Playing by their rules is not always a good idea

Some people on the right have it in their heads that Obama winning the White House has somehow fundamentally changed the nature of politics itself.  I know Obama said he wanted to "fundamentally transform" the country, but I really don't think he's changed the way the GOP will win elections.

Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 hasn't changed the fact that it's been nearly 100 years since a Republican senator has won in a presidential election.  Obama could get away with being a presidential candidate that had an impossibly thin record and the most inane slogans you could ever imagine because the media chose to treat him like a demigod anyway.  Republicans don't have the luxury of being worshipped by the media.  The media only ever gives Republicans glowing coverage when those Republicans are bashing their own party for something, and even then that praise will only last so long; you could be the media's favorite Republican and you'll still be treated like the incarnation of evil the moment you become an obstacle for a Democrat seeking the White House.

You can't spend all day complaining about the media's double standard and then suddenly expect everything to go swimmingly when you try to play by the other side's rules.  Any Republicans seeking higher office should take it as a given that the media will do its level best to tear them apart, and so they need to go the extra mile to make sure they have their shit together before they decide to run.  A Democrat can give one speech and somehow be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, but Republicans need to do more than that.  Giving a good speech or being good in a debate are good skills to have, but they shouldn't be the only skills you have.  Republican candidates need to be good at communicating their ideas in simple and relatable terms, but they also need to be able to show that their ideas work when put into action, which is why governors tend to make better GOP candidates than senators do.  ( People who have their hearts set on nominating a senator will often point to Mitt Romney as a notable exception, but Romney was a governor from a very blue state so he was only going to get so much mileage out of his record there... and Santorum probably would've lost by double digits anyway. )

I'm not saying that it's utterly impossible for the GOP to send a senator to the White House, just that the chances are slimmer than they should be, and when the deck is already stacked against you this much, why risk it?  The media is thoroughly corrupt, probably more corrupt now than it's ever been before.  Our education system is constantly churning out people who don't know how to think for themselves and our culture is constantly finding new ways to fill their heads with left-wing talking points, turning them into millions of people who are basically Democrats by default.  When that's what you're fighting against, there's very little margin of error.  If you really want your favorite senator to be president someday, then maybe you should be telling him to run for governor first before they run for president, or at least be willing to settle for him being on the bottom of the ticket.

( And by the way, speaking of our culture, when Republicans are already perceived as being out of touch, one of the worst ways a Republican can play the "their rules" game is to make yourself look like a culturally ignorant buffoon while throwing around blatantly false allegations of racism. )

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?

I'm a poet and I didn't even know it

Poetweet is an interesting website that takes a Twitter handle and uses it to generate a poem based on that person's tweets.  It can make three different kinds of poems: sonnet, rondel, and indriso.  It can be quite amusing, but if you use it on the same handle more than once the same sentence fragments start to appear over and over again, so it tends to get repetitive very quickly; also, the randomness of it often comes across as just plain nonsensical rather than absurdly funny.

That being said, I found the idea of making a poem out of tweets interesting enough that I thought I'd try to piece one together manually from some of my own tweets and partial tweets.  In some places I mashed a couple tweets together or rearranged the words a bit, but it's all stuff I scraped from my timeline; I didn't add anything extra.  Anyway, here it is, in all its glory:

The King of Empty Promises
by A.J. Winkelspecht

The rich don't pay their fair share.  Let's just put our money in a big pile and split it.
The world can't be fair until we're all lying face down in the same gutter.
Pushing for policies that have failed every single time they were tried.  Same old shit.

Facts are indeed stubborn things... such a shame that so many Democrats are stubborner.
A dishonest MSM.  False and deceptive is their bread and butter.
Every street, a Folsom Street Fair.  Subsidized abortions on every corner.

That's what they want, that's why they lie.
You trying to make us laugh or cry?.

Booing God and Israel.  Washing Obama's feet and anointing him with oil.
Progressives have a king today, now it's Cloward-Piven all the way!
Forward into the beckoning chasm of debt and unemployment and tyranny.

What the hell is this?  Hope?  Change?
If Obama's explicit goal was to see America ruined and Israel destroyed, what would he be doing any differently?

That's what they want, that's why they lie.
The end is extremely fucking nigh.

Is this really as bad as it will get?

Writing at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead suggests that the left may have peaked with the Obama administration.  He makes some good points, but I'm not quite as optimistic as he seems to be.  For one thing, Obama still has two years left in office with no threat of electoral consequences to prevent him from fully embracing the darker angels of our nature, so I expect things to get much worse still before they start to get better; the GOP won big in the midterms, but if they won't stop Obama from sidestepping Congress whenever he feels like it, then how much of a victory was it, really?

Mead is also much more dismissive of Elizabeth Warren's chances than I am.  Yes, she's a leftist kook with a practically nonexistent resume and a partially fabricated bio, but so was Obama; nobody thought anything of Obama either when he ran against presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton in 2008.  Mead thinks it was a unique set of circumstances (mainly Iraq and the financial crisis) that propelled Obama to the White House, but that theory doesn't really explain how Obama got reelected in 2012, does it?  I still think our problems as a country run much deeper than many of us would like to admit.

(Hat tip to @rdbrewer4 for finding Mead's article.)

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.

Here's an interesting idea...

DrewM has a suggestion for how Congress should respond to President Obama's latest power grab:

Yesterday we saw a number of ideas floated about how to respond....rescission, lawsuits, de-funding and withholding votes on nominees to name a few on the table. There's one idea I'd like to add that is in many ways symbolic but that would focus the nation on the seriousness of this problem, do not invite Obama to address a joint session of Congress to deliver the State of the Union address.

The Constitution simply requires that "He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." Nothing requires that he do so in person.

I like this idea.  Frankly, Obama deserves to be impeached, but if the votes aren't there to remove him from office, then surely Republicans can at least force him to do his boasting and preening (and lying) somewhere other than on the floor of the House.

Of course, Obama being Obama, he'll probably show up anyway just so he can give an even douchier version of the same speech on the steps of the Capital Building.  That's fine.  Let him.  That won't play nearly as well as he thinks it will.  People won't see a president, they will see a spoiled little brat who refuses to play by anyone's rules but his own.

Will Obama be a problem for Hillary in 2016?

Allahpundit made an interesting observation:

Has anyone let Hillary know, incidentally, that Obama thinks he no longer needs to worry about short-term electoral concerns? Not that executive amnesty is going to hurt her much in 2016—my strong suspicion is that it’ll help, if only in how it confounds GOP candidates—but his track record on improving other Democrats’ electoral chances is … not good. You would think party bigwigs might prefer less of a loose-cannon Obama at this point, if only for her sake, than having him spinning like Julie Andrews on the hilltop, flinging work permits at every illegal who strays by.

I just assumed that Obama would spend the next two years basically being the biggest asshole ever, but it never occurred to me how the presumptive Dem nominee would view Obama's behavior.  Hillary needs to figure out how much she can distance herself from Obama while still trying to claim her abysmal tenure as his Secretary of State as a plus on her résumé; the more strident and unpredictable Obama gets during his last two years in office, the tougher that will be for her to do.  Plus at any moment the media could push her aside and rally behind Elizabeth Warren instead, much the way they rallied behind Obama in 2008.  ( And with Joe Biden in the mix as well, who the hell knows what could happen. )

Where do we go from here?

The midterm elections finally happened, and Republicans did pretty well for themselves.  Republicans retook control of the Senate, added to their seats in the House, and even won some governorships in unexpected places like Illinois and Maryland.  All in all, if you wanted to see the GOP stick its thumb in Obama's eye, Tuesday was a pretty good night.

So, now what?  Once the 114th Congress is sworn in on January 3rd, Harry Reid won't have a stranglehold on the Senate anymore.  Whether the new Senate Majority Leader turns out to be Mitch McConnell or some other Republican, I don't much care, as long as Harry Reid is finally pushed aside.

One thing you can count on is for Obama to be at his absolute pettiest over the next two years.  You think he's been petty so far?  You ain't seen nothing yet.  Whatever little concern he may have had before about electoral consequences is now completely gone.  He's already talking about sidestepping Congress and the new Congress hasn't even been sworn in yet.  Don't be surprised at all if Obama spends the next two years basically daring Congress to impeach him; expect Obama to take more and more executive action of increasingly questionable constitutionality, all while vetoing every single bill that Congress passes.  And the media will cover for him every step of the way, at least until he makes himself a problem for whichever candidate the media wants to nominate in 2016.

As far as 2016 goes, I'm hoping that Republicans will have enough sense to nominate someone who served at least one term as governor of a red or purple state and whose last name isn't Bush.  There are way too many people running who probably shouldn't be.  Ben Carson is a nice guy, and I respect the hell out of the work he's done as a neurosurgeon, but making Obama uncomfortable for two minutes at a prayer breakfast doesn't make you qualified to be president.  No matter how much you might like the speeches given by Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, neither of them has any executive experience.   It's no coincidence that Herbert Hoover was the last time a Republican was elected president without having first served as a governor, general, or vice president.  If Jeb Bush had become governor of Florida a little sooner and then run for president in 2000, he might've had a chance, but he doesn't have a chance in hell of being president now.

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?

The Obama Protocol

One of the few things I can actually remember from President Obama's inaugural address was his trollish promise to "restore science to its rightful place."  The nerve of that guy.  When has Obama ever not put politics ahead of science?

Obama used his deliberate misunderstanding of the term "greatest geopolitical foe" as an excuse to have a hissy fit in his foreign policy debate with Romney, and now he spends much of his time trying tell us that "climate change" is the greatest threat of the century.  Give me a break.

When Bush was president, Obama tried to make political hay out of panic over the bird flu; and in 2010 he scrapped the very same quarantine rules that he pressured Bush into adopting.  Funny how the science always seems to be settled in favor of whatever position is most politically expedient for Obama at any given time.

And now for the very first time we have a confirmed case of Ebola right here in the United States.  You'd think the first thing we would do is restrict all travel from the West African countries affected by the epidemic, but the White House has flatly dismissed the idea of any sort of travel ban.  Why?  It's not our fault that Ebola comes from predominantly black third-world hellholes, so can we please stop agonizing so much over whether a travel ban might be seen as racist somehow?

What's in a name?

For some reason people are still arguing about whether ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) or ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is the appropriate name to use, and some are even accusing President Obama of using the name ISIL only because he doesn't think Israel has a right to exist.  It's true that Obama has never seemed very fond of Israel, but there's a good chance that he tends to use ISIL only because it's a more accurate translation of the group's Arabic name. The term al-Sham predates any modern concept of Syria the country; what al-Sham refers to is something that would more accurately be described today as Greater Syria, or the Levant.

I call them ISIL not to give their territorial claims any credence, but because that's just the most accurate translation of what they've been calling themselves.  I call them ISIL because I think it's just plain silly to act like these terrorist scumbags plan on staying within the borders of Iraq and Syria when we know damn well that that's not true.  We know what ISIL's goals are, and we know what they call themselves, so let's just be honest about it.  What disturbs me is not that Obama calls them ISIL, but that he so often treats ISIL as if it were a problem for only Iraq and Syria to solve.  They would wipe out Israel if they could, and they'd happily wipe us out too--why wait for them to make a serious attempt at either?

( Lately, ISIL seems to simply be calling itself the Islamic State instead.  I'm not clear on whether that's just supposed to be a shortened version of their name, or if now they are trying to claim the territory of the entire world, or what.  Maybe instead of debating the ISIS vs ISIL thing, we should be debating ISIL vs IS?  I think eventually it will reach the point where I just give up and start calling them The Terrorists Formerly Known as ISIL. )

A few thoughts on Ferguson...

I know all the facts aren't in yet on the shooting of Mike Brown, but after everything I've seen over the past few days, especially today, I wanted to jot some things down while they were still fresh in my mind.

Whether the shooting was justified or not, we just don't know, but we do know that Mike Brown wasn't the perfect angel we were told he was.  Mike Brown committed a robbery at a convenience store not long before he was shot.  There is some confusion as to whether the cop who shot him was aware of that robbery or not, but Mike Brown certainly knew about the crime he had just committed; is it so hard to believe that Brown might have been less than cooperative, thinking he had just been caught red-handed?  ( I also heard that there are photos of Brown supposedly flashing gang signs, but once I saw how hard Pat Dollard was pushing that angle of the story, I sort of stopped caring about it. )

Knowing that Mike Brown was a criminal helps to give some context, but there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered.  Did Darren Wilson have any injuries that would indicate a struggle?  Is there gunshot residue all over the inside of Darren Wilson's police car and enough residue on Mike Brown to indicate that Brown was likely shot while reaching into the car?  The bullet wounds should also indicate how far away Brown was when he was shot, and whether he was standing or kneeling when it happened.  But I have a feeling that a lot of people won't accept the outcome of any investigation that doesn't put all the blame for what happened squarely on Darren Wilson.  Too many people have an emotional attachment to the idea that the police are always the enemy and that Mike Brown has to be an innocent victim, regardless of what the evidence actually says.  And too many people are just looking for any lame excuse to riot, burn shit, steal whatever they can, and threaten to murder every cop they see, just because it feels good and they don't think the rules should apply to them.

Some people are calling on President Obama to get involved to try to calm things down.  I don't know that we should expect Obama to weigh in on this anymore than he already has.  I think in his mind he's already checked that box and doesn't want to deal with it anymore.  On the one hand, he's spent most of his political career worrying about whether he was black enough, too black, or exactly the right amount of black, which is why he attended Jeremiah Wright's church for as long as he did and then dumped that church as soon as it stopped being politically useful.  On the other hand, he loves it when crazy people are yelling crazy things at him because it makes him seem more reasonable, and the leader of the New Black Panther Party is all kinds of crazy.  But honestly, I don't really want Obama inserting himself into this, because all he can do is make it worse, just like he does with every single other thing he touches.

Update:  Wait, the DOJ tried to stop the Ferguson PD from releasing the video of the robbery?  Maybe I gave Obama too much credit.

Why is Obama so reluctant to bomb ISIL?

For some reason it seems like getting President Obama to go after ISIL is like pulling teeth.  He just bombed them for once, finally, but why isn't this a daily occurrence?  I realize that Obama is loathe to put boots on the ground anywhere, especially where he just pulled them out of, but there are plenty of things that can be done to ISIL that don't require boots on the ground.

Seeing all those Yazidis trapped in the mountains is heartbreaking, and I'm thankful that something is finally being done to help them.  I just wonder what the hell took so long and why we aren't doing more.  Obama seems shockingly fine with watching ISIL perpetrate a holocaust against Christians so long as those Christians are given the option to convert to Islam or agree to pay a completely arbitrary tax in order to avoid being executed.  The Yazidis aren't being given those options--ISIL just wants them all dead.  That shouldn't make the Christians being persecuted any less sympathetic though, should it?  Agreeing to live with someone's boot on your neck for the rest of your life doesn't seem like a much better option than death.  Maybe you need to be a law professor to see that distinction.

I have to ask, is Obama a Christian?  I know he calls himself one, but is he really?  I'm not asking to be a dick, or a Puritan, or whatever.  I'm actually agnostic, myself.  But I have to ask how a Christian could sit there and watch what's been happening to his fellow Christians in the Middle East lately and not want to do something about it.  How does a Christian watch an 1,800-year-old church being burned to the ground and do nothing?  The same group doing all these horrific things has been pretty open about wanting to hurt the United States however they can, yet Obama kept looking the other way.  I'm glad to see that Obama was finally dragged kicking and screaming into the White House Situation Room, but why would it take the plight of the Yazidis to do it?  (Yes, the strikes were meant to protect the consulate in Erbil, but Obama specifically mentions the Yazidi situation as an additional reason for them while neglecting to mention any of the horrors being inflicted upon Christians.  Why?  And will the Yazidi ultimately be left twisting in the wind anyway once Obama decides that Erbil is secure?)

How many Americans were on flight MH17?

When Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was first shot down over Ukraine there were reports that as many as 23 Americans were aboard at the time, but the State Department refused to confirm that number.  President Obama specifically mentioned one American who was killed and now everyone is acting as if that was the only American victim; however, the investigation is still ongoing, and will probably drag on for some time since the investigators are being fired upon.  Not that it really matters, as I'm sure the State Department will drag its feet as long as it possibly can in confirming anything unflattering the investigation might yield.  If the State Department ever does confirm that the initial reports of 23 American deaths were in fact accurate, it will only be long after the next distraction comes along so all this can all get brushed aside as old news.

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?

Obama's latest distraction

Ahmed Abu Khattala, someone suspected of helping to organize the Benghazi attack, was finally taken into custody a few days ago.  The YouTube guy that the Obama administration tried to blame for the attack was arrested in about two weeks, but for some reason it took us almost two years to grab one of the actual terrorists involved.  Why did it take so long to find someone who made himself available for media interviews?

I think President Obama still wants to believe that the Benghazi attack really was caused by a YouTube video somehow, and only decided to capture one of the terrorists involved when it could be used as a distraction.  Now Obama gets to beat his chest and pretend to care about terrorism again for a while, and all his spokespeople and media sycophants get to pounce on any Republican who dares to question the timing of it, but announcing that we have Khattala is only the first part of the distraction.  The mess in Iraq is going to be a long term problem that is bound to keep eating away at Obama's poll numbers; he needs a big distraction that he can keep milking over and over again.  Khattala will be tried in civilian court, and of course the whole thing will be turned into a circus.  I don't think the verdict even matters to Obama as much as the circus itself does, especially if he can get Khattala to say something on the stand that reinforces the silly idea that a YouTube video was somehow to blame for everything.

Khattala is being interrogated right now, but I doubt we will get anything meaningful out of him.  Even if Obama wanted to get anything meaningful out of Khattala, which I doubt, he's just not willing to do what it takes to get anything out of him anyway.  With Obama, you either blow the terrorists up (along with everyone around them) before they have a chance to tell us anything useful, or you bring them in and give them some milk and cookies--and if the milk and cookies approach is ever deemed too harsh for whatever reason, Obama just sets them free.  I'm convinced that the only reason Khattala isn't still free right now is because Obama badly needed a distraction and he just can't resist getting a chance to point the finger of blame at Nakoula Basseley Nakoula yet again.

Obama throws Iraq under the bus

An especially militant offshoot of Al-Qaeda called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, has taken control of several cities in Iraq.  They took Fallujah earlier this year, Mosul and Tikrit both in the past few days, and now it's looking like Baghdad might be next on their list.  The prime minister of Iraq has asked for help, but President Obama has yet to offer any.  Drone strikes may or may not still be on the table, but Obama has completely ruled out sending any ground troops back into Iraq.

Obama seems to want to have it both ways by taking all the credit for "ending" the Iraq War while still counting on all the blame for the inevitable horrors that follow to be laid at Bush's feet.  The thing is, Obama has already had a hand in creating these horrors for years.  The maniac currently running ISIL is someone that Obama set free when he needlessly shut down the Camp Bucca prison in 2009.  Obama also gave ISIL a head start when he took it upon himself to supply Syrian rebels with weapons and training without giving much thought as to how radicalized the rebels were becoming or how the weapons or training might be used against us later.

Some people refer to ISIL as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria instead, or ISIS, which can be misleading.  Not only does ISIL want to control Iraq and Syria, but also Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Cyprus, and part of Turkey; since President Obama always makes a point of referring to the group as ISIL instead of ISIS, I have to assume that he knows this.  The leader of ISIL has even specifically threatened the United States, and yet Obama would have you believe that ISIL is a problem that we should leave to the Iraqis to figure out for themselves.

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.

The Incredible Shrinking President

I swear, Barack Obama has to be the pettiest person to ever occupy the White House.  He doesn't have an ounce of humility in his whole body.  He's the sort of person who never once heard the word "no" until he was an adult, and now treats even the slightest disagreement as if it were an act of treason or terrorism.  He's the sort of person who can't handle even the most innocuous criticism, but thinks falsely accusing his opponent of giving a woman cancer is just part of the rough and tumble of politics.  He's the sort of person who would send riot police after veterans to keep them out of their own memorials just to add to the pain he wants to scapegoat Republicans for.

Obama really thought that running for president itself would be the only experience he needed to qualify for the job, just because he's so darned special.  Résumés weren't meant for people like him; those are for the little people.  It worked, though.  He got elected.  Twice.  And after five years of being the least presidential president ever, he's still campaigning.  For what, I don't know.  He can't legally run for a third term in 2016 anyway.  It's almost as if his whole presidency has just been a campaign to get his own show on MSNBC.  Why not?  He seems to get pettier with each passing day, and I don't expect him to be any less petty once he's out of office.  He'd fit right in there.

At what point will people begin to hold Obama accountable for his own failures?  Just how petty and vile does the man have to get before people finally see him for what he really is?

Where will it end?

It's maddening to watch this vortex of scandals swirl around President Obama month after month without any of it sticking to him in any meaningful way.  The same media that desperately tried to find a scandal in every single word that came out of George Bush's mouth--even if they had to invent a few of his words themselves--can barely be bothered to acknowledge any part of Scandalpalooza.  There would be a cacophony of outrage from them the likes of which the world has never seen if even one of these many scandals had happened under Bush, but now most in the media can't even bring themselves to raise an eyebrow at something as brazen as a Watergate-style break-in.

Impeachment might be too much to hope for after the debacle that was the Clinton impeachment, but I'd like to think Obama has more to worry about here than a decline in his poll numbers; after all, he won't be able to run for a third term anyway.  Still, it would be nice if we could get an investigation into these scandals that goes somewhere other than in circles.  If this were a Coen brothers movie someone would have been run out of town on a rail by now.

And in the meantime, much to Obama's delight, we've all been tearing ourselves apart over immigration reform and freaking out over the Zimmerman trial; not that we should never talk about those things, but when we do they seem to have a way of sucking up all the oxygen and then nothing else gets talked about.

Are we really going to sit here and accept this inept corruptocracy as our new normal?  I hope people wake up.  I hope someday this godawful nightmare will finally be over.  But what will it take?  It seems like we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it does we just find ourselves waiting for the other other shoe to drop.  I shudder to think how bad things may have to get for America before they finally start to get better again.