The Founding of Barack Hussein Obama…..The Bill Ayers Chapter

Bill Ayers, the man with whom Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama worked on Chicago projects, published his own manifesto during his years as an active terrorist and dedicated it to a list of people including Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

According to Fox News, Ayers – the Weather Underground terrorist who bombed the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, and stated recently he wished he could have done more – used his book, “Prairie Fire,” to announce his intention to “attack from the inside” and “disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world.”

When confronted in a debate, Obama described Ayers as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” But the campaign of Republican nominee John McCain has made much of of the fact that Ayers hired Obama to work on the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago and shared duties with him on the board of the Woods Fund, charities that distributed millions of dollars to left wing causes.

The weblog Dakota Voice cited a passage from the book:

We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years. We are deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.

Our intention is to engage the enemy, to wear away at him, to harass him, to isolate him, to expose every weakness, to pounce, to reveal his vulnerability.

Our intention is to encourage the people, to provoke leaps in confidence and consciousness, to stir the imagination, to popularize power, to agitate, to organize, to join in every way possible the people’s day-to-day struggles.

Our intention is to forge an underground, a clandestine political organization engaged in every form of struggle, protected from the eyes and weapons of the state, a base against repression, to accumulate lessons, experience and constant practice, a base from which to attack.

“This book contains terrorist, Marxist, anti-American writings that should make the blood of any red-blooded American boil,” Dakota Voice said. “Stop and consider for a moment that Barack Obama allowed this America-hating terrorist help launch his political career in his living room. That Barack Obama worked with this man on the board of the Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund. That they sat together on panels like the one over juvenile justice.

“How can we possibly consider electing someone with this wretched judgment (and possibly questionable sympathies) to the presidency?” the Voice said.

Sirhan Sirhan

The publication said Democrats should be upset, because Robert Kennedy has been a hero to the party. Sirhan was convicted of shooting Kennedy June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where the candidate had just finished a campaign appearance.

According to several online biographies, Sirhan, who remains imprisoned in California, was an Arab who had emigrated to the U.S. and reportedly was disturbed by Kennedy’s pro-Israel positions.

“Hannity & Colmes” co-host Sean Hannity said the book, which Ayers co-wrote with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, in 1974, includes about 100 or so names described as “political prisoners in the U.S.” on the dedication page.

Among those is Sirhan.

“That’s right,” Hannity said. “This college professor, who is just a guy from the neighborhood who never meant to hurt anybody, who bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, New York City police headquarters, dedicated his book to the man who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy.”

It is not Obama’s only connection to people and organizations with revolutionary plans. WND also has reported on his links to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

According to a report from Matthew Vadum, a senior editor for the Capital Research Center, the organization’s “shock troops” have been linked to or convicted of perjury, forgery, identity theft and election fraud, and are under investigation in a dozen states again this year.

His report, titled “ACORN: Who Funds the Weather Underground’s Little Brother?” documents the troubled past and current problems facing the organization.

Obama also has been linked to several other individuals with known anti-American views.

The above article is from WorldNetDaily

An Important Death in Teheran

“While the media blabs on about (relatively) inconsequential WikiLeaks, real drama plays out on the streets of Teheran where two Iranian nuclear scientists were the targets of assassination attempts – one of them successful.

According to (the often-unreliable-but-frequently-fascinating) Debka file, the scientist assassinated — Majid Shahriari — was in charge of their program to deal with the Stuxnet malware that has infected Iranian computers. At that same time, Ahmadinejad publicly admitted setbacks. This isn’t a great time to be an Iranian nuclear scientist. From Debka:

The attacks occurred at 7.45 a.m. Iranian time, less than 12 hours after the WikiLeaks organization uncovered US diplomatic cables attesting to a proposal by Mossad director Meir Dagan to overthrow the Islamic regime as one of the ways of terminating its nuclear program. He proposed enlisting oppressed Iranian minority groups for the task, like the Baluchis and their liberation movement, Jundallah.

Our intelligence sources note that this was the fifth attack in two years on Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran. None of the perpetrators were ever apprehended. Some sources suggest that the latest double hit may have been the work of Jundallah, which recently began targeting nuclear scientists serving the hated regime and which two months ago reported abducting a scientist employed at the Isfahan nuclear facility.

Tehran played down that incident claiming the kidnapped man was a driver. But last week he appeared on the Saudi TV station Al Arabiya and described his nuclear work.

Ahmadinejad et al, of course, blame Israel and the West, and no doubt this “blame” is deserved. How it should be apportioned may be forever a mystery, but it is unlikely we will find out via WikiLeaks, which have thus far done little more than ratify the obvious and make the Obama administration look foolish for its ludicrously ineffective security. Intelligence work evidently has two levels – a completely incompetent one that produces WikiLeaks and a brilliant one that produces Stuxnet.

Speaking of Stuxnet, some recent reports have added Russia to the list of nations (in this case with the US and Germany, not Israel) who have conspired to construct the malware. Now that’s interesting – and undoubtedly crazy-making to the Iranians.

And speaking of ludicrous, over at the WaPo, Jackson Diehl makes the ludicrous assumption that someone working on nuclear weapons is a “civilian.” Not only has he abjured his civilian status, he’s become possibly the most lethal figure in the army.            (This article was written by George L. Simon at Pajamas Media.)

 

The Somnambulate Mr. Obama Now Faces Opposition

“While I was away last week, Jonathan Last’s brilliant essay, “American Narcissus,” appeared at the Weekly Standard. Last assembles an extensive catalog of the two sides of Obama: extreme narcissism — and its flipside, extreme boredom with every aspect of life that doesn’t immediately advance the career of Barack Obama.

Let’s look at a few instances of the latter:

David Remnick delivers a number of insights about Obama in his book The Bridge. For instance, Valerie Jarrett—think of her as the president’s Karen Hughes—tells Remnick that Obama is often bored with the world around him. “I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually,” Jarrett says. “So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy.” Jarrett concludes, “He’s been bored to death his whole life.”

With one or two possible exceptions, that is. Remnick reports that “Jarrett was quite sure that one of the few things that truly engaged him fully before going to the White House was writing Dreams from My Father.” So the only job Barack Obama ever had that didn’t bore him was writing about Barack Obama. But wait, there’s more.

David Axelrod—he’s Obama’s Karl Rove—told Remnick that “Barack hated being a senator.” Remnick went on:

Washington was a grander stage than Springfield, but the frustrations of being a rookie in a minority party were familiar. Obama could barely conceal his frustration with the torpid pace of the Senate. His aides could sense his frustration and so could his colleagues. “He was so bored being a senator,” one Senate aide said.

Obama’s friend and law firm colleague Judd Miner agreed. “The reality,” Miner told Remnick, “was that during his first two years in the U.S. Senate, I think, he was struggling; it wasn’t nearly as stimulating as he expected.” But even during his long, desolate exile as a senator, Obama was able to find a task that satisfied him. Here’s Remnick again: “The one project that did engage Obama fully was work on The Audacity of Hope. He procrastinated for a long time and then, facing his deadline, wrote nearly a chapter a week.” Your tax dollars at work.

And as we’ve noted earlier around these parts, Obama has expressed frustration with other aspects of life. “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me,” Barack Obama told the AP in the early 1990s, as Joel Kotkin reminds us, in this passage highlighted late last month by Instapundit:

Many of the administration’s most high-profile initiatives have tended to reflect the views of urban interests – roughly 20 percent of the population – rather than suburban ones.

When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a “president from another planet.” After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”

Add that to Obama’s previous utterances regarding other aspects of America that induced in him a sense of ennui as a young man.  In 2008, Jim Geraghty spotted this telling passage in a book by David Mendell titled Obama: From Promise to Power:

“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”

Maybe that explains Obama’s fascination with radical chic figures such as Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers: perhaps only rhetoric that venomous could break through the all-enveloping forcefield of young Obama’s existential ennui.

But most presidents don’t arrive at the White House so bored with the quotidian details of the American people. Reagan lived out the American dream of being a self-made man in first broadcasting, then show business, then the governor of one of the nation’s largest states. Ike brought freedom to western Europe. Teddy Roosevelt was the consummate outdoorsman. As Machiavellian as Richard Nixon could seem, he could at least outwardly sympathize with, rather than be bored by, the Silent Majority. Even men born into wealth and privilege such as JFK and FDR appeared much more connected with the American people than our current president.

And as Last writes, far from bored, America’s founding father was extremely humbled by the tasks he had taken on:

When he accepted command of the Revolutionary forces, George Washington said,

I feel great distress, from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important Trust. … I beg it may be remembered, by every Gentleman in the room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with.

Accepting the presidency, Washington was even more reticent. Being chosen to be president, he said, “could not but overwhelm with despondence one who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.”

Jonah Goldberg recently wrote that Obama’s elephantine ego causes him, and his sycophantic advisors, both to inflate the challenges they’ve faced in the Oval Office and the current administration’s place in history:

Rahm Emanuel, as he was fleeing for the healthier and more civic-minded political environment of Chicago’s backrooms, said, “I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”Really? The times have been rough, we can all agree, but if memory serves, the Civil War was no cakewalk either. And that Pearl Harbor thing — not to mention 9/11 — might compete with the miserable economy Obama inherited and then ignored as he pursued his own “transformational” vanity projects.

There’s an irony to occupying the Oval Office. When presidents think they’re bigger than the job they hold, they shrink in office. When they think they’re smaller than the honor they’ve been temporarily bestowed, they grow into it. Obama has done nothing but shrink.

Of course, Obama’s liberal worldview and his current fishbowl-like existence in the White House aren’t helping him maintain contact with anything resembling the day-to-day reality you and I inhabit.

As others have written throughout the last decade, many liberals live in a media cocoon; none more so than the nation’s current president. Peggy Noonan proposes one solution to help him escape its confines: inventing “The Special Assistant for Reality:”

What a president should ideally have, and what I think we all agree Mr. Obama badly needs, is an assistant whose sole job it is to explain and interpret the American people to him. Presidents already have special assistants for domestic policy, for congressional relations and national security. Why not a special assistant for reality? Someone to translate the views of the people, and explain how they think. An advocate for the average, a representative for the normal, to the extent America does normal.

If Mr. Obama had a special assistant for reality this week, this is how their dialogue might have gone over the anti-TSA uprising.

President: This thing is all ginned up, isn’t it? Right-wing websites fanned it. Then the mainstream media jumped in to display their phony populist street cred. Right?

Special Assistant for Reality: No, Mr. President, it was more spontaneous. Websites can’t fan fires that aren’t there. This is like the town hall uprisings of summer 2009. In the past month, citizens took videos at airports the same way town hall protesters made videos there, and put them on YouTube. The more pictures of pat-downs people saw, the more they opposed them.

President: What’s the essence of the opposition?

SAR: Sir, Americans don’t like it when strangers touch their private parts. Especially when the strangers are in government uniforms and say they’re here to help.

President: Is it that we didn’t roll it out right? We made a mistake in not telling people in advance we were changing the procedure.

SAR: Um, no, Mr. President. If you’d told them in advance, they would have rebelled sooner.

President: We should have pointed out not everyone goes through the new machines, and only a minority get patted down.

SAR: Mr. President, if you’d told people, “Hello, there’s only 1 chance in 3 you’ll be molested at the airport today” most people wouldn’t think, “Oh good, I like those odds.”

And so on. It’s a cute idea, but who wants to be the man to tell the president’s finely tailored clothes (just ask David Brooks) that they have no emperor inside? Particularly when, as Jonathan Last highlights, quoting a 2008 New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza on Obama’s presidential run, this is going to be the likely response:

Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, [campaign political director Patrick] Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”

Certainly the legacy media that created the president doesn’t have the courage to admit the president’s faults, as Sarah Palin satirically wrote in her terrific Thanksgiving posting:

My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…

Of course, the paragraph above is based on a series of misstatements and verbal gaffes made by Barack Obama (I didn’t have enough time to do one for Joe Biden). YouTube links are provided just in case you doubt the accuracy of these all too human slips-of-the-tongue. If you can’t remember hearing about them, that’s because for the most part the media didn’t consider them newsworthy. I have no complaint about that. Everybody makes the occasional verbal gaffe – even news anchors.

Perhaps though, there is one clarifying benefit to Obama’s narcissism, as Scott Johnson quipped recently at Power Line:

One of President Obama’s most prominent and least attractive qualities is his vanity. It almost disposes of the speculation that Obama is a Muslim. The man can’t be a Muslim; he worships himself.

What does it all mean moving forward? Byron York believes that “Obama’s poll numbers point to his defeat in 2012″:”

“He’s got to realize the reason he lost independents,” says Winston of the president. “He thinks it was about communications. It wasn’t. It was about substance and policy.” Whether Obama can gracefully back away from the policies that got him in trouble — federal spending, Obamacare — is simply not clear.

Obama supporters point to the example of Bill Clinton, whose approval dipped to 40 percent after losing Congress in 1994, only to climb to 54 percent before winning easy re-election in 1996. Maybe that will happen again.

But Clinton’s former pollster, Doug Schoen, doesn’t see it that way. Schoen recently did a survey asking voters whether Obama deserves to be re-elected and found that 56 percent believe the president doesn’t deserve another term, while just 38 percent believe he does.

Despite his problems, there are still ways Obama can win. His greatest hope, as always in politics, is that the other side will screw up. Maybe the newly empowered House Republicans will do a terrible job, or the GOP will nominate an awful presidential candidate. But that just underscores a stark reality. At this point, it will be hard for Obama to save himself. He’ll need a lot of help to win a second term in the White House.

But as the Professor advises, Republicans should refrain from cockiness. Particularly since the campaign trail in 2008 was one of the few times in his life Obama didn’t appear to be entirely bored with the reality enveloping him.”

(The above article was written by Ed Driscoll at Pajamas Media.)

 

The Unhallowed and Befouled 2010 American University

“The Compromised University”   by David Solway  at Pajamas Media.

“Let’s face it. There is nothing hallowed per se about the university. Like any human institution, it can profane its founding principles and grow corrupt and oppressive. As many have pointed out, the prestigious German universities of the 1930s, for example, were sloughs of degraded scholarship and outright propaganda mills, softening up their students’ minds for the preposterous theories of National Socialism. Even a presumably master philosopher and teacher like Martin Heidegger, appointed rector of the University of Freiburg, used his considerable intellectual powers and prestige to further the Nazi supremacist dogma. For Heidegger, the function of the university was to provide what he called, in his rector’s address, “service to knowledge” as an obligation to the National Socialist state.

What Heidegger had in mind, obviously, was not service to knowledge but service to an ideological parti pris masking as knowledge, really a form of epistemological closure. One must always remember that the university may as easily become an engine of indoctrination as a generator of intellectual vitality or a transmitter of genuine knowledge. We must remain skeptical of slogans and professed ideals such as the shibboleth of “academic freedom,” which can be misused as a cover for illiberal thought and slavish conformity to a ruling ideology. As such, the university can become a ramada for some of the most extremist elements, faculty activists, and incompetent “intellectual workers” in a given society, as Roger Kimball has painstakingly shown in his groundbreaking Tenured Radicals.

This is no doubt why our left-leaning academia seems to have entered upon what David Horowitz has called, in his book of that title, an “unholy alliance” with various Islamic organizations. It hosts aggressive Muslim Student Unions, features Israel Apartheid Weeks, is prone to America-bashing, accepts funding from dubious Islamic sources, and is generally unwilling to confront the practice of Islamic terror and stealth jihad as strategies of warfare. For the university is partial to its own form of intellectual jihad in the ongoing culture wars, the theory and practice of which it considers legitimate. In my own country, the University of Toronto was the originator of the scandalous Israel Apartheid Week hatefest and has currently accepted and posted a blatantly anti-Semitic master’s thesis. York University is notorious for Jew-bashing, much like the University of California at Irvine, and has just hosted the infamous Hamas supporter and pro-Islamist agitator George Galloway. According to Richard Cravatts of Boston University, York is a “cesspool of anti-Semitic, pro-Palestinian activism,” but his depiction pretty well applies across the academic board.

As Horowitz indicates, the academic left’s growing rapprochement with the metastasizing Islamic movement is the latest sign of its abdication from founding principles and the betrayal of its mandate. This is one of the most troubling aspects of the so-called “liberal” university as we have come to know it, which offers an unseemly and unreciprocated hospitality to Islamic themes, curricula, and organizations. Indeed, the humanities departments of many, if not most, major Western universities, with their revisionist professoriate and craven administrations, differ little from their Islamic counterparts. True, the science and technology departments will generally tell a different story, as reflected in the disproportion in scientific achievements between Western and Islamic universities. Nonetheless, our universities, in the words of the Manhattan Institute’s Abigail Thernstrom, are becoming “islands of repression in a sea of freedom.”

It seems undeniable that many universities appear to be in the business of pimping for the Arabs, considering all the Saudi money (as well as “donations” and “gifts” from other Muslim nations) gushing into university programs and endowments. Harvard and Georgetown accepting millions of dollars from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is only one instance of a massive Arab subsidization scheme that began more than a generation ago, thus creating, as Campus Watch Associate Fellow Asaf Romirowsky writes, “bastions of noncritical, pro-Islamic scholarship within academia.”

In The Uncivil University, authors Gary Tobin, Aryeh Weinberg, and Jenna Ferer demonstrate how politicized Middle East studies in particular have become: “Scholarship in the Middle East today has become a platform from which to fight perceived Western domination and to absolve the Arab world of wrongdoing. It is also an attempt to ascribe blame specifically to the United States for any and all of the political, cultural, and social problems ongoing in the Middle East.” Under the mantle of diversity of opinion, free expression, and the unfettered exchange of ideas, many of our universities have given the dais to homicidal despots and enemies of the state while protesting against and even prohibiting anti-Islamists, conservative thinkers, and patriots from speaking freely and engaging students in discussion. The same bias holds in the realm of academic publishing. John Perazzo’s compendious report on the subject leaves little doubt about the extent to which “university presses reflect academia’s dominant worldviews in every way, promoting the tenets of doctrinaire leftism,” disparaging America, and resting “unconcerned about any threat from radical Islam.”

 

Who benefits? Certainly not truly liberal institutions or intellectual scholarship. As Denis MacShane comments in Globalising Hatred, “The role of the liberal university tradition is to defend liberty, not to promote politics that reduce it. One would have thought that all adults who teach at or administer our universities would subscribe to that vision.” Could anything be more obvious? Not, apparently, to many of our professors and their poodling administrations who, as MacShane suggests, give little indication of living in any relation to reality. It seems, to cite from Tennyson’s “The Kraken” — that the “unnumbered and enormous polypi” of the mind have risen from the preceptorial deep and identified with America’s, and the West’s, enemies.

What too many of our students are now receiving is not education in the authentic sense of the term — e-ducere, a leading out of [ignorance] — but the pedagogy of deprivation, by which I mean the want of impartial study, of comprehensive rather than selective knowledge, of scholarly respect for the subject and for the proponents of different political positions, of a grounding in Western history and its philosophical, political, and cultural tradition and, last but not least, of the fostering of native curiosity. Instead, they are increasingly at the mercy of teachers who have betrayed a noble profession. As Thomas Sowell contends, the professors have become fact filterers, that is, indoctrinators who “in the interest of their own vision, are denying to others the right … to … reach their own conclusions.”

I am forcibly reminded of Russell Hoban’s apt description in his post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker of what could well be our educational  institution: “Yet unner neath that Zero Groun I lissent up a swarming it wer a humming like a millying of bees it wer like 10s of millyings.” Our millyings of professors are humming away while the barbarians remorselessly approach. Perhaps, as C.S. Lewis says in The Abolition of Man of the factitious teachers Gaius and Titius, these pedants “do not fully realize what they are doing, and do not intend the far-reaching consequences it will actually have.” But the chances are that they do, as they engage upon “a clean sweep of traditional values and start with a new set.” Only, the new set is not so new.

Democracy cannot survive in default of a reasonably alert and educated public and a viable university system. The almost daily capitulations of our intellectuals, opinion-makers, politicians, and academics to the invasive forces of what is nothing less than a global jihad, whether conveyed through terrorist, demographic, jurisprudential, or rhetorical means, along with the virtual exclusion of alternative discourses, must be seen for what they are: omens of approaching dissolution. And the soi-disant liberal university has become the “Zero Groun” of intellectual ruination, its busy bee professoriate invidiously programming its students with both a left-wing, statist agenda and a misplaced tolerance for radical Islamic thought and practice. David Horowitz points out, as an instance of this nuptial complicity between the left and Islam on university campuses, the interesting fact that “the pro-terrorist Muslim Students Association and the Young Communist League” are part of the same “Peace Workers” coalition.

Intellectuals and academics have long shared a pronounced tendency toward the “philotyrannical,” in its fascist, communist, and Islamic guises. In The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, Stephen Norwood methodically reveals the sympathy of American universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, during the 1930s with the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini; and even after the war, “there was widespread indifference in academia … about the fascist past.” The general hospitality for left-wing causes and Communism itself in the academy is common knowledge. And true to form, as we have seen, the university has become one of the chief incubators of pro-Islamic sentiment — and its natural correlate, anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rancor — in the Western world. Far from being the bulwark and harbinger of liberal civilization, the university seems more than willing to compromise its mandate and welcome into the once “quiet and still air of delightful studies” precisely those who would subvert it. As for the first part of Milton’s lovely and nostalgic phrase, “beholding the bright countenance of truth,” fuggedaboudit. The family mafia of left-wing professors, department heads, administrators, and syndics is simply not interested.

The prognosis doesn’t look great. As the 14^th century Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldun theorized in the Muqaddimah (“The Introduction”), when a civilization begins to decay and enters the twilight of its existence, it is invariably vanquished by a society of barbarians. Looking about us today — at the media, the entertainment industry, the political establishment, and especially the liberal academy — it is hard to disagree.”

2010 America: The Age of Adolescence = The Age of Obama’s Leftists

“Never-never land

One of the great themes of the 1960s was to “do your own thing.” But usually “liberation” distilled down to creating your own rules and norms to justify allowing the appetites and passions to run free, while offering some sort of exalted cover for being either gross or mediocre—or both.

The hip generation that came of age talked about a new, perpetually youthful world that would supplant the values and aspirations of a fading bankrupt establishment (e.g., cf. Bob Dylan’s “the order is rapidly fading.”). And in time the promise of the Sixties, in fact, did permeate the last half-century, creating a contemporary culture of perpetual adolescence, of defying norms and protocols without offering anything much in their place.

From Lady Gaga to Iranian Nukes

Witness current events. A 22-year PFC Bradley Manning, without much experience, knowledge, or maturity, somehow becomes a “military analyst.” (I thought those were 2-star generals, RAND Ph.Ds, decorated colonels, or old Kissingerian National Security Council pros.)

And in our culture without hierarchy and requisites that title apparently allows him—in between downloading Lady Gaga music while in a combat zone in Iraq—to tap into the secret cables of the U.S. State Department, and destroy two decades worth of diplomatic contacts, trust, and friendships.

No matter—you see poor Bradley was also upset, depressed, and he felt underappreciated. In part, that was because his drag-queen boyfriend had recently dumped him. He was, in his own words, “regularly ignored except when I had something essential then it was back to ‘bring me coffee, then sweep the…’ [I] felt like I was an abused work horse.”

Iranian nukes? North Korean missiles? Again, no problem. Bradley, you see, was depressed and in response had the desire and the power to change the global order. (Or in 60s parlance, ‘who is to say that Bradley doesn’t have the right to shut down the diplomatic world’?) Even Bob Dylan would be impressed with how “the times they are a changing”.

Wikicoward

Next enter one Julian Assange—himself on the lamb, avoiding a little sexy horseplay that the uptight Swedish authorities for some reason deemed thus far sexual battery and molestation. Jason is also angry at “them,” the Western world that does horrific things like guarantees enough affluence and security for those like Julian to jet about at will without any visible means of support. In the tradition of Sixties nihilism, Julian, of course, tries to gussy up his destructive egotistical angst into some sort of cosmic humane call for more transparency and nice behavior on the part of the U.S. State Department and military.

In more earthly terms that means he is supposed to be something more than a two-bit computer punk that he is, one who would be terrified to extend his online liberationist creed to Iranian mullahs, Chinese communists, Hezbollah terrorists, or Russian gang lords. The latter do far more to trample the human spirit than does any Western nation, but they also at times tend to decapitate, blow up, or jail permanently any would-be Julian who dares to cross them.

Ant-Christ

While this is all going on, we have the spectacle of brave curators at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery offering us for Christmas season a new exhibit, emblematic of this current post-“piss-Christ” / Andres Serrano age of art.

Its title is coyly encrypted in postmodern bipolarity: “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” And the exhibition apparently is full of Mapplethorpe-inspired gay-related imagery and offers us an image of Jesus being swarmed over by ants. Clever, brave, bold, shocking. Or in the words of the overseers of the federally-subsidized National Portrait Gallery, such artistic courage proves how the gallery is now “committed to showing how a major theme in American history has been the struggle for justice so that people and groups can claim their full inheritance in America’s promise of equality, inclusion, and social dignity.”

But once more all that verbiage turns out to be just Sixties-ish lingo for about the same old, same old:

1. Abject cowardice—since if a theme were really religious intolerance, why not portray Mohammed in lieu of Christ, inasmuch as contemporary Islam is far more intolerant of gays and liberated women than the so-called Christian West. Such a video might better exhibit just how “committed” these federal artistic bureaucrats were to “equality, inclusion, and social justice.”
2. Mediocrity—dressing up talentless soft-core pornographic expression with federal catch-phrases and subsidies ensures a venue for junk art that most otherwise would neither pay to see nor ever exhibit.
3. Politics—all this is supposedly sort of revolutionary, full of neat phrases like “committed”, “struggle for justice”, “full inheritance”, “equality”, “inclusion”, and “social dignity”, and all the empty vocabulary that mostly upscale white nerds like a Bill Ayers employ when they want to tweak and embarrass the gullible liberals who support and pay for their nonsense.

EU too

On a more global front, we are seeing the children of the Sixties deal with debt, as in adolescents buying things even when their parents say they cannot afford them. Sometimes we euphemistically call the binge spending “Keynesian”, sometimes “stimulus”, sometimes “borrowing.” Then when we cannot do it anymore, we look for a “bailout.” That means if you are California, a parent like the federal government should print some money; if Greece or Portugal, parents intervene like those automaton Germanic tribes up north who cluelessly love to work rather than enjoy cappuccino from 1-3 each afternoon.

The EU, after all, was a utopian sixties-style project to the core—multicultural (we can by fiat make all cultures equal); nonjudgmental (lifestyles in Greece are just “different” not more laid back, or, I dare say lazier, than in northern Europe); dishonest (why be tied down by “their” archaic notions of percentages of GDP, when creative bookkeeping is a revolutionary tool to help the helpless?)—and thus bound to fail. What kept such an anti-democratic, anti-free market, anti-sovereign ruling elite so powerful for so long?

A number of things: free, US-subsidized defense that gave them 2-3% of GDP for social spending right off the top; German industry and greed that, in a two-decade shell game, kept making the money to export luxury goods and machines tools to those who bought on credit at cheap interest with no ability to pay anyone back; shared cheap anti-American rhetoric that replaced former unifying commonalities like Christendom and Western civilization; the work of prior generations who rebuilt Europe through thrift and sacrifice after the war and passed on a workable economy and new infrastructure.

Parents, please?

Unfortunately, our parents are dead. So who cleans up the messes?

Former Yale Law Dean Harold Koh (author of “Can the President Be Torturer in Chief?”) now works for Obama and is no longer suing to close Guantanamo, but writing briefs to protect ongoing Predator drone attacks, and shaking a finger at Julian Assange to stop it. Hillary Clinton (“suspension of disbelief”) is angry that Bradley Manning leaked information that her subordinates were told to spy on the UN (My God, the UN, no less!).

Oh, and Barack Obama is “not pleased” either.”

The above article was written by Victor Davis Hanson at Pajamas Media.

Hello, Obama….Time to Wake Up…..Time to Hunt Down Julian Assange!

 

“Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his crew have spent the past few months releasing classified material purloined from the American government.  After the latest round of leaks began this weekend, the Obama administration suddenly discovered that there may be laws against that.  The White House has engaged in a media blitz to assure Americans that they are right on top of those alleged crimes”….

Click on to read an article at HotAir by Ed Morrissey about the Obama response to Wikileads invasion of private government business:

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/11/30/suddenly-obama-administration-looking-into-criminal-charges-for-wikileaks/

Obama Partisan, Brent Budowsky, Claims GOP Attacks Obama’s Family, Faith, and Patriotism!

Unable or unwilling to provide proof or examples,  Brent Budowsky of the Hill, gives advice to president Obama and charges the GOP for acting like Democrats who visciously attack Sarah Palin and  family:

Mr. Budowsky begins the article admiring “Papa Grizzly” Harry Reid, “a great legislator”  and man of war, encouragin the president to take great chapters from the Reid book of politics, for running the country and beating Republicans.

“President Obama can rejuvenate his presidency by mobilizing every weapon against the aggressive war being waged against him, while seizing the high ground by offering Republicans a genuine role in a national unity program that the majority of voters want.

The president should issue a patriotic call and bring into his government nationally respected figures such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and former White House counselor David Gergen. The president will make a historic mistake if he believes minor changes will help him govern in 2011 or prevail in 2012.

Politics is war. The GOP and its far right wing are waging a war against the president that employs attacks and innuendo against his family, faith and patriotism, with some extreme opponents even refusing to clearly respect our president’s Americanism and Christianity.

These attempts to demonize an American president and delegitimize his ability to govern are dangerous to the nation, damaging to our security and destructive to what most voters want for America.

Democrats should ignore opining from certain wealthy Democrats such as George Soros, who met the GOP onslaught of 2010 by manning the rowboats and leaving the battle.

David Axelrod is wrong when he says Democrats should support independent committees but refuse money from undisclosed donors.

Politics is war. Memo to Democrats: Welcome to the NFL. Republicans take money from undisclosed sources. Democrats should too. In the NFL both teams get four downs. It is folly to suggest Republicans get four downs and Democrats get three.

Democrats should host a summit of wealthy donors and organize a national roadshow to raise massive monies for 2012. Democrats should “bless” independent groups led by major-league players such as Harold Ickes or James Carville, who can compete with Karl Rove.

Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), a close ally of Reid and rising star among Senate Democratic leaders, shares the same tenacity of a fighter who plays to win and a legislator who gets things done. She was rewarded with reelection.

Reid and Murray won because they knew the war was coming, planned to fight it, organized to win it and campaigned with a ferocious will.

Democrats should tap the power of the Reid model, which treats politics as the art of war and governing as the art of the deal. They are mutually reinforcing in Washington today.

The president should boldly seize the mantle of national unity, bring to his government major figures of national repute and make the Republicans an offer they refuse at their peril.

In the meantime, politics is war. Democrats must play to win, as Harry Reid did in Nevada.”

A Little Mistake Veep Gore Made in 1994 Voting for Ethanol Subsidies

Debra Saunders at the San Francisco Chronicle,  writes about  an Al Gore “typo” about enthanol subsidies Al admits committing in 1994 he had to do for political reasons. 

“In Greece earlier this month, Al Gore made a startling admission: “First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake.” Unfortunately, Americans have Gore to thank for ethanol subsidies. In 1994, then-Vice President Gore ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn’t factor the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed.

Sure, he meant well, but as Reuters reported, Gore also said, “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president.”

In sum, Gore demonstrated that politicians are lousy at figuring out which alternative fuels make the most sense. Now even enviros like Friends of the Earth have come to believe that “large-scale agro-fuels” are “ecologically unsustainable and inefficient.” That’s a polite way of saying that producers need to burn through a boatload of fossil fuels to make ethanol.

Gore also showed that most D.C. politicians can’t be trusted to put America’s interests before those of Iowa farmers. But there is one pursuit in which homo electus excels: spending other people’s money.

Beware politicians when they promise you “the jobs of the future.” Last week, the Washington Post ran a story about a federal grant program in Florida designed to retrain the unemployed for jobs in the growing clean-energy sector. Except clean tech isn’t growing as promised. Officials told the Post that three-quarters of their first 100 graduates haven’t had a single job offer.

In May, President Obama came to a Fremont, Calif., solar plant where he announced, “The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.” This month, Solyndra announced it was canceling its expansion plans. The announcement came after voters rewarded the green lobby by defeating Proposition 23 — which would have postponed California’s landmark greenhouse gas reduction law AB32 — because voters bought the green-jobs promise.

Back to Gore. There is a movement in Washington to end Gore’s mistake. Republican Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina have proposed ending the 45-cent-per-gallon subsidy on corn ethanol, which is set to expire on Dec. 31 unless Congress extends it.

As DeMint explained in an e-mail to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, “Government mandates and tax subsidies for ethanol have led to decreased gas mileage, adversely effected the environment and increased food prices. Washington must stop picking winners and losers in the market, and instead allow Americans to make choices for themselves.”

That’s what free-market types who oppose corporate welfare — like me — have been saying for years.

So the question is: Will this new batch of Republicans have the intestinal fortitude to buck the farm lobby and agribusiness by weaning them from the public teat? Or are they no better than the farm-lobby-pandering Al Gore?”

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Governor Christie, “This Is Who I Am”, Is Becoming a Star Through Youtube!

“……..AND NOBODY IN NEW JERSEY IS GOING TO HAVE TO WONDER WHERE I AM ON AN ISSUE”

The following is another article about the New Jersey Governor, this one by Richard Perez-Pen’a, at the New York Times:

“A little shaky, the camera shows Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey shedding his sport coat at a town-hall-style meeting, as a teacher criticizes what she sees as his attacks on her profession. He begins to respond, the woman tosses her head in frustration, and Mr. Christie goes for the jugular.

I stood here and very respectfully listened to you; if what you want to do is put on a show and giggle every time I talk, well then I have no interest in answering your question,” he says, as the audience erupts in applause. “If you’d like to conduct a respectful conversation, I’m happy to do it. If you don’t, please go and sit down, and I’ll answer the next question.”

(for video, click here     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkuTm-ON904

The testy exchange is vintage Christie — or, at least, vintage Christie on YouTube, where it has drawn more than 766,000 views, a number that dwarfs those of his peers around the country and has fueled the buzz about his being a potential national candidate. Since Mr. Christie took office in January, his staff has spread his message on YouTube, posting sharply edited videos of him talking tough or dressing down hostile questioners, a sharp contrast with the set pieces that make up most other politicians’ offerings online.

The style and sheer size of the oeuvre — 163 videos — has helped make Mr. Christie, a Republican in a blue state, a YouTube sensation, with myriad fans around the country who can describe his goals, dislikes and manner.

“A lot the political stuff online is really dry, but with Christie, there’s an entertainment factor,” said Nicco Mele, who teaches a class on the Internet and politics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “These videos don’t seem professionally produced, even though they are.”

Mr. Mele, who worked on Internet strategy for Howard Dean’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, noted that “until now, the most visible impact YouTube has had on politics is catching gaffes, but that’s changing.” He described Mr. Christie’s approach as “very smart and unusual” and predicted “you’ll see other people adopt it.”

In the last two years, it has become standard for major political figures to have their own YouTube channels, allowing them to present a carefully tailored image directly to the public. But Mr. Christie’s effort, and its response, have been anything but standard.

The number of videos that Mr. Christie has released — an average of nearly four per week since he has been in office — easily eclipses fellow Republicans considered presidential contenders, even though the others have spent many more years in the limelight. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota has 88 videos on his channel, the political action committee of former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts has 55, and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi has 49.

More telling, Mr. Christie’s clips have been viewed two million times — seven times as many as the other three combined. Even Sarah Palin’s channel has drawn less traffic (though other videos posted about her have more views).

The video of Mr. Christie’s exchange with that teacher, in Raritan in September, has been viewed more times than all but a half-dozen of the videos on the White House channel. A Robbinsville town hall meeting where Mr. Christie contends that “the teachers’ union is about the accumulation and exercise of raw power” has drawn more than a quarter-million views, and one where he calls a local school superintendent “the new poster boy for all that’s wrong with a public school system that is being dictated by greed” has drawn more than 61,000.

The 2008 presidential candidates, particularly Barack Obama, pioneered the use of online video, but state and local politicians have deployed the tool in uneven ways. Mr. Christie hired one veteran of presidential campaigns, Patrick Jones, specifically to work with new media like YouTube and Twitter.

YouTube, started in 2005, is seen as crucial to reaching younger people who may not pay attention to talk radio or cable news. And the strategy’s success was evident as the governor stumped for Republicans around the country this fall.

“Christie, of course, is a YouTube sensation, so I’ve seen a lot of him,” Peter Beacom, a 32-year-old software consultant, said at a campaign rally outside Minneapolis just before the election. “I have to admit, I’m fairly ignorant of Barbour and some of the others.”

A Sean Hannity or Don Imus interview has a bigger audience, but experts say the influence of online video may be greater. People learn of the videos from trusted friends or bloggers, they can replay them endlessly, and they often forward the links to others; and they are likely to pay closer attention to something they seek out rather than something that washes over the airwaves.

“Political opinion is formed by people talking to each other — it’s the community that amplifies the content,” said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident, Web sites devoted to the intersection of politics and the Internet. “Campaigns and candidates are realizing they need to be media organizations, they need to aggregate audiences.”

Michael DuHaime, the governor’s chief political strategist, argued, in classic image-maker style, that “the viral nature of his YouTube videos has less to do with the medium than it does the man.” They work, Mr. DuHaime said, because of the governor’s “real accomplishments and his clear, direct way of communicating his vision for the state.”

But experts said Mr. Christie’s effective, animated speaking style was enhanced by the videography style of his aides. Many clips are from one minute to five minutes long, and generally have an impromptu, almost homemade feel, shot with a hand-held camera in school gyms and firehouses, carefully edited to show Mr. Christie at his most earnest and funny, pacing with a microphone and giving detailed answers to constituents’ questions.

There he is at an October town-hall-style meeting in Monmouth Junction, dripping with sarcasm as he characterizes the Legislature as being overly concerned with trivial issues. There he is ridiculing the teachers’ union this fall in Scotch Plains, and back in June in Robbinsville, comparing it to a playground bully.

“I’ve said, ‘You punch them, I punch you,’ ” he said. “The fight is about who is going to run public education in New Jersey — the parents and the people they elect, or the mindless, faceless union leaders who decide that they’re going to be the ones who are going to run it because they have the money and the authority to bully around school boards and local councils.”

People who have worked for Mr. Christie say that he is perfectly capable of modulating his tone and that he can use scolding and ridicule strategically. YouTube viewers, though, hear the governor saying with a shrug that this is just who he is.

“I have an Irish father, and I had — and I had before she passed away six years ago, a Sicilian mother,” he told an audience in May. “For those of you who have been exposed to the combination of Irish and Sicilian, it has made me not unfamiliar with conflict.”

Comment:   I find this governor  classically American…..a problem solver with the ability to take  exact measurements professionally to cut throught the bull no matter how loud the noise.  I call him the AntiObama, for Obama is  the champion of disingenuousness and duplicity.   Consider the following youtube item about Christis clarity:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lzh82kN-_0        

In this following video, Chris Chistie announces his entry into the New Jersey governor’s race in 2009 in which he briefly reviews his background:      

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cX2pR6TRHc 

Or if you’d like to hear an anecdote from the Governor about an apology from some teachers’ union official  who wrote encouraging teachers to be  prayerful  of the governor’s death,  click here:   http://hotair.com/archives/2010/11/20/awesome-chris-christie-tells-of-apology-from-president-of-teachers-union/

Earmarks Ban Loses in Senate, 56-39

J. Taylor Rushing at The Hill reports that the Senate has rejected the ban on earmarks, 56-39.   He writes:

“The Senate on Tuesday morning defeated a proposal from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to ban congressional earmarks.

In a 39-56 vote, members defeated a temporary ban on the appropriations procedure. The moratorium was offered as an amendment to a food-safety bill that is scheduled for a final vote Tuesday morning.

Senate Republicans have already passed a voluntary ban on earmarks in their caucus, but several GOP senators have objected to it. Democrats have so far declined to ban earmarks from their members.

The legislation would have established an earmark moratorium for fiscal years 2012 and 2013, and also would have covered the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1. Congress has yet to pass an appropriations bill for the current fiscal year, and in the lame-duck session lawmakers are likely to approve either an omnibus spending bill or a continuing resolution to keep the government operating.

In speeches on Monday, Coburn said the ban was the only way to rein in out-of-control spending. He did not speak on Tuesday morning, but Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who supports the ban, alluded to the issue in remarks about the current debate over tax cuts.

“Republicans have heard the voters loud and clear,” McConnell said. “They want us to focus on preventing a tax hike on every taxpayer, on reining in Washington spending and on making it easier for employers to start hiring again.”

But Democrats repeated the argument they laid out in floor speeches on Monday, asserting that the earmark process has already been made transparent.

“We have put in place the most dramatic reform of this appropriations process since I’ve served in Congress,” said Majority Whip and Appropriations Committee member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “There is full disclosure in my office of every single request for an appropriation. We then ask those who have made the requests to have a full disclaimer of their involvement in the appropriation, so it’s there for the public record. This kind of transparency is virtually unprecedented.”

Like other Democrats and some Republicans, Durbin said he would not abdicate any earmarking authority.

“I believe I have an important responsibility to the state of Illinois and the people I represent to direct federal dollars into projects critically important for our state and our future,” Durbin said.

Eight GOP senators voted to preserve earmark spending, including Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), James Inhofe (Okla.), Dick Lugar (Ind.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Richard Shelby (Ala.). Retiring Sen. George Voinovich (Ohio) and defeated Sen. Bob Bennett (Utah) also voted against it.

Two Democrats facing potentially tough reelection battles in 2012 also voted for the earmark moratorium: Sens. Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Bill Nelson (Fla.)

Retiring Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and defeated Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) also voted for the earmark ban, as did Colorado Sens. Michael Bennet (D) and Mark Udall (D).

Jordan Fabian contributed. “