Agony in the Congo---BBC Meltdown Nightly

Walter Mead has a blog called The American Interest which is constantly interesting. One example:

...a rebel movement backed, most observers believe, by Rwanda has recently humiliated a pathetic mix of feckless, poorly led UN peacekeeping troops and forces from the “Democratic Republic” of the Congo’s shambolic army to occupy the key city of Goma. The M23 rebels are now threatening to take the regional capital and loudly blustering about marching on to Kinshasa, DR Congo’s capital on the other side of the sprawling, chaotic and ill-governed country.

MSM coverage of Africa flips between two mood states. In the upbeat mood, which is the Official Position for most of the time and heartily endorsed by the Development Lobby bureaucrats committed to extracting billions every year to support them in affluence as they allegedly solve Africa’s problems, the press is all happy clappy about Africa’s inevitable ascent. The continent is becoming more important, we have been told almost continuously for the last fifty years, and liberated from colonialism is making new strides, advancing fearlessly in development from year to shining year. Some subset of the 59 or so African states are singled out as exemplifying the new age of African progress — like Mali, which before its latest meltdown was widely praised in the media and the world of development professionals as an example of the new, democratic Africa that was on the cusp of emerging.

But then something happens and the mood flips to despair: Nothing has changed in Africa, nothing can change. It is the heart of darkness, there is no hope. The powerful countries outside Africa aren’t good enough or committed enough and in the absence of outside leadership, the Development Lobby loudly wails, even as it quietly whispers that the Africans themselves are too brutal, cynical and divided to make anything happen. The remedy, of course, is more money: no matter what is happening or not happening in Africa the Development Lobby and its media allies will always know what is needed, and it is always the same thing. But, moans the press in its depressed phase, there will never be enough money because the selfish North doesn’t care enough about Africa. Racists!

I am a faithful watcher of the BBC, simply because it goes all over the world where the trouble spots are and says, oh, woe are we, living on a planet with such terrible people---unless the people are PC-protected, like black Africans. Then the most one will here is a muffled 'tut tut," gingham-Victorian style.

In due course this mood will yield to another bracing bout of official optimism and the cycle will continue as it has done since decolonization in the 1960s. Optimism, pessimism, optimism, pessimism. Like much of what goes on in the press, it has very little connection with what is actually taking place on the ground, reflecting elite mood swings more than anything else. In due course this mood will yield to another bracing bout of official optimism and the cycle will continue as it has done since decolonization in the 1960s. Optimism, pessimism, optimism, pessimism. Like much of what goes on in the press, it has very little connection with what is actually taking place on the ground, reflecting elite mood swings more than anything else.

Neither the Africa optimists nor the Africa pessimists are right. The optimists, periodically anointing one regime or group of regimes as the heroes of a new democratic growth surge in Africa are pathetic. Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda now being pilloried as the cause of the fighting in the Congo, used to be, pardon the expression, the Great White Hope of the Africa optimists: the non-corrupt, growth oriented, liberal thinking democrat building a new kind of African paradise on the ashes of genocide. Now they’ve flipped him into yet another commodity grubbing, wealth-hungry African strongman.In due course this mood will yield to another bracing bout of official optimism and the cycle will continue as it has done since decolonization in the 1960s. Optimism, pessimism, optimism, pessimism. Like much of what goes on in the press, it has very little connection with what is actually taking place on the ground, reflecting elite mood swings more than anything else.

Having worked in DC as an FSO and overseas as an executive in a large American firm, I know how true Walter's observations are. The MSM blames GWB for WMD & Lord knows what while denying him credit for getting US aid to virtually halve the AIDS epidemic afflicting Black Africa.

But if the Africa optimists are clueless, the pessimists are flat wrong. Africa is not unchanging; a dynamic process of development and transition is indeed taking place across the continent. Tens of millions of people are flocking to the cities; population is booming; more people are becoming educated; investment is changing the nature of African economies from the Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope. Technologies like cell phones are changing African lives; emigration and remittances are pumping money into economies all over the continent; the triumph of Christianity across sub-Saharan Africa is having progressively deeper cultural and psychological impact; hundreds of millions of people are living in a world their parents and grandparents never knew.

Something is happening, but neither the optimists nor the pessimists get it—less because they don’t understand Africa than because they don’t understand history and modernization very well.

Most people in the west, and especially in the United States, take one of two positions on what modernization means. We are either historical optimists who think that science, technology and culture are moving higher and higher on an ascending trajectory towards a terrestrial utopia, or we are despairing hand wringers who think we are on some kind of down slope toward a final crash. Maybe global warming will kill us all, maybe nukes, maybe clashes of civilization or water wars, but modernization is bringing us closer and closer to inexorable doom.

Having lived in France & the UK, as well as three countries in the Middle East & Vietnam in S.E. Asia, I am a pessimist, but not a gloom & doomer. And Mead has the historical background, much like Robert Kaplan, whom he resembles, to know why.

This is an old pattern for us; going back into the 19th century Americans divided into “post-millennial” Christians who believed that human beings, guided by God, would create a just and prosperous world before Jesus returned at the end of time and “pre-millennial” Christians who believed that humanity’s efforts at progress and prosperity were doomed to fail, and that after an apocalyptic series of wars and disasters, Jesus would return to clean up the mess. Those two views of modern history persist today, even among people who don’t have an explicit religious dimension in their world-view.

Both the optimistic and pessimistic points of view can point to evidence that backs them up in other parts of the world as well as in Africa. The reason is that modernization itself contains both positive and negative elements. As Europe modernized in the 19th and 20th centuries, democracy spread, women got more rights, societies became more fair—and repeated episodes of murderous nationalism killed tens of millions of people and drove tens of millions from their homes in the most destructive wars and radical outbreaks of evil in the written history of mankind.

Those events were connected: modernization promotes nationalism and nationalism often leads both to democracy and mass murder. That was true across Europe; we can see it at work in the Middle East, and ethnic conflict between Tutsis and Hutus in the Great Lakes area in Africa is a major driver of the violence in the eastern Congo today.

But violence rules much of the Dark Continent.

Africa is modernizing today, and along with that process some very hopeful signs can often be discerned. But Africa looks set for a rough modernization. Crazy quilt colonial boundaries, ineffective elites, meddling foreign powers, resource curses, religious strife: all the ingredients are in place for a bloody and agonizing process of development and change.

The western media used to put Paul Kagame into a white hat and hail him as a modernizing savior figure as part of the new wave of African development. Now they have him in a black hat as a kind of resource warlord, promoting conflict in the Congo to get access to valuable mineral resources and royalties.

I read The Economist weekly online as well as in our dead-tree magazine delivered every Friday. Except for some glaring blindspots, such as US & UK politics [!!], this venerable magazine has its ducks in order, compared to the slapdash liberal shambolic make-a-wish kumbayeh vibe of American "news" magazines. Newsweek is so bad it's dissolving itself in left-wing hydrochloric acid. But in Nigeria, crazy Islamist sects like Boko Haram wreak havoc & kill Christians just for the fun of it.

National leaders in tough neighborhoods generally don’t fit well in neat moral categories. They mix serious accomplishments with staggering crimes. They combine a statesmanlike ability to manage a complicated foreign relations portfolio with hard and unwavering action where they think their vital interests are at stake.

This generalization works across Africa & the Arab world for that matter. Syria is a crime on its own people---Sierra Leone shows how quickly a country can rise from horrific crimes in a civil war to re-electing a President who is actually not just feasting on the national treasury. It is a commonplace that African airlines must take their planes out of Africa to be repaired or periodically checked---not because the natives can't DO the repairs, but because the parts and even the machinery disappears because of massive theft. Just a pessimistic way to end this peace at 2 AM.

Greg Mankiew Serves as Obungler's Fiscal Cliff Shrink

Mankiew is a much smarter and much more ethical economist than Paul Krugboy [can anyone spell "Enron Advisor." Read the link in the NYT & consider why according to Bob Woodward's book, the foursome of Boehner, Reid, Pelosi & McConnell all were ready for the debt ceiling deal, but Obungler refused and instead the insane fiscal cliff was forced upon the nation.

Or maybe that's what the retarded liberal dunce Obungler wanted all along---for the epic fail in the US economy caused by higher taxes and defense cuts.

Truth, Justice & the American Way Prevails?

The University of Iowa not only produces shitty football & basketball teams, but spineless gutless University Provosts and other numbnut affirmative action bigots. Read the link above to see how one female Law School prof was denied promotion & tenure for not toeing the PC line.

Palestinians Behind Tottenham Hotspur Fan Attack?

The BBC News had a three-minute piece on TV about a bar/cafe in Rome where ten Hotspur fans were attacked. The attackers all wore ski-masks to hide their identities, and not so coincidentally perhaps, their ethnic background. Turns out that Tottenham has a large contingent of fans from the North London Jewish community, which also led to anti-Semitic shouts by Lazio fans in Rome when they played Tottenham this week.

And of course the spineless degenerate Italian officials allow this to happen with their usual brainless lack of integrity.

WSJ Berates Morsi Diktat;

Here's the text:

The Egyptian revolution took another bad turn Thursday, as President Mohamed Morsi gave himself dictatorial powers over the legislature and courts. The world has feared that the Muslim Brotherhood would favor one-man, one-vote, once, and the Morsi coup is an ominous sign.

"The people wanted me to be the guardian of these steps in this phase," Reuters quoted Mr. Morsi as saying on Friday. "I don't like and don't want—and there is no need—to use exceptional measures. But those who are trying to gnaw the bones of the nation" must be "held accountable."

Mr. Morsi says his diktat will merely last as long as it takes the country to adopt a new constitution, which is what authoritarians always say. They claim to be a necessary step on the way to democracy, but democracy never arrives. Mr. Morsi's rationalization is that he must have this power to "protect the revolution," as if the demonstrators who deposed Hosni Mubarak in 2011 merely wanted another Mubarak with a beard and prayer rug. Mr. Morsi is claiming more power than Mr. Mubarak ever had.

Egyptians took to the street on Friday in protest, sometimes violently, and nearly every other major political leader denounced the putsch. That includes Abdel Monheim Aboul Fotouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader and presidential candidate. The violence is regrettable, but the protests may be the only way Egyptians can prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from becoming their new dictators.

The Brotherhood doesn't control the military or Ministry of Interior, yet neither one is going to rush to defend a more liberal Egyptian state. The military's main goal is to protect its role in government and its economic interests, and the Brotherhood's draft constitution puts the military outside of civilian control.

As long as Mr. Morsi doesn't challenge those interests, the military and police may let him control the courts, the media and the legislature. This is a recipe for rule a la Pakistan, with an increasingly Islamist state but the military and intelligence services as an independent power. The immediate losers will be Egypt's liberals and the Western journalists who inhaled the vapors of Tahrir Square. But whatever Mr. Morsi intends, the Pakistan model is not a recipe for a more stable Egypt.

Mr. Morsi's coup is also awkward for the Obama Administration, which had been praising the Egyptian in media backgrounders for his role in brokering the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Mr. Morsi was hailed as a moderate statesman. Yet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had barely left Cairo before Mr. Morsi made his move. He may have figured that all the praise made it easier for him to grab more power.

Mrs. Clinton and President Obama had said nothing as we went to press, though a State Department spokeswoman issued a tepid statement saying the U.S. had "concerns" and calling for "checks and balances." The Obama Administration has invested its prestige in a moderate Muslim Brotherhood, and it may be loathe to admit that this hope might be going the way of its Russian "reset" or its claim that the "tide of war is receding."

Mr. Obama should condemn the power grab and hope this has some sway with those who want to maintain good U.S. ties. If the Muslim Brotherhood becomes the Islamist Mubarak, it will be a blow to U.S. interests and further evidence of a Middle East sliding away from American influence.

Gosh, amateur hour at the White House. Who would thunkit?

Morsi Power Grab One Day After Gaza Settlement

The 51% victor in the recent Egyptian elections for President sure doesn't waste any time. He emasculates the Army, no mean feat in itself, then brokers a Gaza cease fire, finally seizes all the reins of power in Misr, named for the black mud in the Delta.

I've been to almost two dozen Arab countries as an FSO [missed Djibouti & Libya] & to Egypt many times. The concepts of Islam & democracy are mutually exclusive [I am a State Dept. trained Arabist] & Arab history since the Hegira shows little evidence of any forms of government save autocracy by a strongman with religious credentials---Morsi is just the latest example. Islamists are like Communists---once you vote them in, that's the last election you'll have that is not totally rigged.

Morsi seems not to have learned any lessons in democracy and the silly amateur in the WH in DC elected by the new majority of leeches, minorities, slackers and layabouts---generally the Lumpenproletariat Marx despised, but which in the US loves Marx [if the illiterate loons ever heard of him].

Barry Soetero couldn't find Egypt on a map before he was elected and I doubt if his high-flying paeans to democracy before he got his ridiculous Nobel mean anything to this scandalous fraud anymore. Now he's free to get himself out of the jam he's in, and figure out how to make people think he's not a witless chump on Benghazi & Cairo.

UPDATE: David Kirkpatrick of the NYT reports on Morsi's power grab obliquely, but gets to a level of disapproval.

Mr. Morsi, an Islamist and Egypt’s first elected president, portrayed his decree as an attempt to fulfill popular demands for justice and protect the transition to a constitutional democracy. But the unexpected breadth of the powers he seized raised immediate fears that he might become a new strongman. Seldom in history has a postrevolutionary leader amassed so much personal power only to relinquish it swiftly.

What an understatement! When the Free Officers' Movement secured a figurehead like Naguib and the segued swiftly to Nasser in the early '50's, there was no fig leaf of legitimacy---only a call for pan-Arab & later a Bandung Conference in Indonesia for ALL the impoverished ex-colonial states. Sadat was a later improvement after Nasser died fifteen years after he seized power & Mubarak improved on Sadat slightly. Now Morsi is reverting back to the original Muhammad Ali strongman template of the early 19th c.

In Washington, a senior State Department official said, “We are seeking more information about President Morsi’s decisions and declarations today, which have raised concerns.”

Mr. Morsi’s advisers portrayed the decree as an attempt to cut through the deadlock that has stalled Egypt’s convoluted political transition more than 20 months after President Mubarak’s ouster. Mr. Morsi’s more political opponents and the holdover judicial system, they argued, were sabotaging the transition to thwart the Islamist majority.

The liberal and secular opposition has repeatedly threatened to boycott the Islamist-dominated constitutional assembly. (It is led by Mr. Morsi’s allies in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. Members were picked by Parliament, where Islamists won a nearly three-quarters majority.) And as the assembly nears a deadline set under an earlier interim transition plan, most secular members and the representatives of the Coptic Church have walked out, costing it up to a quarter of its 100 members and much of its legitimacy.

Finally, Fuad Ajami of the WSJ summed it up on the BBC TV news with: "one election for one leader for one time, the same old Egyptian rule [in both senses of the word] for centuries."

Here's the way the NYT article sums it up:

Mr. Morsi also replaced the public prosecutor, Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, a Mubarak appointee widely criticized for failing to win stronger sentences against Mr. Mubarak and his associates, and against abusive police officers. (Mr. Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison for overseeing the killing of protesters, but the verdict found no direct evidence of his involvement, paving the way for an appeal.)

Mr. Mahmoud’s replacement is Talaat Ibrahim Abdullah, former leader of the movement for judicial independence under Mr. Mubarak.

Mr. Morsi ordered retrials for Mr. Mubarak and others accused of responsibility for killing civilian protesters during the uprising. He stripped the accused of protections against being tried twice for the same crime and issued a law setting up a new transitional legal system to handle the retrials.

Another decree provision granted the president the “power to take all necessary measures and procedures” against any potential threat to the revolution.

On the Web site of the state newspaper Al Ahram, a prominent jurist, Salah Eissa, urged citizens “to take to the street and die, because Egypt is lost,” adding, “immunizing the decisions of the president with a constitutional declaration is a forgery and a fraud.”

Nathan J. Brown, a scholar of the Egyptian legal system at George Washington University, summed up the overall message: “I, Morsi, am all powerful. And in my first act as being all powerful, I declare myself more powerful still. But don’t worry — it’s just for a little while.”

The New Pharaoh setting up kangaroo courts in a country being taken over by Islamist crazies. Watch for the "Honor Code" killing daughters get legitimized. And the Copts get persecuted. It's The Alexandria Quartet by Larry Durrell, where the desert creeps in during the last book bringing back the dread sterility of the Arab Middle Ages, where the Fatimids were the high point of Egypt's sad history. And the mad Sultan in 1015 burnt down Churches and Synagogues in his purity of religion---bringing all sorts of insanity into the Arab world. P.S.: The Fatimids were Shi'ites and spawned the Alawites and the Druzis.

No More Rex Ryan Mouthing Off as Jets Coach?

Bill Belichek is the strong silent type. Rex Ryan should be a Defensive Coordinator like his twin brother in Dallas. The nationally-televised game Thanksgiving Evening sliced up the Jets like a turkey---the Patriots had the ball less than four minutes in the second quarter and yet scored 35 points, going into halftime leading 35-3 over the arch-rival Jets. And the chorus began afterwards for Rex's head on a large platter such as any turkey should be served. ESPN has two woeful articles:

Last year Ryan promised the franchise its first championship since man walked on the moon, mocked Tom Coughlin's Giants in the days preceding their Christmas Eve clash, and then watched his team implode before its big-brother neighbor landed in another ticker-tape parade.

Allegedly humbled by the beatdowns and enlightened by the unnecessary stress he was putting on his players, Ryan opened 2012 by dialing back his outsize persona. That didn't work either, not even close. The Jets might be hearing him, but they're definitely not listening to him.

"I know our fans deserve a heck of a lot better than this," Ryan said.

Yes they do. They deserve better than Ryan's ever-weakening defense, better than Rex's blind devotion to Sanchez, better than his empty pledges that the Jets will rebound, and better than his call to suit up a battered Tebow.

Of the fans, Ryan said, "I don't blame them for booing me." At the end of his postgame news conference the coach was asked if he believes he'll make it to 2013.

"I do," he said, "and I think our team will play a heck of a lot better. And I don't believe anybody will ask that question by the time the year's over."

Even if the Jets win three or four of their final five against teams with a combined 17-33 record, Woody Johnson shouldn't be fooled into sticking with the same management group. Tannenbaum needs to go and Ryan's no-ring circus needs to go with him, and the billionaire needs to pick up the tab.

Johnson must lure a Payton or a Dungy, or the next college coach who can make the kind of transition to the NFL made by Jim Harbaugh, a 34-0 winner over Ryan in September. Rex coulda beena contenda, but now he's gone ahead and knocked himself out.

I was getting sick and tired listening to Rex shoot off his mouth each year about how the Jets were going to win the Super Bowl.

ESPN's James Walker expands on Ian O'Connor's comments above:

The 2012 season is over for the New York Jets. The New England Patriots made sure of it with a 49-19 blowout victory over New York on Thanksgiving night at MetLife Stadium.

New York embarrassed itself with a comedy of errors, particularly during the 35 unanswered points by New England in the second quarter. The Jets dropped to 4-7 and their playoff chances are reduced to virtually zero.

From this point forward, it's time for the Jets to start thinking about 2013. New York still has five games left, but this is the start of a lengthy self-evaluation process for next season.

Here are the questions New York should consider:

Who is the quarterback?

It is clear that Mark Sanchez is not the long-term solution. Sanchez had four years to prove he is a franchise quarterback and is regressing. He is 12-15 as a starter the past two seasons.

New York must figure out in these final five games if Sanchez deserves to be the starting quarterback for a fifth year in 2013. Popular backup Tim Tebow is on the roster, and Jets fans are calling for Tebow to get a shot. At 4-7, it may be wise for New York to see what it has in Tebow.

But contractually for the long haul, the Jets may be stuck with Sanchez. He has a lot of guaranteed money next year with his recent contract extension. Going in a different direction would be horrific for New York’s salary cap and the bottom line.

This is a difficult decision for the Jets because Sanchez is not getting better. He is an average quarterback, at best, who can only thrive when everything is going well around him. If Sanchez remains the starter, the Jets could go through many of the same issues on offense next year.

Who stays and who goes?

Sanchez is contractually strapped to the Jets next season. But the Jets have several veteran free agents they can let go. Pending free agents like starting tailback Shonn Greene, tight end Dustin Keller and safeties LaRon Landry and Yeremiah Bell are all playing out the final five games of their contracts.

New York does not have a lot of cap room next year. Therefore, the Jets have a lot of decisions to make on veterans and whether they will stick around after this season.

The Jets are an older team that was built to win now. But they latched onto veterans too long and it's time to get younger and faster. A lot of players are auditioning for jobs in New York in the final month of the season.

Do Jets have the right GM and coach?

Jets owner Woody Johnson said a week ago that he didn’t sign up for 3-6. Well, the boss certainly didn’t sign up for a 30-point loss at home to their biggest rival on national television.

The Jets looked like the "Bad News Bears" at times Thursday, and that reflects on the coaching staff that prepared the team and the front office that put the team together. New York is a roster without much speed or depth, and that’s on general manager Mike Tannenbaum. The Jets also haven’t been well coached at times this year, and that’s on Rex Ryan.

I believe Ryan and Tannenbaum deserve another year. But performances like Thursday in a big game make this pair hard to defend.

Johnson will be watching closely how the Jets play in the final five games, and that could directly impact the future of New York’s head coach and general manager.

It's going to be a long five games for the Jets. But this team has a lot more questions than answers, and this is the time to start searching for solutions.

Remember long ago when Brett Favre was the Jets QB? I still think Brett could have gotten them farther than poor Mark Sanchez. Tebow would be better than Mark...

Jesse Jackson Jr. Resigns Amid Gathering Scandals

Feigning mental illness as an excuse, Jackson is just one of the thirty-or-so Black Caucus members, a majority of whom are basically swindlers and cheats of one sort or another. Read how he angled for Obama's vacated seat by having his foreign-named mentor/minder offer between $1.5 & $6 million for Blagovich, the then-governor now serving a prison sentence, told the FBI. Jackson Jr. & his Alderman wife are now still being investigated, but this resignation looks like Junior is taking the fall so as to avoid a full-blown expose of his crimes and misdemeanors.

TPM Muckraker has more salacious details, including how Ald. wife used campaign funds to redecorate the Jesse Jr. Chicago home.

Jesse Sr. was notorious for shaking down huge corporations as he did to a Toyota plant in Peoria for alleged discrimination, threatening demonstrations, boycotts & mayhem to the brand name. The crook who still infests the American body politic like a flea or a louse, depending on your POV, now acts as an elder statesman, his time like Al Sharpton's as a symbol of black whatever now receding into the past.

“Mr. Jackson is cooperating with the investigation. We hope to negotiate a fair resolution of the matter but the process could take several months. During that time, we will have no further comment and urge you to give Mr. Jackson the privacy he needs to heal and handle these issues responsibly,” according to a statement by Reid Weingarten and Brian Heberlig, who are in Washington, and Dan K. Webb, who is in Chicago.

Reid Weingarten represented my wife [and myself] when we were testifying against Sen. Hatfield about twenty years ago when he was a bright young up and coming lawyer. Now he's graduated to representing the big fish like Jesse Jr.

White House To Boehner: Obamacare Not Part Of Fiscal Cliff Deal

Anyone who read Bob Woodward's book on the maddening negotiations on the debt ceiling that led to this 'fiscal cliff' knows that Obama is as stubborn as the Democrat jackass that symbolizes the Party.

Even with Pelosi, Reid & McConnell on Speaker Boehner's side, Woodward described the nutjob Obama summarily rejecting the deal last summer proposed by the entire House/Senate Leadership.

Instead, Obama pushed for a temporary rise in the debt ceiling to be followed by the 'cliff' in January.

Truth be told, if Obama had pushed for Simpson/Bowles, this entire drama would not be playing out at this strange transitional time.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

David Brooks on Republican/Libertarian Conservatism

David Brooks has written a thoughtful article on where the GOP might be headed in the future. Center-Right, he hopes, but says there are many thoughtful conservatives of many different stripes:

Paleoconservatives. The American Conservative has become one of the more dynamic spots on the political Web. Writers like Rod Dreher and Daniel Larison tend to be suspicious of bigness: big corporations, big government, a big military, concentrated power and concentrated wealth. Writers at that Web site, and at the temperamentally aligned Front Porch Republic, treasure tight communities and local bonds. They’re alert to the ways capitalism can erode community. Dispositionally, they are more Walker Percy than Pat Robertson.

Larison focuses on what he calls the imperial tendencies of both the Bush and Obama foreign policies. He crusades against what he sees as the unchecked killing power of drone strikes and champions a more modest and noninterventionist foreign policy.

Lower-Middle Reformists. Reihan Salam, a writer for National Review, E21 and others, recently pointed out that there are two stories about where the Republican Party should go next. There is the upper-middle reform story: Republicans should soften their tone on the social issues to win over suburban voters along the coasts. Then there is a lower-middle reform story: Republicans should focus on the specific economic concerns of the multiethnic working class.

Salam promotes the latter. This means acknowledging that working-class concerns are not what they were in the 1980s. The income tax is less burdensome than the payroll tax. Family disruption undermines social mobility. Republicans, he argues, should keep the social conservatism, which reinforces families, and supplement it with an agenda that supports upward mobility and social capital.

Similarly, Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute has argued for a Republican Party that listens more closely to working-class concerns. Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review has argued for family-friendly tax credits and other measures that reinforce middle-class dignity. Jim Manzi wrote a seminal article in National Affairs on the need to promote innovation while reducing inequality.

Soft Libertarians. Some of the most influential bloggers on the right, like Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok and Megan McArdle, start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way.

Many of these market-oriented writers emphasize that being pro-market is not the same as being pro-business. Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago published an influential book, “A Capitalism for the People,” that took aim at crony capitalism. Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner does muckraking reporting on corporate-federal collusion. Rising star Derek Khanna wrote a heralded paper on intellectual property rights for the House Republican Study Committee that was withdrawn by higher-ups in the party, presumably because it differed from the usual lobbyist-driven position.

There are a number of unpredictable libertarian-leaning writers, including Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic on civil liberties issues, and Eugene Volokh on legal and free speech concerns.

Burkean Revivalists. This group includes young conservatives whose intellectual roots go back to the organic vision of society described best by Edmund Burke but who are still deeply enmeshed in current policy debates.

Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs is one of the two or three most influential young writers in politics today. He argues that we are now witnessing the fiscal crisis of the entitlement state, exemplified most of all by exploding health care costs. His magazine promotes a big agenda of institutional modernization.

The lawyer Adam J. White has argued for an approach to jurisprudence and regulatory affairs based on modesty, but not a doctrinaire clinging to original intent. Ryan Streeter of Indiana champions civil-society conservatism, an updated version of the Jack Kemp style.

By and large, these diverse writers did not grow up in the age of Reagan and are not trying to recapture it. They disdain what you might call Donor Base Republicanism. Most important, they matured intellectually within a far-reaching Web-based conversation. In contrast to many members of the conservative political-entertainment complex, they are data-driven, empirical and low-key in tone.

They are united more by a style of feedback and mutual scrutiny than by a common agenda. Some politically unorthodox people in this conversation, such as Josh Barro of Bloomberg View, Meghan Clyne of National Affairs and Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, specialize in puncturing sentimentality and groupthink.

Since Nov. 6, the G.O.P. has experienced an epidemic of open-mindedness. The party may evolve quickly. If so, it’ll be powerfully influenced by people with names like Reihan, Ramesh, Yuval and Derek Khanna.

While I cringe at David's tendency on TV to lurch leftward or give a simpering smile and cringeworthy nod to many leftist screeds on PBS Evening News, his reading all sorts of political scribblings --- if he reads even half of the above --- is impressive. I have one of his books on suburban culture, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, and found it sociologically interesting, but not at all judgmental. Brooks is becoming an influential voice, but tends to be too shallow for a trenchant analysis of how America's destiny will work out. A sort of soft totalitarian vibe. O tempura, o mores...

The Real Scoop on Papa John's and Obamacare

JOHNSchnatter knows that ObamaCare is going to cost gigantic amounts of taxpayer money and that every small business will be overwhelmed with even more paperwork and regulations and bullish*t rules imposed from above.

And the consumer of his great pies will pay the extra costs. In 2014, the giant second foot descends on the taxpayer and the nation's health system is probably going to collapse or at least crumble from all the new expenses. It's basically like medicare after one buys some health insurance. In the end, almost everyone loses.

And finally, Palin was right about the death panels. In the UK, every day many elderly patients are denied care that would prolong their lives because some unaccountable bureaucrat in the NHS decides it won't be worth the cost. Bye bye Grandma.

Sebelius or her ilk will turn into 'Big Sister' and pull the plug by rules and regs on thousands of The Greatest Generation as their health deteriorates.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Which Professions Have The Most Psychopaths?

Interesting article. I have dealt with Media, Lawyers, & Journalists in my FSO career. Then in the private sector, I actually was a journalist and then a minor executive in a huge oil company with frequent contact with its CEO, who took a shine to me.

I would say from my experience that the list rings true---even to chefs, some world-class specimens of whom I met when I was Vice Consul in Lyon, France. Lawyers are even more unfeeling than CEOs, whom I found out in my journalistic career [I interviewed many in my job as International Editor of the Oil Daily] were very cagey because they have to think of their shareholders.

Lawyers don't, and often disregard the interests of their client, as I found out.

Media/TV types are hopelessly shallow with only a few exceptions [Howie Kurtz is one very prominent exception whom I met and talked to several times at length].

Journalists run the spectrum, with many who will kill for a story and then others who will share with their fellow ink-stained wretches.

Diplomats should be on the psychopathy list as I've met Richard Holbrooke & several less famous like him who are genuinely autistic and solipsistic in their utter self-absorption.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Is CJ John Roberts an Attention Whore?

The MSM has anointed John Roberts, erstwhile pillar of conservative thought and SCOTUS rulings, a savior of the Republic. This for jumping ship on ObamaCare. Here's how the WSJ editorial ends:

Chief Justice Roberts shares the Esquire honor with Lena Dunham, the star of an Obama campaign ad and the creator and star of the HBO series about 20-something sexual angst called "Girls."

She and the Chief Justice also make the Atlantic Monthly's list of "Brave Thinkers" of 2012, by which they mean thinkers who agree with the Atlantic's liberal editors. Ms. Dunham is praised for taking "the soft glow off the 'chick flick,'" for instance when her character acts "like an underage street hooker to turn her boyfriend on," while the Chief Justice gets credit for "maintaining the Court's legitimacy" with a ruling "both brave and shrewd." President Obama probably has Time's "Person of the Year" nailed down, but expect the Chief to finish a close second.

Such is the strange new respect a conservative receives for sustaining liberal priorities. Our own view is less effusive, and to expiate his ObamaCare legal sins, a fair punishment would be that he hire Ms. Dunham as a clerk.

Is Lena Stanley Ann Dunham's distant relative. Inquiring minds want to know.

CBS reports with two very good pieces by Charles D'Agata and fluent Arabist Clarissa Ward in more detail about the vicious Hamas leadership:

Israel accuses Hamas militants of hiding near civilians, which Hamas denies. But CBS News correspondent Charlie D'Agata reports the Islamic jihad admitted one of their militants was hiding among journalists when he was killed by an Israeli air strike over the Gaza media center Monday. Launch pads are being discovered near mosques and schools, and CBS News crews saw a rocket launch just two blocks away from a residential area.

Egypt, the traditional mediator between Israel and the Arab world, was at the center of a flurry of diplomatic activity Monday. Egyptian intelligence officials met separately in Cairo with an Israeli envoy and with Khaled Mashaal, the top Hamas leader in exile. Until recently, he has only been allowed in Syria and Iran, CBS News correspondent Clarissa Ward reports.

Hamas wants Israel to halt all attacks on Gaza and lift tight restrictions on trade and movement in and out of the territory that have been in place since Hamas seized Gaza by force in 2007. Israel demands an end to rocket fire from Gaza and a halt to weapons smuggling into Gaza through tunnels under the border with Egypt.

With positions far apart on a comprehensive deal, some close to the negotiations suggested Egypt is first seeking a halt to fighting before other conditions are discussed. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are in a sensitive stage.

Hamas leader: Rockets won't stop until demands are met Mashaal told reporters that Israel's threat of invading Gaza was a bluff and Hamas would only agree to a cease-fire if its demands are met. "We don't accept Israeli conditions because it is the aggressor," he said. "We want a cease-fire along with meeting our demands."

When asked by Ward if Hamas wants to see a truce, he responded: "God-willing, the American people will wake up and realize that it is better to stand with 350 million Arabs than to continue to support Israel."

Mashaal eventually conceded that he did not want to see an escalation in hostilities, Ward reports, but was unclear on when he thought a truce would be reached. "Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps never," he told reporters.

Ward and her CNN counterpart whose name escapes me at the moment are two extremely good young Arabists. Ward was also conversing in Japanese, a language I as an Arabist am unfamiliar with. Hamas's answer to the persistent young American reporter:

Hamas leader on truce prospects: "Maybe never" Israeli leaders have repeatedly threatened to widen the offensive, saying an invasion is an option. Israel has amassed troops on the Gaza border and begun calling up thousands of reservists.

Still, an Israeli official emphasized that Israel hopes to find a diplomatic solution.

"We prefer the diplomatic solution if it's possible. If we see it's not going to bear fruit, we can escalate," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic efforts under way. He added that Israel wants international guarantees that Hamas will not rearm or use Egypt's Sinai region, which abuts Gaza, for militant activity.

Clarissa reported to Scott Pelley that Meshal is full of bluster and really wants the escalation to stop, despite daring Israel to invade. As Gaza turns & Israel regrets going along with Condi Rice who in January 2006 convinced the Israelis to agree to let Hamas participate in the municipal elections. So America let these terrorist thugs who shot missiles from civilian areas in Gaza to civilian areas in Israel act back then as a responsible party. They were elected and the Palestinians have been going downhill ever since.

Conclave of Congressional Demonrat Crones Says "Never Blame a Woman"

James Taranto has a great article on the hysterical double standards of the so-called female mind. But men's attitudes towards women go back aways and there is a tendency to say that chivalry and hypocrisy are both just shields against what women consider porn and check this out if you don't believe me.

The Washington Post's Lisa Miller echoes the complaint: "The commentary and analysis of this season's latest and greatest sex scandal . . . is downright medieval. . . . Powerful men are expected to stray. . . . But the women with whom they consort are unredeemed for all of history."

They have a point; there is a double standard. But the feminist critics misunderstand the nature of that double standard.

Petraeus himself, after all, has not exactly been "redeemed." Quite the contrary. The affair came to public attention precisely because of his resignation. No one can take away his considerable accomplishments, but his public career appears to be at an end. History will remember the ridiculous and humiliating way in which it concluded. No doubt he is paying a private price as well: "As you can imagine, she's not exactly pleased right now," ABC News quoted Steve Boylan, a retired Army colonel with a gift for understatement, as saying of Mrs. Petraeus.

When commentators observe that Petraeus must have been tempted by Broadwell, they are not making excuses for his errant behavior. They are merely stating the obvious: that his was a failure of self-control. It is generally understood that men are weak, subject to sexual temptation.

If Broadwell is assigned a disproportionate share of the "responsibility' for the affair, it is because of a failure to acknowledge that women are weak, too--that "human fallibility" does indeed work both ways. If he found a younger, physically attractive woman irresistible, it seems a reasonable surmise that she found a powerful, famous, brilliant man equally so. Indeed, how could it not be so? If either one of them had successfully resisted the attraction, dangerous to both of them, there would have been no affair.

Feminists are not above employing double standards when it suits their purposes. Lisa Miller, the Washington Post columnist quoted above, was last seen in this column disparaging "the smug fecundity of the Republican [presidential] field." Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann all have too many children for Miller's liking, and despite her including Bachmann in the list, she blamed the men: "What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs."

So Miller implies that it is "smug" to have a large family, but according to her "powerful men are expected to stray..."

This kind of blatant hypocrisy is why the Washington Post is slowly sliding into the dustbin of history just like its complicit companions in moral turpitude, the major newspapers and networks in the media.

Can't wait to see them all taken out to the giant piles of refuse that history coughs up to lie, cheat and steal in the name of the "marketplace of ideas." But here's more proof that women have no concept of consistency or elevated perspective on the Demonrat side of the aisle.

As for Fudge and the other defenders of Susan Rice against supposed sexism, they seem to be implying that women in powerful public positions should be spared the rough treatment that would be accorded to men. "In unusually personal terms," the AP notes, "the Democratic women lashed out at Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham." The story does not mention if they lashed out at a third critic of Rice, Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. Her name does appear in the report, but only in passing, and nine paragraphs after McCain and Graham are first mentioned.

Isn't it interesting that the aptly named Fudge & other BC fatties would issue an illiterate and biased statement hating on men. But the mental wastrel Senator from California outdoes the Black Caucus with her breathtaking stupidity and ignorance:

Then again, the standard is different when the black woman named Rice is a Republican. In January 2007, an AP dispatch noted "Sen. Barbara Boxer's remark last week to [Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice that the secretary of state, single and childless, doesn't have a 'personal price' to pay in Iraq."

To call the imbecilic moron Boxer a moral failure is an understatement. But the hypocrisy in the Demonrat Party extends to the culpability of the Rat-in-Chief:

A final irony is that the feminist defense of Susan Rice is ultimately in the service of shielding a powerful man from accountability. After all, Obama was not merely being chivalrous when he said that if McCain and Graham "want to go after somebody, they should go after me." He was also changing the subject away from the failure of his administration, which includes officials of both sexes, to give an honest accounting of the Benghazi fiasco.

Read the whole article to see why even when he feigns chivalry, this specimen of deceptive BS hides his failures by pointing "Look, over there, male chauvinist pigs!"

Terrorist-in-Chief Khaled Meshal Dares Israel to Invade

Khaled Meshal is a craven hyena too afraid to live in Gaza, so he sequesters himself in Damascus where Chief-of-State terrorist Bashar Assad gives this Hamas scavenger-animal shelter from the Israelis.

Speaking at a news conference in Cairo, where the diplomatic efforts were under way, the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, suggested that the Israeli infantry mobilization on the border with Gaza was a bluff on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

“If you wanted to launch it, you would have done it,” Mr. Meshal told reporters. He accused Israel of using the invasion threat as an attempt to “dictate its own terms and force us into silence.”

Rejecting Israel’s contention that Hamas had precipitated the conflict, Mr. Meshal said the burden was on the Israelis. “The demand of the people of Gaza is meeting their legimitate demands — for Israel to be restrained from its aggression, assassinations and invasions, and for the siege over Gaza to be ended,” he said.

This dog of an Arab should shut up and keep his trap shut. I am hoping the coward who has his missiles aimed at Israeli civilians gets his car blown up just like the Hamas military commander did last week. If he had a spinal column, he would aim those missiles at the Israeli Merkava tanks---then he's see a nation with citizens who fight terrorist fags and bitch-boys would retaliate. Aiming at civilian towns in Israel is cowardly, not something the NYT often points out. Israel will take care of Haniya and Meshel in good time. Just like they took out the cowardly hyena who killed an American Navy Officer back in the '80s. That hyena was killed in Damascus and was Meshal's chief assistant terrorist. Both dogs will get their just due at the hands of Israel

And then the dogs will eat their bones too.

Gaza Child Killed by Misfiring Hamas Rocket[s]?

Human Shields are the ultimate cynical ploy by the barbaric whiners in Hamas' leadership who want to parade their victimhood in front of the witless non-Arab, non-Muslim world to gain sympathy and some measure of guilt money. This weekend the visit of Egyptian Prime Minister Kandil was highlighted by the highly-publicized presentation to him of a 4-year old Gaza boy killed the very morning of his visit. Foreign reporters tsk-tsked and the Gaza Hamas PR types wove a web of lies about the unfortunate boy---however, soon independent Gaza observers ratted out the cynical Haniya and his gang of liars:

In private, many people were prepared to admit to dismay that it was happening again. Some of those with homes near strategic points that might soon become battlefields, or targets for Israeli bombers, admitted to feelings of dread at what could be to come. A few even said they had pleaded with Hamas not to launch rockets from near their homes — a sure-fire way to summon up an Israeli airstrike in response. But there were signs on Saturday that not all the Palestinian casualties have been the result of Israeli air strikes. The highly publicised death of four-year-old Mohammed Sadallah appeared to have been the result of a misfiring home-made rocket, not a bomb dropped by Israel.

The child’s death on Friday figured prominently in media coverage after Hisham Kandil, the Egyptian prime minister, was filmed lifting his dead body out of an ambulance. "The boy, the martyr, whose blood is still on my hands and clothes, is something that we cannot keep silent about," he said, before promising to defend the Palestinian people. But experts from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights who visited the site on Saturday said they believed that the explosion was caused by a Palestinian rocket.

In the chaos, it is highly unlikely that Mr Kandil or anyone else at the hospital suspected that the death was the result of anything but an air strike. Sharif Khalah, 26, was standing at the end of the alleyway by the road when the explosion happened.

Anyone familiar with the tawdry cynical mindset of the Hamas and Ikhwan religious fanatics knows that they will say, deny, excuse anything in the advancement and aggrandizement of their goals and territory.

Ross Douthat on "The Liberal Gloat"

Ross applies his gentle and genteel intelligence to examining the egregious solecisms some of the more delusional half-wits on the left emit without stop on captive legacy media:

Maybe it’s too soon to pierce this cloud of postelection smugness. But in the spirit of friendly correction — or, O.K., maybe curmudgeonly annoyance — let me point out some slightly more unpleasant truths about the future that liberalism seems to be winning.

Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values — reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. But it’s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear.

Consider the Hispanic vote. Are Democrats winning Hispanics because they put forward a more welcoming face than Republicans do — one more in keeping with America’s tradition of assimilating migrants yearning to breathe free? Yes, up to a point. But they’re also winning recent immigrants because those immigrants often aren’t assimilating successfully — or worse, are assimilating downward, thanks to rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and high dropout rates. The Democratic edge among Hispanics depends heavily on these darker trends: the weaker that families and communities are, the more necessary government support inevitably seems.

Likewise with the growing number of unmarried Americans, especially unmarried women. Yes, social issues like abortion help explain why these voters lean Democratic. But the more important explanation is that single life is generally more insecure and chaotic than married life, and single life with children — which is now commonplace for women under 30 — is almost impossible to navigate without the support the welfare state provides.

Or consider the secular vote, which has been growing swiftly and tilts heavily toward Democrats. The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the “spiritual but not religious” seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general.

What unites all of these stories is the growing failure of America’s local associations — civic, familial, religious — to foster stability, encourage solidarity and make mobility possible.

Anyone who has read Russell Kirk knows what Ross is getting at. The spirit of voluntarism and independence that De Toqueville raved about 170+ years ago which he contrasted with the tired statist monarchies and emperors and czars of Europe---these virtues in America have been replaced by the same listless and yet self-assured convictions that the state will protect and defend its citizens---even those who would never go to church or have a nuclear family or even vote in municipal and state elections. The all-powerful Washington military=industrial socialism which flourished in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century seems to be their ideal---or some sort of socialism which protects them cradle to grave. Never mind that it's never REALLY worked in Europe, except in demographically tiny countries like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland---even Norway has a huge energy sector which means it doesn't count. Douthat continues:

This is a crisis that the Republican Party often badly misunderstands, casting Democratic-leaning voters as lazy moochers or spoiled children seeking “gifts” (as a certain former Republican presidential nominee would have it) rather than recognizing the reality of their economic struggles.

But if conservatives don’t acknowledge the crisis’s economic component, liberalism often seems indifferent to its deeper social roots. The progressive bias toward the capital-F Future, the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity, the fact that Democrats have benefited politically from these trends — all of this makes it easy for liberals to just celebrate the emerging America, to minimize the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities, and to treat the places where Americans have traditionally found solidarity outside the state (like the churches threatened by the Obama White House’s contraceptive mandate) as irritants or threats.

This is a great flaw in the liberal vision, because whatever role government plays in prosperity, transfer payments are not a sufficient foundation for middle-class success. It’s not a coincidence that the economic era that many liberals pine for — the great, egalitarian post-World War II boom — was an era that social conservatives remember fondly as well: a time of leaping church attendance, rising marriage rates and birthrates, and widespread civic renewal and engagement.

No such renewal seems to be on the horizon. That isn’t a judgment on the Obama White House, necessarily. But it is a judgment on a certain kind of blithe liberal optimism, and the confidence with which many Democrats assume their newly emerged majority is a sign of progress rather than decline.

I was a Democrat for 25 years and learned after my family grew that the Democrats are philosophically hostile to the nuclear family. And to organized religion. And to any kind of self-help outside the federal government nexus. They don't advertise this, but their lurchings toward feminism and unchecked immigration and "gifts" such as unregulated dispensation of disabled benefits and food stamps and unemployment benefits without compensatory economic growth are self-defeating over the long run.

But as I learned working for the Democratic Party in two national campaigns and many state [WI, NE, CA, NY, IL, IN, MI] campaigns, their future depends on dreams rather than hard work and REAL education---not the silly social and psychological and other ridiculous study programs now graduating a collection of pedantic misfits.

Obama is a Political Jim Jones

Bernard Goldberg has a column about Obama as a Mesmerizer. The first commenter used the appropriate Jim Jones analogy. Read the real hold this Cafe-au-Lait P.O.S. has on the mesmerized masses of morons as put forward by Bernie, who is a voice of sanity among the wasted minds of the maniac media.

Incredible Saturday for College Football

Oregon & Kansas State both lost---the first time in living memory that both the number one and number two ranked teams in the country lost the same Saturday. Which leaves Notre Dame at number three and unbeaten---the only unbeaten BCS team in the country and a sure Number One tomorrow morning. However, the storied rivalry with USC happens in Pasadena next Saturday, and we'll see if ND's terrific defense can keep Matt Barkley from scoring a tremendous upset. If ND wins, odds-on it will be ND versus the Crimson Tide in the National Championship game.

And in my godforsaken Big Ten, my native Badgers lost AGAIN to Ohio State---my earliest memories in the fifties are the Badgers winning all their games with Alan Ameche, only to succumb to the Buckeyes. Same story sixty years later---with 2 minutes left in the Fourth Quarter, Montee Ball dived over the goal line with his hands holding the ball in front of him for the TD that would have given him the undisputed all-time record for TDs as a FSC school player---and had the ball punched out of his hands by a Buckeye linebacker. Same story with OSU since forever, the Badgers manage to lose in overtime.

Good thing the Packers wax Bengals' or Brown's asses whenever they play them...!! ;-)

Proust to a Proustolator Like Me

Joseph Epstein writes a review of a book called M. Proust's Library by Ms. Anka Muhlstein, whose authorship includes other books.

With "Monsieur Proust's Library," Anka Muhlstein has added another volume to the collection of splendid books about Proust. A woman of intellectual refinement, subtle understanding and deep literary culture, Ms. Muhlstein has written an excellent biography of Astolphe de Custine, the 19th-century French aristocrat who did for Russia what Alexis de Tocqueville did for the United States. Her previous book, "Balzac's Omelette," was a study of the place of food in that novelist's life and in his work. With "Monsieur Proust's Library," Anka Muhlstein has added another volume to the collection of splendid books about Proust. A woman of intellectual refinement, subtle understanding and deep literary culture, Ms. Muhlstein has written an excellent biography of Astolphe de Custine, the 19th-century French aristocrat who did for Russia what Alexis de Tocqueville did for the United States. Her previous book, "Balzac's Omelette," was a study of the place of food in that novelist's life and in his work.

I have about twenty [20] books about Proust in my personal library and have read about half of them, but I have the Pleiade edition of In Search of Lost Time, of which I have read all three volumes in French, though I admit to skipping about 50 pages of the one of "jeunes filles en flours" which I found too precious. I have also read several chapters of Custine's amazing book on Russia circa 1839. The brutish Czar Nicholas I didn't sound far off from the brutish Socialist Czar Stalin a century later. And Balzac is my favorite French writer aside from Proust---his splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes is at my bedside.

Indeed, Epstein's entire review is also a philosophical excursion about great writers. Here's a paragraph:

Masterworks also engender writing about them by superior people. Small books have been written about Proust's novel by François Mauriac, Samuel Beckett and Jean-François Revel. Other studies of the book have been done by the poets Howard Moss and Howard Nemerov and the critic Roger Shattuck. Full-length biographies of Proust have been written by George Painter, André Maurois, William C. Carter and Jean-Yves Tadié. Others have written books about photography and Proust; about painting and Proust; about his May 1922 dinner meeting with James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky and other of the great figures of Modernism; about his interest in but limited knowledge of English. There is even an excellent biography of Proust's mother, who played so important a role in his life. Proustolators, of whom I count myself one, do not want for excellent reading about their idol.

I've read the George Painter pair of biographies and tried to buy the Jean-Yves Tadié, which was gigantic, the last time I was in Paris.

Here's more of Epstein's philosophical musings on Proust's writings and Muhlstein's notes on little Marcel's reading lists:

As an asthmatic child, Proust read more than most children. Ms. Muhlstein recounts that, by the age of 15, he was already immersed in contemporary literature, having read the essays and novels of Anatole France and Pierre Loti, the poetry of Mallarmé and Leconte de Lisle, and a number of the novels of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens and George Eliot. Unlike Henry James, who referred to their works as "baggy monsters," Proust fully appreciated the great Russian novelists. He thought Tolstoy "a serene god," valuing especially his ability to generalize in the form of setting down laws about human nature. Ms. Muhlstein informs us that, for Proust, Dostoyevsky surpassed all other writers, and that he found "The Idiot" the most beautiful novel he had ever read. He admired Dostoyesky's skill with sudden twists in plot, providing the plausible surprises that propelled his novels.

In his 1905 essay "On Reading," a key document, Ms. Muhlstein notes, in Proust's freeing himself to write his great novel, he quoted Descartes: "The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most cultivated of men of past centuries who have been their authors." Proust's examination of "the original psychological act called reading," that "noblest of distractions," holds that books are superior to conversation, which "dissipates immediately."

For me, The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina are the two great poles between which all writers must gravitate towards---the Fox and the Hedgehog, if you will. The Fox knows a little about everything and the hedgehog knows one thing well. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, if you will. But Marcel knew that one thing.

The one sentence in "Monsieur Proust's Library" with which I find myself in disagreement comes late, when Ms. Muhlstein, considering Proust's condemnation of the Goncourt brothers for their attacks on the morality of their contemporaries, writes: "For Proust literature had nothing to do with morality." Perhaps Ms. Muhlstein meant to write "conventional morality," because a reversal of that sentence—"For Proust literature had everything to do with morality"—is closer to the truth. No other modern author was more alive than he to the toll taken by snobbery, cruelty, brutishness; none so exalted kindness, loftiness of spirit, sweetness of character, the kind and generous heart. No great novelist has ever written oblivious to morality, and Marcel Proust is among the novelists in that small and blessed circle of the very greatest of the great.

I love reading the Goncourt brothers' arch and nasty stories about French writers, especially about the louche critics like Sainte-Beuve. But Marcel was a true gentleman, whose incredible stores of apercus are only exceeded by his kindness and gentility to all around him. Marcel didn't have a mean bone in his body.

NYT Buries the Lede til Last Sentence

A suspected collaborator in Gaza was summarily assassinated in the street, by rag head Nazi terrorists from the Al Qassem Brigades. Here's how the NYT ends the piece:

The brazen nature of the killing suggested that Hamas, which governs Gaza, intended it as a blunt message to other possible collaborators with Israel, which is believed to have an extensive network of informants here as part of its underlying battle with the group. But the shooting evoked mixed feelings. “There were kids and children on the street,” said the witness, Mr. Mohammed. “They should have executed him in a far place.” A spokeswoman for the Independent Commission for Human Rights, the Palestinian Authority’s watchdog agency that monitors prosecutions of suspected collaborators with Israel, said the group had no record of Mr. Ouaida having ever been arrested or sentenced to death. Even if he had been, she noted, such an execution should be carried out by the government after a trial, not handled summarily on the street.

Duh...

UPDATE: The National Journal has a piece on how Obama's killing Osama opened the door to targeted assassinations of evildoers.

As an obiter dicta, in 1999, I was shortlisted for the job of UNHCR chief in Gaza. The pay & perks & benefits from being in the UN system were fabulous, but I was fortunate enough to interview in Amman, Jordan and subsequently rejoiced in not getting the job. I'm sure a stray missile or bullet would have ended my sojourn in this incarnation.

Karen Elliott House's "On Saudi Arabia"

Karen Elliot House was interested in Saudi Arabia as long ago as 1981, when I was recently back from three-plus years there as Political Officer and, having left the Foreign Service, getting ready to head out to Saudi with Bert van Munster, creator subsequently of Cops & The Amazing Race, to do a TV special called Death of a Princess. I had lunch with her and Bill Quandt, recently a member of the National Security Council, to try to explain the arcane twists and turns of that anachronistic colossus of sand and stone and dust just before her first trip to what we used to call "The Magic Kingdom":

In Peter Berg’s whodunit “The Kingdom,” a young F.B.I. agent boarding a plane to Riyadh asks a seasoned colleague what Saudi Arabia is like. “A bit like Mars,” replies the more experienced man.

It’s not Mars, exactly, but for most Americans Saudi Arabia is probably more like another world than any other inhabited part of this one. It is about as distinct from the freewheeling United States as a country can be — not a modern totalitarian “republic” like Communist North Korea, but another kind of dictatorial regime, a fanatically conservative society self-oppressed by thousand-year-old rules, regulations, prescriptions and prohibitions. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is, as Christopher Hitchens once described the occluded realm ruled by the Kim family in Pyongyang, a place “where everything that is not absolutely compulsory is absolutely forbidden.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Karen Elliott House has been visiting the kingdom for more than 30 years, and in her new book, “On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines — and Future,” she skillfully unveils this inscrutable place for regional specialists and general readers alike. “For millennia,” she writes, “Saudis struggled to survive in a vast desert under searing sun and shearing winds that quickly devour a man’s energy, as he searches for a wadi of shade trees and water, which are few and far between, living on only a few dates and camel’s milk. These conditions bred a people suspicious of each other and especially of strangers, a culture largely devoid of art or enjoyment of beauty.”

Religious edicts are crushingly enforced by state, mosque and society. Movie theaters are banned, as are concerts and just about everything else related to entertainment. Women, even foreign women, must cover themselves in public. Unrelated women and men aren’t allowed to mix anywhere. Even Starbucks coffee shops­ are segregated by gender.

Men have it rough, but women have it much rougher. According to Wahhabi Islam, men must obey Allah and women must obey men. “Fortunately for men,” House writes, “Allah is distant, but unfortunately for women, men are ­omnipresent.”

Western women like House, though, have an advantage, despite the fact that they’re forced by the Muttawah, the religious police, to cover themselves. In Saudi Arabia they are treated as “honorary men,” so House was able to interview whomever she liked — men and their wives, women and their husbands — something no foreign man or Saudi citizen of either gender is ever allowed to do.

She describes the society as a maze “in which Saudis endlessly maneuver through winding paths between high walls of religious rules, government restrictions and cultural traditions.” The labyrinth is not just a metaphor. Cities are claustrophobic places where even men but especially women live as shut-ins, socializing strictly with family. Walk down a residential street and in every direction you’ll see not porches and yards but walls “that block people from outside view but, more important, separate them from one another.”

And the country as a whole is riven with virtual walls. The sterile interior highlands of the Nejd are at odds with the relatively cosmopolitan Hejaz on the coast of the Red Sea. In the Eastern Province, where the country’s oil reserves are concentrated, Shia Muslims live under the boot, denounced by Wahhabis as heretics. The Ismailis in the destitute south, with their historic links to Yemen, are not-so-benignly neglected. Each of these regions in turn is divided by tribe, and each tribe is divided by family. Most Saudis marry one of their cousins. Hardly any of them marry outside their tribe, let alone region.

But the highest wall of all — the information barrier restricting knowledge of the wider world and its ways — is crumbling fast. Thanks to the Internet, the young (and 60 percent of Saudis are 20 or younger) know all about life in less cloistered Arab societies and in the West. And they’re not buying into the Saudi system the way their parents and grandparents did.

Totten's synopsis is as pithy and compactly informational as can be. And he relays some of Karen's dry East Texas wit---she told me she grew up in a town so small that the census takers were rumored to miss it every ten years. She is charmingly intelligent, even brilliant, as I recall her in person---at the time, she was rumored to be sleeping with the famous swordsman Richard Holbrooke. Her occasional pieces in the Wall Street Journal have been unfailingly insightful as I read them over the years since our lunch.

“Our minds are in a box,” a middle-aged businessman explains to House. “But the young are being set free by the Internet and knowledge. They will not tolerate what we have.” A single man in his 20s tells her: “Facebook opens the doors of our cages.” And a university official says: “A young man has a car and money in his pocket, but what can he do? Nothing. He looks at TV and sees others doing things he can’t do and wonders why.”

Even if their elders, the government and the religious establishment ease up and give young people a little additional space, there’s a more serious problem that won’t be so easily solved. What on earth will Saudi Arabia do when the wells run dry, when oil can no longer pay for the lavish welfare system that provides subsidized goods and free services to the middle class?

As a pertinent aside, my knowledge of Saudi oil as a backup in the Embassy Economic Section convinces me that the Saudis are not going to run out of the Texas Tea in the next several decades, since their proven recoverable reserves are about 250 billion bbls and climbing every year as new methods of exploration and extraction are employed. The US may become self-sufficient with its humongous natural gas supply now being released by fracking, a safe and efficient method of extraction. However, other countries in the world will reject fracking, as France and a couple of other EU countries has short-sightedly done, so though the price may drop slowly, the Saudis will remain in the clover for a long while and not have to tighten their belts TOO closely...!

Millions of new jobs will need to be created in the coming years just to keep the economy from collapsing. Yet the education system, in the firm grip of Wahhabi fundamentalists, is spectacularly unable to prepare Saudis for professional jobs. And since most refuse blue-collar and service work, 9 out of 10 private sector jobs are held by foreigners.

The entire country, as House so clearly shows, needs a radical overhaul. But where is it going to come from? Not from the cautious and self-interested government, at least not with the current royal cohort in charge.

The Saudi state is an absolute monarchy, but it has a quirk of its own. Sons of the state’s founder, Abdul Aziz bin Saud, who fathered 44 boys, have been ruling the kingdom since his death in 1953. The throne keeps passing from brother to brother instead of from father to son. But the number of brothers is running out. The current king, Abdullah, is in his late 80s. Until this year, the next in line was Crown Prince Nayef, but he died in June, at the age of 78. The youngest brother is in his 60s. At some point, possibly soon, someone from the next generation will take charge.

House repeatedly — and convincingly — compares the Saudi regime to the Soviet Union in its final days when Ronald Reagan said of the various premiers before Mikhail Gorbachev, “They keep dying on me.” The country’s calcified government, its sullen populace, its youth bulge, its outdated religious requirements and prohibitions, the collapse of the information bubble and the dying off of the current line of geriatric rulers are all bound to coalesce into a perfect storm sooner or later.

The huge number of foreigners in Saudi amazes the visitor. When I was there, the Saudis preferred Filipinos and Koreans, until the South Koreans worked through the mid-day heat, which filled the suspicious Saudi overseers with such trepidation that the government ceased hiring Koreans, who wanted to get overtime pay or get back to their own country sooner, the Embassy could never really figure out which. Pakistanis and Palestinians, being Muslim, were FORBIDDEN to be hired, as they were too full of crazed radicalism to be trusted. No Palestinian was ever admitted onto Ras Tannura, the world's largest crude offloading facility---that's how deep the Muslim radicals were suspected.

And I got to visit with, and somewhat understand, Kings Khalid, Fahd & Abdullah during my sojourn and then subsequent travels to the Kingdom. I doubt either Karen or Totten [who has the same name as the Arabist Military Attaché, Major Mike Totten, who served while I was Political-Military Officer for the first year of my tenure] got access to the very highest levels. Still, House's analogy of the last years of the Soviet Union is somewhat appropriate, though the steep decline in oil prices that G.H.W. Bush engineered as Reagan's Vice President had a lot to do with the USSR's steep decline. And Karen is right that liberalism will NEVER see the light of day in the conservative populace in Saudi. It must be remembered that, censorious of the Saudi Royal Family as House is, Kings Faisal, Khalid, Fahd, and now Abdullah are beacons of LIBERALISM in the darkness of Salafist gloom that the Kingdom was beforehand. And it is the Kingdom's good fortune that Salafist Nayef, the recently deceased Crown Prince, croaked before Abdullah.

But we should not expect liberalism, not now, not in this place. “For all their frustrations,” House writes, “most Saudis do not crave democracy. . . . What unites conservatives and modernizers, and young and old, is a hunger not for freedom but for justice; for genuine rule of law, not rule by royal whim.” Justice and the rule of law aren’t at all likely to develop in a system that is not democratic. If House is right, then whatever happens, a new or post-Saudi Arabia may end up like post-Soviet Russia, at least in one way. A spring-like revolution for freedom, where human rights, justice, and the rule of law replace toppled labyrinth walls, will be a dream deferred to generations unborn.

BTW, after living in the heavily walled suburbs of Lyon, France, Saudi Arabia somewhat resembles the southern climes surrounding the Mediterranean, where age-old suspicions and superstitions still hold sway and are tearing apart the EU at the moment, as an obiter dicta.

What Karen House says in On Saudi Arabia is said in other places. But aside from the very readable Robert Lacey's book on the Kingdom, she says it better and more succinctly than the others. I have to buy it on-line to see how it stacks up with the other 100 books I've read about The Magic Kingdom. [Where no planes crash, nor crime happens, etc., etc.]

Hindu Feast of Lights [Diwali] on November 13th

The Hindu Feast of Diwali on November 13th was recalled to me when my wife asked why her Indian doctor was out of office for a religious feast. I said immediately, the Feast of Lights, which flashback came to mind about the time I was flying from Jidda to Jakarta in November, 1977. I looked out the window as we were about halfway there at about midnight and saw the incredible sight of hundreds of million fires lighting up the entire huge nation of India, from coast to coast. It took us a half hour to fly across the country and I was mesmerized completely by the totally unanticipated mind-blowing sight.

I asked the Dutch pilots of Martinair what was going on and I recall their own puzzlement---easy to understand because I'm sure this was the first time they'd flown over India on this particular date [they were flying an empty aircraft which had deplaned Muslim pilgrims that year in Jidda. There were hundreds of flies which had made the round-trip journey from Jakarta to Jidda and then vice-versa!]

Flying back to Saudi, I sat in the pilots' cabin and when we were flying over Sri Lanka further south, they had many stories of where planes had crashed in the forties and fifties in the jungles---a couple had been found only with great difficulty. It turned out Martinair had been flying these routes to and from Jidda for decades ever since long-distance flying from the Dutch East Indies was inaugurated for the yearly Pilgrimage. The reason these pilots had never seen nor heard of the Diwali Festival is that the Muslim calendar is ruled by the moon and varies so much that year-by-year the Hajj starts on a different date and retrocedes by a couple of weeks at a time. Thus the last time the Hajj might have coincided roughly with the Feast of Lights might have been before the invention of aviation!!

I remember vividly while vacationing in the paradise of Bali at the Bali Hyatt [I kept remembering the 'Bali High' song from the Bob Hope movies of the forties] the visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem on November 20th, 1977, thinking to myself that peace was breaking out as I was journeying in Paradise on Earth. [Hint. Hawaii is more beautiful by a tad, but Bali is more interesting by miles and miles.]

James Taranto points out the Demonrats' constant hypocrisy in his first paras:

"Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind of White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign--a White House that would see a 51-48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than an irrefutable mandate."

Yeah, well, shut up, you Republican losers. Obama won, which means a majority of Americans support his policies. Stop being obstructionist and get with the program.

Oh wait, sorry. That quote wasn't from a Republican but from a recently elected Democrat. It was referring not to Obama but to George W. Bush after the 2004 election. The author: Barack Obama, junior senator from Illinois. The book: "The Audacity of Hope."

Har had har.... Hoist by his own petard, he is, the young fool!!, har har har...

Egypt Huffs and Puffs over Gaza

Egypt's sword-rattling would be unsettling if one didn't know that the Brotherhood, or Al-Ikhwan, would perhaps be attacked by the Egyptian Army rather than Israel---the Egyptian Army doesn't want to be chopped up by advanced Israeli weaponry.

As an Arabist, I love Egypt where I've lived and loved for a long time. It's sad to see the country run by a group of dunces, but then again, as an American, who am I to talk. We have a bigger set of morons, including a Moron-in-Chief who thinks he is gifted with a mandate. From 95% of a plantation and over 70% of the Brown Caucus, as they used to call it in California.

Canada Showcases Horror of Socialized Medicine

James Taranto points out as Great Moments in Socialized Medicine our neighbor to the North with its Single Payer paradigm:

"The United States will require at least 52,000 more family doctors in the year 2025 to keep up with the growing and increasingly older U.S. population, a new study found," reports ABC News:

The predictions also reflect the passage of the Affordable Care Act--a change that will expand health insurance coverage to an additional 38 million Americans. . . .

"It's pretty tough to convince medical students to go into primary care," said Dr. Lee Green, chair of Family Medicine at the University of Alberta, who was not involved with the study. . . . "[Patients] won't be able to see a primary care physician hardly," he said. "Primary care will be past saturated with wait times longer and will not accept any new patients. There will be an increase in hospitalizations and increase in death rates for basic preventable things like hypertension that was not managed adequately." But at least a lot more people will have insurance!

The Montreal Gazette reports on how this works out in a country where everyone has insurance courtesy of the government:

Surgery wait times for deadly ovarian, cervical and breast cancers in Quebec are three times longer than government benchmarks, leading some desperate patients to shop around for an operating room. But that's a waste of time, doctors say, since the problem is spread across Quebec hospitals. And doctors are refusing to accept new patients quickly because they can't treat them, health advocates say. A leading Montreal gynecologist said that these days, she cannot look her patients in the eye because the wait times are so shocking. Lack of resources, including nursing staff and budget compressions, are driving a backlog of surgeries while operating rooms stand empty. The latest figures from the provincial government show that over a span of nearly 11 months, 7,780 patients in the Montreal area waited six months or longer for day surgeries, while another 2,957 waited for six months or longer for operations that required hospitalization. The worst cases are gynecological cancers, experts say, because usually such a cancer has already spread by the time it is detected. Instead of four weeks from diagnosis to surgery, patients are waiting as long as three months to have cancerous growths removed.

Barack Obama's re-election pretty well ensures that we're stuck with ObamaCare. And as the Hill notes, "Obama won women by 12 percentage points, while Mitt Romney won men by 8."

Guess euthanasia takes many forms and Obamacare is the American version of Hitler's population purification or Stalin's culling of the herd. Mao's Great Leap Forward, which killed over 30 million people due to the Great Helmsman running the country onto the shoals of socialism also comes to mind.

Obama may be the first inadvertent mass murderer who was killing his constituency with kindness---talk about a rank amateur.

Jill Kelley, Woman Who Sparked Petraeus Scandal, Ran Questionable Charity

Wow, a social-climber female running bogus charities and receiving shirtless photos from an FBI admirer who contacted an ex-Congressman who contacted Eric Cantor to move the silly harassment allegation out of the backwater swamp it deserved to die in. This bimbette with a bodacious pair of ta-tas and a rock on her wedding ring finger the size of a BIG walnut posed as a diplomat to Lebanese & other Arab diplomats here because of a trumped-up honorary consul designation to MacDill AFB. I lived as an FSO in Lebanon and you can take the Lebanese out of Lebanon, but it's often harder to take Lebanon out of the Lebanese. Plus, appoint them a dog-catcher and they'll claim to be a Prime Minister!

Jill Khawam Kelley must have matched Paula Broadwell in megalomania genes and imbecilic pretensions, but Paula did graduate from West Point & studied at Harvard grad school. Maybe Jill & her sister Natalie between them have Paula's IQ. Which leads one to wonder how in the world Paula could have wasted so much time harassing Jill. Ah, the highways and byways of love twist and turn in insane directions.

Of course, Jill's identical-twin sister Natalie is so batshit crazy that letters from TWO four-star generals couldn't persuade a judge to allow Natalie custody of her children. Now that's super-batshit...!!!

Here's a flow chart of all the Pentagram of insanity that this soap opera has turned into---crazy babes and horn dog generals---who wouldda thunk it!!!

Romney & ORCA, How the Swing States Were Lost?

Obama's vaunted "ground game" actually worked---the community organizer knew how to get his Chicago mafia to organize.

This link shows how Romney's business background allowed his macro-topdown to crash---leaving 37,000 strategically placed volunteers trying all day to get ORCA to work, while the voters voted without being recognized as such, leaving stay-at-home Romney-leaning voters AWOL & utterly unaccounted for.

Broadwell at Denver One More Time

Paula was right on the money, according to James Taranto:

If you're a conspiracy theorist, the timing of David Petraeus's resignation was perfect. He stepped down as CIA director Friday, six days before he was to have testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the 9/11 attacks in Benghazi and three days after Barack Obama's re-election, thereby shielding Obama from both pre-election embarrassment and postelection revelations of failure or worse. The proximate cause only adds to the suspicion: What better distraction than a sex scandal?

The trouble with conspiracy theories, and with conspiracies, is that they assume conspirators can control events. As it turns out, Petraeus's resignation has raised new questions about Benghazi. That is thanks to a report by Israel's Arutz Sheva, which found a speech that Paula Broadwell, author of "All In: The Education of General David Petraeus," delivered Oct. 26. Broadwell, who "was allegedly improperly involved with" Petraeus, spoke at her alma mater, the University of Denver.

Here's the pertinent quote from the Broadwell speech:

"The fact that came out today [in a report by Fox News Channel] is that the ground forces there at the CIA annex, which is different from the consulate, were requesting reinforcements.

"They were requesting the--it's called the C-in-C's [Commander in Chief's] In Extremis Force--a group of Delta Force operators, our very, most talented guys we have in the military. They could have come and reinforced the consulate and the CIA annex. Now, I don't know if a lot of you have heard this but the CIA annex had actually taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner, and they think that the attack on the consulate was an attempt to get these prisoners back. It's still being vetted.

"The challenging thing for Gen. Petraeus is that in his new position, he's not allowed to communicate with the press. So he's known all of this--they had correspondence with the CIA station chief in Libya, within 24 hours they kind of knew what was happening."

As Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell notes, "a CIA spokeswoman disputed the Fox News account at the time, saying, 'no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.' "

Hounshell observes that Broadwell's "most interesting revelation is her claim that the CIA was holding several Libyan militia members prisoner, which may have prompted the attack." The Daily Beast's Eli Lake reports the agency denies this: "The CIA has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any suggestion that the Agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless."

Fox's Jennifer Griffin, however, has sources who confirm and expand on Broadwell's account:

A well-placed Washington source confirms to Fox News that there were Libyan militiamen being held at the CIA annex in Benghazi and that their presence was being looked at as a possible motive for the staged attack on the consulate and annex that night.

According to multiple intelligence sources who have served in Benghazi, there were more than just Libyan militia members who were held and interrogated by CIA contractors at the CIA annex in the days prior to the attack. Other prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East were brought to this location. The Libya annex was the largest CIA station in North Africa, and two weeks prior to the attack, the CIA was preparing to shut it down. Most prisoners, according to British and American intelligence sources, had been moved two weeks earlier.

Griffin concludes with the question: "What was the CIA really doing in Benghazi . . ., and who in the White House knew exactly what the CIA was up to?" Did the CIA act in contravention of the executive order, and if so, did the president approve? Did the order create a need to keep up appearances that led to the deaths of Americans in the field?

Tytler's "Fatal Sequence"

Tytler was a Scottish lawyer and author of books on history and jurisprudence. He wrote an historic study of translation theory and died in the early 1800's Here is his "fatal sequence" that democracies go through:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

There's another version that is less specific known as the "Tytler Sequence":

The historical cycle seems to be: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more."

Here is the Strauss-Howe sequence:

Arthurian Generation (1433–1460) (H) Humanist Generation (1461–1482) (A) Reformation Generation (1483–1511) (P) Reprisal Generation (1512–1540) (N) Elizabethan Generation (1541–1565) (H) Parliamentary Generation (1566–1587) (A) Puritan Generation (1588–1617) (P) Cavalier Generation (1618–1647) (N) Glorious Generation (1648–1673) (H) Enlightenment Generation (1674–1700) (A) Awakening Generation (1701–1723) (P) Liberty Generation (1724–1741) (N) Republican Generation (1742–1766) (H) Compromise Generation (1767–1791) (A) Transcendental Generation (1792–1821) (P) Gilded Generation (1822–1842) (N) Progressive Generation (1843–1859) (A) Missionary Generation (1860–1882) (P) Lost Generation (1883–1900) (N) G.I. Generation (1901–1924) (H) Silent Generation (1925–1942) (A) Boom Generation (1943–1960) (P) Generation X (Gen X) (1961–1981) (N) Millennial Generation (Gen Y) (1982–2004) (H) Homeland Generation (2005 – ????) (A)

Last but not least is the Chinese Dynastic Cycle theory. Actually, last AND least is the quote of an Austrian professor of jurisprudence who supposedly opined: "The USA is the only country in Western Civilization which has gone from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture." After the election last Tuesday, I don't find that so difficult to believe anymore.

Colin McCarthy Does a Pick-Six

Colin dated my daughter exclusively during her senior year. She got to meet future All Pro Jimmy Graham and Ryan Cooper, both friends of Colin, who ran back an interception 49 yards against the Dolphins.

Broadwell Speaks on What Petraeus Knew

Paula Broadwell gave an address October 26th that is very revealing:

Military expert Paula Broadwell, who was allegedly improperly involved with resigned CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, confirmed in October that the CIA annex in Benghazi asked for reinforcements when the consulate came under attack on September 11. She also acknowledged that "there was a failure in the system."

Broadwell was speaking at her alma mater, the University of Denver, on October 26. Her lecture, which is on YouTube under the title "Alumni Symposium 2012 Paula Broadwell," now has added value, because based on the recent disclosures, it can now be assumed that she indeed knew exactly what it was that Petraeus knew about the attack.

Broadwell confirmed the reports on Fox News that the CIA annex asked for a special unit, the Commander in Chief's In Extremis Force, to come and assist it. She also said that the force could indeed have reinforced the consulate, and that Petraeus knew all of this, but was not allowed to talk to the press because of his position in the CIA.

"The challenge has been the fog of war, and the greater challenge is that it's political hunting season, and so this whole thing has been turned into a very political sort of arena, if you will," she said. "The fact that came out today is that the ground forces there at the CIA annex, which is different from the consulate, were requesting reinforcements.

"They were requesting the – it's called the C-in-C's In Extremis Force – a group of Delta Force operators, our very, most talented guys we have in the military. They could have come and reinforced the consulate and the CIA annex. Now, I don't know if a lot of you have heard this but the CIA annex had actually taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner, and they think that the attack on the consulate was an attempt to get these prisoners back. It's still being vetted.

"The challenging thing for Gen. Petraeus is that in his new position, he's not allowed to communicate with the press. So he's known all of this – they had correspondence with the CIA station chief in Libya, within 24 hours they kind of knew what was happening."

Read the rest of the post and then you may, as I did, wonder if Petraeus timed his resignation, or was forced to resign, before he had to testify because his "truth" might result in a lot of contradictions with the party line perjury of Obama's foreign policy "team."

Bill Kristol: 'It Won't Kill The Country If We Raise Taxes' On Millionaires (VIDEO)

Raising the tax requirements according to income is inherently unjust. That said, these staggered rates were part of the tax code back in the sixties when the Dems were in the White House. Tax reform, as Speaker Boehner says, is the best route, but finding that norm takes months and the cliff comes into effect on Jan 1st.

Kristol is your basic eccentric, and a hopeless eclectic. However, everything should be taken into consideration. And if anyone has read Woodward's recent book on how the temporary debt ceiling agreement was reached, it appears that Pelosi, Reid & Boehner were all ready to make a deal, and Prez Obama stiffed them all with silly arguments threatening to take his toys and leave the sandbox.

Let's face the bad news. We have four years ahead of a narcissistic twit spending like a drunken sailor for future generations to handle. I'm certain they will wonder what kind of idiots we were to elect an obvious amateur.

Ralph Peters on Real Reason For Timing of Petraeus' Exit.

Col. Peters is a great student of history and I am in the middle of reading one of his great books on military science & cultures:

The timing is just too perfect for the Obama administration. Just as the administration claimed it was purely coincidence that our Benghazi consulate was attacked on the anniversary of September 11th. Now it’s purely coincidence that this affair -- extra-marital affair -- surfaces right after the election, not before, but right after, but before the intelligence chiefs go to Capitol Hill to get grilled. As an old intelligence analyst, Neil, the way I read this -- I could be totally wrong, this is my interpretation -- is that the administration was unhappy with Petraeus not playing ball 100% on their party-line story. I think it's getting cold feet about testifying under oath on their party-line story. And I suspect that these tough Chicago guys knew about this affair for a while, held it in their back pocket until they needed to play the card.

I don't like conspiracy theories, I may be totally wrong, but the timing of this, again, right after the election and right before Petraeus is supposed to get grilled on Capitol Hill, it's really smells.

I thought the same thing shortly after I heard the news, as I remembered that the committee hearing will take place next week.

Perhaps this is the reason that Sen. Feinstein and Cong. King protested so much that Petraeus would be essential to the hearings knowing the rest of the sorry lot would perjure themselves and lie like troopers knowing that their careers for the next four years depended on their testimony. The Party Line of Obama is one total pack of lies.

NO WONDER SECSTATE HRCLINTON SAID SHE COULDN'T TESTIFY BECAUSE OF "SCHEDULING PROBLEMS!" IF SHE LIED UNDER OATH LIKE THE REST, GOOD LUCK WHEN THE COVER-UP WAS REVEALED LATER ON...!!! Of course, traitors around Obama are happy to see HRC on the road...!!!