Category Archives: Politics – international

The Radosh-Horowitz riddle

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Suppose Diana West had written the worst book ever on Roosevelt, Stalin and the Cold War. She hasn’t – she’s crafted one of the best books on this issue ever written – but suppose she had written one of the worst. Suppose the facts didn’t stack up. Suppose there were large gaps in her logic and in the analysis. Suppose it was a pot boiler badly crafted and convincing to no one. Suppose she had done that.

Well so what if she had. Throw it out there for others to deal with. Let it be refuted by those on the left if they have the nerve and the knowledge to do it. Let them unpick her errors and mistakes. Let them take the time and the trouble. If she can establish a case, even on really flimsy grounds, that Roosevelt’s White House was riddled with Soviet agents and that America’s strategy during World War II was shaped in major ways to suit the Soviet Union and Stalin, well, where’s the problem with that? It is an idea worth pursuing and even if the evidence had been thin, it’s not for people on our side to knock it over. There is nothing to be gained by doing the left’s work for them. Put it out and let it be debated.

And the fact is that there is no value whatsoever on the conservative side of politics for anyone on the right to attack West’s book, whether it is good, bad or mediocre. This is politics at its most dangerous, not some useless academic tearoom debate. This really matters if we are to understand the world we live in. Who cares whether there are some obscure errors in what she wrote that no one can see unless they have spent thirty years in an archive. How moronic and politically stupid do you have to be to challenge such a book, even if it is badly done. Whose interests are being served, and exactly why are they being served by seeking some pristine purity and perfection that no one else has ever achieved or could be expected to.

If people are such idiots that they actually think that the interests of the conservative side of politics are served by ridiculously high standards of scholarship that no one can meet, then they should get out of the political arena and sit in their archive and stay in the tearoom because they are useless to any kind of political debate.

The only interests that are served in attacking Diana West’s book are the interests of the left. No other. If that is not 100% obvious then these people are political fools of the highest order. And if they do understand that, who are they really and where are we then?

Not unrelated

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obama sub par

Two stories on Drudge this morning about the way of world at the moment. I don’t have to tell you who “his” is:

SHOCK POLL: 71% of supporters ‘regret’ voting for his reelection…

And then this:

Soros bets big on market crash…

We are, as always, in uncharted waters but somehow this feels different, with the captain on the bridge a full fledged incompetent who not only does not know how to avoid the rocks, but actually continuously seems to be guiding the US, and therefore all of us in the West, towards them.

As good an explanation as any and better than most

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From Breitbart News. Definitely plausible since it fits the facts and nothing else seems to:

Democratic pollster Pat Caddell thinks so, and radio host Rush Limbaugh said it’s plausible. One historian even told Breitbart News the modern GOP resembles a “crime family.”

“The establishment Republicans want the IRS to go after the Tea Parties,” Caddell told Fox News on Sunday.

“When you have 71 percent who want an investigation, 64 percent who believe that it is a sign of corruption including nearly a majority of Democrats,” Caddell said, “the reason is the establishment Republicans want the IRS to go after the Tea Parties. Got it?”

Caddell said the GOP establishment is happy to have the IRS take the Tea Party down a notch.

“Because the Tea Parties are an outside threat to their power hold and I’m telling you the lobbying consulting class of the Republican party and Republican leadership who have been attacking the Tea Parties, and alienating them, they want the IRS to do this,” he said.

On Monday, Rush Limbaugh addressed Caddell’s charges against establishment Republicans in his nationally syndicated program.

“That is a serious charge,” Limbaugh said. “That is a very, very serious charge, that the Republican establishment is aligned with Obama and is okay with Obama using the IRS to investigate the Tea Party. But it’s believable, because we know the Republican establishment, the political class in Washington, is spreading the word that they are not gonna criticize Hillary, it isn’t gonna happen, and we shouldn’t, either. It shouldn’t happen.”

Reagan biographer Craig Shirley told Breitbart News on Monday that he agrees with Limbaugh that Caddell’s charges are credible.”The Washington Republican party is no longer a political party in the way we understand political parties,” Shirley said. “It more resembles a crime family than a movement of ideas.”

Out of his depth in every way known to politics

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In how many ways is the American President out of his depth? In fact, are there any ways in which he is not out of his depth? Turns out, according to the White House, that the stimulus was a big success:

President Barack Obama marked the five-year anniversary of a controversial economic stimulus plan by releasing a report on Monday saying that government spending averted a second Great Depression, setting off a new round of partisan debate about the decision.

Obama had been in office only a month when he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a $787 billion stimulus that Democratic majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives passed over the objections of Republicans.

Many Americans remain doubtful about how helpful the stimulus was for an economy that still struggles to recover from a deep recession that took hold in 2008.

The White House, eager to lay to rest those doubts, issued a five-year report that said the stimulus generated an average of 1.6 million jobs a year for four years through the end of 2012. (Report: http://r.reuters.com/xat86v)

The stimulus by itself raised the level of gross domestic product by between 2 percent and 3 percent from late 2009 through mid-2011, said the report, issued by the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Jason Furman, chairman of the council, said the Recovery Act had a “substantial positive impact on the economy, helped to avert a second Great Depression, and made targeted investments that will pay dividends long after the act has fully phased out.”

Does anyone at all believe this other than those who are professionally compelled to because of political affiliation? Whatever needed to be done to calm financial markets was done even before George Bush left office. What happened after belongs to Obama. And given the monetary policy that has come since, there is no reason to think the US will leave its present troubles before an even bigger crunch than the one in 2008-09.

The socialist nightmare – Venezuelan edition

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This is about the collapse of the Venezuelan economy post-Chavez. It has seemingly taken place almost out of nowhere. Things limped along for a longish while and then, almost overnight, fell apart.

The problem in being unable to recognise what’s going on is due in large part to our economic notions now so firmly based on “flows” rather than “stocks”. We look at how much we are able to buy and not at the underlying productive apparatus. A bridge collapses and the effect on GDP is either nothing at all or perhaps even leads to an increase in output as more effort is required to get from place to place while there is activity in re-building the bridge. That’s the flow side of the story. The stock side, however, is to note that the actual productive apparatus of the economy has been impaired. It cannot produce as much as it could the day before the collapse.

What happens in a socialist economy like Venezuela, or the US at the moment, is that there is a time during which the capital is being run down and there is little recognition that there is major structural damage taking place. Then, in what seems almost inexplicable, the entire economy falls apart all at once. This is from an article on the collapse of the Venezuelan economy.

Welcome to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, a country with the fifth largest oil reserves in the world and absolutely broke. It’s a remarkable achievement for Chavismo. A just-wow moment. Socialism is useless at everything except for smashing things in record time. There it excels. It’s hard to imagine that as late as the 1980s Venezuela had the highest standard of living in Latin America. But then in 1960 Detroit was the richest city in the world in per capita income. Now it’s well … Detroit. . . .

The genius of the Left — Chavez’s for example — is that it destroys things from the inside out. They pervert religion, collapse the mores, abolish the family, shred the constitution and gradually expropriate the property. The differences from one day to the next are apparently imperceptible, but it is harder and harder to go back until finally there is no reversal of ‘progressive gains’ possible at all. The public is finally faced with the stark choice between chaos or authoritarianism. And most people will chose the Boss over the Mob.

The capital, both physical and social, is eaten away and then completely breaks down. Building is hard and requires patience. Destruction from the inside by socialists looks great for a while while the wealth is spread around. But when it falls, not only does it crumble, but no one knows how to put it together again, least of all the socialists who promise everything but deliver nothing but misery in the name of equity and justice.

Bill Ayers authored Obama’s autobiography

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That Barack Obama is not the author of his own autobiography should at least be common knowledge to anyone who comes to this site. I have discussed this myself in a previous post and I will repeat it here since when I mentioned writing Dreams from my Father as part of Bill Ayer’s cv, there seemed to be some dissent. His life story as told by himself was Obama’s only qualification for office so it should be understood that he had and still has absolutely no qualifications for president whatsoever. If you would like to hear it from the person who picked up this fraud, you can go here. What follows below is my own previous post repeated.

Only if you depend on the New York Times for your news would you be unaware that Barack Obama did not write his Dreams From My Father. It was written by Bill Ayers, that “someone in the neighbourhood”, that ex-Weatherman terrorist, who actually knows how to stitch three coherent sentences together on his own. That Dreams was literally the only qualification Obama had for the job of President, it should be clear just how hopelessly off centre the American political system has become. The prime responsibility for this lies with the American media who are more like Bill Ayers in their thoughts than they are like someone of the actual mainstream of American society.

Another book has just been published by one David Maraniss, of The Washington Post of all things, that make it almost certain that Dreams is a concoction of fantasies and lies. The book, Barack Obama: The Story, “documents the many ways — some very small, a few large — in which Mr. Obama’s youthfully constructed narrative appears to be contradicted by the people and events in his life.” It is a scandal that ought to be gigantic but will, like much else about the President, be suppressed. Still, in being by who it is and being as prominent as it is, the book is chipping away at the President’s credibility. And there is more coming out every day, drip by drip.

What did surprise me when the first pre-publication revelation from the book was made about Obama’s Australian girlfriend, was that no one to my knowledge has ever bothered to interview her to ask her for some additional detail. Especially since Obama’s girlfriend in Dreams is anyway a “composite”, it would, you think, have actually been interesting to know some true details about Obama, especially since the fictional account of this composite girlfriend is actually a description of Bill Ayer’s own true love, Diana Oughton, who blew herself up while putting a bomb together back in the 1970s.

Luckily our region is so peaceful and there are no threats of any kind anywhere

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Just something to help you sleep peacefully at night, from a post titled, “These Rumors of a Nine-Carrier Navy? Over the Long Term, They Could Be Off by Nine:

News reports indicate the U.S. Navy could eliminate one of its 10 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers starting in 2015. And according to one prominent naval writer, that single cut should be the beginning of a slow process of completely axing the giant ships from the American fleet.

“The nation must plan a graceful transition that stops building carriers, plans a path for those already built to see them through their service life and creates new means of operational effectiveness in the future,” Capt. Henry Hendrix, an historian and strategist, wrote in a 2013 study for the Center for a New American Security think tank.

The main reason is simple: money. Unless budgets increase, carriers somehow get cheaper or the Pentagon makes deep cuts elsewhere, the Navy cannot afford to maintain today’s 10-flattop force—to say nothing of the 11 carriers it’s required by law to have over the long term.

Hence the recent news that the Navy might propose an early retirement for the 22-year-old flattop USS George Washington—subject to the president’s approval and Congress’ appropriation, of course. And whether or not the sailing branch decommissions George Washington, it’s already planning on keeping just two carriers deployed at a time, down from three or four.

[From Small Dead Animals.]