Category Archives: Politics – international

Delusional liar for president

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There are two sides to the Obama phenomenon, one that he always lies and the second that he is a fantasist lost from reality. So here we have Bob Kerry, who ran for President as a Democrat, bringing both thoughts together at once:

He joked that geneticists will one day soon ‘find a base pair’ of genes that predisposes people to deception.

And he predicted, half-seriously, that ‘they’ll find another base pair which say that politicians have 25 per cent more capacity for – you call it lying, I call it self-delusion.’

Everybody knows but no one can do a thing.

Liars and their media enablers

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Part of the interest in following politics in the US is to see just how corrupt it is, with the heart of that corruption in the media reporting. The certainty that the mainstream media will lie at every turn to protect a Democrat, and do the same to harm a Republican, is as plain as day but almost never discussed. Three instances have come up in the past two days of the ways in which the news is suppressed and distorted.

First Obama went to see the Pope, and this is how it turned out:

President Obama’s first meeting with Pope Francis produced a little schism of its own.

The Vatican and White House gave starkly different versions Thursday of Mr. Obama’s meeting with Francis.

Stark indeed. This is the Obama version, just a bit of chit chat really:

“We actually didn’t talk a whole lot about social schisms in my conversations with His Holiness,” Mr. Obama said at a press conference in Rome. “In fact, that really was not a topic of conversation.”

And this is the Vatican version:

The Vatican, however, issued a statement after the meeting saying the president’s discussions with Francis and two other top Vatican officials focused “on questions of particular relevance for the [Catholic] Church in [the United States], such as the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life and conscientious objection” — issues that have fueled divisions between Mr. Obama and the church.

OK so the Pope says one thing and Obama says another. Just how likely is it that Obama was the one to be telling the gospel truth. But while the media in some sense took note, they left it up in the air about where the truth might be. And then there is this which has also come up at the same time:

The Obama administration now says more than 6 million people have signed up for Obamacare, but critical information is missing, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told Fox News on Friday.

“I think that they are lying to us about who has paid, who has not paid, who is getting subsidies…They don’t want to give us the numbers,” she said. “The way they are surveying this (web)site — you know they are trying to cover things up.”

Of course, Obama has done nothing but lie about the Affordable Care Act so why should now be different? It’s routine for Obama to lie. But as disgusting and despicable as that is, the way this is not a media issue, to be chewed over and discussed, is an important element in what is turning the US into the Argentina of the twenty-first century.

And perhaps most bizarrely of all there is this, At Obama-Putin Phone Call:

While we’ll never know exactly how the phone call went, if you read how the Obama administration described the conversation between Putin and Obama, and how the Russians described it, you’d think they were two completely different phone calls. . . .

When you read the Russian version it sounds like Obama is cooperating to help Putin “protect” the citizens of Ukraine. The White House version has Obama practically berating Putin, while the Russian version has him going along with Putin’s plans.

It is a disastrous business when it is infinitely easier to believe the President of Russia than the President of the United States just as I would find it as likely that I’m being lied to by The New York Times as I am by Pravda. As the article concludes: “Aren’t you glad we have a community organizer in charge of the free world?” Well, tell the truth, aren’t you?

Educated ignorance

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This is about American foreign policy and foreign policy advisors but it is just as true about economics and economists.

Most of these smart young people really don’t know anything. Oh, don’t get me wrong, they had great SATs and went to top schools and have mastered the art of sounding smart, attaining admirable fluency in that unnatural dialect known as Beltway-speak, but as for any deep knowledge about any particular subject relating to how the world really works, that’s about as rare in this crowd as unicorns and Bigfoot. There should be no surprise that Chekists are winning handily these days.

That said, it’s important to note that the ignorance of reality found among our Bright Young Things in DC is hardly their own fault. It can be attributed to their deformed education, especially among those who have studied International Relations, memorizing Game Theory and related unreality when what they needed to be doing was studying languages and history and getting out of the Beltway more.

Experts in game theory, clueless about history and the actual dynamics of the real world. Everything comes back to first principles which are never checked against reality. It is astonishing just how impervious the American foreign policy establishment is to the events of the past few years in the same way that the economic establishment has been impervious to its own disasters of the past few years.

There is then the media who come from the same cohort of over-educated highly intelligent ignoramuses. This is from Rush Limbaugh where I’ve quoted only his first and last lines. You can go to the original to see what comes in between:

I think the mainstream media is pig-ignorant of practically every discipline except party discipline. . . . We talk about low-information voters. We’ve got low-information media, and they are not aware of what they don’t know. They are so arrogant about their all-knowingness that they can’t conceive that they don’t know anything — and, when they encounter it, they’re just flummoxed.

But really, there’s so much going wrong all at once that it’s hard to know either what the problem is or what anyone could do to fix it.

First link via Small Dead Animals

Some call it sleep

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Has it really come down to this. From an article titled, Why Europe Sleeps but is actually about how it is now in a coma:

It is not only cleanliness, but concision that is next to godliness. In theory, then, Twitter should promote near-godliness, for it encourages people to express their thoughts in few words. A good example of such admirable concision was the tweet from Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, reproduced in the electronic version of Le Monde on March 19, 2014: “On the one hand we cannot imagine delivering arms to Russia, on the other there is the reality of employment” (the French have a $1.7 billion deal to build a miniature aircraft carrier for the Russians). This will hardly have Russian president Vladimir Putin quaking in his shoes; on the contrary, it will set him laughing and reassure him that he can mock Western Europe to his heart’s content.

Putin has four things on his side, at least in the short-term. The first, of course, is military power. The second is his increasing control of the media and over public opinion in Russia. The third is that his policy appeals to nationalist passion which, apart from ethnic hatred, is probably the strongest political passion of all. The fourth is the weakness of his European opponents.

Obama’s psychiatric disorder

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It has become pretty clear that Obama is not all there, living in a fantasy world of his own. Here is the latest version:

For anyone who has observed Barack Obama over the years, it’s obvious that a fundamental part of his self-identity involves seeing himself, and having others see him, as pragmatic rather than ideological, reality-based, driven by reason instead of bias.

This has never actually been true. Mr. Obama is, in fact, unusually dogmatic, blind to counter-evidence, and mostly unable to adjust his views to the way things are. So when his worldview collides with reality, he often can’t adjust. He instead creates his own make believe world.

And so on and so forth but to what end? He is supported by the Democrats, the media and by those at the bottom of the income pile whose lives can never be made materially better by asking them to work for what they get.

Mr. Putin, meanwhile, is in the process of restoring the Russian empire. He is besting Mr. Obama at every turn, from arms control agreements to Crimea and Ukraine to Syria, Egypt, and Iran. Russia has established a major presence in the Middle East for the first time since the 1970s. Early in his presidency President Obama canceled a missile defense agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic–and got nothing in return from Putin. Our adversaries are emboldened; our allies are afraid. Confidence in America is collapsing.

Yet the president seems clueless to all this; his failures don’t seem to compute with him. Even Jimmy Carter eventually understood the errors of his ways and adjusted his dealings with the Soviet Union. Mr. Obama remains off in his own world.

In psychiatry, there’s a condition known as dissociative disorder. It’s considered to be a coping mechanism, when the person literally dissociates himself from a situation or experience too traumatic to integrate with his conscious self. A person escapes reality in ways that are unhealthy.

And not just him but all of those highly educated idiots who voted for him twice and support him still. Call them nuts if you like, but they are running America.

The law and Mr Steyn

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steyn monkey trial

Actually don’t click there but click here to assist Mark Steyn. But just how broken is the American justice system. This broken:

After a year and a half ensnared by poisonous fecal tendrils in the unpumped toxic septic tank of DC “justice”, I don’t think “broken” quite covers it. To any non-American, this system is utterly repulsive. In England, trial by jury replaced trial by ordeal. Somehow America has managed to turn trial by jury into a mere postscript to trial by ordeal. I think it ought to be possible to litigate a 270-word blog post in under 270 weeks. So let’s get on with it.

In the meantime, Steyn doesn’t think Michael Mann actually wants to go to court, but with a $30m countersuit in the way he will have no choice. Steyn will some day end up with a bit of that Nobel Prize loot Mann never actually won.

Stop laughing, this is serious

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susan rice at un

And this is some of the text that went with the picture:

There’s an amazing picture taken a few days ago at the United Nations.

Russia had just vetoed America’s diplomatic proposal for Ukraine. So Ambassador Samantha Power, the former Harvard professor appointed by Barack Obama, who is also a former Harvard grad himself, walked over to Russia’s ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, to give him a piece of her mind.

Churkin didn’t even stand up. He just looked at her. And his aides, standing behind him, laughed.

They weren’t laughing at the ironically named Ambassador Power. They were laughing at their good luck; that they had the good fortune to get into the invading business when a feckless man like Barack Obama was in charge of the free world.

Meanwhile, Russian forces storm Ukraine naval HQ in Crimea. Can’t really be much of an issue since so little attention is being paid to it. There’s perhaps not much you can do but to me the response from the West still looks like slow motion insanity. Next stop, Estonia?

UPDATE: Remember this quote and then watch the video below:

“One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch SportsCenter and argue about that,” Obama told The New York Times.

What you are watching is the President of the United States right this minute choosing his bracket, that is choosing which college team will win the NCAA Basketball tournament which is about to start.

Agree, disagree, or let’s discuss

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Hard work and in-depth analysis is not the Obama long suit. In fact, shallow, stupid, superficial and socialist seems more to the point. I mean, why go through all of those decision papers and do the hard yards when a snap decision off the top of the head will do just as well. From an article with the interesting title, How Barack Obama gets things done:

In early 2012, The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza obtained hundreds of pages of White House memos that offered an intimate look into the inner-workings of Obama’s team. Among the story’s nuggets: the president prefers to have “decision” memos delivered to him with three checkboxes at the bottom that read: “agree”, “disagree”, or “let’s discuss.”

But so long as he is keeping his eye on the ball, plugged in and keeping up with events, you can sleep well at night knowing your interests are in the best of hands. From the same article:

“One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch SportsCenter and argue about that,” Obama told The New York Times.

Feel better now? But who are the bigger morons, Obama or the people who voted for him twice?

And a bit more insight from Bret Stephens who has looked at this same article and sub-titles his own, We need a president who rarely thinks and never speaks about how he looks in jeans. OK, fine, we may have just that person beginning in January 2017 at the soonest.