Category Archives: Politics

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Republican

Barack Obama, Ethics, Government, Law, Morality, Politics, Republicans

The Joe Sestak “scandal” is nothing but garden-variety politics routinely practiced by both parties. Yet as Rome burns, such quid pro quo is what is consuming the Republican Party’s bobbleheads. The signal dishonor of which Obama operatives stand accused, via Sam Stein, is offering a job to “Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn) in exchange for him not entering the Pennsylvania Senate primary.” The act has “seasoned political observers, historians, and lawyers responding with veritable yawns”:

American presidential history is littered with quid pro quos, implicit and explicit secret job offers, and backroom deals, so much so that the Sestak offer may be more the norm than the exception to it.
“It is completely unexceptional,” said Dr. Russell Riley, associate professor and chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia. “I read some place today that this is evidently illegal, which was shocking news to me. I don’t know what the statutes are that would bear on this… it just doesn’t seem to me to particularly rise to the level of being newsworthy in the first place and the fact that it’s spun out into a scandal has been surprising.”
George Edwards, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University, says: “There is no question whatsoever that presidents have often offered people positions to encourage them not to do something or make it awkward for them to do it. Presidents have also offered people back-ups if they ran for an office and lost. All this is old news historically.”

The complete column is HERE.

Note, this is not to say the shenanigans of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and President Bill Clinton were legal. They could very well be illegal. They are certainly morally dubious. But politicians are by definition immoral. By blowing the scandal du jour out of proportion, an unspeakably crooked class is made to sweat the small stuff only.

I guess Republicans have a stake in perpetuating this state-of-affairs.

Brown Bastardgate

Barack Obama, Britain, Debt, Elections, IMMIGRATION, Morality, Politics

“He [Gordon Brown] was smiling when he spoke to me but he was thinking that! What else is he thinking when he smiles…” ~Gillian Duffy.

Remember when Obama was exposed in all his contempt for small-town America, depicting potential voters as clinging to their guns, god and other “bigotry”?

At least Obama was generalizing about a perceived prototype, and not badmouthing a flesh-and-blood human being; a constituent just encountered.

Trust Britain’s Gordon Brown with that bit of cruel, callous conduct.

People seem surprised that Brown would harbor contempt for the typical Briton revealed in the person of Gillian Duffy. After hearing Mrs. Duffy’s worries over deficits and immigration, the pompous, two-faced ponce retreated to his limousine, and mic on, proceeded to berate this perfectly decent lady, calling her “horrible,” “old woman,” and “bigoted.”

Poor woman; how hurt and shocked she looked when a reporter first confronted her with Brown’s wicked words.

When the real boor in this electioneering farce came calling, asking her to forgive him on camera, Mrs. Duffy refused to play along. She forgave the bastard as a kindly person would, but refused Gordon’s demand for a public display of affection.

A reminder of BHO’s disdain:

Mr Obama had, before an audience in the liberal bastion of San Francisco, tried to explain his trouble winning over white, working-class voters, the fabled “Reagan Democrats” who will be crucial in the general election.
He said: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Updated: Toyoda Vs. Torquemada

Business, Fascism, Political Economy, Politics, Regulation, Republicans, Technology

The excerpt is from “Toyoda Vs. Torquemada,” my latest WND.COM column:

“Mr. Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota, could have achieved the brevity much-admired in his culture (and mine) had he responded thus to the invitation to appear before the congressional committee investigating the recall of eight million of his vehicles:

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s invitation to Mr. Toyoda: ‘Dear Mr. Toyoda, we will be sitting between 11:00 AM and 5:00PM on February the 24th.’

Toyoda’s putative Reply: ‘Akio Toyoda likewise.’

To complete the one-two punch, Mr. Toyoda’s second in command, Yoshimi Inaba, president of Toyota Motors North America, ought to have sent each of his would-be Democrat and Republican inquisitors a short note, in large typeface, preferably with pop-up pictures.

In it, he ought to have reminded them that his company employs over 170,000 of their countrymen; has invested billions in capitalizing its factories, and is philanthropic at a time when Americans are desperate for charity.

… Mention the unseemly specter of a government—the owner de jure of General Motors and Chrysler—strong-arming the competition, his own Free-Market Motors.

A well-worded barb about the embarrassing, timely FBI raid on a Toyota auto parts operation in Detroit would have been apropos as well. Tell them, Mr. Toyoda, that you are doing business in a country where the competition is backed by the power of the police.

In closing, Toyoda might have reminded the overweening House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that his bosses are Toyota’s customers, and that it is to them alone that he’d be answering.

Back on terra firma, … ”

Read the complete column, “Toyoda Vs. Torquemada.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update (Feb. 27): By the by, this household has never contemplated buying an American car. Gutless gas guzzlers, mostly. If the US made cars comparable in performance and economy to those of Toyota or VW—then sure. American cars are really ugly too, except for the Corvette and mustang. The first is a good car, except that it has some old-engine style oddity that requires yearly tweaking, or so I am told. The Mustang is completely gutless compared to this pocket rocket.

Update II: Akio Toyoda Should Have Sat It Out … At Home

Business, Constitution, Free Markets, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Politics, Regulation, Socialism, Technology, War

Help me understand what hitherto no cable commentator has, and I include the formidable Judge Andrew Napolitano: Under what law or warrant does Congress get to summons Toyota executives for an inquisition? I’m curious.

So too is the “U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeking documents related to unintended acceleration as well as to Toyota’s disclosure policies and practices,” says this newspaper.

Judge Napoiltano of FoxNews didn’t touch on the legal basis for Congress running interference with Toyota—and even seemed to think the first should put the second on notice.

Shouldn’t the matter of the car manufacturer’s malfunctioning accelerators fall to the courts and those harmed? Shouldn’t the injured parties hammer out a settlement in private or in the courts, rather than before our elected buffoons in Congress?

Personally, if I see one more weak, sobbing American begging for The Regulator and the burdened nation to feel her pain; I’ll explode.

(“Shame on you,” Rhonda Smith, of Sevierville, Tenn., said at a congressional hearing.)

What a nation of spineless crybabies. Get a lawyer, join a class-action lawsuit. Go to Haiti. Cry in private. But spare us your imagined near-death experience as your Lexus got ahead of you.

Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor Corp., ought to have reminded the American political ponces of how many of their countrymen he employs and promised politely to fix his company’s problems.

Moreover, Toyoda could have achieved the brevity much-admired in his culture had he borrowed from that clever commie (and rapier sharp wit) Bernard Shaw, who too was forced to decline an invitation from “a collector of social scalps”:

The House Oversight committee’s invitation to Mr. Toyoda: “We will be sitting between four and six o’clock.”

Toyoda: “Akio Toyoda likewise.”

Update I (Feb. 24): Reader “ryan” echoes my thought exactly. Sean and I were discussing the point “ryan” makes. Only in America, were dumbness is elevated to an art, would a vehicle with an ignition key become a self-propelled lethal weapon.

I drive a 2006 Volkswagen GTI, with a high-tech 200-horsepower, 2.0-liter turbocharged engine. The “pocket rocket” has a spectacularly smooth six-speed manual transmission. (I won’t drive an automatic, never have; never will.) If the gas pedal took on a life of its own, I’d automatically—without even thinking—indicate, take the car off the road, put it in neutral and switch off the ignition.

If you can’t do this small thing, ryan is right: you are the lethal weapon, not the vehicle.

As for the comment postulating that Toyota might be in the business of hoodwinking the American buyer: I remind those who profess their love of freedom and markets that such utterances mean that the Demopublican Regulators are winning.

Toyota would not be in business for as long as it has, producing quality cars, if this was its purpose. The car manufacturer relies for its bread and butter on pleasing consumers, not politicians. Profit? Since when is that anything but a blessing? Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Without them there is nothing—no incentive to produce and invent and no signal as to when production must be accelerated or decelerated.

Well-taken too are Robert’s observations about the Japanese. Having just traveled to a mystical city named Nara, to do high-tech, Sean would second that. Modernity has not changed this homogeneous nation’s genteel nature.

“Like, what can I get you guys” is not a refrain you’ll hear in a Japanese restaurant. Sean was taken aback by the gentility and graciousness of the Japanese ladies. Sure, the youth sports all the technological and sartorial trappings; but they respect their elders. This makes for a more refined atmosphere. After all, generational demarcations are necessary to ordered liberty.

If you do the polite thing and bow slightly—no need to touch your toes like this guy does—as you enter an establishment, faces light up and the courtesy is more than returned.

I do believe that the US, a multicultural toilet, is working hard to impress upon the Japanese the need to open up their country to immigration.

Update II: To Haym (and others): The comment (hereunder) is completely off-topic and won’t be further pursued on this post. But I suppose Japanese warriors are not supposed to be as ruthless as their American enemy—also the only power to have ever, in the history of mankind, stooped to nuke innocent civilians. When will Americans apply equal thinking to all sides?!