Category Archives: Bush

Update II: Brownie Points For Barack

Barack Obama, Bush, Europe, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Islam, Military, Neoconservatism, War

Yes, I award them when warranted.

• Obama has lifted the “Pentagon’s 18-year ban on media covering the return of fallen U.S. service members” to the Dover air force base in Delaware.
Excellent, honest move. I applaud Obama for taking it. In this way, Americans can see what death in the service of America’s recreational wars looks like.
As a child in Israel, I remember funerals for the fallen being state affairs. The entire nation would honor the fallen soldiers and be made to confront the agony of death. No wonder Israeli Jews have no stomach for wars.

• Recalibrating the relationship with Russia: another very good move, although, given how Bush-like Barack is—in other words, neocon-compatible—it’s hard to envision him taking a fundamentally different stand on Chechnya or Georgia, for example. Still, restarting the relationship with Russia is in itself a start.

• All in all, making nice with “Old Europe”—which is how the stupid, reckless Bush administration dismissed Europe (including its correct objection to the Iraqi invasion)—is a good thing. Sure, neoconservative war harpies get hot for over heated rhetoric against any and all. They’ll have to get their kicks playing video war games. As will they have to get through their thick skulls that this country is no longer a super power. It’s neither sexy nor smart to smite the world when you’re … broke and bankrupt.

No matter how Republicans spin it, Obama’s overtures to Islam and the Muslim world do not present any change from Imam Bush’s religion-of-peace preaching.

• It’s premature to rejoice over the cuts to some military spending announced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates today. Touted as a balancing of “want and need,” and intended to gear “Pentagon buying plans to smaller, lower-tech battlefields the military is facing now, and expects in coming years”—Gates’ proposed $534 billion budget for the coming year is up from $513 billion for 2009.

This is really nothing but a reshuffle.

Update I (April 7): Obama gets credit on Cuba too. This from MyWay News:

President Barack Obama will soon move to ease travel and financial restrictions on Cuba as his administration conducts a broad review of its policy toward the communist nation, a senior American official said Monday.

“We can expect some relaxation, some changes in terms of the restrictions on family remittances and family travel,” said Jeffrey Davidow, the White House adviser for the upcoming Summit of the Americas, which Obama will attend.

Davidow said Monday that the changes – which officials say would allow unlimited visits to Cuba by American families and remove caps on money transfers – are intended not only as a moral step for the estimated 1.5 million Americans who have relatives in Cuba, but also to foster change there.

Good going. Trade—not democracy or sanctions—is also the best antidote to war. The more economically intertwined countries are, the less likely they are to quarrel. Boycott Cuba less and barter with it more and it’s bound to tone down its belligerence and transform for the better.

Update II (April 8): Neocon Newt Gingrich is going gaga, but here again Obama’s “refusal to take military action against nations like North Korea and Iran” is the right thing to do.

Newt the nut told Fox News’s Gretta von Susteren that Obama needed to learn from his trip. And what is it that Newt believes the lessons ought to be? Obama must follow the neocons’ policy prescriptions and consider nations that do not do what we want them to do as hostile. From the fact that Europe didn’t indulge Obama, he needs to learn what Newt and the neocons preach: there is no basis for diplomacy, unless the world bows to America.

Only America has national interests; other nations have a problem aligning theirs with America’s.

Future Of The Dollar Teeters

Barack Obama, Bush, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation

Trashed By “W,” and his “worthy,” wastrel successor, the once-solid dollar may soon be dumped as the world’s reserve in favor of a basket of fiat currencies.

Reuters:

“The U.S. deficit is so huge. This is why all countries, particularly East Asia, are concerned because we hold a lot of these assets. What happens if the U.S. dollar falls 40 percent? Many central bankers will be losing huge amounts of money.”

Yahoo Finance:

“Central banks hold their reserves in a variety of currencies and gold, but the dollar has dominated as the most convincing store of value — though its rate has wavered in recent years as the United States ran up huge twin budget and external deficits.”

Tough love indeed.

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.