Monthly Archives: March 2014

Obama and his world of fantasty

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He doesn’t say it, of course, but Benjamin Netenyahu and the entire Israeli government does not trust Obama on a single thing. Not for his promise of support, not for his ability to understand the political and military realities and certainly not on his willingness to stand by Israel when times get tough. The only thing he absolutely believes about Obama is that he will do as much damage to Israel as he is capable of getting away with. The interview with Obama conducted by Jeffery Goldberg, which is reported in an article by Elliot Abrams subtilted Obama’s scary interview, should be read if your interest is in the preservation of the Israeli state in the midst of the most hostile American government since its founding in 1948. One exchange after another shows Obama either lying outright, or as Abrams suggests, living in a fantasy zone in his own head unaffected by reality. The final para:

Change is apparently not scary to Mr. Obama, who is confident all his policies are right. Those who disagree are uninformed, or itching for conflict, or ignorant about the risks they will soon face, or sadly unable to adapt to world events. This is the Obama who said of his own nomination that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” If he believes it, it must be so. The Goldberg interview reveals that five years in, nothing has changed.

Obama may well be mentally disturbed, more than just a narcissist but someone who is fully detached from reality. He knows everything, and is smarter, shrewder, more insightful than anyone else. Other than in his ability to rise to higher and higher political offices, nothing he has every attempted has succeeded, but in no case has he ever shown self-doubt or any recognition that the things he set out to do did not work out in reality. There is no discussing anything with such a person and normally you would not have to. And then there’s this from The Washington Post about Obama’s escape from reality in relation to the Ukraine. This is an editorial titled, President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy:

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”

That’s a nice thought, and we all know what he means. A country’s standing is no longer measured in throw-weight or battalions. The world is too interconnected to break into blocs. A small country that plugs into cyberspace can deliver more prosperity to its people (think Singapore or Estonia) than a giant with natural resources and standing armies.

Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not received the memo on 21st-century behavior. Neither has China’s president, Xi Jinping, who is engaging in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and the weaker nations of Southeast Asia. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is waging a very 20th-century war against his own people, sending helicopters to drop exploding barrels full of screws, nails and other shrapnel onto apartment buildings where families cower in basements. These men will not be deterred by the disapproval of their peers, the weight of world opinion or even disinvestment by Silicon Valley companies. They are concerned primarily with maintaining their holds on power.

OK, the President of the United States is disconnected from reality, a man who lives in his own head with a reality separate and distinct from the actual world of events. But is that it? Merely to note that this is so and then do nothing? Let your country be ruined along with your friends and allies because all avenues of escape are closed? If we know he’s crazy, why don’t we bloody do something?

Panic in the capitals of Europe

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It’s not as if Obama’s intentions from the start were difficult to read. He’s a hard left ideologue whose greatest hatreds are for the civilisation of the West and in particular the country of which he is president. That there are revelations upon revelations as one by one, but ever so slowly, the truth begins to dawn on those fools who elected him, or the international mobs who supported him, is something like a revelation to me. Just how self-deluded can these people really have been. This is from Richard Fernandez:

The capitals of Europe have gone from complacency to a near panic in the last 72 hours, not simply over the crisis in the Ukraine but in the growing awareness that for at least the last half decade they’ve been standing on a trapdoor.

Are they really that clueless? Could they really not see that Obama is their greatest enemy? We are living in a sea of troubles, which are building not going away, and the American defence budget is about to be slashed. Could these people really not see it coming? Whatever the panic that may suddenly have overtaken them, did they really have no inking of the kind of person Obama is, what his beliefs are and the end points he has been aiming at. Listen to Fernandez himself, who still writes as if Obama wants to do the right thing by America and the West:

To see it coming would have invalidated the fundamental premise of Obama’s foreign policy: that the train line was unobstructed; that he could talk to people he now knows he can’t talk to. For a while the deal making seemed too almost too good to be true and Obama marketed his “opportunities” and “investments” with almost evangelical zeal. Even now Obama plans to tell Benjamin Netanyahu that time is running out for Israel to make a deal with the Palestinians. One of those magic deals Kerry’s negotiated, like the one with Syria. He is figuring to tell the Israeli prime minister he had better buy now while supplies last or miss the deal of the century, the deal of a lifetime! Maybe he even plans to exhibit all the notices he’s received from his “partners for peace” about how close he is to grabbing the Big Brass Ring.

“The fundamental premises of Obama’s foreign policy”! It really is pathetic. The principle of Obama’s foreign policy is to encourage our enemies, and the greatest possible triumph in Obama’s mind would be the destruction of Israel. More from Drudge:

Obama warns of ‘fallout’ for Israel if peace effort fails…

‘Time Is Running Out’…

USA pushing Israel to stop assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists…

Basically, it’s the USA pushing Israel to stop defending itself. That he will never get them to do, but he might get the US to stop providing help. That’s the aim. And as for us out here in the South Pacific the message is equally grim. No immediate threats at the moment but with America withdrawn from active engagement and too broke to really do anything, and more so as time goes by, where does our safety lie, thinking say a decade or two ahead?

The kind of empty thought processes that seem to animate political decisions is a never ending frustration for me, but the mere 6% of Australians who supported Romney at the last American election has left me with the profound belief that the world map a century hence will look nothing like the one we see today. Some people will be on top – who I do not know – and a lot more will be on the bottom, and the possibilities of peace, freedom and prosperity will have withered. But it is the present delusion that Obama is a fit and proper president, that he intends to do the right thing and is trying to make the world a better place for the likes of us, still does not go away. We will reap the whirlwind and never know why that was.

UPDATE: From The Diplomad, Climbing Out of the Obama Foreign Policy Hole:

The Obama foreign policy team is peopled by the “well-educated,” i.e., they have college degrees, and as befits the “well educated” in today’s America, they are stunningly ignorant and arrogant leftists, but mostly just idiots. They do not make plans; they tend to fly by the seat of their pants using a deeply ingrained anti-US default setting for navigation. They react to the Beltway crowd of NGOs, “activists” of various stripes, NPR, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Relying on what they “know,” they ensure the US does not appear as a bully, or an interventionist when it comes to our enemies: after all, we did something to make them not like us. Long-term US allies they view as anti-poor, anti-Third World, and retrograde Cold Warriors. Why else would somebody befriend the US? Obama’s NSC and State are staffed with people who do not know the history of the United States, and, simply, do not understand or appreciate the importance of the United States in and to the world. They are embarrassed by and, above all, do not like the United States. They look down on the average American, and have no problem with anti-American regimes and personages because overwhelmingly they are anti-American themselves.

His conclusion is what I was trying to say:

Above all, we need men and women in the highest reaches of our government who know, understand, and love the greatness that is Western civilization, especially that variant of it handed us by our great English forefathers, and the role the USA should and must play in ensuring its survival. We do not have that now; freedom-loving people around the world pay the price for that hideous fact, and that must change. That is the only way out of this hole dug by the Obamistas and their “progressive” groupies.

I just make the further point that it is now unimaginable to me that the United States could elect such a government which is what makes me pessimistic about our future. And while all this goes on, the headline at Drudge is, RUSSIACHINA UNITE!.

Newsweek’s deathbed recantation

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obama - hit the road newsweek cover

And this is the text:

I Too Have Become Disillusioned

By Matt Patterson (Newsweek Columnist – Opinion Writer)

Years from now, historians may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable and disturbing phenomenon, the result of a baffling breed of mass hysteria akin perhaps to the witch craze of the Middle Ages. How, they will wonder, did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world’s largest economy, direct the world’s most powerful military, execute the world’s most consequential job?

Imagine a future historian examining Obama’s pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League, despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a “community organizer;” a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention, less often did he vote “present”); and finally an unaccomplished single term in the United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions.

He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as a legislator. And then there is the matter of his troubling associations: the white-hating, America-loathing preacher who for decades served as Obama’s “spiritual mentor;” a real-life, actual terrorist who served as Obama’scolleague and political sponsor. It is easy to imagine a future historian looking at it all and asking: how on Earth was such a man elected president?

Not content to wait for history, the incomparable NormanPodhoretz addressed the question recently in the Wall Street Journal: To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers, would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberal Dom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were ‘a bit’ extreme, he was given a pass. Let that sink in:Obama was given a pass – held to a lower standard because of the color of his skin.

Podhoretz continues: And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also so articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) “non-threatening,” all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?

Podhoretz puts his finger, I think, on the animating pulse of theObama phenomenon – affirmative action. Not in the legal sense, of course. But certainly in the motivating sentiment behind all affirmative action laws and regulations, which are designed primarily to make white people, and especially white liberals, feel good about themselves.

Unfortunately, minorities often suffer so that whites can pat themselves on the back. Liberals routinely admit minorities to schools for which they are not qualified, yet take no responsibility for the inevitable poor performance and high drop-out rates which follow. Liberals don’t care if these minority students fail; liberals aren’t around to witness the emotional devastation and deflated self-esteem resulting from the racist policy that is affirmative action. Yes, racist. Holding someone to a separate standard merely because of the color of his skin – that’s affirmative action in a nutshell, and if that isn’t racism, then nothing is.

And that is what America did to Obama. True, Obama himself was never troubled by his lack of achievements, but why would he be? As many have noted, Obama was told he was good enough for Columbia despite undistinguished grades at Occidental; he was told he was good enough for the US Senate despite a mediocre record in Illinois; he was told he was good enough to be president despite no record at all in the Senate. All his life, every step of the way, Obama was told he was good enough for the next step, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary.

What could this breed if not the sort of empty narcissism on display every time Obama speaks? In 2008, many who agreed that he lacked executive qualifications nonetheless raved about Obama’s oratory skills, intellect, and cool character. Those people – conservatives included – ought now to be deeply embarrassed.

The man thinks and speaks in the hoariest of clichés, and that’s when he has his Teleprompters in front of him; when the prompter is absent he can barely think or speak at all. Not one original idea has ever issued from his mouth – it’s all warmed-over Marxism of the kind that has failed over and over again for 100 years. (An example is his 2012 campaign speeches which are almost word for word his 2008 speeches)

And what about his character? Obama is constantly blaming anything and everything else for his troubles. Bush did it; it was bad luck; I inherited this mess. Remember, he wanted the job, campaigned for the task. It is embarrassing to see a president so willing to advertise his own powerless-ness, so comfortable with his own incompetence. (The other day he actually came out and said no one could have done anything to get our economy and country back on track). But really, what were we to expect? The man has never been responsible for anything, so how do we expect him to act responsibly?

In short: our president is a small-minded man, with neither the temperament nor the intellect to handle his job. When you understand that, and only when you understand that, will the current erosion of liberty and prosperity make sense. It could not have gone otherwise with such an impostor in the Oval Office.

Of course the Nazis were socialists

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It is only on the say so of Joseph Stalin that Hitler and the Nazis have not been identified as socialists. The modern left naturally wants to be spared the connection. Anyway, this issue has come up in a debate in the UK that has been discussed by Jonah Goldberg in an article titled, Nazis: Still Socialists. This is how Goldberg sums up:

Conservatives, libertarians, and other champions of free-market economics must constantly put pressure on politicians to fend off the natural human tendency to fight innovation as a threat to the status quo and the powers that be. Across the West there’s a tendency among bureaucrats, politicians, academics, and other members of the New Class to convince the people to hand over the major decisions of their lives to the “experts.” These experts aren’t all in the government, but they all collude with government to convince people that the experts have all the answers and that the people need to hand the reins over to them. They will tell us what to eat, what to drive, what to think. It’s an approach that puts politics before economics. Because it is an attempt to politicize peoples’ lives. Or as Hitler put it, “Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.”

Personally I prefer the Otto Strasser version, a leading Nazi and therefore in a position to know, also quoted in the article:

We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!

That’s the Greens. That’s the left. That is a quite accurate summary of socialism going all the way back to its first origins, just as it will continue to be as far forward as the eye can see. Tactics may differ but the rhetoric will always remain the same.

In this debate on the affirmative was Daniel Hannan who has himself written an article, Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism. All the more important, therefore, to continuously remind them of it. From his article:

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Hannan for some reason wishes to absolve the modern left from Nazi tendencies. I am more willing to leave it an open question. But what he writes is how to seriously get under the skin of the modern left:

Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order.

His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”

Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their ideology.

And when before has Hannan touched on this. Here, in this article from February 16, 2013 titled, So total is the Left’s cultural ascendancy that no one likes to mention the socialist roots of fascism. It has certainly touched a nerve given it had 1357 comments at the Daily Telegraph in London.

President Pussy Kitten threatens Russia

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More red lines? More empty gestures? Who is this cypher to go arounds pretending strength and resolve? From the Associated Press:

President Barack Obama is warning Russia “there will be costs” for any military maneuvers it launches in Ukraine, a move U.S. and Ukrainian officials say they believe to be already underway.

So what are these costs?

Officials say Obama may retaliate by canceling a trip to Russia this summer for an international summit and could also cut off trade discussions with Moscow.

Or as Charles Krauthammer has said:

The Ukrainians, and I think everybody, is shocked by the weakness of Obama’s statement. I find it rather staggering.

Anyway, if the lights are going out all over Europe and the West, it will be because of our war on fossil fuels. If there’s another kind of war coming it will be because of American weakness, not because of its strength. Meanwhile, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine appears to have begun. But what needs to be treasured is this:

In 2008, when she was the GOP vice presidential nominee, Palin questioned in a speech whether then-Sen. Barack Obama would have the foreign policy credentials to handle a scenario in which Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. . . .

The former Alaska governor was happy to highlight her prediction on Friday and scold those who criticized her 2008 comments.

“Yes, I could see this one from Alaska,” she said on Facebook. That remark was a reference to a 2008 interview in which Palin argued that Alaska’s proximity to Russia helped boost her foreign policy experience.
“I’m usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine.”

In October 2008, Foreign Policy labeled Palin’s prediction as “strange.”

Does the left ever get anything of importance right?

UPDATE: To which must be added this:

Oh they are shaking in their boots [with laughter] in Moscow tonight. Can’t somebody show up to work at the White House and tell this Jello-spined juggalo that his warning and threats just aren’t making it? I mean really. This tough guy spiel is just an embarrassment:

“The Obama administration is evaluating whether President Barack Obama will go forward with plans to attend an international summit in Russia this summer amid reports of Russian intervention in Ukraine. A senior administration official says it’s hard to see how Obama and European leaders would attend the G-8 summit in Sochi, which is scheduled for June.”

So let me get this straight. The “penalty” for Russia if it keeps its hold on the Ukraine is that it doesn’t get to waste precious summer days in June in the presence of this cowardly little narcissist and his entourage of fluffers and fellators? Well, yes, that would certainly make any leader of Russia give up the security of his fleet’s access to the Crimea, the Black Sea, and from there into the Mediterranean. Let’s not forget that Russia lost the Crimean War in the middle of the 19th Century [not that long ago in the Russian mind] which took about half a million lives on all sides. In that war, most of the fighting took place for control of the Black Sea, with land battles on the Crimean peninsula in southern Russia. Deja vu all over again? Why not? That’s the history of Russia writ large.

Simply put, if Russia cannot maintain control of the Crimea and Sevastopol it cannot maintain the Black Sea Fleet.

The Black Sea Fleet is considered to have been founded by Prince Potemkin on May 13, 1783, together with its principal base, the city of Sevastopol. Formerly commanded by such legendary admirals as Dmitriy Senyavin and Pavel Nakhimov, it is a fleet of enormous historical and political importance for Russia.

The Black Sea Fleet enables Russia to control and dominate its close in “backyard” of Georgia as well as have access to the Mediterranean and, hence, the Middle East and Suez. Without the Crimea and Sevastapol, Russia ceases to be a nation with global reach. This is something Putin will not do. Ever. This is one of those annoying strategic situations in which trying to force Russia to step back can easily become a trigger for thermonuclear war. And Russia is still in the strategic nuke business.

Instead of understanding how history lives in the present and shapes the future, this pig-ignorant “president” doesn’t have a foreign policy, all he has is a series of poses and postures; none of which are all that butch.

Indeed, it would seem that the only group on the planet that are afraid of this putz are D.C. Republicans. And I’m not too sure about them any longer.

More news on the economy

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From The Oz today, Tony Abbott eyes $5bn for new road funding:

ROAD funding will surge again in the federal budget in May as the Abbott government casts an “eager eye” on new projects to lift faltering economic growth.

The budget plans include billions of dollars to upgrade old road and rail infrastructure in outer suburbs, on top of the Coalition’s existing $35.5 billion list of public works.

The new spending will come with tough conditions on the states to hasten construction after a federal audit revealed $3bn in cash sitting idle in state coffers.

I guess with the state of economic theory being what it is, the worst that the ALP can say is this:

The Coalition agenda is being criticised by Labor infrastructure spokesman Anthony Albanese on the ground it ignores public transport projects such as urban rail.

Meanwhile:

Investment spending will dive from $167bn this year to $125bn next year, according to figures released on Thursday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, adding to the case within the government for outlays on public works.

If these are projects that can show a net positive return, then there is a case to be made. Otherwise it’s just more waste.