UNITED STATES RIDES
THE RUNNING BOARDS OF HISTORY


SEC-STATE CLINTON BOASTS:
"WE DID NOT LEAD THIS"


PREZ OBAMA AFFIRMS:
"WE WILL NOT DEPLOY ANY AMERICAN TROOPS
ON THE GROUND"

Brings a tear to the eye, doesn't it folks?


The world's last remaining superpower treads water and waits for the FWENCH to take the lead -- and they do.

Not so super.

So the French have already gone airborne and dropped their first package, to be joined by the Brits, the Canadians, the Danes, the Norwegians, and various other players to be named later -- forces which, all combined, aren't half what is needed to enforce a no-fly zone, according to military talking heads on the tube.

The U.S. now maintains command and control of the operation, but will [PROUDLY] surrender the con to a coalition committee, or some such thing.

Kinda gets ya right here, don't it?

Meanwhile, certain well-trained pilots on a certain American aircraft carrier twiddle their thumbs in nearby waters, wondering why their C-in-C has plunked them unceremoniously into the rumble seat.

Well, we'll see how long this long-distance involvement lasts -- over a hundred Tomohawk missiles have departed their Mediterranean-based chutes, as President Obama pushes the red button on "Operation Keep Your Head Down".

Unconfirmed reports tell us that the Commander-in-Chief, currently on tour in a production of Flying Down to Rio,

has been heard to mumble,






"I got me some of these...."








"Now if I can just grow me a pair of these."










BTW: Anybody heard from Code Pink?????


Damn you, George W. Bush!!!!!

A WHOLE NEW MEANING TO THE TERM

"EARTHSHAKING"



UPDATE: video has been removed from the YouTube. Well, it is pretty disturbing. Try here.

Don't worry, folks -- the United States Navy is on the case, surfing the tsunami to deliver the necessaries. I have it on the highest authority. (My baby boy.)


Meanwhile, back on "solid ground":

OBAMA WISHES HE WERE PRESIDENT OF AN ASIAN WORKERS' PARADISE

Gee, ya think?

Governing a country full of people who refuse to be coerced and ignored can be such a pain. There was nothing in the Alinsky manual about putting up with pesky voters' expectations.

Sheesh!!! Can I play through?


And at the other, er, extreme: some people just
keep wanting to be president of the U.S.

NEWT, THE HELPLESSLY PATRIOTIC -- JUST GIVE IT UP, DUDE!

Jeffrey Goldberg, over at the Atlantic, is properly disdainful of Newt Gingrich's limp attempt to explain away his, er, "colourful" (read: "tawdry") personal history. Apparently he got distracted from his duty to be a decent human being by the seductive siren song of patriotism.

Puh-le-e-eze.

Step out of the way, Newt. If it was ever your moment (and I doubt that), it has most assuredly passed. Make way for the New Kids on the Block (Kantor, Ryan, Rubio, even Palin. No Newt, no Mitt, no way. That's it.)


I believe his name was Barry Maguire, and once upon a time he wrote:

THE EASTERN WORLD, IT IS EXPLODIN' --
VIOLENCE FLARIN', BULLETS LOADIN'

So, class, let's review: these are some of the images we've been meditating on for the past three years. Keep them in mind during your daily perusal of the Drudge Report.































Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, piracy in Somalia, slaughter in Darfur, Al Qaeda in Yemen -- and the strange shrunken spectator watches the World on Fire.


This is how we "Win the Future". Yeah?

MANLY WISDOM FROM A BRITAMERICANUCK

Don't know what's been up with columnist-to-the-world Mark Steyn -- some 'health issues' apparently -- but he has surfaced and is swinging away in full form.

He whacks another demographic analysis out of the park, while giving us his latest assessment of the American Chief Executive and C-i-C: 'The strange shrunken spectator who serves as president of the United States.'

Hey, he said it, not me!

Wish I had.

WOMANY WISDOM FROM A CANUCKESS

National Post's Barbara Kay sums up the Palin Revolution. Nicely, of course.

Back in Hogtown (Toronto) and recovered from big green ear infection.

Watching my new favourite Canadian TV show, Republic of Doyle (family detective business in St. John's, Newfoundland). Big caper about the theft of the famous "Veiled Madonna" from the Basilica. Get one for yourself from Victorian Trading Co.

Not cheap, though [$250]. And not available for shipping to Canada. Heh.

THE NEW MATH:


OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

x (CARTER FOREIGN POLICY)

+ EGYPT

÷ LATEST POLLS

= UTTER INCOHERENCE


= HELL ON WHEELS

= BOOGAH BOOGAH


TO THE POWER OF TEN

NEW DEFINITION OF "MESS":

OBAMA ADVISER TO DECORATED GENERAL
IN MESS DRESS:

"MORE WINE, PLEASE"

Valerie Jarrett, "Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement" [I think that's another term for Chicago-Daley-Machine-Crony-Without-Portfolio], attended the Alfalfa Club Dinner. In a quest for more wine, she apparently tossed a glance over her shoulder and made her requirements known to nearest guy in a short jacket, mistaking him for the Little Man from the Village.

He turned out to be a much-beribboned General in some branch of the American armed forces, properly done up in his mess dress, of this sort:












The man in question was not only an officer but a gentleman. He dutifully fetched the requested beverage, delivered it to Madam, and then proceeded to sit down at her table. Do you think she had the wit to feel uncomfortable? Our correspondent maintains a polite silence.

[hat-tip/ Daily Caller via Instapundit]


NEWSFLASH!

Goundhog Day 2011 snowstorm is caused by:

GLOBAL WARMING.


Al said so.

[hat-tip Drudge]










Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.


You remember Egypt.

HOTTEST THING ON TV
IN THE LAST MILLION YEARS

For obvious reasons.

It's sharp and witty and funky and gritty and chock-a-block with suspense -- and there are these two guys, a Mutt and Jeff combo, each strangely endearing in his own weird way.

There's this fellow here, Martin Freeman, who plays the eminent Dr. Watson [here in the 21st century, he's a demobilised army doc wounded in Afghanistan -- oh! that's what he was in the 19th century too]. He's dry and a bit broody, but trying very hard to be normal, which is hopeless when you get a look at his new roomie. And he's as cute as a hobbit -- which works in his favour, since he's playing Bilbo Baggins in the hobbitty prequel (if it ever gets made).

But the real headline is the overnight blast of stardust lingering over and around the other fellow, whose name sounds like a spell taught at Hogwort's: Benedict Cumberbatch. [gesundheit] He's utterly brilliant and original as the all-new blackberry-toting Sherlock Holmes.

Suddenly the adolescent world is swooning over this tall stringbean with an angular face above a near-Leno jaw, who's been picking up acting awards and publicity by the bushelful. He's the hottest thing going, friends -- he's on top of the world, what could he possibly want that he doesn't already have?????

Answer: kids. Well, that was unexpected. He's had a co-vivant for years, who better watch out, because there could soon be girls lining up around the block ready to have his baby. Hmmm, try to imagine.....

That's it! All the little Cumberbundles will look like Freddie Highmore! Could do worse.

Three TV movies have been aired so far, and we'll have to wait [we can't wait!] until fall for the next instalments. Hurry, hurry, Mutt and Jeff. And congratulations on the well-earned success, Mr. Cumberbuns. You've got the world on a string --- SO WHY THE LONG FACE?!!!

Ha ha ha har har hee hee hee.

Watch for it -- when the leaves start to fall.

OH MAMA!

PALIN REDUCES ENTIRE SOTU TO ITS ESSENCE



"Winning the Future" = WTF

Too funny. Too true.

UNLIKE THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

I REMEMBER SPUTNIK

It was 1957, we lived in Anderson, Indiana; my sister was in school and I wasn't. She came home with her latest art project, a cork ball studded with toothpicks, painted tourquoise blue and sprinkled with glitter. The world had officially ushered in The Space Age, and America was WAY behind.

What a perfect image for the condition to which Barack Obama has willfully reduced the United States of America.

As the rest of the world wheels and deals for oil money, and China collects its billions by flooding the nation with bright shiny trinkets, the United States stands tall in its sophomore's purity: oil is off-limits; endangered beetles and public sector workers are comfy on a pillow of privilege -- regular guy workers are asked to delight in the prospect of years on the dole; the military is stretched and slated for reduced numbers with which to act out super-sensitive Rules of Engagement; Orwell's language police preaching 'civility' with all the politesse of the Seven Words You Can't Say On Television; government lumbers on under a party and a president whose grasp of their job is to economy and geo-politics what 'Professor' Harold Hill's 'Think System' is to music.

The President has literally bowed and abased himself to every unsavoury global thug he could seek out. He has done everything in his power to turn the nation of pioneers into one of indentured servants. He has lately wined and dined our monetary master, who [Hu] leered with satisfaction and repaid our hospitality by stopping just short of taking a poop on the banquet table.

And the NASA budget has been slashed to where we'd need a bank loan to produce a Sputnik. I'm not even sure we could afford the cork ball and the toothpicks.

I popped in and out of the SOTU panto last night [Pillars of the Earth was on another channel] because, between the self-congratulatory hot-air issuing from the podium and the robotic jack-in-the-box action out on the floor, it has all become meaningless ballet to the delicate strains of Stockhausen.

I have this mental image of one of those tennis-ball lobbing machines for practicing one's serve solo, except this machine is center-stage on the congressional daïs and what it's lobbing has been collected, bolus by bolus, from the loose hay on the stable floor. Out on the floor, standing is actually the normal position, and the sitting is a ducking reflex. [By the way, if your tennis ball server remains in this position for more than four hours, consult a physician.]



Guess I'll do my patriotic duty and, after a suitable period of mourning, read the text of the SOTU address, unimpeded by all the jumpin' jack flash.




By the way, how did that Sputnik thing work out for the Big Russian Bear, anyway?


























Ahh..... Miracle on Ice.

Henderson scores for Canada.

Da, Da, Ca-na-da -- Nyet, Nyet, So-vi-et.

Big Sputnikin' Deal.

Heady days.



So, as long as we're into 'the big con' and 'never let a crisis go to waste' -- well, listen to the master. No Sputniks required.

MEMO TO FILE -- NOTE TO SELF

This is what it looks like when somebody practices what the President preaches:


Dr. Gosnell Arrested for Murdering 7 Babies Who Survived Abortion – A Practice Barack Obama Supports & Has Voted For 4 Times








And on a related note,

PDS*/"Palinoia" DIAGNOSED AND 'SPLAINED

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal has the goods on Why They Hate Her [Sarah Palin] -- he's not the first to say it [some of us have been making this case for two years now], but he says it well, and that's not easy coming from a man.

It's not very complicated, really. Women hate her more than men, and that's because she's a good-looking, successful, professional woman with a good-looking supportive non-metrosexual husband; she's held good jobs, made good money, kept her figure, pursued her dreams, and had five children.

That's not supposed to happen at the turn of the 21st century. There was this myth for awhile that a woman could "have it all", but most women just couldn't shake the biggest obstacles to their success: men, and kids. They just seemed hopelessly drawn to these corrosive forces. And when they found themselves stuck, trapped by traditional domestic shackles, who was in their corner but the friendly abortionist, the sine qua non of modern female ambition?

But Sarah Palin got on with life and career and family without the services of the abortionist, and even dares to suggest that other women ought to do the same -- even when they discover that they are set to be burdened by the greatest obstacle of all, a handicapped child.



Sarah Palin is hated partly because she's an ordinary woman (and doesn't pretend to be otherwise) who has done extraordinary things; but mostly because of the most ordinary thing she ever did: she let this child live. 90% of women in her position had their children destroyed.

They're out there. They know who they are. And they are the driving force behind *Palin Derangement Syndrome.

BYRON YORK PUTS CNN

IN THE CROSSHAIRS

Over at the Washington Examiner, Byron York does an in-depth analysis of CNN's usage of the Crosshairs metaphor in just the one month prior to the Tucson shootings.

And, like all sane people, Byron thinks it's nothing to go all wobbly about, like John King did on a recent broadcast.

He's all, like, Dude! It's okay! Um.... KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY!



See, everybody's got a crosshairs fantasy. Some were actually good ideas....












Others were a form of inflammatory and uncivil rhetoric responsible for the death of Marcel Marceau. I knew it!

"... after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live."

Shakespeare -- Hamlet


The air has been thick with ill reports since last Saturday's murder spree in Tucson, most of them lazy and brainless slanders proffered as explanations for Grade-A insanity. I will make no attempt to behave like a news source, since others have done it better already [the usual kudos to clearing houses such as Instapundit and American Thinker], nor to catalogue the long list of journalists, pundits, and politicos who have gone so far beyond the borders of partisanship that the wonderful neo-verb "beclowning" is inadequate to the situation, and we must settle for the more mundane "disgraced" to describe what, in their foaming extremism, they have done to themselves.

As a minor bump on the cosmic log, I have enjoyed the luxury of waiting out a suitable period of time, to pluck some actual facts from out of the whirlwind of shrieking din, and have chosen to draw attention to this morning's interview with Zach Osler, an old friend of the accused [Jared Loughner], and a sweet-looking young man who has taken on an unnecessary and onerous burden of guilt for having failed to intervene where others, in genuine positions of responsibility, should have done the job.



The mad rush from left field to score political points off the Tucson tragedy has manifested itself in safe generalities, making passing use of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords by name, but avoiding too much reference to the few other victims whose names have been released, most particularly the remarkable, beautiful 9-year-old symbol of all that it means to "choose life", the late and much lamented Christina Taylor Green -- born in the national shadow of September 11, 2001 -- died in the radiant morning of her little life, in the instant of one jerk on the trigger. [Video of a very moving but dignified interview with her father has been rolled up by ABC -- transcript of much of it is here.]

It took no time at all for the twisted perverts of the Fred Phelps Westboro "Baptist Church" clan to seize this particular tragedy as an opportunity to crow their deranged message to the world, and quickly announce their utterly incomprehensible plan to picket the funeral of this lovely child -- an act so grotesque that even their jittery clots of synapses recoiled at it within a couple of days. [Or was it just the devil's bargain -- the offer of radio airtime in Phoenix and Toronto, if they called off the hounds and bitches at the Green funeral -- that caused them to relent??]

The creatures have now re-set their sites on the funeral of the other high-profile victim, District Judge John Roll. It's not yet clear whether the Patriot Guard Riders will officially perform their usual intervention services, but rest assured there will be patriot riders who will guard the victim families from being "Phelpsed".

And may all the slain innocents, victims of their interest in the free exercise of rights among a free people, rest in the sleep of peace.


SATURDAY

While all this mayhem was going down in Arizona, back in Pennsylvania, a soldier came home.

Another death -- a peaceful end to a long and ordinary life -- briefly interrupted by violent conflict, grueling hardships, and inexpressible courage

MAJOR RICHARD WINTERS,
leader of the Band of Brothers
Dead at age 92

It's a good week to remember the nobility to which ordinary men can rise when called upon to be of service to their fellows. God welcome and bless Dick Winters as he strides into the heavenly reunion of Easy Company of the 101st Airborne, who drifted into and around Ste. Mere Eglise in Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, and forever planted their boots in the history of man's humanity to man. And God bless writer Stephen Ambrose for reminding a wider world of what they did.

Read and salute, here here here and even better here

If (and only if) you have reason to be there, Major Winters will be memorialized on (appropriately) St. Joseph's Day, March 19, at his church in Hershey, PA. The public is invited, but, for God's sake, make a hole and leave room for his Band of Brothers.

Requiescat in pace.

I love a boy in uniform.

SURPRISING FOOTNOTE TO PREVIOUS POST

#1 Son has just arrived home from deployment, having spent some months as a resident Marine on a Navy Amphibious Readiness mini-aircraft carrier thingy. We had a brief conversation which touched on baby brother's former commander, the notorious OPH (Owen P. Honors -- see below).

Level of sympathy on the part of our Marine for the predicament of Captain Honors?

Absolute zero.

XO's are supposed to be iron-gut enforcers, not the class clowns with an inexplicable amount of time on their hands. That is all.

Well, I defer to the expert.

All I would add (my two-cents) is that, since Honors has long since ceased his childish shenanigans, had never been reprimanded for them by anyone until now, and has already been a successful commander of another aircraft carrier, the USS Mount Whitney, for more than two years without complaint or incident or repetition of questionable conduct that we know of, I think the statute of limitations on former jackass-dom should be considered passed.

A reprimand on record, some sort of probation, a fine, or just the public embarrassment would seem to be sufficient punishment. And if what he did was so terrible, his then-commander should receive equal, if not greater, punishment for his negligent approach to discipline.

Marines. Hard-ass. It works.