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Oh, wait . . . that's from an alternate universe

Apparently there's some magazine out there called Time . . . forgive me, I haven't read comic books since I started grade school . . . that chose Barack Hussein Obama as their Man of the Year.

The reason:? Because he won re-election with over 7 percent unemployment—something no one has done since FDR!

Obviously that says a lot more about the stupidity of voters than it does about the brilliance of The Amateur.

What an excellent cartoon

Hillary passed out and bumped her head, and now she can't testify about the Benghazi debacle? When did the FDA ban using the smell test?

Read this article by Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison.

It was one of the most memorable images from the 2008 presidential campaign . . . The ad featured a red telephone ringing urgently at 3 am in the White House. The voiceover for this political ad assured us that Hillary Clinton would be able to answer that telephone, that she was someone "tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world." The Red Telephone ad is almost unbearably painful to listen to today.

On September 11, 2012, that red telephone did ring . . . and the response in the White House, in the State Department, was: "The number you have reached is not a working number..."

Jonah Goldberg tells us that the liberal obsession with race is growing old.

It's like a metastasizing cancer of delusion . . . To watch MSNBC is to think the hosts see themselves as the official newsletter of the Underground Railroad.

Sure, there are racists in the Republican Party. (There are some in the Democratic Party, too.) And if you define racism as disagreeing with the Congressional Black Caucus or Barack Obama, the GOP is racist to the bone.

Victor Davis Hanson deals with the same theme, talking about the new racial derangement syndrome.

There is a growing danger in this latest round of racial tribalism. Stirring up the pot for short-term political gain in a multiracial society is abjectly insane. If the new racialism grows unchecked, it will eventually lead to cycles of backlash and counter-backlash -- and some day to something like the Balkans or Rwanda.

Sadly, I've been around long enough to witness news reports of many shootings. The aftermath always follows the same pattern. At some point, usually about three milliseconds after the first empty shell casing hits the deck, the liberals start talking about taking away guns.

This is what I was talking about in my last post . . . which, if you're reading this, is my next post. Yesterday I had a very pleasant conversation with someone who thought we needed to clamp down on guns in America. He was sincere in his desire to solve the problem, and he was interested in my point of view. We finished the conversation having not changed each other's mind and having not questioned each other's character.

Contrast that to the juveniles on that comedy network MSNBC. Their take is that anyone who owns guns is evil and all guns should be confiscated. Again, that is what I was talking about. When people starting saying I'm evil, I take umbrage at that. Then I'm likely to say nasty things about the people that say that, and pretty quick we're in a fight.

Let's not do that, people. Let's have a talk, let's try to figure out the root causes of this and try to understand where everyone's coming from. Let's not let people—on either side—who aren't sincere make us start disliking each other.

That's why I was careful to talk about sincere people in my last post. Those people I will listen to. Those people I will respect.

When you're dealing with people who aren't sincere—people who have a hidden agenda, you give no quarter. You don't act like a Republican, who, as you recall, is always anxious to be run over by liberals and who gets fooled every single time by their feints of sincerity.

If I had more time this would be shorter.

I'm trying to say that we shouldn't be fighting about this right now, but the liberals are desecrating the moment and we have to make sure it's clear who is forcing this fight. We can't act like Republicans here. Republicans try to take the high road. I guess that's admirable, but where has it ever gotten us? The democrats are always trying to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. Their tendency to point fingers and cry and scream "It's his fault!" is childish. It's despicable behavior that we don't want to stoop to. It's tacky and unseemly, but it works. It works every single time. And we seem unable to point out what they're doing.

Maybe we need to take a lesson from the other side. Pick your metaphor: it's a battle, it's a sporting event, it's some kind of competition where each side is trying to win and in order to win the other side has to lose. Whether it should be that way is another discussion, but that's the way it is. And when you're in that situation and your strategy isn't working, maybe you need to examine what you're doing.

Maybe it's time that we spend some energy making sure people know who is to blame. But we have to be careful. We've got to remember we're new at this. We're stupid when it comes to combatting evil people. We have to do it right so they don't turn it around on us.

But what we cannot do what we always have done . . .

Consarn it all to blasted tarnation! This is not coming out right . . .

There is going to be a fight. Right now should not be the time. Right now we want to grieve, we don't want to fight. We don't want to think about the horror or talk about whose fault this is.

But the liberals aren't going to let that happen.

There is going to be a fight and it's going to get nasty and ugly. And when it does we have to make sure people know who's to blame for it.

Here's a story I made up, completely out of my own head, without reference to anyone that I know or have heard about, just to illustrate my creative genius.

Let's say you have a (fictitious) ex-husband who is evil. He never let the kids have pets while you were married, but after you're divorced you let the kids get a cat. It's a bother to take care of, but the kids love it and you figure that need is filled.

Then one day, when the (fictitious) ex has the kids, he lets them get a puppy. Doesn't ask you, just shows up to drop the kids off with the new puppy. You tell him they can't have it, he has to take it back, but he just gets in the car and splits. He's laughing like a hyena as he drives away, while his kids stand in the driveway sobbing.

All the kids know is that Daddy got them a puppy, but Mommy wouldn't let them keep it.

That's what the Republicans face. How do you make the children understand who is really to blame for what happened?

It's so astonishingly sad. I don't want to say anything about it. It seems like . . . I don't know, it seems like people feel like talking about it can somehow take the edge off the horror.

It doesn't make sense. It will never make sense. There's nothing anyone can say, but we're desperate to find something that will give it meaning.

And a lot of the talk comes from that place deep inside everyone that's screaming "How do we prevent this from ever happening again?"

Wanna hear a confession? I want to find 27 bad guys and kill them.

You can't kill the guy that did it. Some sense of justice inside you feels ripped off for that. But killing him after he's committed this unspeakable horror doesn't fix anything. And he's not the last bad guy.

So something inside my Department of Justice wants to find 27 bad guys and kill them.

That's my instinct for desperate measures for desperate times, but it's not my job. The fact that I would never follow through on those fleeting, artless impulses goes to the heart of this matter. Behaving how we should and not how we want is what makes us humans. And not doing that is what makes the monster who did this be something else.

But beneath the horror and the shock and the panic, everyone wants to figure out how to fix this; to prevent it from ever happening again. We have different views about how to do that.

I really hope that we don't let those different views make us dislike each other

You know where I stand on the second amendment, but I can understand the sincere frustration of the other side. They are wrong. They are exactly wrong, but a lot of them are as sincere as I am in wanting to fix the sickness that we see.

Obviously I have no use for people--from either side--who use these tragedies to pontificate. You sometimes get the sense that people relish tragedy when it backs up their position. Those people are just evil.

But I really hope that sincere people can respect each other's earnestness to fix the problem, and not allow a monster to cause us to dislike each other over our understanding of the methods to use.

You know the story on me-- I'm not one of those who wrings his hands and asks "Can't we all just get along?" No. We can't and we shouldn't. We argue and we disagree because we're free to do that.

I usually like divisiveness--things that make it clear which side you are on.

People might say that Bush divided the country. Well, if he did that's not a bad thing. It made people show their true colors. If Bush divided the country, what has Obama done? Same thing times 100. And I view that as his greatest contribution to America. After watching Obama for four years it's pretty hard to be ambivalent about what he is and what he's doing.

I like the clarity that divisiveness brings.

But when it comes to something as serious as protecting our children, let's not scorn those who disagree with our methods; not if they are as sincere as we are about solving the problem. If our methods are sound we should be able to sell them without resorting to derision.

I've told you that about the right number of people are dying on this planet. The problem is that it's the wrong people. Most everyone feels that way, but it's not our job to decide who or do anything about it. It's not that frustrating; it's just the way it is.

But somebody figured out something they could do with the concept. They made a TV show about it.

Apparently there's a show about a sociopathic serial killer who only kills bad guys. He knows he can't control his urge to kill, so he decides he's going to take out the garbage.

I've said it before: If you don't hate weeds you can't credibly claim to love flowers.

Among all the great advice that I don't follow is this gem: Never speak unless you can improve upon the silence.

I haven't talked about the shooting in Connecticut. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to hear about it, I don't want to read about it, I don't want to think about it.

But when you grow up you have to do things you don't want to do.

Fortunately, I have friends and family that are grown up. One of them offered these views that I'm posting.

This is not about gun control. It is about SELF control. So many of the recent killings have been committed by young men in their 20s. Why? Because they consider it an option. Not only an option but their first option. How would any gun control law in the entire world have stopped Adam Lanza from stealing his brother's ID, his mother's car and LEGALLY PURCHASED AND REGISTERED GUNS and shooting children?

I have watched my stepdaughter play video games in front of her young daughters where the entire goal is to shoot as many people as she can. The family watches violent wrestling shows and yell yeah as people on TV are covered with blood and carried off unconscious and people cheer at the carnage.

The younger generation is being shown in video games, movies and through social media that it is acceptable to make fun of others in a public arena. Empathy is a thing of the past. Public ridicule and public retaliation have been made acceptable in our society. It is now considered a good idea to air your dirty laundry, to make your grievances public, to share others faults with the world and laugh when others join in to help you publicly humiliate someone.

Over the 4th of July here [where I live] a single father of 2 children under 5 asked a neighbor in the apartment next door to keep it down. The neighbor's response? He came over and shot and killed the man in front of his children.

A young man drove from Connecticut to Casper and killed his father's girlfriend with a knife then drove to the college and killed his father with a crossbow in front of the class he was teaching. This was 3 weeks ago. Gun control would not have saved anyone in this situation.

What needs to happen is for people to start seeing others as people again. This is not a video game, you can't hit the restart button and regenerate anything. Revenge is so easy. Hate seems to be the only road people even venture down now. If people would return to the days when it was once again fashionable to be good and evil didn't draw so much attention, there would be no need for all this debate.

---

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Dennis Prager echoed some of those sentiments. He said that this isn't about "going crazy," it's about "going evil." He said that Freud has reduced human behavior down to a psychological--mental--thing, and we've bought into it. When you do something like this monster did, it's not your mind that's broken, it's your conscience. It's not your thinking that's broken--you have to be able to think to shoot and reload. It's your feeling. He said it much better than I am, but he nailed it. What's broken is conscience.

Mental illness (this is me speaking now) is not mental, it's spiritual. I'm not talking religion here, I'm talking your soul--that part of you that's not physical and it's not intellectual, but it's just as real. That part of you that's aware of yourself; the part that loves, that worries, that cares . . . you know what I'm talking about.

Mental illnesses are typically maladies of the soul, not of the mind. Think about it. Depression is your soul hurting. The mind can be involved, but usually what's involved is confusion, like mixed signals from what you think you know and understand.

But that part of you that's actually hurting is your soul.

I heard a good insight on Obama's "plight."

He wrings his hands and whines and cries about the mess he inherited. But he didn’t "inherit" anything. We didn't force the job on him or even ask him to take it. He begged us to let him do it and spent all of his energy and millions of dollars getting himself in the situation he's whining about.

Read this commentary about Susan Rice withdrawing herself from consideration for Secretary of State. C'mon, just read it.

The idea is that she would've (if only) been the greatest Secretary of State the world has ever known, and would've brought about Peace in our Time, but she's such a patriot that she just can't see dragging the country through the mess the evil Republicans would make of the nomination process. She wrings her hands that this once great nation has come to this—that people actually question someone who lies to their face. Oh, the humanity!

Do not fall for it! This is the same old thing—they are telling anyone who dares examine their behavior "you are not allowed to speak!"

It's the same old other thing, too. Nothing is sacred to these people. If they gave one microgiveacrap about Civil Discourse they would not use it as a disposable surgical gauze to clean up after themselves.

These people are despicable. Just revolting. These are the kind of people that sacrifice their own children to get what they want in a divorce.

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We went to the Christmas performance of the Bar J Wranglers the other night. I've seen their show before and always enjoy it. But I always get a kick out of the performance technique you see at live concerts.

"We just found out we have a special friend in the audience tonight. Randolph, come on up here on stage with us."
Randolph comes up on the stage.
"Would you be willing to do a song with us? Anything special you want to perform tonight?"
You know, I was thinking, we used to do that one song, you remember? That one about the saddle?
"Yeah, yeah, that . . . that saddle song."
You remember that?
"I do. That was a great song."
Well, do you think you guys could keep up if I played a little of that?
"We sure will try."
Okay, let's try it in G major, follow my chord changes.

Everyone knows the shtick. They've been practicing that thing together for weeks. But we like to play along.

You know how this game is played. The papers all report that Susan Rice has asked the President to take her out of consideration for Secretary of State.

Bullcrap.

The President has sent his little emissaries to Susan Rice to tell her "You're done, have a nice life." They work out the whole script. "You get to say: 'For the good of my country I am asking that you not consider me.' The President says 'Are you quite sure? I really wish you would reconsider,' and you're going to say 'Yes. Yes, I'm sorry, but as a patriot I can't drag the country through this.' And just in case you want to deviate from the script, look at these surveillance pictures of your kids playing in the park."

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The great thing about the "if only" is that nobody can disprove it. I can prove that Obama is a failure as a President, but you can't prove that Romney wouldn't have brought Peace in the middle east, and a pot roast in every pan, and a cure for baldness.

Instructions on things with guarantees is one example of other places where you see this technique used. "We will replace your engine if it fails within 200,000 miles after pouring in this magic additive." When you go to collect they ask if you followed the directions precisely and poured it in at midnight at one of the three authorized garages in the country using a silver funnel with Mario Andretti's autograph on it.

That's the purpose of most of the instructions you read—not to teach you how to effectively use the product, but to provide the supplier with a way to blame you when it's not effective.

A close personal friend of mine works in a company where the official policy is that you must wear the company clothing with the logo, and not communicate in a language other than English. If you fail to follow these policies "You may disqualify yourself from raises or promotions."

A guy that works there told me "So they can say that's why they didn't give you the raise they were never going to give you."

As an enlightened Leany on Life reader you already picked up on the relationship between the political "if only" and the political maneuvering to shift the blame to the Republicans. This is what I call the Hussein Hustle, in honor of Saddam Hussein offering George Bush "peace" terms that were ridiculous for the sole purpose of being able to say Bush rejected "peace" after he did the obvious thing and laughed at him.

When you have an "if only," the next step is to find someone to blame for preventing that amazingly incredible utopian ideal that could have been. The democrats are maneuvering the Republicans into rejecting an unacceptable offer to shift the blame when the inevitable occurs. So now our Hussein Hustle can be in honor of two tin-pot dictators named Hussein.

That's why Ann Coulter and others are recommending that Republicans disassociate themselves with this. Whatever is going to happen will be a disaster because the democrats are involved. But the democrats are frantic to get Republicans fingerprints on it. It doesn't take much (especially for democrats) to shift the entire blame to someone else.

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But only 'cause I didn't post it the week after when I thought of it.

Here's what drives me crazy. All of these really smart people who got it wrong before the election are now telling us what we did wrong in the election according to their analysis?

Let's say you have a pinched nerve in your back. It hurts so bad you can't stand it, so you're always icing it to try to get a little relief. You don't know how you'd survive if it weren't for the ice.

What if the ice is preventing it from healing?

That's FDR. "Omigosh what would we do without FDR?" People were running to him to get relief, but what he was doing to provide relief was preventing healing. The great depression lasted a decade because of the policies that he had addicted people to.

And it's a game democrats continue to play. They perpetuate racial inequality, poverty, disrespect of women, etc., but sell themselves as the only thing standing between those issues and catastrophe.

Somewhere there is a psychologist with the training and background to figure out why I spend a minute posting to this blog. I don't have anything insightful to say. I'm too busy to waste my time on this, so by the time I finally get my ideas posted they are ridiculously out of date (What do you mean you didn't get that "pet rock" reference?)

Is it venting? Am I seeking validation? Am I just OCD—which, by the way . . . oh crap here comes another post . . . remember the days when being meticulous was considered a good thing?

Oh, well. It's like women and color TV. You don't have to understand them to love them.

No idea how that relates, but it was a great line I heard when I was about 11, and it's as relevant as anything else I post.

So, voici all the stuff I haven't been posting since the apocal . . . uh, the election.

One weekend last October I was working on the kids' treehouse. I didn't get it finished on Saturday. Sunday after church I climbed up there, you know, just to look around. Just to see what still needed to be done. I measured a few things, I grabbed the cordless drill and drilled then screwed in place a couple of boards. I rough-fit a few more, but I was just piddling.

The power saw was right there. The boards needed to be cut, and the saw was right there. I could clearly see what I needed to do to finish the job. But I couldn't do it. It was Sunday and I have religious convictions against doing that sort of work on Sunday.

(yeah, okay, honestly against drilling and screwing in boards, too, but hey, the drill was cordless)

I had a maddening feeling of frustration. I knew what needed to be done, but I was constrained. I could measure this board, move that one over there, think about where this other one could go . . . I could inefficiently do some tasks that gave the appearance I was moving closer to finishing, but I was religiously restricted from just getting the job done.

It occurred to me that the conflict I felt is what Barack Obama would feel if he were capable of understanding his religious convictions.

The economy can be fixed—it could've been fixed. But Barack Obama is religiously—philosophically and ideologically—restrained from doing what needs to be done to fix it. He is inhibited by his ideology from implementing policy that benefits business, frees up investment, prevents union graft and corruption, restricts crony capitalism and allows freedom of working. He is religiously opposed to Capitalism.

Obama cannot fix the economy. Barack Obama can never fix the economy, even if he actually wanted to. It's not his fault—he's just being true to his religion.

That thought occurred to me last October. It took that long for it to work through the cosmos and out of the pen of a cartoonist today.

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If I tell you I know a guy who weighs 225 lbs. you probably get an image of a fat guy. But you figure you're pretty clever, and you don't want to jump to conclusions, so you ask "Well, how tall is he?" I tell you he's just shy of six feet and you think, 'Yeah, fat guy.'

You're asking the wrong question.

How much you weigh is just part of the equation—the important part is how much of that weight is fat and how much is muscle. 225 is a very healthy weight for a man with 8% body fat; it's a very unhealthy weight for a guy packing 30% body fat.

So Clinton says "Yeah, so when I was President the economy was booming, we had budget surpluses. When Bush was President the economy crashed."

Anybody who buys that bilge figures an anorexic person is a fit person.

Clinton "presided" over a good economy because he sucked so bad that the Republicans took over Congress in 1994. The economy didn't crash under Bush—in spite of 9/11—until the democrats took over Congress.

I'd make a chart that showed that, but if you are capable of understanding the concept you already do.

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This is like your phone. You're trying to text and it's not sending. So you check the phone signal. Full bars. Wi-fi—full signal.

Maybe there are other factors that you aren't seeing . . .

Three factors combined to cause the catastrophe on November 6th.

The train didn't crash, but on that date the pin came out that will allow the rail to work free that will cause the American Special to derail in a flaming heap.

I just wanted to come forward as an eyewitness, so that when the fire marshals of history sift through the smoldering ashes of this once great nation they will know that one person identified the accelerant and the ignition point.

First factor was all the analysis you're hearing. All the things the Republicans did wrong—the Hispanic vote, the turnout, the concentrating in the wrong electoral places, and the things the democrats did right in the campaign. Do we need to moderate more? No, we need to sell conservatism harder . . . yah de ya dah . . . all the analyzing and data that you are hearing about.

That's the only factor you're hearing about.

The second we can't talk about. You know there was unprecedented voter fraud. Chicago Barry and Axelrod the Handler are never going to leave something as important as their dictatorship up to the will of the people.

Do you honestly believe that 2,500,00 less people showed up to vote for Romney, a great candidate, than did for McCain, a lackluster candidate?Eespecially after four years of seeing the reality of Barack Obama as President?

Give me a freaking break.

If you understand the electoral system you don't have to move many votes around to make a huge difference. If you win the critical states by a tiny margin you still get a huge amount of electoral votes. If JFK wasn't above that, what the hell makes you think that someone as slimy as Obama and Axelrod wouldn't stoop to it?

They did it so blatantly in the case of Al Franken. They pulled votes out of thin air right in our faces, said "What are you going to do about it?" and continued to do it until they had enough to send the man who lost the election to the senate. They proved that they could and we could do nothing about it.

In addition to stealing and manufacturing votes, part of the voter fraud was defrauding the voters. Hiding information on unemployment, the economy, the Benghazi, scandals, "flexibility," etc., until after the election. Not that any of that that made one bit of difference on the kind of person that would vote for Obama.

Finally, the main reason. The rules have changed.

I told you this when those Colorado professors predicted a landslide for Romney based on all the factors that cause people to vote one way or the other. Well, how people voted and where the votes were allotted were two different things, but maybe they needn't have gone to the trouble.

The factors that cause people to vote one way or another were not in play in this election.

That was the intangible factor that we may have understood but couldn't address. Barack Obama was the hip candidate. The people that vote for a celebrity like him couldn't care less about fiscal issues, foreign policy, legislative agendas—all that boring crap. They could not care less about anything. They voted for the celebrity.

All the rules have changed. Best you not forget that.

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I'm not the only one that understands it. Right after the election Dennis Miller had Major Garrett on, going over the analysis and the data. That's interesting, and it's important to understand. I'm not saying don't look at it at all. But you're losing the forest in the trees if you think the answer is in there.

So Garrett went over all the data (and it was actually quite enlightening) then a couple of his callers explained the underlying reasons:

John in New Hampshire: I think everyone's idea of the demographics going into the election were correct, and the one thing that people forgot was Barack Obama was the cool black candidate. It got him elected the first time, and I think it was enough to pull him through this time.

I think that if it was a white candidate in there against Romney, he would have lost handily. That was that one intangible factor that we just didn't understand that night after the election. This is the Kardashian guy. Of course he's gonna win."

Dennis Miller: Well listen John, I've gotta' separate the cool and the black. I don't get the black thing . . .

John: But his demographic does notice that . . . the MTV, the under 30 crowd . . .

Major Garrett: It seems to me, Dennis, that's a cultural observation, not a racial observation. I think there is something worth considering in the shifting cultural matrix of our country, in that, for some, when they see the President, in the closing weeks of the campaign, appear on Jon Stewart or Jay Leno or The View, it bespeaks an unnecessary trivialization of the institution of the Presidency.

There are a large number of Americans . . . in ways that it would have bothered them twenty years ago, it simply does not now. And that is a cultural shift.

DM: Well I would say it boils down to this: Joy Behar is the new Chet Huntley

MG: Well, in certain quarters, if not Chet Huntley, at least someone who is viewed as an arbiter of equal or near equal weight. And that simply wasn't the case twenty or thirty years ago.

. . . And that's what takes someone like Joy Behar or Jon Stewart or David Letterman and puts them in a different category than they would've been viewed twenty or thirty years ago . . . no one would have taken any part of that conversation seriously. In ways that are significant politically now, a segment of our country does.

Barb in KC: I do have to kind of agree with the caller before. I think that people voted for Obama strictly because they don't believe that we are in a post-racial phase, and they did not want to see the first African-American President go down as a failure . . . It truly was white liberal guilt. They wanted Obama to have another four years to try to make good on it, and they were willing to sacrifice the economy to make that happen.

The full transcript is way, way down at the bottom of this post if you want to read it.

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Read this article by Mona Charen about the election. Here's an brief excerpt:

I grieve mostly for the country in the wake of Obama's victory, but also a bit for Romney. He deserved to win. He would have been a good president. And this much is certain -- the assassination of his character by the Obama machine was disgusting. Obama won ugly. We should never forget that.

Our American system is based on two things: 1) accountability, 2) to the people (see Mosiah 29:26). The people vote to elect leaders and those leaders are beholden to the people.

It's a great system. The power is held in a huge body that is presupposed to be mostly good. Leaders are compelled to do the right thing by that unseen hand of accountability.

All the rules have changed.

Can you imagine Barack Obama ever being held accountable for anything? Go ahead, try to imagine that. You can't do it.

There is nothing Obama can do, even if he tried, to lose the support of his imbecilic base and the media. They have too much Stupidity Capital invested in him.

That should make you a little nervous. The system has been completely circumvented. Are you comfortable with that? Are you comfortable with that in any setting? Would you ride on a Ferris wheel where the control box is open with jumper wires that the carny has to clip together?

They . . . . don't ask me who "they" are . . . have found a way to get around the system. All the rules have changed.

Again, I just wanted the fire marshal, when he sifts through the ashes of this once great nation, to find one eyewitness who identified the ignition source and accelerate

Bill Clinton was a horrible choice for President. I said at the time that you'd be hard pressed to find someone less suited for that office. Well, we managed to do it . . . but the fact remains, Bill Clinton was not the kind of person that is suited for that high office.

What a bizarre world we live in where we long for the times when such a horrible person was in office. (No, my calling him a "horrible person" has nothing to do with Monica Lewinsky. I've dealt with that elsewhere, but even absent his juvenile inability to control himself he was a bad, bad choice).

That is why Bill Clinton (pardon my language) is a great lesson in why our system is structured the way it is.

Our system is structured on the idea that men will act in a way that they perceive best fulfills their self-interest. You can argue forever on how men should behave. But you can't structure a system on that, any more than you can build an irrigation system on the assumption that water naturally runs uphill.

Bill Clinton has a whole different idea from other Americans of what America should look like. But he can't stand people not liking him. If you weren't paying attention I'll give you some books about his upbringing and all the complex psychology that leads to a human being growing up to be the waste of skin that he is. But he his self-esteem is based on what others think of him. He has to be adored.

He was a failed President a year and a half into his term. Then the Republicans took over Congress. At that point two things happened: 1) He uttered one of the stupidest statements ever to fall from the lips of a human "The voters have said that they agree with what I want to do, but I'm not moving fast enough," and 2) he had to change what he was doing and work with Congress.

Bill Clinton is the perfect example of why our system is structured the way it is.

He had to work with Congress to preserve his precious legacy. The Republican congress balanced the budget, passed Welfare Reform . . . look it up yourself. They did some good stuff. Bill Clinton took credit for all of it, but who gives a crap? It was good for America.

Bill Clinton doesn't care about America. If you weren't in diapers during that period you already know that. Bill Clinton did what was good for Bill Clinton, and, as the Founding Fathers were banking on, in a lot of cases that's good for America.

You heard this concept batted around during the 2008 democrat primaries. Hillary is evil, but she's predictable. I'd post the articles but you'd never read them. Hillary will do what's in her best interest, and she's smart enough to know that she has to please the people to fulfill her best interest.

I think Thomas Sowell wrote the article "In Greed We Trust" that examined that same thing. Again, why should I track down an article that you'll never read?

Here's where the train switched to the rails that gave us Bill Clinton: the day he started playing the saxophone.

Maybe if he had taken up guitar he would've been a rock star and his sick need to be adored and used as a sex object would've been fulfilled and America would've been spared his disgusting presence.

But he is a great lesson in how our system works.

You don't get less substance than the recycled speech that Obama gave after winning the election. It was pretty much a photocopy of his butterflies and daffodils speech at the 2004 convention. He said nothing and he said it in a way that's pleasing to the ears of crazy people and idiots.

And just in case you ever believed a word Obama ever said before . . . "Joe Biden is the finest Vice President anyone could ever hope to have?" Seriously?

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I missed this one from after the VP debate.

And you remember this great cartoon from during the election.

Ah, those blessed days when we thought there still might be hope for America . . . . sigh.

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If Only

I first became aware of this concept when I was asking my dad about JFK, who I had learned in school was probably the greatest President ever to live. Dad said that had he not been assassinated he would probably have gone down in history as a failure. He didn't do anything, but think of all the great things he would've done had he not been killed!

Bill Clinton got his "if only" courtesy of Monica Lewinsky. That's what everyone will remember of his presidency, and idiots will forever say "what a shame, think of what a great President he would have been if only . . . "

Nixon got one. He was a genuine intellectual and a capable leader. We'll never know what he might have done "if only . . . "

(We do know what he did do, EPA etc . . .)

We have our "if only," if only we were smart enough to take advantage of it. Romney would've fixed this economy. He would've restored America. We know it's true and no one can say different 'cause we only get one shot at the timeline. But the idiots in the Republican party are now examining everything wrong with his strategy and his political ideology and . . . anyway.

If only . . .

Obama was denied his 'if only' by his idiot voters putting him in office. It's a helluva lot easier to give speeches and bad mouth everyone else than to actually lead. Had McCain won Obama would've been bigger than Martin Luther King and every ill in the world would be lamented as only existing because Obama didn't win the election.

Instead he's proven he couldn't lead a teenager to a porn stash, and the imbeciles that elected him have given him another four years to confirm what a waste of skin he is. He's been denied his if only.

Ann Coulter points out that the democrats are trying to corner us into a political "if only" on the fiscal cliff. She says that we have to Make the Democrats Own the Obama Economy.

The democrats know that their approach won't work. They don't care; the purpose of their plan isn't to fix the economy, it is to blame the Republicans for the economy. It's the old trick—make them an offer they cannot possibly take so you can paint them as uncooperative.

The Republicans will reject what the democrats are trying to do, we won't reach an agreement, and the economy will crash. But it will be the Republicans' fault. "If only they had gone with our plan!"

Ann Coulter's plan is to go along with them and make sure they own it. Dennis Miller has weighed in on that approach, saying to pull it off we have to seem absolutely sincere. I just don't know. Even if we gave them every durn thing they wanted it would be our fault. We just aren't smart enough to deal with evil people in the media and the democrat side of this country.

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Apropos of nothing

Is there anything more stupid than "green jobs?"

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Sitting on the Fence

A lot of people like to say "I like to think my politics go right down the middle."

I don't.

I mean, that's fairly admirable of you to admit something that stupid, so I appreciate that you at least own up to it. But you shouldn't say it like you're proud of it. "Look at me, I'm an idiot! Woo-hoo, I da man! I can't make up mind or defend a position!"

Men's Health said something in one of their style guide deals that can only ring true to an Obama voter. They said "In terms of facial hair, maintain just the right amount. Neither a full beard nor clean shaven. Don't go to one extreme or the other." (emphasis added just in case you missed the ludricrousness of that.

It's just as stupid in politics. Do you really want to be halfway between the wrong and right position?

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Israel and Palestine

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Thanksgiving

Yes, it has been that long since I've posted . . .

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Remember a place called Benghazi?

Does anyone still think the rules haven't changed?

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Obama gets tough with Assad

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Pompous does not equal Intellectual

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Dennis Miller Show Transcript

What I posted before was the crux of the matter. Here's the Full Transcript just so you can decide for yourself if I got the right point out of it.

John in New Hampshire: Listen, I just wanted to bring up the one thing that nobody's bringing up, and I think everyone's idea of the demographics going into the election, I think they were correct, and I think the one thing that people forgot in all of it, was, again, and I don't want it to sound worse than the way I'm am putting it, but Barack Obama was the cool black candidate, and it got him elected the first time, and I think it was enough to pull him—squeak him through this time.

I think that if it was a white candidate in there against Romney, I think he would have lost handily. And I think that was that one intangible factor that we just didn't understand that night after the election. And then the next day, it just dawned on me. "Well, hey, wait a minute, we forgot. This is the Kardashian guy. Of course he's gonna win."

Dennis Miller: Well listen John, I've gotta' separate the cool and the black. I don't get the black thing, but then again, I'm actually working under the assumption that (in) a post-racial society you don't kinda' notice that—that's been done already

John: But his demographic does notice that. I mean, it is—that is his demographic, the MTV, the under 30 crowd. I mean, it is.

DM: Well is it the cool thing to do . . .?

Major Garrett: It seems to me, Dennis, that's a cultural observation, not a racial observation.

DM: Okay

MG: And I think there is something worth considering in the shifting cultural matrix of our country, in that, for some, when they see the President, in the closing weeks of the campaign, appear on Jon Stewart or Jay Leno or The View, it bespeaks an unnecessary trivialization of the institution of the Presidency. There are a large number of Americans, and they showed up in good measure on Tuesday, who don't believe that. Now, I'm not here to litigate that, whether that's right or wrong. What I'm here to say is, for a sizable portion of the population, in ways that it would have bothered them twenty years ago, it simply does not now. And that is a cultural shift. It may be, to the mind of some, a sign of the apocalypse, to others it might just be a (sign) we are a different, less uptight culture than we were, say, twenty or thirty years ago. I don't know what it means. That it exists, and that it is not taken askance, appears to be solidly true.

DM: Well I would say it boils down to this: Joy Behar is the new Chet Huntley

MG: Well, in certain quarters, if not Chet Huntley, at least someone who is viewed as an arbiter of equal or near equal weight. And that simply wasn't the case twenty or thirty years ago. And that's part and parcel—and I know that your audience, and many talk radio audiences I deal with, they feel alienated by what they consider a dominant media culture, or something that is foisted upon them by the media. The media is more diverse, more varied, and less hierarchical than ever before.

And that's what takes someone like Joy Behar or Jon Stewart or David Letterman and puts them in a different category than they would've been viewed twenty or thirty years ago.

DM: Well, I would say . . .

MG: (And it just wouldn't have been) [unintelligible] treated like an anchorman—no one would have taken any part of that conversation seriously. In ways that are significant politically now, a segment of our country does.

DM: Well, I would say diverse in every way save one—ideologically. I simply do think that the great preponderance of journalists in this country now have liberal leanings. And I'm not being paranoid, there. I think that's self-admitted. When they admit, you know, do those polls of who they vote for, who they donate to, that's just the math of it. So, yeah, it might've gotten diverse in all the platforms, or who gets to speak to a President now, but I would say the one thing where it's maintained the same, and if not even winnowed down a little more, is, I think—and like I said, this is based solely on who they say they're registered as.

MG: Right, and I don't deny that, that's a fact anyone can check on, check out for themselves. My only point is—and I think these reinforce each other, they don't conflict with each other—is many of those same people work for a company like Newsweek. And I worked at US News and World Report from 1998 to 2000. Now the idea that US News and World Report might not be long for this world was on our minds when I worked there. The idea that Newsweek might not was inconceivable—inconceivable in the late 1990s. And it's gone now, or nearly gone. It'll be gone at the end of this year. I mean, that was a totem of American communication—mass communication—through a weekly news magazine. It's vaporized, okay?

And all I'm saying is, those trend lines and the divergence of voices that appear on the web and everywhere else in the American media have never been larger, and so I guess my sense is that that institutional heft of liberalism, to the degree it exists, Is at least diluted by all these other voices that can be found with the click of a mouse.

DM: Folks there's an argument to be made that being grilled by the quartet at The View, of the fivesome now, (is) what Meet the Press used to be on Saturday morning.

Barb in KC: I do have to kind of agree with the caller before.

I think that, the people that I've talked to, the friends, my circle, they voted for Obama strictly because they don't believe that we are in a post-racial phase, and they did not want to see the first African-American President go down as a failure. And, secondarily, they don't, think, or they don't know that the conservative party, the Republican Party, is a party of inclusion. It truly was white liberal guilt. They wanted Obama to have another four years to try to make good on it, and they were willing to sacrifice the economy to make that happen. And that surprised the heck out of me.

DM: Well, I'll tell you what, when I said my idea of post-racialism is sorta being unaware with it, I realize, trust me, that that increasingly makes me, a, whatever a new definition of racist is. I just don't notice it, and I'm beginning to get that if I don't notice that "Chicago" is racist or a man using "revenge," if I find that 'wow, that's weird that the President would use the word "revenge" in the last week' . . . by not, by you know, thinking, 'well I don't usually think that way,' that's kinda the new racist.

So I get it. I'm not saying I'm the majority anymore.

MG: And, you know, I would never disagree with Barb about what her experience is talking to her friends and in her community. I take every anecdote I pick up on the campaign trail for exactly what it is—a reflection of what people see and experience themselves.

If you look at the data, the electorate seemed to say two things—getting back to our original point. The economy was number one, but the message and the communication, talking about it, and whom they were more willing to side with on the central question of the economy, redounded to Obama's benefit. And, the other thing that's worth pointing out, Dennis, I was surprised, matter of fact stunned might not be too strong a word that in the exit poll data, and you have to consider it valid, 'cause that's what people said, about who they blamed for the economy, President Bush was blamed more than President Obama after four years. That's an awfully long shadow.

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