Monthly Archives: June 2010

UPDATE III: Can General (Stanley) McCrock (Chris’s Episode)

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Military, Neoconservatism, Republicans, War

BHO ought to accept General Stanley McChrystal’s resignation. He must. If he doesn’t, the president will be in even more trouble than he already is.

The Telegraph:

The US commander in Afghanistan was ordered to fly back from Kabul for a carpeting after he and his aides were quoted in “Rolling Stone” magazine mocking the president and senior officials. … Although the worst barbs came from the lips of aides, they indicated that the general did not respect Mr Obama. One was quoted as saying Mr Obama appeared “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the military and “didn’t seem very engaged” when he first met Gen McChrystal.

What is it about the American memory? It’s non-existent.

What is it about the Neocons-cum-Republicans? They have no core principles other than to line up behind their man and against Obama. They cheered this McChrystal chap when, in October of 2009, he sojourned to London to lobby for more troops.

At the time I wrote that, “It’s got to be obvious that the general knows nothing about the chain of command. He lacks discipline or a code of conduct. McChrystal’s a lobbyist in fatigues, guarding his fiefdom.”

As is my habit—it hasn’t rubbed off on our valued blogger James Huggins, who carries the torch for GOP fraudsters—I reminded my readers at the time that “Gen. David Petraeus conducted himself similarly. Although he didn’t lobby abroad for his cause, Petraeus assumed a decidedly political role. However, back then, Republicans and their Bush boy were on board with Petraeus’ push for more war.

The difference between Petraeus and McChrystal is that the first was successful in establishing the illusion of a successful surge in Iraq—quite a feat given that the Democrats were not yet in power. So useless is this McChrystal that he has not even been able to win the PR war, and persuade the ruling Obamamaniacs that his war wank is working.

It goes without saying that both O’Reilly and Hannity have already dictated received Republican opinion: BHO must forgive McChrystal and let this loser win their war. (And BHO’s war)

UPDATE I: “I think it’s clear that the article in which he and his team appeared showed a poor — showed poor judgment,” the president said in his first comments on the matter, surrounded by members of his Cabinet at the close of their meeting. “But I also want to make sure that I talk to him directly before I make any final decisions.”

UPDATE II (June 23): “The Runaway General: Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.”

That’s the title of the Rolling Stone article. What would a crappy Stone feature be without the expletives? So raw and real. The cussing is all the “writer’s” repertoire; he’s not even parroting the army men, whom you’d expect to cuss. Clearly a requirement of a job with RS. Imbibe from the masters: “Fuck this; fuck that, be shit-faced, piss-off.”

McChrystal is molding the military into a cross between the “Green Berets” and an “armed Peace Corps”—killing tempered by nation building—with a view to carving out a permanent place for himself over there, and taking his showcase war on the road, when the gig is up.

The guy is as evil as he looks. Not as stupid as McMussolini, who finished 894th out of 899 at the Naval Academy and lost five jets, but a serious underachiever, “ranking 298 out of a class of 855.”

This man McChrystal is a riot of fuck-ups to use Rolling Stone lingo. Hey, this is easy. I think I’ve got it, Enry Iggins.

UPDATE III (June 23): CHRIS HAS AN EPISODE. This is the second momentous time Chris Matthews felt an-Obama induced thrill up his leg. Although Chris spends his days in sexual delirium over BHO, like in a boy who reaches maturity, the thrill manifests only on very special occasions. Emasculated left-liberals don’t often allow themselves to revel in the masculine—it represents oppression. But when an all-round good guy like the president shows a bit of that manly magic, “girlie boys” get giddy.

Obama sacking Stanley: now that was a good day for Chris, who managed to disguise arousal with folderol about the act instantiating the genius of the Constitution; the beauty of our country’s landscape, blah, blah.

Here’s the wreck himself:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

UPDATED: Where Have All The Oil Rigs Gone? (Too-bin The Tit)

Barack Obama, Business, Economy, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Political Economy

Under what authority does this president make it illegal for business to do business? Under the same grant of power that allows him to force individuals to buy a product, presumably. The result of BHO’s six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is that companies are beginning to depart. After all, it costs millions to sit idle. Wait a sec, perhpas the next step the encroaching state can take is to forbid the companies to leave. Ludwig von Mises warned that the road to socializing the means of production was paved with interventionism.

Yahoo News:

“Already, three rigs have left or are in the process of leaving the Gulf of Mexico,” Chett Chiasson, executive director of the port commission for the town of Port Fourchon, which services 90 percent of deepwater activity in the Gulf, told AFP. “If this moratorium goes for six months, these rig operators and these oil companies will have no choice but to go somewhere else,” with a devastating impact on jobs and the economy of Louisiana and the rest of the United States…”

WND reports that the scary James Carville “told CNN’s John King, ‘This president needs to tell BP, ‘I’m your daddy, I’m in charge. You’re going to do what we say.'”

Carville has tapped into a dominant sentiment among Americans—unless the networks are interviewing an unrepresentative minority.

To explain why he wanted money and lots of if from BP, one such mundane mind told one of the networks, “We are the parent; PB the child. We want to punish the child but not to make him leave the house.”

The other reason he gave: we live day-to-day here. I guess this will be a valid basis upon which to join the claims process. Right there you see what the problem is with a Chicago-style shake down, as opposed the legal claims process, where at least some evidence must be presented.

The “goose in folklore laid a golden egg a day until its greedy owner killed it in an attempt to get all the gold at once.”

UPDATE (June 22): TOO-BIN THE TIT (tit as in a “despicable or unpleasant person). Last night, the Alpha Female of CNN, Anderson Cooper, called on his legal analyst, Jeffrey Too-bin, to confirm what is known to every left-liberal with an opinion on how the law should work, but no knowledge of how it works (that’s tit Too-bin).

Too-bin was to predict whether New Orleans District Court Judge Martin Feldman would leave or lift “the Obama administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.”

Tit was ponderous. He shook his curly pelt and indicated that BHO’s decree was so reasonable he could not envisage its overturn. And, in any case, the Powers That Be had wide discretion such as was seldom challenged by the Courts. It was all good, promised Too-bin. I made a mental note to revisit the tit when Feldman rendered the right ruling.

Contra the Too-bin, my instinct (located in my head) was that Judge Martin Feldman would indeed do what he did:

Issue “a temporary injunction Tuesday, lifting the moratorium and accusing [Interior Secretary Ken] Salazar of ‘arbitrary and capricious’ behavior that will cause ‘irreparable harm’ to 33 other deepwater oil rigs that the government unfairly assumes are unsound, despite the fact that all of them have been reinspected since the BP blowout on May 28.” [Washington Examiner]

Here is the Cooper/Too-bin tet`-a-tete´. Coming from an analyst, the Us vs. Them language is unbelievable:

Sorting it out tonight: CNN’s senior legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, who joins us from New York.

Jeff, what the companies bringing this suit — what do they have to prove to get the moratorium overturned?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SR. LEGAL ANALYST: They have to prove that the action by the Obama administration was arbitrary and capricious, it was simply an irrational act to do this. That’s a very tough standard to meet but that’s what they have — that’s what they’re trying to show.

COOPER: And Bobby Jindal, the governor here, he filed a brief along with the plaintiffs, saying the moratorium basically will turn an environmental disaster into an economic catastrophe. Those were his words. That’s really an economic argument he’s making.

TOOBIN: That’s right. It’s important to remember that the judge has a very narrow function in this case. He doesn’t have to decide whether it’s a good idea to have this moratorium or not. Judge Feldman’s (ph) job only is to decide whether the Obama administration was legally within its rights in establishing this moratorium. And it is legally within its rights as long as it acts in a rational way. That’s a very broad standard.

The economic arguments that Bobby Jindal made, you know, 4,000 jobs lost directly, 10,000 jobs lost indirectly. Those are arguments to be made to the Obama administration saying, don’t do this, it’s a bad idea. I don’t see how a court is going to take those arguments and say, well, that makes this beyond the pale legally.

COOPER: Yes. Essentially you’re saying the judge isn’t ruling on whether these rigs are safe or not, or whether that even matters. All he’s ruling on is the state of mind that the president had when he made this decision?

TOOBIN: Well, it’s not so much the state of mind — about whether there is a reasonable justification, whether the act of establishing this moratorium is a reasonable response. And when you have an economic — an environmental catastrophe like we’ve seen, shutting down these rigs for six months does not seem to me — and I suspect will not seem to the judge — as an irrational response.

Now, the companies — and Bobby Jindal points out, that a lot of these rigs that are being shut down, have passed their safety inspections. So why shut them down? That means it’s an irrational act to shut them down.

The government responds to that by saying, look, the Deepwater Horizon, it passed its inspections. That shows that the safety inspections aren’t good enough. We need the six months to fix the system. That’s an argument I think that’s going to be very tough to respond to.

COOPER: So, you think the judge is going to leave the moratorium in place?

TOOBIN: I think it’s very likely. When it comes to these sorts decisions where an administrative agency has a lot of discretion, judges are very reluctant to step in at the last minute and stop it, because they figure the agency has the expertise. The law gives the agency a certain amount of discretion. It would take an extreme irrational act to get a judge to stop it, and a six-month moratorium — and remember, it’s only six months, it’s not forever — I think is not something that the judge — that most judges would view as irrational.

COOPER: All right. Jeff Toobin, I appreciate it.

[SNIP]

We’ve gone from Too-bin to too-good. Yes!

UPDATE III: Beck Revised (Who Eats Nails? Spencer Or Mercer?)

Conservatism, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, History, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Race, Republicans

I’ve followed Glenn Beck closely and have concluded that overall, flaws and all, he is a force for liberty. One such example was when “Beck Broke From The Pack” to denounce perpetual war as the health of the state. Let us not forget how polluted are the waters in which conservatives swim. Glenn has changed that somewhat. Not for nothing does Sean Hannity keep his distance from Beck.

“Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot” discusses some mindless Beck missteps, such as mistaking “Geert Wilders, an influential Dutch parliamentarian working against the spread of Islam in his country, as a man of the fascist, far-right.” Unforgivable.

IMMIGRATION IGNORANCE:

Glenn also vastly overestimates the virtues of the “American People,” and underestimates the forces (state-managed mass immigration) that are dissolving what remains of that people and busily electing another. (Glenn: Once the country is 50 percent Third World, you might as well be talking to the hand.)

Nevertheless, I revised the “blithering idiot” verdict I passed some years back.

Richard Spencer has not. Glenn “going-to-school-with-each-new-show” has earned the contempt of the editor of AltRight.com.

The funny thing is that I second Richard’s analysis, as I have made the same points myself about Beck’s ridiculous fetishes (stop waxing fat about “Faith, Hope, and Charity”; build on life, liberty, and property, I wrote).

Beck’s (Harry) Jaffarsonian civil rights preoccupation and racial revisionism—sad to say, there were no black Founding Fathers!—are contemptible. But, what do you know?, I have been more forgiving of Glenn than Richard Spencer. Having been characterized as someone who eats nails for breakfast, I’m pleased when along comes a young man who is more uncompromising than myself, even if this guarantees he will not be playing footsie with this conservative tootsie (“intellectual windsock”) on Sean Hannity’s Great American Panel, a forum of and for the Idiocracy.

Read Richard’s superb analysis, “The Glenn Beck Deception: Inside the PC Lunatic Fringe.”

UPDATED I (June 22): I have been extremely careful to separate Beck from James Huggins’ Republican “freedom fighters” (see comment hereunder). Without much success. If you are convinced by Huggins’ GOP loyalism—and Mr. H has stuck to his guns, insisting these hacks stand for liberty—your learning curve is, well, wobbly.

UPDATE II: Here’s the “‘Mercer Eats Nails For Breakfast’ (Not)” accusation:

I’ve been called THE WORD WARRIOR…but I would run for my life if I saw Ilana Mercer coming my way! Does she eat nails for breakfast?— Anthony St. John

UPDATE III: Who Eat Nails for Breakfast, Spencer Or Mercer? Probably both, but Spencer wins out this time, I’m pleased to say. In case you think (sorry Huggs) that every tough-talking toots on Hannity’s “Great American Panel” can eat nails or swallow flames: tough, here, implies an ability to reason, and an uncompromising fealty to first principles. These must draw on fact and on history. To reason in the arid arena of pure thought is not what Richard (or myself, for that matter) does. Most libertarians, however, do so err.

Canada Rising

Canada, Conservatism, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Political Economy

The Left will tell you it’s “regulation” that accounts for Canada’s strong banking system and solid economic growth. Nonsense on stilts; conservative financial practices account for the fact that Canada’s “economy grew at a 6.1 percent annual rate in the first three months of this year. The housing market is hot and three-quarters of the 400,000 jobs lost during the recession have been recovered.” (AP)

Canadian banks “aren’t as leveraged as their U.S. or European peers.” And I imagine that they did not aim to make home owners of those who cannot afford homes, and give credit to those who are not creditworthy.

The other day, CBC front man, Peter Mansbridge, reported approvingly on a Fed interest rate hike intended to prevent the distortions and the overextension that our artificially low interest rates are perpetuating. On American TV you’d have someone come on to give the Keynesian line to the contrary; government must stimulate; make up for sluggish demand, keep rates low. The CBC, as left as they come, did not present the “another side” to the interest rate hike story—-and rightly so.

There is only one correct economics, and it’s not the Keynesian kind.