Category Archives: Bush

Big-Time Beggars

America, Barack Obama, Bush, China, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation

The political class yaks about the fiction of our dependency on foreign oil markets, exploded in “The Goods On Gas.”

We are to believe that, while gas trading is oh-so dangerous to America’s national security, accruing debt and selling it to China—that’s just dandy.
China, reports Bloomberg.com, is worried that its “Treasury holdings [will] be eroded by “reckless policies.”

I wonder whose?

BAB readers will know that “China, the U.S. government’s largest creditor, is ‘worried’ about its holdings of Treasuries and wants assurances that the investment is safe.”

“We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States,” Premier Wen Jiabao said at a press briefing in Beijing today. “I request the U.S. maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets.”

Honor? Come again!

“White House National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers, asked about Wen’s remarks, said overseas ‘confidence’ in Treasuries would be hurt without the administration’s steps to end the economy’s decline. President Barack Obama is relying on China to sustain buying of Treasuries amid record amounts of debt sales to fund a $787 billion stimulus package.”

China is enabling Barack as it did Bush. The only reason it doesn’t put an end to the US’s spending addiction is that it stands to lose a lot if it does:

“‘China won’t sell the U.S. debt now as that will only drive down Treasury prices, hurting not only the U.S. but also the value of its own investments,’ said Shen Jianguang, a Hong Kong- based economist at China International Capital Corp., an investment bank partly owned by Morgan Stanley”

“‘China’s purchases of American debt have been one of the few bolts keeping the wheels on the global economy,’ said Phil Deans, a professor of international affairs at Temple University in Tokyo. ‘If China stops buying, where does Obama’s borrowing to fund his stimulus come from?’”

This reminds me how brain dead are the Sinophobes. Beggars can’t be choosy, and they most certainly can’t afford to be as arrogant as the US is.

Update II: Addicted To That Rush

Barack Obama, Bush, Conservatism, Drug War, Music, Republicans, War on Drugs

“The title of this column comes not from Rush Limbaugh’s unfortunate addiction to prescription drugs, but from the eponymous ‘Mr. Big’ hit. (They don’t make musicians like Paul Gilbert and Billy Sheehan any longer, but I digress.) Nevertheless it alludes to another of Rush’s missed opportunities: Speaking against a war into which he was involuntarily drafted and almost destroyed.”

“Rush rightly denounced the State’s failed war on poverty. It failed not because fighting poverty is not a noble cause, but because, given the perverse incentives it entrenches, government is incapable of winning such a war. The same economic and bureaucratic perversions make another of the State’s stalemated wars equally unwinnable and ruinous: the War on Drugs.”

“Lysander Spooner, the great, American 19th-century theorist of liberty, defined vices as those acts ‘by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which a man harms the person or property of another.’ A conservative worth his salt should know the difference; and should know that government has no business treating vices as crimes.”

“If for harming himself a man forfeits his freedom, then he is not free at all. …”

The excerpt is from my new WND column, “Addicted To That Rush.” It brings together, somehow, the Steele-Limbaugh spat, the Bush/Barack death wish for America, the progressive rock group “Mr. Big,” and much more.

Update I (March 6): Sigh. Over at The View From The Right, Larry Auster and readers discuss (rather obsessively) the one-word change I made in quoting Auster in “Addicted To That Rush.”

Auster had written:

“…their criticisms of Obama will have the stink of rank partisanship.”

I changed that to:

“…their criticisms of Obama will have the [odor] of rank partisanship.”

Let me indulge Auster’s readers: First, the change was introduced quite appropriately, encased thus []. Next, there was no deep deception, just an editorial choice. The reader Leonard D. got the issue of redundancy right, writing:

“My guess as to what Mercer did not like about ‘the stink of rank partisanship’ is that it is redundant, ‘rank’ being almost synonymous with “stinky.”

However, and not withstanding Leonard D.’s valid point, I’d have expected traditionalists to get that “stink” is rather crass and certainly very earthy. A good word, no doubt, but not the most refined one when used by a woman. Again: an honest word, for sure, but I don’t like “stink” because of its connotations (bodily fluids, etc., say no more).

Traditionalists, generally hip to the vulgarization of society, should have been hip to this preference. I simply chose a daintier, less vulgar word.

There is a time and a place for everything, and I have indeed used strong language to describe elected officials on the blog (but not in columns).

Update II: The spouse, also the best guitarist I know, tells me that Paul Gilbert located to Japan, where there is a vast audience for maestros of guitar and progressive rock. It figures: the Japanese also have aggregate higher IQs than the local Coldplay fans, to whom complexity and competence are cuss words.

Torturing The 'Torture' Issue

Bush, Crime, Democrats, Iraq, War, WMD

Ever wonder why the Democrats and their media lapdogs never shut-up about the issue of torture, when Bush’s decision to wage an unjust, illegal war ought to be the focus of their Ire? The matter of torture is, after all, subsumed within the broader category of an unjust war. Moreover, one can make the case for torture in desperate, dire situations. (I’m not making the case, I’m saying that one can attempt to justify incidents of torture: you were not thinking clearly, you were desperate to avert another disaster, you wanted to save hostages; you worried you’d be blamed if you didn’t extract crucial information.) But how on earth do you justify lugging an army across the ocean to occupy a third-world country that is no danger to you and has not threatened you? You don’t, you can’t.

Democrats are nearly as culpable as Republicans on the matter of the war on Iraq. So they stick with their limited, safe mandate of torture. MSNBC’s Maddow and Olbermann, and their constitutional scholar, are thus careful to skirt the need to prosecute Bush and his bandits for invading Iraq. Instead, they stick to waterboarding.

CNN confirms that “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has called for a commission on torture allegations”:

The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman called Wednesday for the establishment of a nonpartisan “commission of inquiry” to investigate allegations of wrongdoing against former Bush administration officials in their prosecution of the war on terrorism.

Nothing “did more to damage America’s place in the world than the revelation that our great nation stretched the law and the bounds of executive power to authorize torture and cruel treatment,” Sen. Patrick Leahy said at the start of a committee hearing.

American “detention policies and practices from Guantanamo Bay [Cuba] and Abu Ghraib [Iraq] have seriously eroded fundamental American principles of the rule of law,” he added.

Leahy, D-Vermont, called for the “truth commission” to have a “targeted mandate” focusing on issues of national security and executive power. He said it should look specifically at allegations of “questionable interrogation techniques,” “extraordinary rendition” and the “executive override of laws.”

He added that the commission should have the power to issue subpoenas and offer immunity to witnesses “in order to get to the whole truth.”

Leahy refused to rule out of the possibility of prosecutions for perjury committed during the commission’s hearings.

Torturing The ‘Torture’ Issue (I)

Bush, Crime, Democrats, Iraq, War, WMD

Ever wonder why the Democrats and their media lapdogs never shut-up about the issue of torture, when Bush’s decision to wage an unjust, illegal war ought to be the focus of their Ire? The matter of torture is, after all, subsumed within the broader category of an unjust war. Moreover, one can make the case for torture in desperate, dire situations. (I’m not making the case, I’m saying that one can attempt to justify incidents of torture: you were not thinking clearly, you were desperate to avert another disaster, you wanted to save hostages; you worried you’d be blamed if you didn’t extract crucial information.) But how on earth do you justify lugging an army across the ocean to occupy a third-world country that is no danger to you and has not threatened you? You don’t, you can’t.

Democrats are nearly as culpable as Republicans on the matter of the war on Iraq. So they stick with their limited, safe mandate of torture. MSNBC’s Maddow and Olbermann, and their constitutional scholar, are thus careful to skirt the need to prosecute Bush and his bandits for invading Iraq. Instead, they stick to waterboarding.

CNN confirms that “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has called for a commission on torture allegations”:

The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman called Wednesday for the establishment of a nonpartisan “commission of inquiry” to investigate allegations of wrongdoing against former Bush administration officials in their prosecution of the war on terrorism.

Nothing “did more to damage America’s place in the world than the revelation that our great nation stretched the law and the bounds of executive power to authorize torture and cruel treatment,” Sen. Patrick Leahy said at the start of a committee hearing.

American “detention policies and practices from Guantanamo Bay [Cuba] and Abu Ghraib [Iraq] have seriously eroded fundamental American principles of the rule of law,” he added.

Leahy, D-Vermont, called for the “truth commission” to have a “targeted mandate” focusing on issues of national security and executive power. He said it should look specifically at allegations of “questionable interrogation techniques,” “extraordinary rendition” and the “executive override of laws.”

He added that the commission should have the power to issue subpoenas and offer immunity to witnesses “in order to get to the whole truth.”

Leahy refused to rule out of the possibility of prosecutions for perjury committed during the commission’s hearings.