualifications given by a young woman who knew nothing about me personally except that I had served overseas in several countries for the State Dept & done a couple of Foggy Bottom positions, then left State to do TV production & other very interesting work as Asst. Producer for "Death of a Princess" for PBS on the murder of a young princess by public execution for running off with a young Saudi of non-royal status. Georgie Ann Geyer told me subsequently that the viewer ratings for the three-part series were the highest in the history of PBS EVER and my work with Bert Van Munster, later creator/producer of "Cops" and still the executive producer of "The Amazing Race" had been one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.

Meantime, waiting for the Wilson job, the door had [inadvertently, I believe] been left slightly ajar and as I sat waiting outside for the panel's inquiries, I could overhear her telling the panel that I had "failed in every job which I had taken on in my State Department career and thereafter." This advance prepping done by a young Ivy female preppie was blatantly tendentious, but since I was not supposed to have eavesdropped, I thought it would be bad form to bring up this rather silly and superficial prejudicial and slightly dumb as well as non-classy and ignorant faux pas by a young woman whom I had met and conversed with for less than ten minutes in my whole lifetime. The panel interview turned out to be bland and uneventful---no one asked any "hard" questions. And the young woman who had given the sort of chilling pre-curtain raising appraisal had been briefed by another woman with whom I had had some difficulties on the PBS shoot---as they would have said much more colorfully in Goodfellas---it was an inside-the-Beltway thing with all the inconsequential and unimportant lack of gravitas that academic politics has in a slightly similar environment---like a tenure squabble of the sort that drove Amy Bishop into being a homicidal maniac, but which hardly left me breaking a sweat.

And I reflected on how little it meant to be regarded as a "failure in every job" when I had glowing personnel reports, but had always been a little "out of the box" on certain positions & may have seemed a square peg to some who wanted seamless round peg/round hole orthodoxy on every issue. As a final coda and denoument, I learned very shortly after that a very qualified person, more qualified than I in my own view, had already secured a lock on the position. Not only that, I was a friend of the dude and subsequently he performed very well, having been a Middle East Ambassador to Syria, & my own relations with him had previously been and continued to be warm and even friendly.

But as it happened, the short-term result was that there were no fallback positions available and I took on a couple of jobs way out of my accustomed skill set [being a courier, a pizza delivery man, then a bartender and then a member of Mondale's national staff in 1984, although by then I had come to admire Ronald Reagan. I soon got a job at selling bonds, passed my NASD 7 & NASD 63 and embarked on a whole new direction in my life, while my faithful wife took on jobs as a country representative with a very well-connected PR firm and even represented [she had a law degree] the National Society of Tort Lawyers as well as countries such as Panama and Greece. And during my wife's success at PR, she was also able to sell reak estate working with a broker's license. She even sold a couple of homes to State Dept. friends of mine, including David Welch, just yesterday in the Al Jazeera news supposedly implicated in trying to get Qaddafi out of his PR jam as recently as August 12th [David's subsequent career after Marilyn sold him and Gretchen the home in Chevy Chase was spectacularly successful, as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Asst. Sec'y of State for the Middle East, and upon retirement, a Bechtel corporate official.]

In the same period, I then rebounded to work in a DC boutique stock & bond firm connected to Drexel Burnham Lambert, then segued to working for Denis Neal's lobbying firm, working on Morocco, Pakistan, the Sudan and backstopping other countries in the region. I even met Charlie Wilson and have a bit part in the book [though not the movie] "Charlie Wilson's War." I ended up suddenly with a job offer to take the position of International Editor of the Oil Daily & my first overseas trip was to Vienna just after my daughter Nicola was born in May, 1989. I can remember calling home from the famous Imperial Hotel in Vienna, where Wagner composed several of his best musical scores, during the Tienanmen Square fiasco which coincided with an OPEC meeting in Vienna, hearing Niki's crying and laughter across the Atlantic where I had been driving as a courier & pizza dude just two-three years before. I also worked for Charlie Waterman at Jefferson Waterman on side projects The Oil Daily was aware of and which didn't interfere with my daily reporting. The weirdest moment was a phone conversation with the chief stockholder & virtual owner/megaboss of Occidental Petroleum, the [in]famous [?] and eccentric Armand Hammer, who told me admiringly he thought my columns in The Oil Daily the best reading of his day [Of course, when the colorful AH died a year later, the stock in his company rose over 20%!!!]. I also had a chance to travel to the Gulf War in 1990 as the ONLY oil reporter in the Gulf War, which of course was primarily over oil and subsoil rights. My good friend Adel Al-Jubair [currently Saudi Ambassador to the US] had managed to get me the visa, over the strenuous opposition of the Saudi Ministry of Information, who wanted a strict prohibition on reporters for oil publications. My access to high-ranking Saudis due to my previous residence as Political Officer in Saudi the previous decade gave me face-time on CNN, MacNeil-Lehrer, NBC & CBS as well as the opportunity to ask questions on the televised daily briefings in Riyadh. In addition, I drove Pulitzer reporter Caryl Murphy around town [she needed a chauffeur as a Washington Post reporter doing her interviews] and got some sidebar info using her status as a door-opener. Soon after Desert Storm was over, out of all this print & TV exposure, Amoco Corporation noticed and hired me for a salary & benefits package in late 1991 amounting to close to six-figures. In the five years after that humiliating Wilson interview [there were other episodes and vignettes not quite so shaming, but looking for a job is always a humbling exercise.

All this boring personal commentary is a feeble attempt to elucidate that when life presents you with lemons, there are many ways to make lemonade and an occasional lowering of income and social status [delivering pizzas to then radio DJ Larry King broadcasting out of Alexandria and a famous black sportscaster whose name escapes me this late at night [Crossman?!?} was hardly suitable resume-building material, but bouncing back is an essential component of what life is all about.

So when I see the bizarre ups and downs of Steve Jobs' and Steve Wozniak using their talents [and Jobs' admitted fast-and-furious razzle-dazzle] to recover from failed attempts that blew a lot of hopeful shareholders' money out the window, I can only remember my own much less successful, but similarly chequered career. Driving as a courier & delivering pies & slinging drinks in a Georgetown disco-bar & restaurant [closed for too many violations due to fake IDs shortly after I graduated to selling municipal bonds through cold calls in a bucket shop ] are hardly suitable bullet points in my long and singular resume. I do remember that Steve Jobs went to Pixar---a much more glorious sidestep on his way up the ladder to ultimate planetary domination of innovation & growing his Apple firm [being rehired by a company that fired you reminds me of Churchill's famous apothegm---"it takes courage to rat, but considerable ingenuity to re-rat" when WC jumped from Conservative to Liberal and then back to Conservative] to a size larger than Exxon/Mobil if only for a few days. His life is the most interesting biography, perhaps, of anyone still alive in the business world of the last seven decades---making Trump & Buffett & even Gates look dull boring in comparison....!

Taking his Newton concept and reworking it several different technological twisting ways and finally massaging a glorious failure in the nineties into the greatest success in IT history in 2010 with the phenomenal sales of iPad & the iterations of his other innovations---you have to hand Jobs a unique and singular laurel wreath of the Unbeatable "Comeback King of Corporate Chutzpah." [TM]

I don't think you can find anyone in the history of Sports, Politics or Business who can even approach Steve Jobs in magnitude and sheer glorious triumph even after he was finally downed by the worst adversity anyone can ever encounter---the "Big C," as film legend John Wayne used to call the dreaded and still ultimate champion---Cancer.