Anti-Corsi Crusade a Symptom of American Corrupt Laziness on the Left

The New Criterion blames America's "corrupt and lazy culture" for the sleazy lazy accusations of WaPo's Saslow in his review of the Corsi book. Here is James Bowman's take-down of the superficial "critical reviews" being trotted out by the intellectually bankrupt elites of the left. Ironically, it's titled "What Everyone Knows.:

My colleague, Roger Kimball, remarks elsewhere on how the New York Times’s reporting on a new anti-Obama book by Jerome Corsi is riddled with opinion masquerading as fact. But where the Times reviewers only venture to say that "Significant parts of the book. . . have already been challenged as misleading or false" (fancy that!), a similar hatchet job in today’s Washington Post flat out tells us that they are false. After a tendentious summary of the book’s contents, the Post’s reporter, Eli Saslow, tells us in the third paragraph, and simultaneously with the first mention of the book’s title, not only that "Corsi's The Obama Nation lacks major revelations and has been dismissed by Obama's campaign as a series of lies from a serial liar," but, in his own words, that "parts of the book have also been disproved by the mainstream media."

Good old mainstream media! You can always count on them. But hold on a minute. Mr Saslow unaccountably neglects to mention which parts of the book have been "disproved," or what the disproof consists of. Or where this disproof can be consulted. I guess he figures that, if he tells us that the mainstream media did it, it ought to be good enough for readers of The Washington Post. He doesn’t even mention which outlets of the mainstream media disproved it, but that may only be modesty. Anyway, there’s no reason he can see why we should want to check this assertion for ourselves. In the same way, he helpfully adds that, "In 2004, Corsi co-wrote Unfit for Command, in which Swift boat veterans criticized Sen. John F. Kerry's Vietnam War record. That book was also widely disproved."

Once again, he doesn’t bother to go into detail. What? You don’t believe him? He does add that, "Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, has started a Web site to help discredit these tactics on Obama's behalf," but although he hyperlinks to a brief bio of John Kerry — some readers might not know who he is, after all — he doesn’t to the website. In any case, the website is only (he tells us) interested in discrediting the tactics, not the truth of the assertions made by Senator Obama’s detractors. That goes without saying, I guess. It’s typical that it’s not the substance of the criticism that either the media or their Democratic darlings take issue with but the fact that anyone should dare to criticize them in the first place. Conscious of their own moral rectitude, their own immunity from criticism, it must in their minds follow ipso facto that the criticisms are untrue. They are "disproved" by having been made at all.

This is the reality of "media bias": not so much a twisting of reality as an inability to imagine any other reality than the one they have learned — through the intellectual slackness of a culture which routinely pretends that dissenting views either don’t exist or, if they do exist, are so illegitimate as not to be worth a moment’s consideration — to take for granted. A trivial example of the same phenomenon appeared in The New York Times on the same day as its hit on Mr Corsi’s book. In an article by Choe Sang-hun on the highly competitive South Korean education system, we read that, in one particular "regimented" crammer in Yongin, "the students here were forsaking all the pleasures of teenage life. No cellphones allowed, no fashion magazines, no television, no Internet. No dating, no concerts, no earrings, no manicures — no acting their age."

Of course it never occurred either to this writer or to any of the editors who may have seen the piece between writing and publication that it might be only in our corrupt and lazy system these these things count as "acting their age." In South Korea, as throughout the world for most of its history — and up until relatively recently in the U.S. and Europe as well — teenagers acting their age would have been working hard and having very little opportunity for even such of these indulgences as then existed. But the Times’s editorializing about the South Korean system must be so uncontroversial, the assumptions behind it so widely shared, that no one even sees it as editorializing anymore. It is simply the fact. Yet maybe if students in the U.S. spent a little more time taking part in a vigorous clash of ideas and a little less with cell phones and fashion magazines and television they wouldn’t grow up with such a blinkered view of the world.

And for that you and I can thank the academic elites who prefer socializing rather than educating American youth.

Slackers like Saslow believe that simply making apodictic accusations equals literary or factual criticism. The NYT & WaPo lead the MSM in making lazy non-reflective reflexive statements rather than pursuing journalistic accuracy.

Requiem for My Brother Jim

My brother Jim died in Perth, Australia & is being interred today in Fremantle.

Requiescat in Pace.

Who is Barack Hussein Obama?

Roger Kimball asks this question concerning the MSM blackout on strange aspects of Obama's biography.

Russia Threatens Georgia: Oil Pipeline & NATO Member, Part IIship Both Vex Russkies

Alan Philips says the Ossetians are descended from the Alans, and I have heard they speak an Iranian dialect. Were the Alans part of the Achaemonian Empire? I do know from reading Simon Montefiori that Stalin was fascinated with the Iranian Safavid Dynasty, which ruled Georgia in the 17th-18th c. & adopted some Iranian "governance" methods to further his purposes. In a word, poisoning, which Mr. Djugashvili passed onto his protege Vlad "The Empoisoner" Putin. And Lavrenti Beria was part Abkhaz by ethnic background. So the Russians have a love-hate relationship with that tiny republic, mostly hate.

But Philips has a good summary worth noting:

It is often said that Russia is a riddle wrapped inside an enigma. But the story of Vladimir Putin is really quite simple. In 1997 he wrote a doctoral thesis on the need for greater state control over Russia's raw materials; his presidency ended with a campaign of harassment of the oil company BP, seemingly designed to force it to cede control of its Russian joint venture TNK-BP to Russian interests.

It is tempting to see the Russian actions in Georgia as a continuing campaign against BP. The oil company is 30 per cent owner of a pipeline that crosses Georgian territory on its way to Turkey and Western markets. But despite reports - not confirmed - of the Russian air force attacking the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, this is not an oil war.

"In Russia, politics still trumps economics. The Russians have accepted that the pipeline exists. This is more about punishing Georgia for daring to try to join Nato," says James Nixey, a Russian expert at Chatham House.

I disagree, and plan to buy Petrostate by Marshall Goldman, whom I knew back in my State Dept. days. Putin has the cowering Krauts by the metaphorical throat with the so-called oxymoronic "Friendship Pipeline" & if he gains control over the BTC, will discourage investment in another loop adding Kazakh crude & Turkmeni gas [currently landlocked & under Russian economic captivity] an outlet to the Black Sea and the Med at Ceyhan. The Turks want to build an LNG terminal in Ceyhan & ship the LNG to parts of EU-nuchland currently cowering under Soviets, oops, Russian economic control.

But NATO is Russia's biggest bug-a-boo & I recommend reading all of Philips for an interesting perspective.

Mickey Kaus Depants Howie Kurtz, Lays Bare Edwards' Alibis, Strips Elizabeth of Cred & Dignity

Mickey Kaus is a refugee from the left and subsequently has become a fountain of integrity---Edwards' transparent phoniness led Mickey to believe Sam Stein's original revelation about the disappeared "webisodes" & the mystery surrounding their provenance. The National Enquirer got its bloodhounds on the trail and the obese, over-staffed and liberally-biased dinosaurs of the dead tree media & its boob-tube satrapies snoozed while the NE ran with the ball. Mickey kept tabs all along, and is now keeping the snobbish watchpuppies of the MSM honest. Edwards' bumptious self-centered solipsisms are a rich quarry of stone-headed slacker silliness. The rube got sucked into a NYC clubbie over the hill & shelled out $114K after she boinked his brains out for several months---though the rube with good hair denies that completely.

Tabloids 1, MSM Dinosaurs 0.

But wait, there's more! Howie Kurtz digs a deep hole & then jumps in with the para below. Does anyone notice the slight oversight Mr. Kurtz makes in the paragraph below:

I don't think the party favoritism charge holds up. Yes, the media went hard after two Republican senators, Larry Craig (who pleaded guilty in that bathroom incident) and David Vitter (who admitted calling an escort service). But they also pounced on New York's Democratic then-governor, Eliot Spitzer (whose taste in prostitutes was revealed by the New York Times), and, famously, Bill Clinton (whose Monica Lewinsky mess was disclosed by The Post and hotly pursued by Newsweek). It helps, of course, when there is a law enforcement inquiry that journalists can cite as evidence.

Kurtz conveniently forgets that little above-the-fold expose on another Republican, Sen. John McCain in the NYT just about three months ago. Howie wouldn't be biased at all---party favoritism isn't such when it also involves lobbying with an implied love interest.

But Mickey catches Howie in another mega-whopper in the same paragraph: Note the bold-faced fact in the para above that now Kurtz gives credit to Newsweek for breaking the Lewinsky story, when in fact, it was Matt Drudge who broke the story AFTER Newsweek had SUPPRESSED its own story on Lewinsky. Drudge brought it into the open and the Post reluctantly "disclosed" the truth about the infidelity of Bill, the lying-under-oath POTUS.

Howie isn't just a coward. Howie is a lying coward.

Thank Mickey Kaus for helping to show this fraud Edwards to be a serial liar.

And thank Mickey again for demonstrating that the Washington Post is a liberal lying piece of dead-tree garbage when it comes to "facts." Read Mickey's full piece on Slate at thelink at the very top.

Kagan on The Return of History & the End of Dreams

Robert Kagan is perhaps the most acutely perceptive observer of "Die Untergang des Abendlands," the end of western hegemony as a new century/millenium dawns & America dozes the deep slumber that obesity & overconsumption induces.

Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia's attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition, complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory, and even -- though it shocks our 21st-century sensibilities -- the use of military power to obtain geopolitical objectives. Yes, we will continue to have globalization, economic interdependence, the European Union and other efforts to build a more perfect international order. But these will compete with and at times be overwhelmed by the harsh realities of international life that have endured since time immemorial. The next president had better be ready.

Even though Nora O'Donnell and other media mavens may disagree, perhaps the pivot point of 2008 isn't change, but a return to the values that kept democracy alive when its enemies [Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, BabyKim & Saddam] sought its downfall.

And were eagerly aided by quislings in the USA, including the Hollyweird Ten & other "fellow travellers," who now reincarnate their treason by blaming the US & Georgia for provoking a brutal dwarf who wants to be a czar....!

These lefty blogs blame McCain and exalt Obambi because he will be pliant enough to sooth the hurt feelings of Vlad The Empoisoner & his KGB hit-thugs.

God help us if we elect another empty-headed smiley-face like James Earl Carter---I wish Hillary were the Dem nominee so we could actually have two candidates for POTUS with real balls!

Russia Regards West As Waning, Hopes Obambi Will Be Carter Redux

James Sherr of Chatham House has an interesting perspective on Russia under the new Poison-Czar Putin. Chatham House is a superior version of the leftist-infested "think tanks" in DC which have long given up thinking, for the most part, and have become echo-chamber YouTubes for the respective political parties.

In the Chatham House view, Realpolitik trumps the misty-eyed "globalization" Thomas Friedman & the NYT pilot fish preach incessantly as the dawn of democratic capitalism:

Russia's regional objectives are therefore straightforward. It aims to show its neighbours, by means of the Georgian example, that Russia is "glavniy": that its contentment is the key to "stability and security", and that if Russia expresses its discontent, Nato will be unwilling and unable to help. It aims to show Nato that its newest aspirant members are divided, divisible and, in the case of Georgia, reckless. It aims to show both sets of actors that Russia has (in Putin's words) "earned a right to be self-interested" and that in its own "zone", it will defend these interests irrespective of what others think about them. For Russia, the broader implications are also becoming straightforward. To its political establishment, to the heads of Gazprom and Rosneft, to its armed forces and security services and to their advisors and "ideologists", the key point is that the era of Western dominance is over.
Far from rejecting "globalisation", as Westerners might suppose, their view, in Foreign Minister Lavrov's words, is that the West is "losing its monopoly over the globalisation process". The Beijing Olympics are reminder enough that the cresting of what Russians call Western "democratic messianism" and the rise of "sovereign democracies" is not purely a Russia-driven process. But the West needs to know that Russia is determined to play a significant part in that process and that it is now able to do so.
The West will not have adequate responses to these events until it draws adequate conclusions. The first is that the era of democratic "coloured revolutions" is over. A few years ago, the Kremlin rightly feared that Georgia's Rose Revolution and Ukraine's Orange Revolution might destabilise the political elite in Russia itself. Today, the issue is whether these countries will be able to achieve their minimal objectives. Given today's harsh "correlation of forces", the issue for Tblisi is not whether it is right to use force against separatists but whether it is wise. The issue for Kiev is not whether its prime minister threatens its president but whether their divisions threaten the independence of the country. The issue for Nato and the EU is whether their "currency of influence" buys "stability and security" in this region and, if not, whether it is time to change it.

The left among EU countries wants to become quiescent, shed NATO as a Cold War artifact no longer useful, and employ its vaunted "diplomatic skills," [you know, the ones that brought us WWI & WWII to dampen conflicts around the world by employing soothing words to intractable crises.] But Mr. Sherr isn't so convinced Russian autocracy might not trump Western democracy when brutal methods are employed in a crisis.

...Russia is exasperated with the West and also contemptuous of it. In the Georgian conflict, as in the more subtle variants of energy diplomacy, Russians have shown a harshly utilitarian asperity in connecting means and ends. In exchange, we appear to present an unfocused commitment to values and process. Our democracy agenda has earned the resentment not only of Russia's elite but of the ordinary people who are delighted to see Georgia being taught a lesson. Our divisions arouse derision. Russians have no worries about the emergence of a unified EU energy policy, and they are losing their worries about a unified commitment to Nato enlargement. The war in South Ossetia, and the movement of conflict beyond it, should be a reminder that contempt has consequences.

George Kennan famously noted that Russia historically has only neighbors who are "either enemies or vassals." It appears that Putin thinks an iron fist will send the EU-nuchs scampering into neutrality and away from NATO, effectively making the EU a vassal-bloc dependent on the new incarnation of the USSR's energy pipelines. Sherr is somewhat pessimistic himself:

The final conclusion is the need to focus on what is at stake. Is our relationship with Russia the most important issue? If so, what happens to that relationship if we demonstrate that brutality works and that "zones of interest" can be formed against the interests of the countries that reside in them? What happens to our wider scheme of interests in Central and Eastern Europe and the Black Sea and Caspian regions? Today, those questions are now being asked. But it is late to be asking them.

Politico's Jonathan Martin notes that John McCain was prescient on Russia's malevolent intentions, going so far as to call Putin an "apparatchik" back in the 2000 campaign. John certainly came out far more strongly than Obambi or GWB did in the original attack on Friday, and he seems to have guessed that this was no mere whiff of grapeshot on the Russians' part, but a serious attack on Georgia's various infrastructures, including the BTC pipeline.

IMHO, electing a temporizer like Obama would signal Russia and China that it's okay to make their "near-abroads" like the South Caucasus, Ukraine, and Tibet into vassal states or even reincorporate them into the main country. Taiwan would soon follow in the Far East & scaling back NATO would scare Poland & the Czech Republic back into a moral no-man's land which would effectively return them into Russian satellites.

McCain would continue to make the world safer for democracies.

WaPo Continues to Protect Pretty John-Boy & Slut Rielle

Washington Post continues its limited-hang-out coverup of John-Boy & his relations with La Dame aux Pickup-Bar-in-NYC.

Hilarious! This certified slut who picked up the N.C. rube at a bar in NYC, conned him into a $114,000 job as his pole dancer, got a $15K/month stipend to keep her mouth shut, denied that Edwards' houseboy was her lover, & was actually the subject of Jay McInerney's book The Story of My Life because she was such a sleep-around druggie---this whore now refuses to give a blood test!

Now she's on Edwards' gravy/money train until Elizabeth croaks & she can go live in that 40K sq.ft. mansion in N.C. & get laid on the side trips to NYC, where she hangs around bars.

This Hair-and-Makeup fraud wanted to be POTUS!?

Conning a con-man is good work, Rielle, congratulations.

McCain On Obamablahblah & Maureen on Teen-Idol John-Boy

Maureen Dowd excels in deflation-of-tires 101. Edwards is parsed & then semiotically unmanned by the red-head Catholic girl in the Sunday NYT---which finally deigned to stoop to the National Enquirer level of [REAL] journalism.

Here's McCain starting to be McCain: “Taking in my opponent’s performances is a little like watching a big summer blockbuster, and an hour in, realizing that all the best scenes were in the trailer you saw last fall.” [h/t: Instapundit]

And Jake Tapper has more on Lisa Druck's paranormal sex-life olympiad HERE

Now that Rielle/Lisa is set for life in a $3 million house & paid $15K/month to keep her mouth shut, no paternity can be established unless one of her sisters gets a blood sample from the tot conceived in John-Boy's shameless philandering.

Georgia & Tigers & Bears, Oh My!

James Traub has an excellent article in the Sunday Times with the obsequious title "Taunting The Bear." In an elaborate & richly detailed piece, Traub keeps inserting the subtext implied by the title---Georgia should just assume the position and accept its role as a vassal state. Forget about NATO membership or a democracy based on western values. The US has more important fish to fry---like submitting itself to the UN & an international polity led by EU-nuch "international partners."

George Kennan, whom I met in his Princeton home & had cocktails with,[ Arthur Schlesinger Jr. style], reminiscing about his foreign adventures, had the Russian mentality & its implacable aggrandizing hostility firmly in perspective & his short description of this international tyrant still holds true today:

This new round of bellicosity struck Georgians as frighteningly familiar. Alexander Rondeli, the director of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, recited to me a thought he attributed to the diplomat-scholar George F. Kennan: “Russia can have at its borders only enemies or vassals.” Here, for him, was further proof, as if it were needed, that imperialist expansion and brute subjugation are coded in Russia’s DNA. The Georgian elite came to view Russia as an unappeasable power imbued with the paranoia of the K.G.B., from which Mr. Putin and his closest associates rose, and fueled by the national sense of humiliation over Russia’s helplessness in the 1990s. “You should understand,” Mr. Saakashvili said, mocking the Europeans who urge forbearance on him, “that the crocodile is hungry. Well, from the point of view of someone who wants to keep his own leg, that’s hard to accept.”

The hapless EU-nuchs are symbolized by German Quisling Gerhard Schroeder who is now Putin's houseboy & live-in chambermaid. The other whimpering cowards on a continent that used to count in world affairs will predictably cower in unison.

Of course, the US has a very large stake in the region, both in the Middle East Levant & in Azerbaijan/Kazakstan & their rich energy reserves:

Marshall Goldman, a leading Russia scholar, argues in a recent book that Mr. Putin has established a “petrostate,” in which oil and gas are strategically deployed as punishments, rewards and threats. The author details the lengths to which Mr. Putin has gone to retain control over the delivery of natural gas from Central Asia to the West. A proposed alternative pipeline would skirt Russia and run through Georgia, as an oil pipeline now does. “If Georgia collapses in turmoil,” Mr. Goldman notes, “investors will not put up the money for a bypass pipeline.” And so, he concludes, Mr. Putin has done his best to destabilize the Saakashvili regime.

The EU-nuchs keep temporizing with Saakashvili, Georgia's US-educated and beleaguered president. Meanwhile, the US is virtually headless while its feckless POTUS winds down his second term & prepares to ride out of town into the sunset.

Putin has certainly chosen the right time to strike, while the world gazes awestruck at another more successful dictatorship in Beijing as it pulls off its coup de theatre. Meanwhile, Robert Kagan has the best perspective & Obama's boy-Friday echoes the theme, though sotto voce:

People of all political persuasion now seem to get it about Russia. In “The Return of History and The End of Dreams,” Robert Kagan, the neoconservative foreign policy expert who is advising John McCain, writes of Mr. Putin and his coterie: “Their grand ambition is to undo the post-cold war settlement and to re-establish Russia as a dominant power in Eurasia.” Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at Stanford who is advising Barack Obama, also views Russia as a premodern, sphere-of-influence power. He attributes Russia’s hostility to further NATO expansion less to geostrategic calculations than to what he says is Mr. Putin’s cold war mentality. The essential Russian calculus, he says, is, “Anything we can do to weaken the U.S. is good for Russia.”

Energy is the one Achilles Heel that Putin discerns in the American armor, and along with his US allies Pelosi & Reid & the Gore-bot brigades, America will be weakened as we fail to exert our right even to drill in our own sovereign landscapes.

No wonder Putin thinks the USA is a rotten fruit ready to drop off the tree! The fruit is also wormy, which helps him in his plans to reassert Russian ascendancy over Eurasia.

Prominent Democrat Comes Out In Favor of Drilling

Mickey Kaus got the story & wouldn't let go. Now the simpering whiners like Paul Begala are trying to defend John-Boy Hair-and-Makeup, the biggest fraud in a year when the Dems paraded their roster of phonies & bogus robo-fingerpointers such as Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson Sr., William Jefferson [AKA "BJ"] & others to jump on Larry Craig.

Remember how fast & furious the Mark Foley story jumped from a website that lasted two weeks to front page above the fold? Do you think the PMS GrayLady will print anything about sleazy trashbag John Edwards, who still won't admit paternity because he is a trial liar [oops, lawyer!]?

Just asking.

Russia Threatens Georgia: Oil Pipeline & NATO Membership Both Vex Russkies

The Washington Post has a four-page piece on the Russian invasion of Georgia without mentioning the main reason for the incursion/blitzkrieg/whatever. That would be journalism, something the WaPo only practices from time to time.

Despite the NATO subtext of the invasion, the main cause for the Putin Putsch is that the Russians want to control the pipeline from Baku to Ceyhan which passes through Georgia for about a third of its distance.

I was working for Amoco when the pipeline agreement was signed in the mid-nineties & even then the Russians were dead set against the export of Caspian oil to the West without going through Russian territory. [I visited Baku & other parts of the Caucasus a dozen times back then & almost died of food poisoning.] Even the otherwise unworldly Bill Clinton was 100% behind the Amoco Pipeline [soon to be the BP pipeline] & as Amoco's Strategic Entry guy, I got frequent & instant access to NSC officials husbanding the project inside the USG.

The US planned & helped build this pipeline---it keeps the price of oil far below what it would be if the Russians controlled it. The Russians are still the largest crude exporter in the world [or tied with Saudi Arabia] and want the price as high as possible.

Watch for the pipeline to be disrupted or bombed by Russian planes to jack up the price of oil again---you saw it here first.
UPDATE: HERE is the aforementioned bombing of the pipeline, as promised when I wrote the blog about 40 hours ago.

And with high oil prices, dissatisfied Americans are more likely to vote in a feckless Obama---the Russians consider this callow youth a Jimmy Carter Redux. The USSR invaded Afghanistan because they knew Jimmy was a toothless tiger cub---he was so busy giving away the Panama Canal & grinning while Iran took US hostages, the USSR thought he was as stupid as he looked.

Obama would just be another EU-nuch.

Putin is behind this & is the "strategerist" striking while the world's media is preoccupied in Beijing----he knows the US MSM doesn't want to cover a war in the faraway Caucasus while the lazy newsies are basking in Beijing smog & a US presidential race, plus he knows the MSM wants to minimize the foreign policy implications as that would make McCain look like the man for the job.

Look for media minimizing of this invasion until the pipeline is hit & prices spike $20/barrel.

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, Etc., Etc.

David Brooks might have mentioned Marshall McLuhan in his Spenglerian [oops, I did it again!]put-down of the academics & their nattering spawn. Actually, a great teacher of mine at St. Louis U. named Fr. Walter Ong, S.J. said the same thing back in the sixties, noting that "culture" has gone from linear verbal to aural musical all the way to visual pattern-recognition in a very short time.

In a word, the triumph of process over goals. Paradoxically, the underlying quest for a goal, constantly denigrated in popular culture, has given rise to end-time chiliastic apocalyptic scenarios that do distill the current distaste for the processes we are engaged in, and overturn them as they are almost always without fulfillment.

My brother died last night, in Perth Australia, of a sudden onset of metasthesized cancer which spread rapidly throughout his body. Jimmy has reached his end-zone quest for rest, which the rest of us yearn for.

God bless him, and if he reincarnates, I hope I meet him again in another lifetime.

McCain Begins to Emerge as Front-Runner

Peggy Noonan has a perceptive piece in today's Wall Street Journal on the slow undertow pulling Obama down from his floating [and walking] on water. Obama has simply demonstrated that without a teleprompter, he sucks at ad-lib repartee with reporters. A serious young man, but he'll have to wait a while before he's ready for prime time:

Is Mr. Obama's self-conception in line with his gifts, depth, wisdom and character? That's the big question, I suspect, on a number of minds.

As for Mr. McCain, I think he had the best moment of the month this week at the big motorcycle convention in Sturgis, S.D., when he was greeted with that mighty roar. And his great line: "As you may know, not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I'll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day." Oh, that was good.

There's a thing that's out there and it's big, and latent, and somehow always taken into account and always ignored, and political professionals always assume they understand it. It has been called many things the past 50 years, "the silent center," "the silent majority," "the coalition," "the base." The idea of it has evolved as its composition has evolved, but the fact that it's big, and relatively silent, and somehow always latent, maintains. And watching that McCain event—vroom vroom—one got the sense it is perhaps beginning to pay attention to the campaign. I see it as the old America, and if and when it reasserts itself, the campaign will shift indeed, and in ways you can even see from 10,000 feet.

Indeed, & I recall some EU-nuch Kraut Kommentator noting he's just seen "POTUS 44" in Berlin in front of rapturous empty-headed EU-nuchs of the same ilk that cheered Adolf three generations ago.

Americans, happily, will decide this election, not the two Left Coasts & self-appointed elites from the Academy and Hollyweird---not forgetting crooked unions or crooked trial lawyers.

The noisy lefties who don't want their phones tapped, but do want their noses in your business & hands in your wallet can't wait to get the Democrat tax machine in charge of the country.

But I think four more years of waiting for Obama to "season" a bit isn't too long.

Iran Wants a Nuke to Threaten Gulfie Sheikhdoms

Iran is an enemy of the Gulf sheikhdoms/kingdom of S.A. on several levels. One is religious, where Iran still claims Bahrain, with its sixty percent Shi'ite population. Other pockets of Shi'ites live in the Al Hasa Oasis & towns like Al-Qatif and Hofuf on the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Although the Arab Shi'ites traditionally detest their Iranian co-religionists on nationalist grounds, the delusional Iranian paramilitary units still believe that Iran can control world oil exports by controlling the Strait of Hormuz & domineering the Arab states on the western side of the Persian/Arabian Gulf.

For U.N. purposes, Iran denies any development of nukes, instead claiming that they are developing a nuclear energy production which is ludicrous on the face of it, given its ownership of 30% of the world's natural gas underground. However, the Hate-America moron lefties in the US support Iran, because this dovetails with the international left's instinctive anti-Semitism. [A site called Newshoggers is particularly biased & despicable in its hatred of Israel.] So far, the Israelis have been careful to follow up their strategically brilliant elimination of Osirak in 1981 with subsequent take-downs of nuke sites like the destruction of a Syrian site late last year. Is Tehran & environs next on the Israeli target list?

Israel does have grounds for fearing the paramilitary creeps to the north & west of their borders, and Hezbollah & Hamas [who of course are Sunni] have a temporary marriage of convenience due to their common hatred of Israel. Many in Beirut believe that the next time Hezbollah seizes Israeli soldiers, the south part of Beirut will be reduced to rubble in a rapid fashion. Despite the hypocritical whining of anti-Semites in the EU-nuch countries and the Arab League.

Indeed, secretly the Peninsula Arabs would probably enjoy seeing the diminishment of Tehran's ambitions in the Levant. However, the main goal of the Iranians in building a nuclear bomb is to intimidate the Saudis and Gulfies into submission---allowing Iran to influence the export of oil to the rest of the world from that strategic resource basin.

PM Olmert's resignation & the possible ascendancy of Netanyahu does not bode well for the Hamas & Hezbollah violent reactionaries in the Levant. Hopefully, Iranian presidential elections in early '09 will remove Ahmedinejad & lessen the influence of the Basiji & Pasdaran paramilitaries on Iranian foreign policy.

Obama Lies About Big Oil & McCain

Obama appears to be choosing a path of populist demagoguery to win independent voters, a ploy which is as ill-conceived as its facts are inaccurate.

Nancy Pelosi is pursuing a hypermoronic refusal to allow a vote on drilling offshore and in ANWR, probably because she believes that her own clear-headed Dem lieutenants [at least a third of the Dems in the House are more than just shills for the far left] will support what even Obama realizes is a necessary policy for increasing US oil supply---offshore drilling, that is.

McCain has been inept at pushing his advantages in the energy area so far, but the old codger is slowly, oh so slowly catching on that he may have stumbled upon a winning gambit----due to the insufferable stupidity of Pelosi & Reid in their "firm," [read "pig-headed"] oppositon to drilling in the most prospective areas on and off-shore.

FactCheck puts the Obama hysterics about Big Oil's having McCain "in its pocket" in perspective:

It bears repeating, as we've reminded readers before, that oil companies themselves don't make donations. It's illegal under federal law for corporations to donate directly to candidates and has been since 1918. The ad refers to donations from executives and employees of oil companies, given either directly or through company-sponsored political action committees, or PACs.

Both candidates accept donations from individual employees of oil companies. In fact, when Obama claimed in an ad last March that "I don't take money from oil companies," we criticized him for being a little too slick. The CRP puts Obama's total from oil and gas donors at $394,465.

Based on CRP's figures, McCain's oil and gas donations account for just 0.9 cents out of every $100 he's raised. Obama's oil and gas total comes to 0.1 cents per $100. That's a significant difference between the two candidates, and it's clear that the industry is favoring McCain with its donations. Whether that puts him "in the pocket" of the industry is a judgment we'll leave to our readers.

Of course, the MSM continues to piously & devoutly recite Obama's half-truths without critical assessment, except for a few outliers like the WaPo, which has a sophisticated readership able to discern when it is being flimflammed. Even so, FactCheck also mentioned a July 31st article in the Post that contained inaccuracies in exaggerating McCain's ties to Big Oil.

McCain's almost impossible to keep under control, like a bowling ball in the back of a moving pickup truck. The fact is that until now, Johnny Mack is unable to stay on-topic long enough to impart a consistent message on just about everything, let alone energy. Let's hope his handlers can reel him in by the last two months of the campaign.

If he's still lurching & reversing & backing & hauling in October, he may have lost an election which appears now is his to win---through sheer ADD lack of attention span.

NYT Op-Ed Columnist Yearns for Acheson

David Brooks must have something in his contract that requires hiim to write [at least] one sycophantic Op-Ed on Democrats per month, even if it is sheer unadulterated gibberish. Today he meets his quota for August, hitting his marks like a pro. Here's his homage to the rosy-fingered sunset of memory:

...in the late 1940s, global power was concentrated. The victory over fascism meant the mantle of global leadership rested firmly on the Atlantic alliance. The United States accounted for roughly half of world economic output. Within the U.S., power was wielded by a small, bipartisan, permanent governing class — men like Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, John McCloy and Robert Lovett.

Brooks went to Harvard, where they instruct gullible young people [like himself?] with a flim-flammedversion of history based upon pious concoctions ginned up by liberal narrators [Sean Wilentz is the flavor du jour among current acolytes of the Arthur Schlesinger Jr. school of ardent revisioning of the past as it never was.]

Therefore, David probably never got the memo that Dean Acheson committed a colossal blunder that, were it cone by a Repub, would resound down the halls of memory like a clanging gong to be repeated on a monthly basis to demonstrate the foolishness of Republicans.

Is David even aware that in Feb, 1950, Dean Acheson got up before the UN & recited a list of countries that the USA regarded as worthy of protection? Is he aware that Acheson & his moronic imbecilic underling, an Asst. Secretary of State for East Asia named Dean Rusk, had inadvertently & carelessly left South Korea off the list?

While the sleepyheads in Foggy Bottom continued their useless drudgery, Joe Stalin read the speech and, much smarter than Rusk or Acheson, immediately divined that the US didn't care about Korea one way or the other.

Tens of thousands of American soldiers died because of the stupid unprofessional carelessness of a third-rate moron who is now regarded as a "great" Secretary of State by dilettantes like Brooks.

And while GWB gets pummeled by the mindless MSM, including many Repubs, for taking a terrorist nation off the list of countries ruled buy socialist dictators, vapid & vacuous commentary like Brooks' continues to infest the Op-Ed pages of the NYT.

As Columbia student leader Mark Rudd told me when he was my houseguest in Ann Arbor some thirty-nine years ago while puffing on my ganga, "No fault on the left."

And so-called Republicans often further this mindless adherence to a broken historical narrative devoid of truth & honor.

Sen. Coburn Upsets Earmark Applecart

Sens. Ted Stevens & Dingy Harry Reid are two examples of the "spend & spend some more" culture on Capitol Hill, according to the WSJ's John Fund:

This week's events further discredited the earmark culture. On Tuesday, Mr. Stevens, ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee, had to step down after being indicted for failing to report over $250,000 in gifts from a firm that sought earmarks from him. The day before, Republicans enjoyed a rare success when they beat back an attempt by Majority Leader Harry Reid to ram through an earmark-laden omnibus bill that Mr. Coburn had refused to help pass by the often-abused "unanimous consent" process.

Congress as a whole was clocked at a 9% approval rating in a recent poll, way below the hapless tongue-tied George W. Bush. Nancy Pelosi is revealing herself as a nasty old nanny with autocratic attitudes & a penchant for bossy bitchery that reminds most voters of their mother-in-law. Dingy Harry has an androgynous voice that makes Schwatzenegger's famous "girlie man" epithet appear particularly apt. Ted Stevens is just your angry old uncle who is wrong and proud of it. Sen. Byrd of W.V. suffers from chronic brainlock & is even fodder for Dem-adoring SNL skits & video snippets. Chuck Shumer & Chris Dodd & Joe Biden typify the libtard entitlement paradigm and Dodd's special treatment on his home mortgage didn't shame this sharp-practices artist from the very next day proposing a $300-billion plus bailout of the very mortgage firms that gave him special attention which was outed the day before. [Dodd's own father, another senator of CT, was censured by the Senate fifty years ago for dipping into his campaign funds for personal ATM purposes---back before ATMs & back when the Senate still had a sense of right-and-wrong.] Here's more Fund on brave souls like Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, and Jeff Flake"

One reason Congress now has even lower approval numbers than in 2006 is the failure of Democrats to make good on their vow to clean up the earmark process. A "moratorium" on earmarks has been quietly set aside; and the Congressional Research Service has been directed by Congressional leaders to no longer respond to requests from members on the size, number or background of earmarks. "Democrats claim the earmarks will now be transparent, but they're taking away the very data that lets us know what's really happening," says South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint. Democratic earmark reform, concludes Mr. Coburn, "not only failed to drain the swamp, but gave the alligators new rights."

Mr. Coburn's main point on earmarks is that senators must choose between a culture of parochialism and a culture that puts the national interest first. He stipulates that few members are corrupt, and that most go with the flow. He has even offered to release his holds on earmarks -- if their sponsors will propose reducing federal spending elsewhere, so "we aren't just dumping more debt on our kids."

His offer hasn't been popular. Included in the Reid package was $1.67 billion for ocean and coastal programs that were pet projects of Mr. Stevens. But the Alaska senator has refused to even discuss spending offsets to pay for what he calls "Stevens money." In 2005, there was so much "Stevens money" that Alaska snared almost $1,000 in earmarked federal funding for every resident, 30 times what went to the average state, based on population.

Mr. Stevens was a big reason the earmark culture had such a grip on Senate Republicans: Few dared risk his wrath. When he became chairman of the Appropriations Committee in 1997, he proudly proclaimed, "I'm a mean, miserable SOB." When Mr. Coburn dared challenge his $228 million "Bridge to Nowhere" in 2005, Mr. Stevens warned fellow senators "if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next."

In the House, GOP Rep. Don Young of Alaska -- the former Transportation Committee chair who stuffed the last highway bill with over 6,000 earmarks -- played a similar intimidation game. "Those who bite me will be bitten back," Mr. Young warned Rep. Scott Garrett last year. Mr. Garrett, a New Jersey Republican, had tried to kill a $34 million earmark sponsored by Mr. Young.

Now Mr. Stevens is almost certain to lose his Senate seat -- either through defeat or conviction on felony charges. And Mr. Young is trailing in Alaska's August 26 primary to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, a protégé of Alaska's reform Republican Gov. Sarah Pallin. Here's hoping the removal of both men from Capitol Hill stiffens the spine of more Republicans to forswear the earmark culture.

They may not like it, but Mr. Coburn is showing Republicans how the GOP can return to its small government roots. Consider Ronald Reagan, who in 1987 vetoed a highway bill because it had a mere 121 earmarks in it.

Reagan quoted a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1796, warning that allowing Congress to spend federal money for local projects would set off "a scene of scramble among the members (for) who can get the most money wasted in their State, and they will always get most who are meanest." Reagan didn't think that represented good government or good politics. Republicans today should heed his warning.

And here is a good sign:

John McCain won the GOP nomination and retains support from independent voters today in part because he vows to veto any bill containing pork-barrel projects. Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake, Mr. Coburn's antiearmark counterpart in the House, thinks voters in GOP districts are now disgusted enough to make the political costs to a member seeking pork greater than the benefits.

I consider McCain better than Obama on only a very few issues, such as Iraq, taxes, & appointment of sane judges. But I will vote for McCain if he can emulate the Coburn/Flake school of responsible legislation & imitate Ronald Reagan in vetoing Omnibus bills with earmarks.

Jackson, Sharpton & Grievance Crew Don't Want Obama Elected

Obama is beginning to be heckled by black audiences, prompted most likely by the Victimhood Mafia led by Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson, whose lucrative & powerful positions would be undermined by a black president.

And also, consider the fact that if Obama loses, these whiners & belly-achers would be able to cash in on four more years of loo-zer BS that keeps the black community stuck in the urban wasteland of crime, drugs, and scams to rip off the government.

Instead of losing if Obama wins, they will keep their status & actually gain traction with their pathetic cons if he loses.

I wonder if the hecklers were ringers sent there by Jackson or Sharpton.

Why Democrats Lose National Elections---Reason #4

There follows a comment I made to a blog on The Moderate Voice by "Holly in Cincinnati."

I would argue that polls consistently over the last half-decade demonstrate that basic political/cultural beliefs in the USA among the electorate are roughly 35% conservative, 20% liberal, and about 45% what used to be called "mugwumps," [i.e., your mug is on one side of the fence & your "wump" is on the other, as Plunkett once put it, I believe.]

The predominantly liberal media [network, cable, print] make the 20% of Americans who subscribe to "progressive" values appear much larger a percentage than they really are. And the two Left Coasts control the narrative except in "flyover country" where talk radio rules, and tr is conservative.

The reason Repubs always exceed media expectations is twofold: the tendency for conservatives to actually turn up at the polls on election day & vote and of course, the second reason is the delusional nature of the left, which always thinks that it is stronger & better placed than it is in the last few days of the campaign, at least for POTUS. The Left is in PC denial over all sorts of things, first & foremost, its own relative unimportance compared to its bloated self-esteem.

Obama appears to be one more articulate, but shallow idealist whose intentions are certainly honorable, but whose supporters have a million axes to grind, many of them products of their own immoderate view of their own self-importance.

And why is it that almost all Dem candidates for POTUS are lawyers? Not since Gerry Ford has the Republican Party run a lawyer at the top of the ticket [unless Bob Dole went to law school].

The American people generally rate lawyers somewhere between politicians & IRS investigators, two other unpopular professions.