If Obama loves America, he sure does have a funny way of showing it

Our hopelessly corrupt left-wing media is apoplectic over comments that Rudy Giuliani made expressing doubt in President Obama's love of country.  Of course, these same media hacks were just fine with Obama questioning Bush's patriotism whenever it suited him. (And somehow they never seem to notice that if Obama held himself to the same standard on debt he held Bush to, he'd have to call himself the most unpatriotic president ever.)

Obama's early life was filled with communists and anti-colonialists who harbored a deep resentment of the West in general and of America in particular.  As a young man, Obama specifically sought out Jeremiah Wright and chose him as a spiritual mentor, and he sat in the pews of that church for over 20 years while Wright spouted all sorts of anti-American nonsense; at one point Wright even explicitly blamed America for 9/11.  Obama's political career began in the living room of Bill Ayers, a domestic terrorist whose terror group bombed the Pentagon on Ho Chi Minh's birthday.  After all that, why should anyone just automatically assume that America gives Obama the warm fuzzies?

Michelle Obama openly admits that she wasn't proud of her country until her husband was elected president.  This is the woman he chose to spend the rest of his life with?  This is his soul mate?  What does that say about him?

One of the first things Obama did as president was go around the world apologizing on behalf of America.  Obama apologizes for America, yet he jumps to the defense of Islam again and again.  Bizarrely, he even tried to credit Islam with being part of the fabric of our country from America's inception, yet somehow he neglects to ever mention the Barbary Wars.  Obama refuses to call Islamic terrorists what they are because he refuses to believe they might actually be motivated even in part by Islam.  And Obama's apparent anti-Semitism causes him to spurn Israel, America's greatest ally in the Middle East, over and over again.  Are these the priorities of a man who loves America?

Whenever Obama speaks about American exceptionalism he either seems to dismiss it outright or he gives an answer that demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the term.  (Once, he even tried to offer himself as proof of America's exceptionalism, which is just the sort of thing you'd expect a malignant narcissist to do.)  As president, Obama has always placed far more importance on the advancement of his own far-left agenda than he has on the constitutional principles of popular sovereignty. republicanism, federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, limited government, and individual rights.  Even the lectures he gave at the University of Chicago Law School were never much more than a series of "social justice" talking points dressed up as lectures about constitutional law.  Can you really say that you love America when you don't love any of the things that make America special?  Can you really say that you love anything that you've promised to fundamentally transform into something completely different?

The Stupid Party strikes again

Mollie Hemingway has a great piece up at The Federalist explaining what a debacle the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act turned into in the House of Representatives.

Even if you were certain you didn't have the votes to pass it, why pull the bill?  All pulling the bill does is give people the impression that it's extreme when it's actually pretty mainstream; in fact, a virtually identical bill passed the House in 2013 without incident.  Late-term abortion bans always poll extremely well; even many folks who don't call themselves"pro-life" are still in favor of banning late-term abortion.  So why not just hold the vote on this bill regardless of whether or not you think enough votes are there to pass it, and then let whoever is extreme enough to vote against it show themselves for what they are?

Why in the world did Speaker Boehner let this happen?  I want to give the guy a chance, but this is the kind of stupid shit that keeps pushing me into the anti-Boehner camp.  Just take the easy win when you have it, Mr. Speaker!  Please stop trying so hard to find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  ( I'm glad that he invited Bibi to speak to Congress and all, but I don't think it was part of some master plan of his to give Obama a nervous breakdown, so I can only give him so much credit. And, really, it should've been a no-brainer anyway. )

Many conservatives are calling for Representative Renee Ellmers to be primaried in 2016 as punishment for throwing a spanner into the works with her flip-flop on late-term abortion.  Ace even goes so far as to say that we should vote for her Democrat opponent if she somehow survives a primary challenge.  I used to think such ideas were insane, but I have to admit he makes a surprisingly persuasive argument.

A few thoughts on the "cromnibus"

I was never a fan of Dodd-Frank, but why is Congress even messing with Dodd-Frank right now instead of trying to stop Obama's executive amnesty?  You don't have enough votes to impeach Obama?  Fine.  But surely you must have enough votes to at least try to defund the amnesty, right?  I mean, how can you say that something is unconstitutional while at the same time you willingly continue to fund it?  ( Ahh... apparently, Obama will be funding his amnesty with fees collected from immigrants, which makes it hard for Congress to defund. Still, I find it hard to believe that Republicans in the House can't do something to stop it, even if they have to do it in a separate bill. )

And if you are gonna mess around with Dodd-Frank, why do it in a way that basically legitimizes the idea that banks should be too big to fail, while leaving all the parts of Dodd-Frank that hurt small businesses in place?  That's a bit odd.  Personally, I think the only way banks should be allowed to resume trading derivatives is if taxpayers can be guaranteed that those banks will never receive any sort of bailout ever again; if they want to take on that kind of risk, okay, but don't expect taxpayers to be the ones left holding the bag when it doesn't work out.

On top of all this, Boehner apparently still plans on inviting Obama to give the State of the Union speech in the House of Representatives.  If we can't even get a symbolic gesture out of him, why is he there?  I've defended Boehner in the past when I thought people were being too quick to jump on him, but I'm quickly reaching the point where I don't really care who the House Majority Leader is as long is it's not him.

What really happened to Eric Garner?

I keep hearing Eric Garner being described as having been choked to death by a police officer.  I've watched the video many times, and I'm not so sure that's what happened.  The officer had his arm around Garner's neck for most of the video, but not in a choke hold.  I believe the officer was using what police call a "lateral vascular neck restraint" to partially restrict blood flow; this type of restraint shouldn't affect air flow when done properly.

It's true that Garner screamed several times that he couldn't breathe, but if you watch the video closely all the way to the end you'll notice that he continues to scream that he can't breathe even after the arm is gone from around his neck.  The medical examiner ruled that the cause of death was a combination of the neck hold and the weight placed upon Garner's back while he was on the ground; I strongly suspect that it had much more to do with the latter than the former.  Police need to be more careful about putting too much weight on someone who is being held on the ground, especially in cases where the person being restrained is already morbidly obese.

Garner's asthma was probably a factor here too, but I don't think we could really expect the officer in question to have known about that.  Garner knew about his own asthma, though, and screaming like a maniac from the get-go before the police even tried to touch him probably wasn't the best idea--if hysterical fits of laughter can trigger asthma attacks, then I don't see why hysterical fits of screaming couldn't do the same.  ( And being a grown-ass man, Garner should've realized that screaming fits tend to not make very good get-out-of-jail-free cards anyway. )

I can understand thinking that confiscatory cigarette taxes are stupid, especially while making it easier for people to get marijuana at the same time, but the whole reason that police exist is to uphold the law, so I can only be so angry at them for enforcing the laws that I don't like; I'll save that anger for the people who actually write these stupid laws and push to get them passed.  As far as this particular case goes, the focus should be on whether or not the officer followed proper procedure and whether or not that procedure needs to be changed.

Thomas Friedman is an idiot

I normally pay very little attention to Thomas Friedman, mainly because he so rarely takes a break from openly pining for Chinese-style autocracy to say anything even remotely useful.  Now Friedman is trying to compare ISIL to the Joker from The Dark Knight.  I should probably ignore this drivel too, but I just can't stand seeing someone use such a great movie to make such a shitty analogy.

If you insist on comparing ISIL to a Batman villain, then they are clearly Bane, not the Joker.  ISIL doesn't "just want to watch the world burn", they want to run it; they want to be the ones who get to decide which cities are spared and which cities are burned to the ground.  ISIL doesn't see itself as an agent of chaos, it sees itself as a check against the decadence of the West, much as The League of Shadows sees itself as a check against the decadence of Gotham.

( And of course, Friedman being Friedman, his ultimate diagnosis is that Iraq and Syria just weren't enough like China to keep ISIL from spreading.  Sigh. )

By the way, if anyone is like the Joker here, it's Obama.  The Joker wanted to upset the order of things; he wanted to turn the heroes of Gotham City into villains by repeatedly forcing them into making impossible decisions.  Obama seems pretty intent on upsetting the order of things too.  ( Hey, remember his promise to fundamentally transform the country? How did that work out for everyone? )  The Joker detests what he calls planners and schemers.  Obama doesn't seem to much care for people who have plans either; he told us about eleventy billion times that if we liked our plans we could keep our plans, but of course that was always a pernicious lie.  Speaking of lies, the Joker tells so many conflicting stories about himself in The Dark Knight that you can't tell if there is any truth at all there buried under all the fabrications; he might as well have been Obama's ghostwriter.  And how can anyone watch that scene where the Joker sets a great big pile of money on fire just to piss people off without thinking of Obama?

Obama to win an Emmy?

Hey, remember that painfully unfunny "Between Two Ferns" skit where President Obama spouted dishonest Obamacare talking points in between exchanging really dumb insults with Zach Galifianakas?  It just got nominated for an Emmy.  No, really.

And you know it has to win, too.  It just has to.  These fucking Obama cultists wouldn't nominate their deity for such an award if he wasn't guaranteed to win.  Fine.  Give it to him.  Give him an award for making an awful infomercial while the word burns, our economy withers, and victimized children pile across our southern border by the tens of thousands, bringing lice, scabies, and tuberculosis along with them.  Give him an Emmy.  He already has a Nobel Prize and two Grammys under his belt, go ahead and give him another award just for being him.  Then you can give him a Tony and an Oscar, while you're at it.  And a Peabody.  And a Super Bowl ring.  And the Medal of Honor.  And the key to every city in America.  And then you can literally start giving him individual awards for every single poopie that he makes.  And the world will continue to crumble, but at least Obama will feel really good about himself while it's crumbling, and that's all that really matters, right?

The curious case of Bowe Bergdahl

After it became clear to President Obama that the Shinseki resignation wasn't going to be enough to make the VA scandal go away, he decided that it was time to reach into his magic bag of distractions and pull something out; what he pulled out was Bowe Bergdahl, the last remaining American POW in Afghanistan.  Obama was hoping that bringing Bowe home would make himself immune to criticism about the treatment of veterans by showing that he leaves no man behind.  Indeed, most people were initially glad to hear that Bowe was released, if a little queasy about releasing five high-level terrorist scumbags to do it.  But then we started hearing from Bowe's platoon mates that he was only captured because he deserted his post, and Bowe's father showed up in the Rose Garden speaking in Arabic and Pashto, looking like he just crawled out of a fucking spider hole.  Add to all that the sheer lunacy that is the twitter account run by Bowe's father, and this started to look like the worst deal we ever made with anybody.

And over the next few days the deal continued to look worse and worse.  Not only did President Obama violate the law by failing to consult Congress on the deal, but he also blatantly lied to us about why he did it.  First we were told that Bowe was so sick that he would have died if the deal hadn't happened right away, and then the story eventually became that Bowe would have been murdered by the Taliban if the deal were ever made public, even though the Obama administration and the Taliban had both talked rather openly about the possibility of such a deal.

Before Bowe disappeared, he emailed his parents to tell them how much he hated America and our military, and how much he wanted to help the Afghan people; after taking his father's idiotic advice to "OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE", he went AWOL and left behind a note saying that he didn't want to be an American anymore.  At least six people died searching for him.  The Obama administration knew all of this, and yet they still expected us to be euphoric over this deal for some reason.

Bowe converted to Islam while in captivity.  He also declared himself a mujahid and was reportedly allowed to carry a loaded gun.  The Pentagon knew this for years, and yet the exchange went ahead anyway.  Why?

And now the latest feeble attempt at spin from the Obama administration is that Bergdahl's platoon mates were probably all psychopaths or something.  Rather than distracting us from the VA scandal, it seems that Obama has only succeeded in reinforcing the idea that he cares much less about how our troops are treated than he does about how it affects him politically.  Maybe for his next trick Obama will ask John Kerry to resign as Secretary of State and nominate him for Secretary of Defense instead.

A Poem for Dzhokhar

You and your brother thought it would be fun to blow up a bunch of innocent people.

You smiled as you placed a bomb right next to an eight-year-old kid.

You really thought you'd get away with it.

You were wrong.

Now your brother is a speed bump and you have a hole in your throat.

Now you get to spend the rest of your life in a cell waiting to die.

How will it end?  With a needle in your arm or a shiv in your thigh?

Your lunatic mother can't save you.

Your idiot groupies can't save you.

I hope your cellmate loves your puppy dog eyes as much as they do.

Don't drop the soap.

Don't drop the soap.

Don't drop the soap.

Don't drop the soap.

Yet another eco-friendly pipe dream

So, some dufus says he invented a car that runs on air:

Yeah, that sounds great, except they never explain how much energy it takes to compress the air in the first place; after all, that energy is what will ultimately power his car, not the air itself.  Sorry, hippies, but there's no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.  The energy has to come from somewhere.  This car was a cute idea, but it takes a lot more than just a cute idea and sharing a birthday with Jules Verne to rewrite the laws of physics.

(By the way, what are the chances that a minor fender bender could cause the car's air tanks to explode?)

Happy Presidents' Day!

Senator Ted Cruz took to Twitter to ask his followers who their favorite Presidents were... so of course lots of folks started flipping out and calling him a birther for no reason.  (Protip: Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and 24th in office, so don't freak out too much when someone says we've only had 43 presidents... that's technically true.  FDR was a couple of months into his fourth term when he died, but he only gets counted as one president... Cleveland only served two terms, it just so happens that those terms were interrupted by Benjamin Harrison's single term.)

More idiocy from Ron Paul

If your response to the news of Chris Kyle's death is to spout bromides like "he who lives by the sword dies by the sword", then you should probably just shut the hell up... but that's the thing about Ron Paul, he never seems to know when to shut the hell up, especially now that he's not running for office anymore and no longer feels the need to pretend he's sane.  When he was rightfully called out for his disgraceful statement, he issued a clarification that didn't really sound any better.

Rand Paul must be giving a presidential run serious consideration, since he made a point of publicly disagreeing with his father on this... but Ron Paul will always be saying this kind of crazy shit, so unless Rand is willing to completely disown his father, he's never even going to have a chance.

Obamapalooza 2013

My, what a disgraceful inauguration that was.  Everything about it disgusted me: the way President Obama tried to superimpose it upon the celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday, the hyperpartisan inaugural speech he gave (and the insipid inaugural poem that accompanied it), the awful-looking Romulan outfit that Michelle Obama was wearing, and her utter classlessness as John Boehner tried to make polite conversation.  So now we have to suffer through an orgy of media sycophants falling all over themselves to wash Obama's feet and anoint him with oil, and to remind us all for the trillionth time how profoundly historic he is... brace yourself for four more years of failure, and four more years of him (and these same sycophants) blaming Bush for that failure.

Sure, Obama is historic.  He's the first black president--if you don't count Bill Clinton--but so what?  He's also got the thinnest resume of any president in our nation's history, and probably the thinnest skin.  In only one term he's already added more to the national debt than any of his predecessors.  And, as I like to joke, it turns out the first president to eat a dog will be the last to eat a Twinkie.  Not everything you could call historic is inherently good.  If Obama ate a baby on live television, that would be pretty historic too.

These days, I find myself thinking a lot about another historic president.  Calvin Coolidge was the first president to have his inauguration broadcast on the radio, and the first to have his State of the Union address broadcast on the radio... he was also the first president to appear in a sound film:

Calvin Coolidge left office with a budget that was smaller than than the one he inherited... how many presidents managed to do that?

Screw you, Chris Christie!

So I'm guessing that Chris Christie has no plans to run for president in 2016, or ever, unless maybe it's as a Democrat.

I wouldn't mind seeing some more video of him yelling at teachers who need to be yelled at, but other than that I'm pretty much done with him.

The End Is Nigh!

Lots of people are freaking out because December 21, 2012 is supposedly the date that corresponds to the end of the Mayan calendar... but if you take leap years into account the world should have already ended several months ago, so I don't really expect the world to end tomorrow.

That's not to say I'm optimistic, though... after all, Obama will still be president tomorrow, the media will still be full of lying assholes, and most of the voting public will still be stupid and/or crazy.

Where have the 2004 voters gone?

I don't remember any Republican in 2004 telling me that it would be the end of America if John Kerry won the election.  2012 was another story... it seemed like I was being told every single day that it was the most important election in our nation's history.  Yet Mitt Romney still fell short of Bush's vote tally by about two million votes, despite the stakes being much higher this time than they were back in 2004.  Where the heck did all those Republican voters go?  How on earth does someone show up to vote against John Kerry but stays home when a president with a record worse than Jimmy Carter's is asking for a mulligan?

Republicans already have enough of an uphill battle winning over all the stupid and/or crazy voters out there... why make it any harder?  If you watched Romney wiping the floor with Obama in that first debate and came out of it thinking there was no difference between those two men, then you need to get your head examined (preferably by someone other than Dr. Ron Paul).

Conservatives need to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, or we'll be out of power for the next 40 years.  I'm not saying we should nominate nothing but squishy moderates, I'm just saying we shouldn't be so quick to tar everyone with the RINO brush.  We can't let ourselves get as hysterical as some of the freaks on the other side, and then let that hysteria turn into apathy if we don't get our way on everything... we can't afford apathy in the face of political zealots who are quite happy to destroy the country so long as the GOP gets blamed for it.

Update:  Hmmm... Ramesh Ponnuru has an interesting take on the so-called "purge of conservatives" from committees in the House that has so many people calling for John Boehner's head.

Our long national nightmare is NOT over

So... Obama somehow managed to win a second term, despite having a record that should have gotten him tossed out on his ear.  What happened here?  I mostly agree with Ace's list of things that hurt Romney, but what's going on beneath all that?  The root problem, as I see it, is that we have far too many voters in this country who simply can't be reasoned with.

Many people on the left are Kool-Aid drinkers.  They are firmly decided yet decidedly misinformed, the type of people who refuse to even speak to anyone that watches Fox News.  They tend to think of themselves as highly-informed voters, but they deliberately seek out only the most rabidly left-wing media outlets and completely shun all dissenting opinions.  If they even acknowledge that there is another side, it is only to present a cartoonish caricature of their political opponents... they don't have any interest in knowing what anyone on the right really thinks about anything.

For some voters, their problem is not so much willful ignorance as it is an overreliance on emotional thinking.  They like to think of themselves as having an open mind, but their minds are so open that their brains have fallen out.  They don't necessarily shun opposing views, but it can still be very difficult to reach such people... they don't process information in the same way that logical people do.  You can hit them over the head with cold hard facts all day long and not even make a dent, because they base their votes more on how they feel than anything else... if the facts hurt their feelings, you aren't going to get very far with them.  The only chance you have to win over people like this is with appeals to emotion... and the very next day the Democrats would probably just win them right back again by appealing to class envy, hurling false charges of racism or homophobia, stoking hatred of Christians or Jews, playing on imaginary fears of wars on lady parts, or arranging a well-timed photo op.

And then there are those who can't really be bothered to think at all.  They are the product of a failed school system that doesn't teach kids how to think critically.  They know all sorts of things, but they don't know how they know them.  They might not seek out overtly political stuff, but most "straight" media coverage they get from our corrupt media is just a watered-down version of the delusional crap they would get from MSNBC...  and even when they try their best to avoid that sort of stuff, it still finds them anyway in dribs and drabs thanks to all the left-wing talking points that permeate pop culture.  They might call themselves apolitical, but they are Democrats by default.  Some of these people can be converted, but they have to be mugged by reality first.  That being said, if seeing both 9/11/2001 and 9/11/2012, and suffering through the worst economic recovery in our nation's history aren't enough to wake them up, then I don't know what will.

These are all long-term cultural problems we face here, they didn't just suddenly crop up on us overnight.  And it seems to get a little bit worse every single year.  I still remember my first run-in with this sort of thing... it was something that happened to me way back in grade school, but it stuck with me.

Ronald Reagan was running against Walter Mondale, and my fifth-grade teacher polled the class on who we would vote for... she gave us some ballots to fill out, but first she gave us a twenty minute lecture on the awfulness of Reagan and the wonderfulness of Mondale.  I didn't know very much about politics at the time, but I was vaguely aware that my father was a Reagan voter, and I knew what my teacher was doing was very wrong.  This was a push poll... I didn't know the proper term for it at the time, but I could see it for what it was and it made me very angry.  As it turned out, I was the only kid in the whole class who didn't vote for Mondale.  You'd think the teacher would be satisfied with how successful her push poll was, but no... she spent the rest of our time in class trying to track down and expose the identity of the sole Reagan voter.  I stayed quiet, hoping she would just give up and get back to doing her job, but she didn't stop until she got every kid in class but me to fess up to who they voted for... she finally found me by the process of elimination.  Then she got in my face and demanded to know why I voted for Reagan... so I got in her her face instead and called her every name I could think of, chasing her right out of her own classroom.  I hated her guts from that day forward, and I never blindly took the word of any teacher again... any respect they got from me they had to earn.

That was 1984.  I can only imagine how insufferable the teachers in that school are today, now that we're living in the Age of Obama.  We can argue about Romney's strategery all we want, but what are we going to do about all these other problems?  This isn't just about the next election.  I fear this will take generations to fix, assuming we haven't already reached some sort of tipping point.

Update:  Of course, folks on the right can be just as hard to reason with sometimes.  Apparently some people were so butthurt about how the primaries turned out that they stopped identifying themselves as Republicans, which was part of where all the confusion about the polls came from.  Also, by the sounds of it, Project ORCA turned out to be nothing short of a GOTV fiasco.  Oh well.  Maybe next time we'll somehow manage to get our act together, if the country lasts that long.

Update:  Ugh... I'm really amazed that I'm still arguing with brainwashed Dems who are 100% certain that Mitt Romney's position on abortion is identical to Todd Akin's, while also having to take crap from people on the right who see no difference between Romney and Obama.  It's almost enough to make me want to just say screw it and start picketing somewhere with some "Obama=Akin" signs.

The Man Who Laughs

I really don't think Joe Biden's maniacal laughter during the VP debate did Obama any favors:

It's hard to take someone seriously when he's acting like such a clown during a serious discussion about Iran's attempts to get nuclear weapons.  Lots of people keep making comparisons to Jack Nicholson's portrayal of The Joker... it actually made me think more of Nicholson's performance in The Pledge, the scene where he is sitting there all looking disheveled and muttering crazy thoughts to himself.  But speaking of The Joker, did you know that a film based on Victor Hugo's novel The Man Who Laughs was the original inspiration for The Joker?

BREAKING: Obama voters are dumb

It's amazing how strongly people can feel about things they aren't even really trying to understand:

And then there's this bold fresh piece of humanity:

Good lord... yes, be sure to vote because we needs to keep Obama in president.

Creepiest campaign manager ever...

Here is Barack Obama's super-genius campaign manager posing in the creepiest campaign photo that I've ever seen in my entire life:

What the hell was he/she/it thinking?  Yeah, tell me again how weird and out of touch you think Mitt Romney is.  Meanwhile, Obama's campaign manager is so creepy looking that anyone who sees him immediately has to reach for the brain bleach afterwards... he looks like he should be the President of NAMBLA or something, and yet he really thought it would help the Obama campaign to put this picture of himself out there.  Self-awareness is definitely not his strong suit.

How Obama chose to spend 9/11

No, this isn't some stupid Obama impersonator playing a joke, this actually happened today:

 

What the hell?  This is the only interview he gave today, and they don't even mention that it's the anniversary of 9/11.  Yeah, tell us again how weird you think Mitt Romney is, Mr. President.

And if that's not enough, there's the administration's utterly pathetic response to the events that took place in Cairo and Benghazi today... not to mention the pointed snub of Benjamin Netanyahu.  Sadly, John Bolton's description of Obama as the first post-American president becomes more and more apt with each passing day.