Update II: Vote for Cooter Obama; Obama's Hillbilly Half-Brother

Barack Obama

Now, the colorful Cooter—introduced without the customary media bias in the article “Obama’s Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign”—is a guy I can get behind. Our friend Rob Stove–he sent the item—agrees. He writes: “If I had voting rights in the States, I’d vote for Cooter any day rather than either McCain or the Child”:

“Barack Obama’s once-commanding lead in the polls slipped to two points Monday, continuing a month-long slide that many credit to the recent appearance of the Democratic candidate’s heretofore unknown half-brother, Cooter Obama.

Long kept a family secret, the overalls-clad, straw-chewing Kentuckian first entered the public spotlight in July, when he drove his 1982 Ford flatbed pickup through the press corps at an Obama rally in order to inform his brother that he caught the skunk that had been living under his front porch. According to witnesses, Cooter’s skunk proceeded to spray Washington Post political reporter Michael D. Shear in the face.

Cooter Obama attempted to pay for damages to the Capitol lawn with homemade jerky.

“Sorry ’bout that, mister! Some tomater juice’ll take care of the stank,” Cooter said as his mortified younger brother led him off the stage. “Shoot, Barack, you didn’t tell me you was runnin’ for president!”

Since Cooter’s emergence on the national scene, the Obama campaign has downplayed the brothers’ relationship. A statement issued last week by Obama’s top adviser, David Axelrod, claimed that the two lived together only for a brief period in 1981, shortly before Barack left to attend Columbia University and Cooter had to drop out of chicken-killing school because an air conditioner fell on his head.

Nonetheless, political experts said Cooter’s increased visibility in recent weeks has hurt Obama’s polling among urban, upper-middle-class, non-straw-hat-wearing voters. The Obama camp has scrambled to control the damage caused by Cooter’s penchants for loudly practicing his banjo during Obama’s speeches, repeatedly referring to Barack by his childhood nickname, “Ol’ Jelly Legs,” and chasing his troublemaking pig, Mbogo, in the nude in the background of Obama’s CNN interview on the importance of education.

The problem came to a head last week, advisers said, when Cooter arrived unannounced at a $100-a-plate fundraiser, slipped past security, and proffered a jug of moonshine to the high-society donors, claiming it would “straighten their curlies.” In addition, dozens of would-be attendees at a Cedar Rapids, IA town-hall meeting Sunday were turned away at the door by the elder Obama, who was sitting at the entrance in a rocking chair and brandishing a double-barreled shotgun.

“What Sen. Obama’s half-brother meant to communicate was that he was pleased that the candidate’s message of change is fostering vigorous dialogue,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said following the incident. “In no way was his proposal to ‘fill y’all’s backsides with rock salt’ intended to be taken in any other way.”

In the past two weeks, Obama has lost support from such groups as PETA, which withdrew its endorsement when Cooter punched a swan in the face, claiming it was “one of them mean ones”; the Clean Energy Group, which protested Cooter’s recent attempt to fry a squirrel in a flaming 20-gallon barrel of diesel fuel; and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), whom Cooter mistook for an outhouse Monday and urinated on for 35 seconds.

“I thought we would be able to escape controversy by leaving the country for a week and visiting Iraq and Europe,” an unnamed source in the Obama camp told reporters. “Little did we know that Cooter would command just as much attention back home by getting drunk with the Russian ambassador, lighting off fireworks, and crashing Obama’s campaign limo into a creek in the Ozark Mountains.”

Despite the setbacks he has caused, Cooter has secured a small but devoted following, and has occasionally managed to reflect well on the campaign. At a speaking engagement to which Obama arrived two hours late, Cooter kept the crowd’s spirits up by breaking out a washtub string bass and a washboard and holding an impromptu hoedown.

Although his primary focus has been to support his brother, Cooter Obama said he is not without political aspirations of his own.

“Shoot, I’m helpin’ because I love my brother,” Cooter said. “Maybe if he gets elected he can make me Secretary of Moonshine. Course, that don’t mean I ain’t votin’ for the other fella. Ol’ Jelly Legs wants to take my guns away.”

NEWSFLASH: Cooter is alive and living in Kenya–barely. According to the Daily Telegraph, George Hussein Onyango Obama is the youngest of the presidential candidate’s half-brothers. He lives in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Mr Obama, 26, subsists on less than a dollar a month.

By the looks of his “three metre shack,” Brother Barrack and that Sister of Mercy Michelle have not sent a dime. Real charitable folks.

If not some cash, I bet you the American Cooter would send a dead chicken and a flask, at least, before Barrack would send anything.

Update II (August 23): It seems that Obama’s Kenyan half-brother, to his great credit, is a proud man, not a beggar. Note the condescending tone in which Obama spoke about George in his best-selling book. Clearly making a point of separating himself from his African tribe: “I have nothing in common with those people.” Maybe he doesn’t. As poor as George Obama is, he doesn’t feel the need for dependence–on government or on his rich relative. Yet Obama is a firm believer in the power of the hand-out.

Update II: Vote for Cooter Obama; Obama’s Hillbilly Half-Brother

Barack Obama

Now, the colorful Cooter—introduced without the customary media bias in the article “Obama’s Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign”—is a guy I can get behind. Our friend Rob Stove–he sent the item—agrees. He writes: “If I had voting rights in the States, I’d vote for Cooter any day rather than either McCain or the Child”:

“Barack Obama’s once-commanding lead in the polls slipped to two points Monday, continuing a month-long slide that many credit to the recent appearance of the Democratic candidate’s heretofore unknown half-brother, Cooter Obama.

Long kept a family secret, the overalls-clad, straw-chewing Kentuckian first entered the public spotlight in July, when he drove his 1982 Ford flatbed pickup through the press corps at an Obama rally in order to inform his brother that he caught the skunk that had been living under his front porch. According to witnesses, Cooter’s skunk proceeded to spray Washington Post political reporter Michael D. Shear in the face.

Cooter Obama attempted to pay for damages to the Capitol lawn with homemade jerky.

“Sorry ’bout that, mister! Some tomater juice’ll take care of the stank,” Cooter said as his mortified younger brother led him off the stage. “Shoot, Barack, you didn’t tell me you was runnin’ for president!”

Since Cooter’s emergence on the national scene, the Obama campaign has downplayed the brothers’ relationship. A statement issued last week by Obama’s top adviser, David Axelrod, claimed that the two lived together only for a brief period in 1981, shortly before Barack left to attend Columbia University and Cooter had to drop out of chicken-killing school because an air conditioner fell on his head.

Nonetheless, political experts said Cooter’s increased visibility in recent weeks has hurt Obama’s polling among urban, upper-middle-class, non-straw-hat-wearing voters. The Obama camp has scrambled to control the damage caused by Cooter’s penchants for loudly practicing his banjo during Obama’s speeches, repeatedly referring to Barack by his childhood nickname, “Ol’ Jelly Legs,” and chasing his troublemaking pig, Mbogo, in the nude in the background of Obama’s CNN interview on the importance of education.

The problem came to a head last week, advisers said, when Cooter arrived unannounced at a $100-a-plate fundraiser, slipped past security, and proffered a jug of moonshine to the high-society donors, claiming it would “straighten their curlies.” In addition, dozens of would-be attendees at a Cedar Rapids, IA town-hall meeting Sunday were turned away at the door by the elder Obama, who was sitting at the entrance in a rocking chair and brandishing a double-barreled shotgun.

“What Sen. Obama’s half-brother meant to communicate was that he was pleased that the candidate’s message of change is fostering vigorous dialogue,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said following the incident. “In no way was his proposal to ‘fill y’all’s backsides with rock salt’ intended to be taken in any other way.”

In the past two weeks, Obama has lost support from such groups as PETA, which withdrew its endorsement when Cooter punched a swan in the face, claiming it was “one of them mean ones”; the Clean Energy Group, which protested Cooter’s recent attempt to fry a squirrel in a flaming 20-gallon barrel of diesel fuel; and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), whom Cooter mistook for an outhouse Monday and urinated on for 35 seconds.

“I thought we would be able to escape controversy by leaving the country for a week and visiting Iraq and Europe,” an unnamed source in the Obama camp told reporters. “Little did we know that Cooter would command just as much attention back home by getting drunk with the Russian ambassador, lighting off fireworks, and crashing Obama’s campaign limo into a creek in the Ozark Mountains.”

Despite the setbacks he has caused, Cooter has secured a small but devoted following, and has occasionally managed to reflect well on the campaign. At a speaking engagement to which Obama arrived two hours late, Cooter kept the crowd’s spirits up by breaking out a washtub string bass and a washboard and holding an impromptu hoedown.

Although his primary focus has been to support his brother, Cooter Obama said he is not without political aspirations of his own.

“Shoot, I’m helpin’ because I love my brother,” Cooter said. “Maybe if he gets elected he can make me Secretary of Moonshine. Course, that don’t mean I ain’t votin’ for the other fella. Ol’ Jelly Legs wants to take my guns away.”

NEWSFLASH: Cooter is alive and living in Kenya–barely. According to the Daily Telegraph, George Hussein Onyango Obama is the youngest of the presidential candidate’s half-brothers. He lives in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Mr Obama, 26, subsists on less than a dollar a month.

By the looks of his “three metre shack,” Brother Barrack and that Sister of Mercy Michelle have not sent a dime. Real charitable folks.

If not some cash, I bet you the American Cooter would send a dead chicken and a flask, at least, before Barrack would send anything.

Update II (August 23): It seems that Obama’s Kenyan half-brother, to his great credit, is a proud man, not a beggar. Note the condescending tone in which Obama spoke about George in his best-selling book. Clearly making a point of separating himself from his African tribe: “I have nothing in common with those people.” Maybe he doesn’t. As poor as George Obama is, he doesn’t feel the need for dependence–on government or on his rich relative. Yet Obama is a firm believer in the power of the hand-out.

Energy Independence Idiocy

Economy, Energy, Free Markets

I’ve spoken frequently on BAB about the folly of “Energy Independence Isolationism,” including about comparative advantage:

“The idea of trade is that everyone does what he is best and most efficient at, and exchanges the products of that labor for stuff others do better and cheaper. To aim for self-sufficiency is to aim for bankruptcy.”

John Stossel expounds on the concept in “The Idiocy of Energy Independence”:

“It’s amazing how ideas with no merit become popular merely because they sound good.
Most every politician and pundit says ‘energy independence’ is a great idea. Presidents have promised it for 35 years. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were self-sufficient, protected from high prices, supply disruptions and political machinations?
The hitch is that even if the United States were energy independent, it would be protected from none of those things. To think otherwise is to misunderstand basic economics and the global marketplace.
To be for ‘energy independence’ is to be against trade. But trade makes us as safe. Crop destruction from this summer’s floods in the Midwest should remind us of the folly of depending only on ourselves. Achieving “energy independence” would expose us to unnecessary risks — such as storms that knock out oil refineries or droughts that create corn — and ethanol — shortages.
Trade also saves us money. ‘We import energy for a reason,’ says the Cato Institute’s energy expert, Jerry Taylor, ‘It’s cheaper than producing it here at home. A governmental war on energy imports will, by definition, raise energy prices‘. Anyway, a ‘domestic energy only’ policy (call it ‘Drain America First’?) is a fantasy.”

Read the rest here.

Update II: POT. KETTLE. BLACK.

Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Russia

Easily one of the most mind-boggling spectacles in the Georgia/Russia conflict is that of Bush accusing Russia of “bullying and intimidation”; of Bush admonishing Russia about its unacceptable “way of conducting foreign policy in the 21st Century”; of Bush expressing “grave concern” about Russia’s “disproportionate response”; and of Bush condemning the violation of the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation.

Bush may be describing Russia but he is also describing what he did to Iraq. Another of Bush’s Freudian projections and hypocrisies all rolled into one is to charge Russia with pursuing “a policy that promises only confrontation and isolation.”

Since the war in Georgia is one neocons and neoliberals can get behind, both factions–and most mindless media–have chosen to ignore this Bush burlesque.

Update I (August 16): More “pot-kettle-black” Bushisms, delivered to Russia:

“The days of satellite states and spheres of influence are behind us.”

What’s Iraq? Afghanistan? Pakistan? Some of the reasons given by American policy wonks for the U.S.’s lingering in these blighted spots are the fear of other players getting the upper hand in these regions.

What is that if not “sphere-of-influence” plotting and planning?

Perhaps I just don’t have the necessary partisan gene, or blind sport, required to ignore these pious, specious homilies.

Update II (August 20): Americans fall for these easy storylines politicians and pundits spin, rather than look at how we conduct ourselves in the world and the repercussions this has.
Why is it that the US can increase its spheres of influence with attendant invasions and military presence in countries across the word, yet when another super power acts comparably, our “analysts” apply different yardsticks to its conduct?

In the context of the Georgia/Russia conflict, who among big-time pundits is able to consider America’s national interests? Who is able to offer a perspective that doesn’t, atavistically, galvanize American opinion around imagined enemies, but rather, looks at the crisis from a bilateral perspective?

None other than Pat Buchanan. This from Buchanan’s latest, “Who Started Cold War II?”:

“Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.
If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.
The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.
Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.
And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship?”

Read the entire column.

***

(August 15): “Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them,” writes Pat Buchanan in a sharp analysis of the conflict in Georgia, among which are some pesky facts mass media has concealed:

“Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.

Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili’s army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours.

Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.”