THUNDERSTRUCK.

AGAIN.

AT THE ENEMY WITHIN.

It is a difficult task to collect one's thoughts, to try and paint a picture from the trickle of news, and to formulate a response to the freakish nature of the massacre at Fr. Hood. I expect it will come into focus over the next week or so, despite the best of efforts of a perverse media establishment and the President they worshiped into office to spin and wring and mangle the data so as to steer us away from the obvious conclusions.

I have but one thought so early in the story: how delicious it is that a homicidal devotee of the one of the [if not THE] most misogynist cultures in human history was halted in his murderous tracks by a gun-totin', pants-wearin', ass-kickin', baby-makin', soldier-lovin'
W-O-M-A-N.

Meet Sgt. Kimberley Munley.

Hear her roar.

Take your burqa, and shove it, Major Jihad, you tiny little man. She even took a through-and-through bullet of yours, but it didn't stop her from putting a stop to you. May you recover enough from the ass-whoopin' she gave you, just to up and die of shame.


SPEAKING OF TINY LITTLE MEN

...anybody home?



The Procrastinator-in-Chief acquitted himself with his customary 'cool' -- that charming mixture of icewater in the veins and stumble-bum incompetence we have come to expect, as he mounted the podium after the massacre, and addressed the crisis as about (you should pardon the expression) bullet-point 4 in the notecards -- after due deference to our 'first Americans' (a new blended term for the multicultural lexicon) and their convention, and a friendly 'shout-out' to someone he personally had pinned the Presidential Medal of Freedom on only last August -- Dr. Joe Medicine Crow -- except the President called it the Congressional Medal of Honor. Honor, freedom, whatever...

After several minutes of this self-ingratiating b.s., Mr. Obama finally remembered to pull a long face and talk about the "tragedy" at Ft. Hood. Except it wasn't a tragedy -- tragedy would be if 13 people died in an avalanche. It was an act of jihadist slaughter, sir. The murder of our nation's defenders within what should be the safe confines of their own home base, in their own home country. And all you can say, little man, is that we shouldn't "jump to conclusions." Aw, go ahead, Mr. President -- jump.

Jump into that nice dark suit. Put away the nine-iron. Another photo op, comin' your way.



Another baker's dozen of The Best of Us -- requiescant in pace.

CINCINNATUS TELLS US OF THE DEATH OF HIS FRIEND.



One of the best.

I’ve been plotting out this post in my head for a week or so, working on the graphics, and accumulating links. By coincidence, I have found myself galloping to keep up with the realities that have bolstered my own ideas – life imitating art, truth being stranger than fiction, all that kind of stuff. However, I will lay things out in the order as conceived, in hopes to “infotain.”


IMAGE IS EVERYTHING

The first time I ever saw the Che-style Obama face was on the now-famous wall of the Houston Obama campaign headquarters, which lies between my sister's house and the church. There was the tri-colour paint-by-number graphic which has now become the icon of hopey-changitude, supersized on a large mustard wall. At the time I first saw it, Obama was to me an amusing, sophomoric poseur whose jet-puffed platitudes one could hardly imagine fooling anybody. Heh.

As time passed and the unthinkable became the electable, that stretch of matte
mustard wall and its painted poster art just screamed for some kind of comment. It's taken awhile, but this past week some poor sod just couldn't take it anymore and went a little jiggy with a spray can. It was just a matter of time. With that in mind, I've done a little embroidering of my own on the Icon of The One, with appropriate links and meditations.

ITEM: OBAMA JUSTICE DEPARTMENT OVERTURNS ELECTION RESULTS
in smalltown North Carolina --

THE MESSAGE: black citizens of Kinston are too STUPID to vote for candidates instead of parties

Local voters of Kinston, N.C. decided, by a ballot initiative vote of TWO to ONE, that candidates in certain local elections would not be identified by party affiliation. Nobody complained, nobody rallied the "nay" voters to fight the outcome of vote. But the nannying busybodies of the Obama administration "reached out" from inside the Beltway to tell the voters of Kinston, N.C. that they were not capable of making decisions for themselves.

Though black voters outnumber white ones in Kinston by a ratio of two to one, so the measure for non-partisan candidates could not have passed without the black population's approval, Attorney General Holder and Co. have conjured up some bogus "civil rights" complaint as justification for unilaterally overturning the local referendum result.

Obviously, in the opinion of the DOJ operatives, black voters in Kinston MUST necessarily see their interests served ONLY by Democrats, and will be unable to identify which candidate will serve their interests unless he or she is identified during the campaign and on the ballot as a Democrat. Without a party affiliation spelled out in black and white (ahem), black voters will be prevented from exercising their right [their DUTY?]to vote [Democrat].


ITEM: in case you've been living in an abandoned hermitage hut on Skellig Michael and missed it,

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION KEEPS UP ALL-OUT OFFENSIVE AGAINST FOX NEWS,

with the usual asides for Rush Limbaugh and all conservative talk-radio gabbers

Nobody could have missed the story, as recounted here, or here, or here. All during the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama couldn't contain his obsessing about Sean Hannity, and avoided any direct contact with FOX until the nights of the Republican convention, when he sat down with Bill O'Reilly, and got the ONLY hardball-ish questions he has ever endured. Once he was elected, it was presumed that The One would accept his acceptance, and rise above the opposition criticism which is served up to every elected official.

Bu-u-u-u-t no-o-o-o-o-o -- he's still a little, um, jumpy.

So when the few voices of opposition, or mere probitive curiosity, among the media try to do their job and face off with these powerful agents of mass hopey-changitude who have swept into office, suddenly it has become as important to the new administration to target and stifle its opposition as it is to find and carry out solutions to the grave problems confronting us.

What needs to be said is being said, here, there, and everywhere, by Republicans and Democrats alike who see it for the childish sandbox feud that it is. But it is worth pointing out, in the most graphic way, that Mr. Obama is drifting perilously close to his "nattering nabobs of negativism" moment. With his dithering, his puffery, his petulance, and his Janus-faced politicking, Mr. Obama does not need to take on the cartoon persona of Nixon's disgraced (for chump change compared to Charlie Rangel.....) Veep Spiro Agnew.

Mr. Obama, this warning is probably too late, but YOU DO NOT WANT TO GO THERE.


ITEM: LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM

That's the title of a tiresome book by tiresome Resident Senate Comedian Al Franken, he of Minnesota. But Google any variation of the word "LYING" and the word "OBAMA" and you'll get literally millions of choices, and only a few of the top ones are Birthers and other Moonbats. Some are even disillusioned liberals.

The subjects of the lying are almost too numerous to count: --

-- TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT - legislation posted online
-- GITMO, DETENTION, RENDITION POLICIES - change!!!
-- AFGHANISTAN - war of necessity, pursuit of the Taliban, Bin Laden, Al Qaida
-- HEALTH CARE - single-payer, illegals, abortion, rationing, duty to die
-- CAP AND TRADE - tax hikes, soaring electricity cost
-- GAY RIGHTS - marriage, military
-- EMPLOYMENT (and maximum unemployment)
-- STIMULUS SPENDING
-- ACORN
-- HE'S NOT THE [insert name of radical associate] I KNEW

And the beat goes on.

Over the past two years various people have made the observation that at least some portion of support for Obama as both candidate and president comes from people who support him in spite of his attempts to sound centrist, because the unwhispered secret is that they know he's lying -- it's just something he has to do to get elected and appease certain groups. (Even Jeremiah Wright said so.)

Just to refresh the memory, John Hinderaker at Powerline probably said it best.

But if there is one drum that the President has beaten incessantly, starting with Inauguration Day, and at every opportunity at home and abroad ever since, in the most degrading and unseemly fashion, it is the fake and fraudulent oil drum of GEORGE BUSH BASH-AND-TRASH.

Unable to stop playing this tune to excuse his every shortcoming, Obama, and his henchmen, pulled out every stop this past week with the most heinous and flagrant falsehood yet: that over seven years at war, the Bush administration "never asked key questions" about a strategy for Afghanistan. This is a breathtaking and COLOSSAL LIE.

Key questions were asked, and answered, and turned over to BOTH candidates for president in 2008, and then followed up on with the winning team during the transition, at which time the Obama team REQUESTED SILENCE about the findings -- why? so they could claim credit for the strategy, and lie about its source later on? do they plan the lies that far in advance? We'll leave that to speculation.

Weekly Standard Official Hottie Stephen Hayes is too polite when he calls the Obamanoids "ingrates". Suffice it to say that, on the most important issues facing the nation and the world, they are prepared to LIE, for the most self-sodden reasons. Puke-making.

Obama's reflexive Bush-bashing even spilled over to the First Lady (and I use the term loosely), who wasted no time in projecting her own obliviousness to the plight of military families onto former First Lady Laura Bush -- a move that was not only low-class, low-rent, and profoundly unladylike, it was also a COLOSSAL LIE. [thank you, hollering Cassandra]


ITEM: in a similar vein, artery, or what you will,

OBAMA FIDDLES WHILE AFGHANISTAN BURNS

I won't speak to this, because others more qualified should have their say. Over at Blackfive, OEF Afghanistan veteran Deebow writes an OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT. Pithy quote:

Mr. President, deciding to do nothing is still a decision.

I demand, decency demands, Americans who believe in victory demand, and most importantly, the American families with family members in the fight -- who certainly have the most invested and unquestionably the most to lose-- demand that the politics, excuse making and dithering end and that you give the necessary support to the men and women who are bearing the battle and taking the fight to our enemies. I am not asking, I am telling you to listen to those with the knowledge and skills that can turn the tide of this rapidly resurgent enemy we face and to give them the resources they ask for.

ITEM: THE WHOLE LIFE AND ART THING

JULIUS CAESAR

The spousal unit and I took a rare outing to farm country and dropped in at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, as it is once again calling itself, despite the fact that non-'Speare plays in performance still outnumber 'Speareworks considerably. We'd heard good things about this year's Julius Caesar, so that was our play of choice.

[sidebar: Let me take the opportunity say how very much I liked the production, though it was not flawless. I thought Brutus was poorly played, on the whole, though he got better as time passed. As Caesar Geraint Wynn Davies built his character in a particular way, not the only way it could be done, but it worked for me. Cassius, Tom Rooney, looked lean, but not especially hungry, kind of dweeby in fact -- but he was fantastic -- excellent, intelligent reading of the role. Ditto Mark Antony (the "fantastic", not the dweeby), sizzling in the hands of Jonathan Goad -- great stuff.

Costumes and sets were unusual, and have met with negative criticism. I'd have changed a few things, but on the whole I get what the designer was doing and I approve. Amusing sidelight: Caesar's wife, Calphurnia, was played, not memorably, by a lovely black actress, Yanna McIntosh, dressed in mustard yellow and looking for all the world like Michelle Obama. Maybe it meant something -- maybe it was just fun. Couldn't tell ya. But in general, Kudos to everybody.]

I was especially interested in seeing this play because, although JC has never been one of my favourite Shakespeares, I taught it and directed an abridged version with a class of grade 7 & 8 students this past spring, and so went to the theatre with a more developed idea of how I thought it should go than I would otherwise have had.

As I taught the play last spring, quite unintentionally it kept hitting me on the head with various passages about the dangerously growing hubris of the new conqueror, especially as expressed by the "lean and hungry" Cassius. The parallels to both candidate and now President Obama were eerily obvious. Naturally I was prepared to take my place in the audience at Stratford and have these sentences resonate for me, in a way that I expect few in the audience, and NONE on the stage, were likely to share.

Well, I don't know what the director's intentions or politics may be -- I have to doubt that he is as critical of the Annointed One as I am -- but he did seem to be having some fun with the possible modern parallels of the whole mob/cult effect generated by an arrogant, larger-than-life, too-good-to-be-true, amn't-I-almost-godlike victor assuming the throne of empire.

...And this man
Is now become a god, and Cassius is
A wretched creature and must bend his body...
...Ye gods, it doth amaze me
A man of such a feeble temper should
So get the start of the majestic world
And bear the palm alone...
Why, man, he doth bestride the world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
...Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!...
Now is it Rome indeed and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.

Ah, savour it, fellow right-wing crazies! Is't not Obamarama writ large?

Large indeed -- for what did we see when the curtain rose, but a colonnade upstage, with three large banners hung between its sets of columns: red, navy, light blue, and at the bottom in dark blue letters [good Roman capitals, they were] the name emblazoned, "CAESAR". Now what does that remind us of??!! I couldn't believe it. It could NOT have been accidental. As they say on the blogs, "HEH."

Foolishly I left the theatre without making sure that the graphic on the banner was to be found in my programme, and alas the only version I've been able to find is this one, where the colours are not so obvious and the imperious head is hidden behind the (rather too doughy) face of Brutus as played (rather too stiffly) by Ben Carlson. I shall look further afield to see if I can find it unadorned, but you get the idea. Heh, indeed.

That was to be the triumphant coda to today's post -- but lo! What madness through yonder internet porthole lies? Could it be another Obama flunkie, Rocco Landesman, appointed to "remake" the National Endowment for the Humanities, telling us that the President is "the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar"? Is this dude for real? Does he not know what a (a) stupid, (b) uncomfortable, (c) factually incorrect, and (d) did I mention stupid? remark that is? But there it was, on Drudge, for all the world to see.

Naturally it did not take long for persons of actual intelligence to swoop down and humiliate this fellow, with facts, for starters, and better grammar and more logical thought process for the main course. Landesman at least has enough of a grasp of the basic humanities to know that what he said -- "powerful writer" -- is not really what he meant, but rather that Obama is the most powerful man who is also a writer since Julius Caesar, if ya know what I'm sayin', blah, blah..... Forget it, dude. You are just wrong in every conceivable way, and the boys at Powerline and The Corner are more than happy to show you how.

And that needlessly specific claim that Mr. Obama is "the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt"? Pass the salt friend, good chance you are gonna eat this one. Just check it out, or ask Bill Ayers [via Bluegrass Bulletin].

There was a Caesar -- here comes such another?

And for the love of God and the all the gods, this does NOT constitute a death-wish, a threat, an incitement for Harry Reid and Chris Dodd and Barbara Boxer to stab Barack on the floor of the Senate. Or even at the Theatre of Pompey.

NO.

NOT.

NUNH-UH.

IT'S DIABOLICAL, IT'S FRAUDULENT, IT'S OUTRAGEOUS

MOSTLY, IT'S HILARIOUSLY COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE

HACK JOURNO'S CRANK OUT PALIN BIO PARODY

Don't be fooled. When you go to buy Sarah Palin's Going Rogue at your local book emporium, be sure to pick up the one with the cover photo that says "I'm enjoying the crisp Alaskan breezes", not the one that says "I'm in the political spotlight in my cute red suit."

By gum, they're a clever bunch over at O/R books and The Nation, who have collected some of the Left's finest commentators to bury their hatchets in the former Alaska Governor. Essays by a herd of snorting journo's are bound together for the reader's delectation, including such sterling prose stylists as Naomi Klein, Frank Rich, and Eve Ensler (think we'll get her vagina to crank out a monologue?). Can't wait to hear what they have to say? Then pick up the designer knock-off, the $10 Rolex of political biographies -- it's the one on the LEFT:


You'll know it by its paper cover -- the publishing world's equivalent of "direct-to-video". A scam so cheesy, even National Public Radio thinks it might be ethically challenged.

But if you want the real story, by the only Genuine Star of the '08 political constellation, lean to the RIGHT and get the other one, HARDCOVER, hot off the presses in mid-November.

Don't be fooled by these people who are SO much cleverer than YOU!!!

What does the O/R in O/R Books stand for? The brand new publishing partnership of Oakes [John, whose clients have included Abbie Hoffman and John Waters] and Robinson [Colin, who previously published Noam Chomsky and Nobel Prize imposter Rigoberta Menchu]. Talk about pedigree, pal!!!

Phew!! That was a close one. It's almost too much for the cradle-to-grave welfare-dependent mind to process, and we all know that's the book-buying demographic both are aiming for, right?

NFL / MEDIA / POVERTY PIMPS
MESSAGE TO LIMBAUGH
(and all the rest of us in the GLOBAL COMMUNITY):

"NON-MEMBERS OF THE CULT
NEED NOT APPLY"

Talk-radio guru Rush Limbaugh has been dropped (offered the chance to tastefully withdraw, he refused) from the group bid to buy the St. Louis Rams. This went down for one solitary reason: influential people do not like his opinions.


NEWS SHOCKER!!!!

LEFT-WING MEDIA HATE-MONGER OLBERMANN DEFENDS LIMBAUGH'S BID!!!!

Well, let's remember that MSNBC smash-mouth commentator Keith Olbermann was inexplicably promoted from being a full-time sportscaster to some sort of political pundit, so on this subject he's finally found something about which he's in a position to offer analysis. (So happy to give him the opportunity to take a breather from such inspired editorializing as imagining newsblogger Michelle Malkin as a "smashed-up bag of meat with lipstick".)

Olbermann, to his credit [!!!!#$%????], can't understand why anyone would want to prevent Limbaugh from owning a piece of St. Louis's loser football team. Whoa!!!

If even Olbie recognizes the rank idiocy of what has transpired, then it's GOTTA be obvious to one and all.

What is less obvious to many, however, is what this kind of incident signifies about how the United States of America has entered the final, accelerated stages of a hideous transmogrification. Will it escape being a giant rotting cockroach by the end of one term of rule by The Cult? Gallup tells us that membership in The Cult is experiencing creeping shrinkage. That's good. Secretary of State Hillary Broadbottom Clinton is now more popular than The Messiah. I guess (gulp) that's good too. Will civilization survive until 2012?


"POVERTY PIMPS"?

I borrowed that moniker (applied to Race-Shakedown Kingpins Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) from former NFL linebacker and long-time pastor Ken Hutcherson. Vitally important race/color credentials available here.

OVER AT DOC PLUMBO'S, I VENT ABOUT HEALTH CARE

Oh Canada.

Again.

There's a bit of hagiography (holy legend) about the Second Apostle of Rome, St. Philip Neri, which has the ring of historical truth, and the solid gold seal of metaphysical truth.

Here it is, as recounted by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in his journal First Things:

The story is told of St. Philip Neri (1515-1595) that he gave a most unusual penance to a novice who was guilty of spreading malicious gossip.

He told him to take a feather pillow to the top of a church tower on a blustery day and there release all the feathers to the wind. Then he was to come down from the tower, collect all the feathers dispersed over the far countryside, and put them back into the pillow. Of course the poor novice couldn't do it, and that was precisely Philip's point about the great evil of tale bearing.

Slander and calumny have a way of spreading to the four winds and, once released, can never be completely recalled. Even when accusations are firmly nailed as false, the reputations of those falsely accused bear a lingering taint. “Oh yes,” it is vaguely said, “wasn't he once accused of . . . "

The words of the Bard that you learned in grade school are entirely to the point:

Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

A heinous crime against reputation is going on at present in the United States, created by a national media for whom their profession has become an ethics-free zone, with the willing complicity of Democrat politicians and their accomplices in the liberal punditocracy, f'rinstance those public menaces the Race-Shakedown Twins, Sharpton and Jackson.

The crime in question is the slanderous attribution of vicious and repugnant utterances to radio gab-king Rush Limbaugh -- utterances that have been branded "racist" (with good reason), and are being blown around by once-reputable media organs like wildfire through an L.A. county canyon in midsummer, without the merest, slightest, most perfunctory effort to discover whether these things were ever actually said.

Limbaugh categorically denies having said them, and challenges the slanderers to produce a single authentic source for any one of them -- a task that not one slanderer has succeeded in doing, and the furious back-peddling has begun already, though with reservations and without apology or retraction.

Rush Limbaugh is one of the most politically astute voices to command the public ear in America. He is also brash, relentless, occasionally vulgar and sexist, culturally under-educated, and genuinely EDGY (where most on the contemporary arts or discourse scene who claim to be so don't even come close to it). Limbaugh is proof that genuine, Swiftian satire is not yet dead -- though his most vicious and/or hypersensitive critics prove equally that it (satire) may be on its last legs.

One of the areas where Limbaugh can be the most edgy is in matters of race, or more specifically, racial politics. One might sometimes be able to characterize his mode of delivering uncomfortable truths as "offensive" or perhaps, more accurately, "abrasive" -- but I challenge anyone to reveal a single abrasive utterance for which an intelligent person, in the cool light of reasoned debate, could not make some coherent and persuasive arguments. Others might disagree, but even Limbaugh's most outrageous claims ARE basically arguable.

Anyone who claims otherwise, and who attributes to him the kind of mindless bigotry embodied in the controversial "quotes" now scurrying around on the public winds.... well, you could say a lot of things about such a person, but one thing is for certain: he or she has NEVER been a listener to the Rush Limbaugh program. IMPOSSIBLE. In fact, Limbaugh's harshest critics, on any subject, prove again and again that they could not possibly have listened to his show for more than a sound bite. (Or, I will allow, it's possible that they did listen longer than a bite, but they have demonstrated themselves too blind and stupid to grasp what they heard.)

There are any number of legitimate criticisms one could make about Limbaugh's program and his manner in delivering it -- I've made a few above, and there are more. I'm always surprised at how his most vitriolic critics seem to miss everything that they might genuinely criticize, and then spew with abandon criticisms that are patently false, even as they themselves engage in all the crass, hateful, superficial, often cruel ad hominem attacks and dishonesty of which they accuse their target. It's a strange thing -- one which, I'm thinkin', betrays nothing so much as FEAR.

Now, I can picture some sort of academically-inclined leftist phiilosopher/ideologue -- of an intensely serious and humorless and apocalyptically tragic mentality -- cultivating the kind of visceral hatred for Rush Limbaugh which has clearly gripped his opponents in media and politics. But I cannot picture this serious partisan lowering himself to engage in the mindless schoolyard savaging, the casually bald-faced lying, the hysterical bogey-manning that issues from Limbaugh's media enemies day in and day out, to their everlasting humiliation; the non-stop indulgence in the very sins for which they would burn Limbaugh at the stake (or some other form of execution, as cheerily recommended by Chris Matthews and others).

What's going on here is just wrong. And the purpose of it is not simply to discredit Limbaugh's opinions, but to destroy his reputation in order to prevent him, as a private citizen, from pursuing a private business transaction to become part-owner of a sports franchise.

Limbaugh has become very rich doing what he does, and that's probably his biggest sin -- he has enough ready cash to fulfill the ultimate sports fantasy, especially for the fan who was never talented or fit enough to play himself. How much, one wonders, does rank jealousy of both his money and his sports-dream lie behind this all-out effort to sabotage Limbaugh's bid for the St. Louis Rams?

On such things apparently the world turns, and, like Hitler at the English Channel, this advance must be halted in its tracks. A proud moment for the fifth estate.

St. Philip Neri, Holy Fool, pray for us.

Now, remind me, I live in a big, cold urban wasteland.......why?

Off the ol' front porch:


Toward Placentia Bay:


Old lighthouse, Dodding Head, Great Burin Island



Pickin' partridgeberries:


Home again tomorrow. Yeech.

REAL LIFE ~ THE ONION:
A SEAMLESS GARMENT

PRESIDENT-OF-THE-WORLD OBAMA
WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Mere days ago the kings of the satirical world over at The Onion [read regularly -- die laughing] gave us a short list of the highlights of Barry Obambi's address to the United Nations, among them:

-- Now is a time when we must do something about some problem, perhaps by working with others.

-- If Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons, then it will have to face blank and blank. Oh shoot, I forgot to fill those in.

Little did they know that, based on these very concepts, that very president would shortly be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Or is that Piss Prize?, awarded, as it has been so often in recent years, for little more than consistently pissing on the United States whenever a microphone presents itself -- see: Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat....

Little did we know that the criteria for Nobel status would evolve into something resembling a grading category on a kindergarten report card ["does not run with scissors" or, dare I say it, "promises hope and change"] -- marked on a Dewey-esque sliding scale of "pass/fail" or "satisfactory/unsatisfactory", of course.

On a more serious note, the folks at PowerLine have put together a nice summary of the history of Nobel Prizes, ancient and modern, which explains how these absurdities just keep happening, and how, in fact, the once-prestigious award has a very long record of being fairly ridiculous. Read and learn.

Instapundit has an excellent round-up of responses, including a devastating poignard from Richard Cohen at the WaPo (who will temporarily be forgiven for making effective use of a slur on Sarah Palin), and some wise words from my friend David Warren (via RealClearPolitics). Even the Huffington Post is rattled by the ridiculousness of it. [No link -- life is too short....] Gateway Pundit offers up that it was Nobel for "the gift of gab" -- fair enough.

Is this just another case of "Trophy Kid" Syndrome? The unfortunately-named Starshine Roshell seems to have more sense than her parents [cripes, boomers, the things you did to your kids -- Starshine???], and wrote a needed complaint about what it means when you give a trophy to just anybody, merely for showing up. Little did she know that six months later.....

IRONY ALERT: Oh, those cut-ups at Saturday Night Live! Little did they know that the Big Prize would soon be awarded to the President they had slam-bammed the week before for having been in office nine months and achieved absolootly nuttin' -- nada -- not so much.


POST RACIAL AMERICA

Remember that campaign promise? Well, I'm betting it will come true -- later rather than sooner, and in a backwards fashion. I'm betting that ordinary pale Americans ["white" is ridiculous, and "Caucasian" is exclusionary and inaccurate] are going to get so fed up at being called racists for voicing opinions and ideas that have nothing whatever to do with racial considerations, they are going to start barking back or just ignoring the Amen-corners of the Racial Grievance Industry, and eventually silence them all by diminution and irrelevance. It has begun already.

What's terribly sad, though, is that the road to racial harmony has been carpet-bombed in the few months since the ascendacy of The First Black President and Harbinger of Racial Harmony, due entirely to the redoubled efforts of the racial grievance industry, who can think of no other defense of their stumbling standard-bearer as he fraks up his foray into global politics. Check out this sad survey on the question of whether America is or isn't a basically fair and decent society. That opinion among the country's major minority group has turned on a dime [perhaps one of the few remaining in the national purse, Mr. Geithner?] is itself utterly indecent.


SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

That snippet of Biblical text is often misinterpreted by those who were deprived of learning their King James English: "Suffer the little children come unto to me" means, in today's lingo, "Let the children approach me." The words carry no meaning related to the endurance of physical pain.

Sadly, the two interpretations (correct and not) are increasingly, perversely, fused as we observe in the culture the acclerating normalization of "intergenerational sex". The most recent, most heinous development is the downright weirdsmobile support for convicted child-rapist Roman Polanski, found overwhelmingly among the European (largely the Fwench) "arts community", but leaking frighteningly over into the upper echelons of Hollyweird.

The Polanski affair, however, remains at the fringes of society by virtue (ahem) of having sprouted from the weedy world of entertainment, where no one expects to find normality, whether it is in matters of serial marriage, drug habits, or obscene amounts of money being invested in really really bad taste, from horrible fashions to obese mansions full of kitsch furnishings.

Far more disturbing is the introduction of skewed morality into the politics and education that are supposed to serve the rest of us -- the normal people in nice little homes in ordinary neighbourhoods around the corner from the barber shop. In the United States this skewed crew has come to rest in the nest of Czars -- Presidential appointments to positions of advisory authority and policy influence, appointments requiring no public vetting or representative approval process.

Various czars have been outed as having troublesome records, the most extreme of examples of which have recently crashed -- Van Jones, "Green Jobs Czar", was revealed to be a self-described Communist (bad) and, by any definition, an anti-white racist (way badder). But a President, who is proving himself to be as GREEN as a man can be at his own new JOB, was a long-time admirer and couldn't wait to get Jones on his team.

More disturbing is the presence of Kevin Jennings in a Czar-ship where his capacity to do horrific damage is far greater than Jones's boondoggle. Jennings, by some bizzarro twist of circumstances, ended up being "Safe Schools Czar" -- this despite his being a gay activist whose work and publications all revolve around one aspect or another of being gay in school.

The crowning finial seems to be his intro blurb for a book called Queering Elementary Education [no, I'm not making that up]. Apparently in that Foreword, Jennings totally (and revealingly) steps in it, by expressing some brand of endorsement for a certain Harry Hay, who has an unsavoury connection with the notorious NAMBLA -- the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Learn all you need (and perhaps more than you care) to know about that group from a new book, The Last Undercover [profiled here at Big Hollywood], about the FBI's exposure of its repugnant operations, by intrepid agent Bob Hamer. It's one thing to sacrifice your life for your country -- another to sacrifice the inner sanctity of your own mind, which this poor man probably had to do in order to achieve his aims.

Big Hollywood, obviously a significant source of reflection on the Polanski affair, and thus on larger issues regarding mainstreaming of pedophilia, also offers an interesting piece by a gay conservative who was himself a "Lolito", as he calls it. It won't be agreeable to every reader, but is also food for thought, especially about what happens to the Tolerance Police when fascism becomes fashionable.

John Nolte at Big Hollywood weighs in with a rather chilling piece on Hollywood's pedophilia-mainstreaming agenda. I weigh in on page 4 of his comments, citing a terrific 1997 article by Norman Podhoretz -- Lolita, My Mother-in-Law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flynt -- about how Nabokov's Lolita made pedophilia "thinkable", for which reason Podhoretz, who once made a career of debating against censorship of any kind, came to the reluctant conclusion that Lolita should never be read, and never even have been written. Food for thought, from Commentary -- for purchase, but worth it.

October 9 -- 69th would-be birthday of the composer of Imagine. Imagine all the people living for today. How perfect. How ee-e-e-e-e-w-w-w.

Imagine the vast expensive estate in the British countryside. Imagine the custom-made white grand piano in the gigantic mansion sitting-room with the garden view. "Imagine all the people sharing all the world" (except maybe that giant estate and its sitting room: "Zer vuss rhoom for seven families in ziss house..." -- Dr. Zhivago)

"Imagine no possessions," like the custom-painted Rolls Royce.

Imagine -- the speedo version, but you get the gist...

TERRA NOVA BLOGGING

It's always nice to have an excuse for neglecting the blog, the present one being that I had an urgent mission in Newfoundland: to sleep until whenever, rising only to soak in Dead Sea salts in my old footed tub, then maybe take a drive to Walmart, more to take in the scenery than to buy anything, closing the day with an arduous trip through an episode of Battlestar Gallactica...

Fog has its uses.

Is it any wonder I can't make myself sit down and digest the implications of the Afghano-Obama-ditherama? I read, I listen, I shudder, I look out the window and think better thoughts.

LEARN SOMETHIN' NEW EVERY DAY

Newfoundland experienced a "Wreckhouse wind." I looked this up. Wreckhouse is an area in the southwest of the island, that gets wind blasting off the ocean, funneled down a series of narrow valleys only to burst out onto the plain simultaneously, creating a massive pressure change and some sort of effect that can cross the whole province. You figure it out -- it's all right here. Enjoy the part about it blowing the narrow-gauge railway trains off the track -- Newfoundland central planning strikes again. All resemblances to Canadian Human Rights Commissions or American congress in session is strictly coincidental.

Gateway Pundit gives it short and quick:

EPIC FAIL



Drudge was less kind:

THE EGO HAS LANDED


Chi-town OUT in Round One for the 2016 Olympics, notwithstanding the epic "sacrifices" of Michelle, Barry, and the Really Big "O" [Oprah].




There are lots of reasons to be against a Chicago Olympics.
--Time to give them to some region that has never hosted (Rio)
--Best to let Tokyo have them before their population is too old to field a single team
--Chicago is beset by so many versions of urban nightmare that no Olympics bid could avoid screwing the poor, enriching the Machine, and endangering the visitors

Sticking it to a breathtakingly narcissistic career-Chicagoan now occupying the White House and screwing the poor, the middle class, and the wealthy of America is way down the list of reasons.

Is this a schadenfreude-free zone? Mmmm, it is hard to resist just a tiny little BWA-HA-HA-HA.

Me? I'm pulling for Madrid.

UPDATE: RIO WINS IT

Footnote [and, pathetically, that's all it is]: Apparently the President did take time out from his Shilling-for-Daley-ville tour to spend 25 minutes with General McChrystal while Air Force One was warming up -- their second conversation since the General was appointed more than two months ago. Afghani-where? Oh, you mean that place where we keep encountering "man-made disasters" from the TAH-LEE-BAHN?....

How's that Hope'n'Change working out for ya? for all of us?

POP CULTURE QUERY:

I've never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie --
is INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS worth a look?

Frederic Raphael at Commentary has a review. I read the first couple of paragraphs and was unsure where he was going with it -- there were indications that he has seen Taratino's other films, as well as various compliments to the artistry. Then, fearing that there might be spoilers in the review, I scrolled to the bottom line to see if he recommended it:

As Harvey Weinstein would surely say, when a job is also a hit, what can possibly be wrong with it, unless you’re some kind of a pussyfooting elitist loser? Inglourious Basterds has to be great because, if the boffo box-office figures are true, people love it. It’s therefore undemocratic to go calling it the antihuman dirty dream of a pretentious, vacuous clown primed with Hollywood gelt to do the Jews a favor by showing that they too, given the chance, coulda/woulda behaved like mindless monsters. What does it matter, after all this time, if the world gets sold the idea that what Shoshanna and the Basterds did to the Nazis was exactly what the Jews would have done to the Germans if Harvey had been around to greenlight the project?

Going to Inglourious Basterds reminded me of Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties, in which a concentration-camp inmate commits liberating suicide by leaping into a lake of sewage. Tarantino makes an even bigger splash by getting us all to pay to jump into an ocean of his own effluent from which he and Harv alone emerge, with $$ carved in their foreheads.

I'm guessing.....not?

Why am I not surprised? I've always had this sense that Tarantino, kind of like Cronenberg, is a man with many innate talents who has volunteered them to be enslaved to a set of truly base appetites. Won't be rushing out to Blockbuster for his oeuvre any time soon.

THE WIDER WORLD

I've been ducking any survey of the News o' the World in recent days, since it's all so very chilling, and the Reader of the Free World so increasingly, ludicrously incompetent at coping with it.

For a dose of major league reality, Michael Yon contributes to the Washington Times this morning. Return in kind by contributing to him, and he'll keep on delivering the straight story, from deep within the belly of the major beasts.

And then there's the hub of representative democracy, where the Democrat[ic?] Party is fixing to use legislative sleight-of-hand to ram through a massive health care bill as an amendment to an unrelated codicil to their earlier economic disastrathon. It's not that difficult to understand, but the Heritage Foundation does a good job of breaking it down. America, get ready to kiss your ass [your liberty, your economic security, your children's future] G'BYE!

UNITED NATIONS FOLLIES:

Gale alert: OBAMA WAGS HIS FINGER AND SAYS "THE MURDER OF INNOCENTS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED"

Is that a fact?

Apparently some innocents are more equal than others.


Meanwhile back at Turtle Bay ["Filmore East", says Dennis Miller]:

CANADA GROWS A PAIR AND VOWS TO WALK OUT ON HOLOCAUST-DENYING MADMOOD AHMADINNERJACKET

Do not mess with these people.


Over at Jewish World Review,

GEORGE WILL SOUNDS OFF ON THE "invertebrate" TELEPROMPTER KING

Bile alert: wear you Mackintosh and wellies, and bring your brolley. Will has clearly run out of patience with The One and the bulk-head of his bile boiler has burst its rivets --tsunami!!!



NOW THAT IRAN IS NEARLY NUCLEAR:

Surprise necessities for survival. Number 1 is, like, so-o-o obvious. [From Popular Mechanics, the magazine for essential debunking in a bunk-filled world -- Katrina, 9/11 "Truthers", etc.] Hat-tip/Instapundit.

WHAT I FOUND WHEN GOOGLED
"OBAMA+U.S.+REPUTATION"


You're gonna love this:

I Googled and got an Inauguration Day post that recounts a December 2008 interview with Worst President Ever Jimmy Carter. Money quote:

...not too long ago somebody asked me if the new President could change the reputation of our country in the first hundred days he was in the office and I said he could change the reputation of our country in the first ten minutes...

How's that reputation enhancement working out for you so far, America?

Well, according to our former friends and allies, the citizens of Poland, it's working out like this:







Translated in English, that would be:


TREASON!









[from their website.:]





















[hat-tip: the increasingly essential, Acorn-busting Gateway Pundit]

Hugh Hewitt makes a neat point:

"The kid's not ready." That's what a friend's father has been saying about Obama since the day he was elected. If Matt Latimer's tacky-by-definition tell-all book is to be believed, it's something Bush said as well. "Not Ready To Lead" is sounding more true all the time ("Always Ready To Campaign" could work nicely, though). As so often with President Obama, we are left to believe that he is either 1) haplessly naive, 2) brilliant beyond measure and playing a game of long ball none of us can comprehend, or 3) not interested in what have traditionally been American interests.

Or he's a triple-threat player.

Hewitt links to this gem at the Corner:

Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, ACORN's gotta engage in fraud, and Obama's gotta talk. It's really that simple; and it is amazing, given how little this guy actually knows about economics, about foreign affairs, about, well, just about anything...

Obama was reported, after the speech [at the 2004 Democratic Convention] and the thunderous reception that it received, to have said to someone, "You know, I can play in this league."

And so there we have it: Obama really believes at his core that empty rhetoric is the same as substance and judgement.

Read it all.

That curious quotation -- "I can play in this league" -- conjures up a later, similar little squeak of hubris, uttered to Harry Reid: "I have a gift" -- reflected on by Daniel Henninger, with considerable prescience, last April. By September, the increasing consensus is that "the gift has stopped giving, because people have started listening."

And just in case anyone wanted to know precisely when it all started to go horribly, horribly wrong for Mr. Obama, that December interview might provide a clue:

Kira: With the new president elect Barack Obama, what do you think about him being the new president elect and do you have any advice for him?

Jimmy Carter: Well, I have already talked to his major appointments - I have talked to the next Secretary of State and the next Security Advisor who will be in the White House with him and I have also yesterday talked with the person who is going to represent him and United States at the United Nations. So, I have already prepared him for some of the things that the Carter Center is doing that he might find helpful.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.


On a final note, during a conversation with popculture rabbi, Michael Medved, something happened to insure that "John McCain's approval rating among conservatives just skyrocketed." [hat-tip/ Gateway Pundit]

McCain broke down and admitted that "President Carter has earned his place as, if not the worst president in history, then certainly the worst in the 20th century."

SAY WHAT?

WHERE WAS THIS STRAIGHT-TALKIN' SENATOR MCCAIN IN 2008?

DOOBIES FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE

Formerly sane pioneer blogger Andrew Sullivan came to the U.S. from Britain but shows that he doesn't really get why we are no longer a colony. Ya, see, Sully, it was all about dissolving the cast-iron divisions between classes, or perhaps going back to medieval times, between the "Estates". Sully has no use for the First Estate, the governing element of The Church. But apparently he is all in favour of retaining the barrier between the Second and Third Estates: The Nobility and The Peasants.

It all unfolded when Sully got caught sucking on his weed-stash by some of the local constabulary, while at Cape Cod National Seashore, a Massachusetts park.


Now, the good folks of the bean-state have reduced penalties for possession to the misdemeanor category, for which reason they are less hesitant to prosecute than if it were a more serious crime. Most ordinary people caught in Sully's circumstances could expect to get convicted and punished, but the U.S. Attorney in question politely declined to prosecute because a criminal conviction might prove an obstacle to poor old Andrew in his quest for "a certain immigration status" (?) in the United States.

Beg pardon? Well, I await correction, but I'm guessin' that this "certain status" is "spousal", applying to Andrew Sullivan because he married his male partner when Massachusetts legalized such arrangements. If that's the case, I can't imagine why it has to be cloaked in mystery. There's no mystery about Andrew. Maybe the "certain status" has nothing to do with his "marriage" -- in which case it's even more puzzling that the relevant documents hesitate to give this immigration status a name.

Whatever kind of status it may be, the more important thing is that the U.S. Attorney showed blatant favouritism in his treatment of the Sullivan case, and Judge Robert Collings, who heard it, while finding it outside his role to demand otherwise, made a clear finding that Sullivan asked for, and was granted, unequal treatment before the law.

Powerline lays out the case. [hat-tip: Hugh Hewitt]

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 + 8


Once again Project 2996 honors the victims of the September 11 terrorist attack on America.

Project 2996 was conceived by Dale Challener Roe, who has tried to repeat the tribute annually over the years. I haven't been part of it since 2006, but I decided to play my part again this year, by repeating my tribute to Jack Aron, and taking on couple of others. The Project assigned me another WTC victim, John Thomas McErlean, and I requested the opportunity to pay tribute to Rick Rescorla.


In 2006 I volunteered to write a tribute to one victim, and was privileged to be introduced to Jack Charles Aron, who died in the offices of Marsh & McLennan in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center. A man I had never met or even heard of before was brought to fleeting life again through the words of his friends, colleagues, and family -- my contribution was to collect and sift through them to bring his portrait into focus. He left behind him a wife, Evelyn, a son Timmy, who is now a young man of 19, and a host of heartbroken friends and relatives. He was one of 295 employees of Marsh & McLennan whose lives were taken that day.


Beth McErlean was looking forward to celebrating her 14th anniversary on September 12th. In 1987 she had married John Thomas McErlean, a high-school sweetheart, now father of her four children and a vice-president and partner at the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald. But when her anniversary day dawned, her husband was missing and presumed dead, his office having fallen from its lofty perch on the top floors of World Trade Center 1 into a disintegrated chaos of twisted metal, ash, and fire.

John McErlean had survived the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. On that day he had carried a woman down 80 flights of stairs. No one knows what he was doing when he met his end in 2001, but his brother Tom figures he was probably engaged in the same sort of service to others.

John Thomas McErlean Jr., a handsome, dark-haired and square-jawed Irishman, grew up in Larchmount, New York. He formed an attachment to that community which drew him there to bring up his own family. He attended Iona, the Catholic boys prep school run by the Irish Christian Brothers in New Rochelle, and then St. Michael's College in Vermont, where he earned his business degree.

In the turbulent years since 9-11, the public has been forced to endure the foul spewings of wretches who need not be named, to the effect that those who died in the towers were symbols rather than human beings, that they represented all the grotesquerie and rapaciousness of American society, even to the extent that they were "little Eichmanns".

Imagine how such a slander would sit upon the relatives of a John McErlean, whose life outside of Manhattan's financial centre made room for being an athlete, a sailor, a coach of children's sports teams, and active member of St. Augustine's Parish. He spent his last summer vacation on Nantucket, flying kites, riding bikes, and building beachside bonfires. John bought a t-shirt that was corny, but whose motto spoke what was for him a profound truth: "Life is Good". "It seems so simple," he said, "but it's true. I've been blessed with a wonderful family and everything I wanted from life." He was 39 years old.

John's son Ryan is now 19, son Timothy 17, daughters Mary and Allie 16 and 12. In their sorrow they have known the generosity of the Larchmont/Mamaroneck Friends in Need organization, which has supported them and, in their mother's words, helped to "remind us all that there is much more good in our world than evil."

Of the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered on September 11 in all three locations, 658 of them were employees of Cantor Fitzgerald -- every single employee who happened to be at his or her desk that morning; the handful who were late, or on vacation, or going about their business out of the office that morning were the only ones left from the entire New York head office. It has been a long road back.


Nearly 3,000 people died on September 11. If not for the heroism of one man, that figure might well have been DOUBLED.

I refer, of course, to the indispensable Rick Rescorla, British/American soldier, hero of Ia Drang at Landing Zone X-Ray in Vietnam, and roly-poly oracle managing security for Dean Witter/Morgan Stanley, who had predicted BOTH World Trade Center bombings (predictions to the Port Authority obviously falling on deaf ears).

You've seen his picture --the iconic pose [taken by the once-reputable and Pulitzered CNN veteran Peter Arnett] on the cover of the best-selling military history, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, by General Hal Moore, (made into a thrilling film starring Mel Gibson as Moore -- Rescorla is not mentioned in the film despite his key role in the book -- not quite enough room for two heroes!) The book gives an account of a pivotal battle in 1965, which marked the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to real all-out war.

It is almost pointless to try and memorialize Rick Rescorla, to pile word upon word after all the words which have been written, by people far closer to Rescorla's reality than myself. I've learned most of what I know about him from military blogs like Mudville Gazette [excellent video there] and Blackfive. There are numerous websites devoted to him and his story -- his many stories, since the several phases of his career are each worth their own book. The skeleton of the history goes thus:

Born: 1939 Hayle, Cornwall, the old Celtic kingdom at the far southwest reach of England.

British Service: 1956-1963 Paratrooper, Cyprus and Northern Rhodesia

American Service: 1963-1990 Colonel, U.S. Army, 1st Cavalry Division

I saw Rick Rescorla come swaggering into our lines with a smile on his face . . . saying, ‘Good, good, good. I hope they hit us with everything they’ve got tonight. We’ll wipe them up,’ " recalled Lt. Larry Gwinn in the 1993 book, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young. Rick took a bullet in the arm and fought for six hours before the battle he called "a long, bloody traffic accident in the jungle" ended.

More than 300 men died at Ia Drang. Rick earned a Silver Star, a Purple Heart and Bronze Stars for Valor and Meritorious Service..."We were flown away," Rick said to the authors [of We Were Soldiers] "but the stench of the dead would stay with me for years after the battle." [more here]

Security work:
1985 -- joined Morgan Stanley to manage and advise on corporate security

1990 -- concluded from a security review of the WTC that it was vulnerable to terrorist attack, most likely a truck bomb in its underground parking garage

1993 --predictions fulfilled -- Rescorla "jumped on a desk in the middle of the firm and threatened to drop his pants if his people didn't chill out and listen. In the stunned silence that followed, he launched an orderly evacuation, refusing to leave until the entire tower was empty." Following this attack he became convinced that there would be another, more deadly, probably involving airplanes. He advised his employers to move their offices to New Jersey, but they were not persuaded.

September 11, 2001 -- After the north WTC tower was hit by an airplane, Rick Rescorla initiated a timely evacuation (punctuated by his bouts of folksongs and patriotic anthems through a bullhorn) of thousands of Morgan Stanley employees from the south WTC tower, ignoring assurances from the Port Authority that his people were safe and need not move. He went back and back again, to clear as much of the building as he could, for long enough that there are at least a dozen stories of "sightings" and phone calls made while he did his duty protecting his charges. In the end he went in for a last round-up, and was not seen again.

Rick Rescorla was one of only SIX Morgan Stanley employees who did not survive on 9/11. He saved the lives of nearly 2,700 people in the south tower. [Another 1,000 from Building 5 also evacuated safely at his order.]

Rick Rescorla gave his life doing what he had always done, with the dedication and skill he had acquired during his military career. Many of his fellow soldiers have signed on to the effort to award him the Congressional Medal of Honor, for which he is technically ineligible because he had retired from the reserves and did not die in military service.

Surely he is a proper candidate for America's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In any case, the living recipients of the Congressional Medal awarded him their own honor, the Above And Beyond Citizen's Medal, in March of 2009.


Other military personnel have honoured Rescorla in their own way. FOB Rescorla (forward operating base) was established near Farah, Afghanistan. Blending the sublime and the ridiculous, in a way that the honoree would no doubt appreciate, a fitting mural decorates one of the FOB latrines.

Likewise, a beautiful bronze statue, based on Arnett's photograph, has been unveiled at the National Infantry Museum at Ft. Benning Georgia.


Heroes come in all shapes and sizes and vocations. The heroism of a man like Rick Rescorla deserves monuments and wide public recognition. But every good father is a hero to his children, and does heroic service to society by being just that. We throw that word "hero" around a little promiscuously, even as applied to the victims of 9/11. I count myself lucky to be given the opportunity to salute and remember on this day three men who seem to me to deserve that title, for services large and small.

Jack, John, Rick -- in your name, and for all the others

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
We will remember them.

[For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon, September 1914]

SCOLD-IN-CHIEF GRABS THE AIRWAYS
FOR SPEECH # 18,642
ABOUT HEALTH-CARE-INSURANCE-REFORM-
EVERYBODY'S-A-LIAR-BUT-ME

Gateway Pundit covers the "liar" charge aimed directly (minus only her name) at Sarah Palin.

Never mind that the speech itself piled falsehood upon falsehood, contradicting not only what common sense tells us about the legislation on the table, but also what candidate, and then President, Obama has said in one speech or interview after another.

And someone yelled, "You lie!"

Imagine.

Joe Wilson -- no, not that Joe Wilson, but a Republican Congressman from South Carolina -- exploded at just one in a series of mendacities flowing from the slick lips of El Bambo. He did use the word "lie", which would have gotten him banished from the British Parliament -- but then again, if the American congress allowed for any of the free-wheeling back-and-forth, not to mention the chief executive facing the assembly during a Question Period, maybe the poor congressman wouldn't have lost control of his tongue -- a simple "shame, shame" or "balderdash" would have sufficed.

Instapundit covers the whole question from a variety of sources, including reader James Somers, who opined that:

...it might also be noted that a lot of Democrats and MSM journalists (same thing, I know) who suddenly have the vapors over Joe Wilson’s breach of decorum thought it was just dandy when an Iraqi journalist threw shoes at President Bush...The point is that lefties loved Sticking It To The Man when Chimpy McHitler was president, but now they’re prissily toting around copies of Robert’s Rules of Order.

Velvet-tongued Veep Joe Biden deplored this outburst, as did asp-tongued California flake, Rep. Maxine Waters. And then, of course, the ever-accomodating Senator John McCain urged an immediate apology from Wilson (which did occur) -- forcing us to wonder whether he ever did the same when President Bush was hooted and booed at during an address in the same august assembly.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine [hat-tip: Instapundit] does a thorough analysis of the speech, which he read rather than watched. He guesses that the delivery was Obama standard: "smooth, generally flat, occasionally a bit whiny." Having watched only a few excerpts during the Fox de-briefing, I would say that Hinderaker missed those other qualities that often creep into the Obama delivery, that is, the snippy, scolding sense of irritation that his critics won't roll over and button up in the face of his fundamental superiority. Still, Hinderaker catches that element in the tone of the words, and nails this phenomenon straight-on:

I'm not sure whether Obama and his handlers understand how this sort of talk grates on those of us who are not liberal Democrats (a large majority of the country). Debating public policy issues is not "bickering." Disagreeing with a proposal to radically change one of the largest sectors of our economy is not a "game." This kind of gratuitous insult--something we never heard from President Bush, for example--is one of the reasons why many consider Obama to be mean-spirited.

Hinderaker closes his piece with the ultimate "bottom line":

This was not, to put it kindly, a speech that was directed at thinking people.

Nor, as the writer points out, did it seem to be directed at a people who have ever heard of YouTube, where there is evidence aplenty that Mr. Obama will take any position, at any given moment, if it suits that moment, regardless of how diametrically opposed it is to the position he took the moment before.

Over at American Thinker, Geoffrey Hunt predicts for Obama a "spectacularly failed presidency." A whole bunch of things are going wrong, but Hunt hits on the one that is becoming increasingly obvious:

Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us...

It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task-- all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience...

In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, P.J. O'Rourke was talking "failed presidency" last November.


Today's comic relief:

The president is the descendant of slave-owners. [It must be true -- I read it in the New York Times.] Can we expect him to fork over some reparation bucks any time soon? Boy, it makes me glad my ancestors came over in steerage from Ireland in the 1840's, Germany in the 1880's, and Greece in 1905 -- it means I never benefited from slavery no-now, and don't owe nobody nuttin'.

Apparently Obama's also related to Confederate President Jefferson Davis -- Adams, Harrison, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Gore, Bush, Dodd, Chafee....dynasties anyone?

Comic relief, part deux:

Buffalo's WBEN local talk guy, Sandy Beach, just opened his show with the suggestion that the next time President O'Whopper gives a speech, he should just arrange to have it in a church so the kneelers will be in place.

Heh.

WE PRAY TO THE LORD...

PLEASE HELP ME KEEP DOWN MY LUNCH



[tip of the hat to JammieWearingFool and Gateway Pundit]

Newsflash!

THOUSANDS MOURN FALLEN HERO
AT FUNERAL MASS

...times two...

...in BUFFALO

TWO FIREFIGHTERS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES
LAID TO REST
Requiescant in pace.



[uh, ...newsflash, take 2: ...and... roll it!]

A KENNEDY PASSES

HEROIC FIGHTER FOR THOSE MARGINALIZED
BY DISABILITIES

DEDICATED TO FAITH & FAMILY

LIFELONG PUBLIC SERVANT

... uh, that would be....

EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER, 1921-2009

Requiescat in Pace




[damn! I'll get it this time....
Here we go: Newsflash!...]

ADDENDUM: ANOTHER KENNEDY PASSES

AT LAST

Edward M. Kennedy, the senior senator from Massachusetts, can stop swimming now -- stop treading water and paddling furiously to escape that riptide moment which consummated a lifetime pattern of trampling over rules, feelings, persons, and boundaries of decency to preserve and prosper himself: from cheating on exams, to cheating on his wife, to trying to cheat the American system by getting the State of Massachusetts to do a legal flip-flop [or insert a Joe-Kennedy-hand-pick] every time he wanted keep up the Democrat vote-count in the Senate when a vacancy occurred.

Actually it's not accurate to refer to a "riptide moment", because the Chappaquiddick incident [good analysis here] unrolled with chilling calculation over a period of hours; and while he may have been swept into the moral whirlpool by an instinctive and natural panic, it is plain for all to see that he very quickly made the conscious choice to go with that flow.

[That is assuming, via the benefit of the doubt, that he did not in fact drive off that bridge deliberately -- and why would he do that? Well, it could have made a speedy end to any nasty fallout from accusations of rape or impregnation. The burial, literally, of any autopsy findings on Mary Jo Kopechne leave these speculations both legitimate and eternally hanging.]

It is my sincere belief that the life of any person cannot be summed up in their one worst act. Ted Kennedy could long ago have been completely forgiven for his role in Mary Jo's death, were he sincerely repentant, and (as a putative Catholic) had he availed himself of the Sacrament. But, let's face it, his life was not otherwise sterling, both personally and politically.

He left a shattered wife after 20 years of marriage, for a dissolute life of booze and broads [brought to a close only by his marriage to a fellow-divorcé barely older than his children, which he has insisted now has the Catholic Church's blessing, though God alone knows how].

And he has championed [with at least a coherent consistency not found in many politicians] every cause on the left-wing political menu, often with requisite passion, but just as often with characteristic excess in spleen and calumny against his foes. Reliable and respectable Mona Charen sums this up perfectly today. What time we invest in wondering whether Mr. Kennedy has had the grace to repent his horrific wrong toward Mary Jo Kopechne [feel free to doubt that -- apparently it was one of his favourite topics for a good joke] could just as well be spent on the subject of his unquestionably deliberate character assassinations of Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork, President George Bush, and the American military in Iraq.

Odd, that -- a man whose family was sliced apart by physical assassination found the public slaughter of personal reputation out of one side of his mouth irresistible, while out the other side he was an impassioned advocate of "hate-crime" legislation, and insidious and repugnant vehicle for gagging free speech, which is always selectively enforced (Christians are never considered victims) and inevitably morphs into the creation of "thought crime." (Welcome to Canada)

But then, why should this man blanch at character assassination when he has been able to make himself comfortable with the bodily death of one (Mary Jo) or of millions (the killing fields),

or of millions upon millions (the pre-born) where it suited his larger agenda. [Kennedy was against abortion when he began his political career, but, as Germaine Greer so deftly said it, "I never knew a philanderer who wasn't pro-choice."]

The one time he did hold his tongue while the rest of the Democrats were flapping theirs was during the confirmation hearings for successful Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas -- Kennedy's own well-earned reputation as "an aging Irish boyo clutching a bottle and diddling a blonde" and "Palm Beach boozer, lout and tabloid grotesque" and "the living symbol of the family flaws" [from GQ, Time, and Newsweek, respectively -- long before there was ever a Fox News!] made it impossible for him to meddle in the lurid sex-swamp that the Democrats were juicing up for Judge Thomas. Far from being understanding, the Dems were livid with avuncular ol' Ted for not firing off a shot at that OK Corral.

I'm glad there is a God who is in the forgiving business, since such vast swaths of his creation [i.e., me] are not. The Anchoress, as usual, inspires with her charity and largeness of spirit at these moments. I make my less generous comment part-way down her page.

Senator Edward Moore Kennedy:
Knight Errant of England
-- not everyone thrilled with taking Camelot this far!


Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
-- not everyone thrilled at this shallow substitute for a Gold in the 100-metre breast-stroke!

Lion of the Senate
-- would you want to be one of these?:

"Once established with a pride, males are usually able to scrounge food from the females, but they also have pride duties: males have to patrol and mark their territory by spraying urine, rubbing secretions of glands on objects, and roaring."

[I think they called it a "waitress sandwich" -- Chris Dodd would know...]


And in answer to the musical question: why am I dissing the guy, now he's dead and can't do any more damage? That's an easy one. It's the rank dishonesty of it all -- the papering over, the re-writing, the distortion not just of the sordid realities of his repugnant personal life, but of the true picture of his performance as the total political partisan, right to the last week of his life where he tried to game the system to overturn his own previous gaming of the system to preserve the filibuster-proof majority in the senate. The longer his "leonine" career went on the more it became self-parody, as he barked and bloviated his way through the process while his underlings tried to prop up his superficial involvement -- best exemplified by his laughable performance at the Roberts and Alito hearings, as he took the field against two men each with more intellectual heft in their left eyebrow than Kennedy has every displayed at any juncture in his academic or political life.

Had the commentators of the past few days simply had the good taste to keep their assessments out of the stratosphere of hagiographical exaggeration, distortion, or just plain lies (Kennedy was a fighter, but it was never personal????) people like me might have just laid off and let it go. But I have heard enough (and I haven't listened that much) to find myself so sickened by the disingenuousness that I had no choice but to vent a little reality into the cloud. So here it was.

What is it with these professional stenographers? It's like calling Michael Jackson "the greatest entertainer who ever was" just because he died. Greater than Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr.?

NO.

NOT.

Not even greater than the ensemble cast of the Carol Burnett Show, for cripes sake. Give me a break.

What children these newsmongers are -- once it was their sin to try and rewrite history by knowingly spreading falsehoods (Cronkite on Vietnam) -- now I think they rewrite it because they are too emotionally self-indulgent and memory-challenged to keep their grip on reality on these momentous occasions.

Fortunately, when the flower-shrines have wilted and the kleenexes have been hauled away, most regular folks get on with their lives, and come to the sad conclusion that the world is full of the over-praised, and that these displays of emotional extremism change nothing. How much better to acknowledge a sane assessment of a person's true worth, and feel happy for the good they actually did, than to canonize them without warrant. So it is even with Princess Diana, whose departure still holds all the records for excess. She loved her sons. As memories go, that should be enough.

For the Tedster: Requiescat in pace is enough too.

EVEN A BROKEN CLOCK IS RIGHT TWICE A DAY

EVEN A HOPELESS CHAUVINIST CAN GET IT RIGHT
ON OCCASION


In My Fair Lady, Professor Henry Higgins lets loose with a famous tirade against all womanhood which contains these memorable lines:

Women are irrational, that's all there is to that!
Their heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags.
They're nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating,
calculating, agitating, maddening and infuriating hags!

Higgins is, of course, being vastly unfair with this mean-spirited sweeping condemnation based on tired old chauvinist stereotypes. Such generalizations about all women should not be tolerated!

...even if, in selected instances, he totally NAILS it:

JANEANE GAROFALO + SPLEEN + VENT = COMEDY?

In an appearance at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 21, [the increasingly tatted and decreasingly funny Janeane] Garofalo ripped into tea party protesters, or what some of the wizards of smart on the left have deemed “tea baggers”…

“Do you remember tea baggers?” Garofalo said. “It was just so much easier when we could just call them racists. I just don’t know why we can’t call them racists, or functionally retarded adults…

“The functionally retarded adults, the racists – with their cries of, ‘I want my country back,’” she said. “You know what they’re really saying is, ‘I want my white guy back.’ They apparently had no problem at all for the last eight years of habeas corpus being suspended, the Constitution being sh*t on, illegal surveillance, lied to on a war or two, two stolen elections – yes, the John Kerry one was stolen too. That’s not tin-foil hat time...

“Our media is quite happy to report on any stolen election around the world, any stolen election around the world except ours,” Garofalo said. “And it’s just unexamined narcissism. It’s just, if you were to say this to the average American, ‘You know they steal elections in Uganda.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘You know they steal elections in America.’ ‘Why do you hate America?’ ‘Why didn’t you ask me why do you hate Uganda?

“This is not politics, this is neuroscience. It is purely limbic brain activity – this emotion over being angry that there’s a black guy in office, with the people showing up armed to the health care meetings – to whatever, the town halls… It makes me soul sick.”

Indeed.

Some sort of sick, in any case.

Somebody help this woman. Let's pass the hat.

A SHORT VACATION BUT A LONG, HOT SUMMER:

THE AMAZING WILTING PRESIDENT

Fouad Ajami at the Wall Street Journal lays out a withering assessment of the Great Obamatron Disenchantment now in progress, among the massed voting blocks slowly recovering from their temporary insanity of last fall. Money quotes:

In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton's wasn't…

The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan's view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan…

In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the "Yes we can!" mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.

Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance…

Sssss-s-s-s-s-s-s-s

IN A SIMILAR VAIN:

Chris Stirewalt at The Washington Examiner declares the bloom to be off the romance of the rose between the slobbering press and the insufferable vanitas of the Obama machine.

[hat-tips both: Instapundit]


TREND-SPOTTING:

THE RETURN OF 'HIPPIE SH*T'

This is actually last winter's story, since I first noticed it when shopping in Houston over Christmas: the very, very depressing return of fashion merchandise based on what we blithely categorize as 'hippie sh*t'. What would be best consigned, unlamented and unremembered, to the dustbin, trash heap, rubbish tip, dumpster of history -- the love beads, the fringe vests, the embroidered jeans, the tie-dyed tees, the sprinkle of hot-pink daisies, the haze of doobie-smoke -- is once again fashionable, being marketed from Walmart to Filene's.

At the time I credited this immediately to the coming of the Obamessiah -- and patted myself on the head for the prescience of my post of October '08, about the 'new' White House decor we could look forward to:


Now it's everywhere. So it was hardly surprising to learn [upon discovering that my Newfoundland rental car had Sirius satellite radio, including an all-Broadway network] that there had been a hugely successful 2009 revival of that profound study of late 20th-century social reality, HAIR -- the American tribal love-rock musical -- the navel-gazing, free-loving, peacenikety, draft-card-immolating blasphemenomenon of 1965.

If, like me, your only exposure to the complete work in performance was the Milos Forman film of 1979, here are some scenes you missed, according to the Wikipedia synopsis of the original script:

Berger gives a joint to Claude that is laced with a hallucinogen. Claude starts to trip as the tribe acts out his visions ("Walking in Space"). He hallucinates that he is skydiving from a plane into the jungles of Vietnam. Berger appears as General George Washington and is told to retreat because of an Indian attack. The Indians shoot all of Washington's men. General Ulysses S. Grant appears and begins a roll call: Abraham Lincoln (played by a black female tribe member), John Wilkes Booth, Calvin Coolidge, Clark Gable, Scarlett O'Hara, Aretha Franklin, George Custer.

Claude Bukowski is called in the roll call, but Clark Gable says "he couldn't make it". They all dance a minuet until three African witch doctors kill them – all except for Abraham Lincoln who says, "I'm one of you". Lincoln, after the three Africans sing his praises, recites an alternate version of the Gettysburg Address ("Abie Baby"). Booth shoots Lincoln, but says to him, "I ain't dying for no white man".

As the visions continue, four Buddhist monks enter. One monk pours a can of gasoline over another monk, who is set afire (reminiscent of the self-immolation of Tri Quang Duc) and runs off screaming. Three Catholic nuns strangle the three remaining Buddhist monks. Three astronauts shoot the nuns with ray guns. Three Chinese people stab the astronauts with knives. Three Native Americans kill the Chinese with bows and tomahawks. Three green berets kill the Native Americans with machine guns and then kill each other.

A Sergeant and two parents appear holding up a suit on a hanger. The parents talk to the suit as if it is their son and they are very proud of him. The bodies rise and play like children. The play escalates to violence until they are all dead again. They rise again ("Three Five Zero Zero") and, at the end of the trip sequence, two tribe members sing, over the dead bodies, a melody set to a lyric about the nobility of Man ("What A Piece of Work Is Man").

EX-SQUEEZE ME? Could anybody but a Bill Ayers type feel nostalgic about this twaddle?

["Gimme a head with hair/ Long beautiful hair/ Shinin', gleamin', streamin', flaxen, waxen"/ Put it on an empty head/ Hangin' in vacant eyes/ Here baby, there mama / no problem so big it can't be solved by explosives............]







Ahem.

Some comments about the "themes" in Hair, from the Wiki-tooters:

Religion appears both overtly and symbolically throughout the piece, and it is often made the brunt of a joke. Berger sings of looking for "Donna", which takes on the double meaning of the woman he's searching for and the Madonna. During "Sodomy", a hymn-like paean to all that is "dirty" about sex, the cast strikes evocative religious positions: the Pietà and Christ on the cross. Before the song, Woof recites a modified rosary. In Act II, when Berger gives imaginary pills to various famous figures, he offers "a pill for the Pope"... Claude becomes a classic Christ figure at various points in the script. In Act I, Claude enters, saying, "I am the Son of God. I shall vanish and be forgotten," then gives benediction to the tribe and the audience. Claude suffers from indecision, and, in his Gethsemane at the end of Act I, he asks "Where Do I Go?". There are textual allusions to Claude being on a cross, and, in the end, he is chosen to give his life for the others. Berger can be seen as a John the Baptist figure, preparing the way for Claude.

More from the synopsis:

After handing out imaginary pills to the tribe members, saying the pills are for high profile people such as Richard Nixon, the Pope, and "Alabama Wallace", Berger relates how he was expelled from high school ("Goin' Down")... Claude returns from his draft board physical, which he passed. He pretends to burn his Vietnam War draft card, which Berger reveals as a library card. [ring any bells?????!!!!!] Claude agonizes about what to do about being drafted.

I would add to this the observation of a high school friend of mine, a girl with a beautiful sweet soprano voice that could lovingly embrace three octaves in range. She saw a production of Hair in San Francisco, and was shocked to discover that a beautiful song she enjoyed singing -- How can people be so heartless? -- was occasioned by the world's lamest plot device: the dismissive treatment of a gift tee-shirt by an inconsiderate boyfriend. Having suffered this rank offense, the offended giver draped herself in white and blue veiling resembling the Virgin Mary as she stood in a top-lit spotlight bewailing her ill-use.

My friend was so disgusted by the triviality of the back-story she said she could never sing that song again -- it was all just too creepy.

Needless to say, such things were re-imagined when the story was puffed, fluffed and packaged to be palatable for the coming 1980's. Yes, I admit it -- I rather enjoyed Forman's film, and found the look of the characters familiar from the sights and sounds of my high school days. Apparently Rado and Ragni, godfathers of the original show, were less amused.

Original writers James Rado and Gerome Ragni were unhappy with the film. In their view, Forman failed to capture the essence of Hair in that hippies were portrayed as "oddballs" and "some sort of aberration" without any connection to the peace movement. Both are quoted as saying: "Any resemblance between the 1979 film and the original Biltmore version, other than some of the songs, the names of the characters, and a common title, eludes us." In their view, the screen version of Hair has not yet been produced.

However, the film was generally well-reviewed. Writing in The New York Times Vincent Canby called it "a rollicking musical memoir.... [Michael] Weller's inventions make this Hair seem much funnier than I remember the show's having been. They also provide time and space for the development of characters who, on the stage, had to express themselves almost entirely in song.... The entire cast is superb.... Mostly... the film is a delight."

Ah, that's the problem right there. No wonder Rado/Ragni went wiggy about it. Oddballs? Aberrations? Perish the thought!

Anyhoo, it's ba-a-a-ck -- and I suspect the current revival version has reprised all the original bite. Or maybe it just bites. Like the original. Whatever.

When, oh when, will the Boomer bunkum DIE?????

Die, hippies, die, DIE!! Or maybe just grow up? Step aside and let the next generation breathe.



Sign in my office:



And don't let the door swat you on the rump on your way out.

Once upon a time, in my senior year of college...

'O LUCKY MAN' TOLD US ABOUT JUSTICE

It was 1974, it was 2009, it was the age of Obama




JUSTICE



Case against Black Panther poll-patrol thugs vaporized by Obama/Holder Justice Department





Lockerbie terrorist bomber released on 'compassionate' grounds --

First the Scottish government, then the Libyans, show their compassion for 270 murder victims --









Obama expresses justifiable outrage:
calls the decision 'inappropriate' and 'a mistake' --
oooooooo-o-o-o-ooh


Lord of the Manor Chris Dodd (D-Conn) cleared of ethics charges on sweetheart mortgage deal

AT LAST:
PROOF THAT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
IS OUT OF STEP WITH THE MODERN WORLD




[hat-tip: failblog.org]

HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN,
JIGGETY JIG

Back from Newfoundland, just in time to turn around and zip out of town in FULL WEDDING MODE.

Or as these folks would put it [slide to minute 4:00]:





Or maybe it's closer to this version:



Anyway, it's not me, but sonny-boy #2, and it all goes down in just four days!



THOUGHT FOR THE DAY (and the next 1200 days or so):

WE TOLD YOU SO























And I believe we also told you this:


















And we sometimes dared to mention this:













And it all added up to this:



















MY TWO-CENTS' WORTH ON HEALTH CARE:

There are many comments and criticisms one could make about any single-payer [government] health insurance system, such as Canada's. But on that subject, I am fond of making this factual (not critical) observation:

The Canadian Health Care System is a gift from the American taxpayer and their national military.

Why? Because if Canada invested in its own defense to the extent required to genuinely protect its people and territory without dependence upon the United States, the country wouldn't have a hope in Hades of affording socialized medicine.

The U.S. military is 2,300,000 strong (regular plus reserves), with plans for another 750,000 to be added within the next three years.

The Canadian military is less than 100,000 strong (regular plus reserves), with no plans for increase. The number has already increased from its nadir in 2001 [having fallen by one third in the decade since 1991].

Canada's population is approximately one tenth [10%] that of the U.S., and its land mass is larger. Canada's military population is less than one half of 1% [.043] of that of the U.S. [Feel free to help me with the math if I've screwed this up.]

Canada is essentially defended at the expense of the United States, with Canadians secure in their knowledge that the U.S. would never permit any military threat to their northern neighbour, because it's just too close to home and would leave America vulnerable.

So Canada's far (FAR) from perfect health care system is even more expensive than anybody is letting on. In at least one sense, it has cost Canadians their sovereignty.

STILL ALIVE,
SURROUNDED BY VISITING RELATIVES,
TAKING IN THE SIGHTS

What's the attraction in Newfoundland?

We report, you decide.

POTUS RETURNS FROM TRIUMPHANT FOREIGN TOUR

THANK GOD FOR THAT "RESET BUTTON" ON
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS --

THANK GOD HE HAS RESTORED TO AMERICA
THE RESPECT AND GOOD WILL OF THE WORLD

So please explain why nobody's asking him to dance....
[series of hat-tips: Gateway Pundit]







Then the Russians stuffed him into his little chair so he could rest his head on his knees...




But at least he got a warm and respectful reception from this member of the Libyan cast of La Cage aux Folles, who, I'm given to understand, sells upholstery fabrics on the side.



SPEAKING OF INTERIOR DECORATORS:

After several weeks doing battle with the crooked walls and ugly paint in our century-old retreat, I slapped on a hand-silk-screened, non-pasted, historically inspired Arts & Crafts wallpaper border purchased from Bradbury & Bradbury in California, and lovingly transported by hand on three different airplanes all the way to Newfoundland.

And let me say that, of all my various wallpapering experiences, this was by far THE BIGGEST DECOR PAIN IN THE ASS I HAVE EVER PUT MYSELF THROUGH.

That having been said, it is absolutely beautiful and worth every slobber of paste, every trip up one of three ladders, and every cuss word. I love it. Purty, eh? Pictures in situ forthcoming.

Daddy soon!

DADDY HOME!!

DADDY GETTING RE-ACQUAINTED
WITH HIS TEMPERPEDIC MATTRESS!!!!

The Eagle has landed, Cincinnatus has emptied the sand from his boots at the front door, and the little nuclear family is one again.

Hello again, America -- nice to see you intact. Can I get some sleep now?

... no longer.


OOH-RAH.

3:30 p.m. EDT, five o'clock in Newfoundland


I walk out my front door and see this:



I walk out my back door and see this:


Mm-m-m-m-m. Baking in the back porch sun, eating leftover cod au gratin, the cod bought fresh off the wharf just hours after it was caught. Mm-m-m. World? What world?

THE LAST WORD ON MICHAEL

We leave it to Representative Peter King of New York.



Yeah, what he said.

Duly noted: Texas Representative and perennial fluff-head Sheila Jackson-Lee (no relation, presumably) introduces a resolution to honour MJ, offered up in the House Foreign Affairs Committee -- is that because one of the kids whose parents sued him for intergenerational touchy-feely was from Australia? The resolution rolls out a plethora of "Whereases" describing Jackson's accomplishments and acts as a "global humanitarian" -- yeah, I always saw him as Mother Teresa in eyeliner... [double hat-tip Gateway Pundit]
Puh-leeeze.

May the poor tormented tiny dancer rest in cosmetically re-arranged pieces. I said my piece about him here (unattributed -- find me -- I'm not heavily disguised) to my friend David Warren, and I think it fits him like a glove, as 'twere.


The very empty suits of Michael Jackson, poseur and wannabe:



























Actual heroic "fruit salad", worth having:

AWARDED THE CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR:

Jason Dunham, Marine, Iraq
and Michael Thornton, Navy Seal, Vietnam















Mary Edwards Walker, Army, American Civil War
and Mitchell Red Cloud, Marine, WWII; Army, Korea















Michael Murphy, Navy Seal, Afghanistan
and Michael Monsoor, Navy Seal, Iraq















LIBERATORS OF IRAQ:

General Ray Odierno,
Commanding General Multi-National Force, Iraq
and
General David Petraeus,
Commander, U.S. Central Command

Big Ray is on Facebook, here. How cool is that.

Li'l Peaches has French & German parachutist badges. How cool is that.


And then there's Cincinnatus, transitioning from the Sandbox. Known around home for the last few weeks as "Daddy Soon!"

Yeah, what he said.

RE: SANFORD AND SON

COULDN'T HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF.
DIDN'T TRY.
LEFT IT TO CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD.

Back when Toronto's National Post ceased being a great paper and hemorrhaged all its best writers, including Christie Blatchford (Mark Steyn, John O'Sullivan.....), security should have paid closer attention to what was being removed in the file boxes when Christie cleaned out her desk. Predictably, she walked off with their balls.

A woman for whom the term "broad" was coined (and she'd be proud to know we think so), Blatchford has once again unleashed her acerbic wit and keen eye to deliver what should be the definitive pronouncement on the pathetic public follies of Michael Jackson and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Swoosh, whack, schwing, Christie successfully puts both in their proper place (way off centre, by any measure of sanity and human dignity).

(If you think she looks scary, check out her subjects...)

Truly, Michael Jackson defies any category of explanation -- Blatchford calls him a train wreck, and says it all. She cuts a wider swath through the notion that Jackson is being remembered in "makeshift" memorials throughout the world. Kitsch and ghastly, yes, but not since Princess Diana's demise have the teddy-bear temples been in the least bit spontaneous or makeshift. (Christie: "Makeshift, my arse.")

Sanford, unfortunately, is easily explained: have gun, will travel. Still, one may reasonably ask, "What the hell is it with these philandering political weasels, that they must come snivelling before the TV cameras to tell the world stuff that's nobody's business?"

There's at least a partial answer to the question: they do it to rationalize and excuse their transgressions, even as they pretend to ask forgiveness and call their actions "inexcusable". Sanford is one of the most transparently unrepentant ever to present himself for public atonement.

I'm not sure who is leaking all his Harlequin Romancified emails -- if he's doing it himself to paint a sympathetic picture of a man in the thrall of Great Passion, he has misfired completely and made an even more colossal ass of himself. I would never have guessed that they came from his wife, but even she is now granting interviews about the chronology of their shattered relationship, so who knows what else she might consider appropriate? What is wrong with these people? Does every soiled underthingy go right out on the line, in view of a deliberately assembled audience?

TOO-O-O
MUCH-CH-CH
INFOR-R-MA-A-A-A-A-TION-N-N-N-N.

Anyway, back to Blatchford. I defer to the honorable gentlewoman. Money quote:

...if ever a lover had looked deep into my eyes and said something like “I love you more than life itself,” or written, as Mr. Sanford did, “my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body,” I would have either vomited or kneed him sharply in the nuts... To me, it's a miracle that Mr. Sanford found two women (wife, Jenny, and lover, Maria) who think his verbal wanking sexy or endearing.

Read and enjoy.