Beyond the Precipice

Yeah, I know other pundits are smarter and more elegant and have this figured out but please bear with me--this is a form of therapy. 

The clown show that just unfolded over the last few days had me, a registered skeptic, fooled.  I actually thought the GOP had pulled off some kind of clever coup by flying off the fiscal cliff with a parachute.  But as the sky begins to clear the sun is becoming more visible, and it looks reddish.  
 
So, what just happened?  Well, it's important to start out with the most likely goals of the president, who was driving the clown car.  With reelection out of the way he appears to have two main goals in the short term--1) redistributing wealth and 2) killing the GOP for 2014 so he can redistribute more wealth, ban more guns, nationalize more health care, give amnesty to illegal aliens, bow down to the UN on climate change and further weaken the church and charitable giving.   All of this would be part of the change he was talking about in 2008.

In trying to neuter the GOP he's using a divide and conquer strategy, pitting the Tea Party against the moderates to splinter the body.  That's why he wanted only some of the Bush tax cuts to expire, knowing how it would affect the party psychologically.  So far the plan is proceeding wonderfully.  Speaker F Yourself is severely weakened with talks of a mutiny.  In all likelihood Boehner cajoled the TP members into voting for the 41 to 1 plan by scaring them about press fallout and promising they would go after Obama on the debt ceiling in a few months.  Now some of these TP members are on the record as voting for tax increases and pork, thank you very much.

When the debt ceiling fight arrives Obama will float back down off the mountain and lecture them about using the debt ceiling for politics, reminding them of their recently-passed spending increase votes by saying "Congress needs to pay for what they have spent".   He will then ignore his own advice and use the debt ceiling to demand even more tax hikes from the rich to pay for any reforms, which is in effect poking the wound. 

But the truth about our debt will come out, you say!  Some places.  But just because Faux News and Limbaugh reports something doesn't mean it really happened.   Hannity's ratings are already way down, Boortz is off the air, Limbaugh becomes less relevant with each passing year.  

If the GOP can't get Obama to cut anything without more tax increases they may be forced to do something drastic like shutting down the government, which is unlikely because the moderates remain deathly afraid of the punishment they'll receive from the press, the White House, Pelosi, Hollywood, Jon Stewart, Facebook, Twitter and Kim Kardashian.  As bizarre as it sounds the RINOs may actually join forces with the Dems to eradicate the Tea Party, who will become increasingly marginalized and ostracized.  How many Alinsky rules is that?  I've lost count.   

Even if the GOP were to coalesce around a set of balls and challenge the administration with something drastic it may result in another credit downgrade, which the Dem machine will beat in a drum circle until the mid-terms, trying to convince the rest of America just how "radical" these "terrorists" are, ie, they must be stopped.   If that sounds wild and unbelievable just look around.  If they are successful America as we know it could be gone by 2016.  And many progs will wave goodbye to it, saying good riddance to a racist invention from a bunch of old white guys and cheering for the new fair freedom-less Utopia of ultimate balance, never quoting Ben Franklin again.   Just remember, they won't be called radicals, it's those little old ladies at Tea Party rallies wearing funny hats and sitting in lawn chairs who were the radicals. 

So what's really going on?  From my view, one group is playing chess and the other is playing checkers, and the GOP is getting beat at checkers.  It's not over yet--halftime or early third quarter maybe, but the GOP is down big and needs a Tebow.   Are there any?  Even the real one is mired in controversy these days.  But at some point there is going to be a goal-line stand. 

Just a Tactic

A day after Michelle Obama appears at the NAACP meeting in Kansas City we get a proclamation from that group calling all who self-identify as tea partiers as official racists. Meanwhile Eric Holder is suing the white governor of Arizona for doing a job American politicians won't do while refusing to prosecute the black guys who were standing in front of the polls with clubs. Outrageously outrageous!

More like a yawn. Desperate men do desperate things, and stirring the race pot to generate turnout in the mid-terms is pretty desperate. So the tea folks should just ignore this. No counter-proclamations, no emotional comments, just refuse the bait and keeps eyes forward. On second thought, this is probably OK..

Beck and the Individual

Caught some of the Beck radio show today running an errand. After what some would consider a paranoid roundup of the latest inroads of the far left he got to a point-- it's not the left or right, it's the individual to blame for America's troubles. We're falling down on the ethical/moral job.

The founders warned against our grand experiment leading to tyranny if the individual failed to uphold their end. Some predicted that only a religious public could uphold the framwork through ethics/morals, etc. But as Beck pointed out, even most atheists believe in some kind of moral responsibility to their fellow man, so it's not just an invisible sky man thing.

This is all debatable through history but there does seem to be a "change" in America. Perhaps the reason we have Chicago machine politicians running the government and lecturing everyone on how to behave....and perhaps the reason we're seeing more and more silly laws mandating things that should be obvious, like purchasing health care insurance, being careful with the fatty foods, not letting toys override parental responsibility, profiling people to determine citizenship and so on and so forth, is because individual personal responsibility has eroded to the point where the state believes it has to erode individual liberty to 'save' things.

Cartoonish Thuggery

Was the Post's cartoon about the chimp in bad taste? My first reaction was 'yes'. Calling black people monkeys is a well-known slur in the south, so that imagery immediately came to mind when the word stimulus was used.

But on second viewing, not as much. We know Obama outsourced the drafting of the bill to Pelosi, so if anyone should be offended it's her. And there's nothing offensive about suggesting the bill was written by a monkey, unless one is a literate, conservative monkey. The question is whether the Post tried to use that excuse to slip in a monkey=Obama comparison.

The NAACP believes they did and are demanding people lose their jobs over it. While many are genuinely outraged the chance to take a free shot at the Fox News media syndicate amidst the outrage hasn't been lost on anyone of minimal mental capacity. No reason to squander an opportunity to eliminate the opposition if it arises, and it don't get much better than this.

If the cartoon was tacky and offensive the strong-arming is far worse. To say political cartoonists can no longer use monkeys when mentioning Obama after eight years of Bushchimpy cartoons is patently absurd. Wonder what the smirking chimp thinks about it? Or the cartoonist who depicted Condi Rice as Aunt Jemima? Freedom of speech isn't always pleasant. Just ask Jesse Jackson.

So please NAACP, back off. Your condemning voices have been heard but you have no business deciding punishment. Let the Post's readers determine that through canceled subscriptions or angry letters to the editor.

It's a war for oil, you know

The London Independent is warning its readers of a new law soon to be passed in Iraq that will open up the country's spigots to "big oil". You can probably guess what's coming:

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. .

Of course the war was partially fought about oil--Saddam was sitting on a gusher. Everyone knows the emerging economies of India and China and the diminishing Saudi fields are expected to stress the world supply pretty soon. Unfortunately, it seems most of the world's oil is controlled by nutballs.

Admittedly there might be some 'splainin to do regards remarks made before the war about using the revenues to offset the costs of fighting. But the Independent puddles through their entire story without reminding us how Saddam handled his oil through Oil for Food, which basically amounted to a UN-sanctioned child starvation program.

They also forgot to mention back room deals with the French and Russians that would have seen Total or Russia's state-controlled oil company (neither are part of big oil, I guess) monopolizing his crude, contracts that were to go into effect as soon as the aforementioned countries could bamboozle away the UN sanctions, mass graves not withstanding. Don't forget all that oil he torched in Kuwait, just because.

Such glaring omissions, other than proving their bias, tends to leave the impression that having a murderous dictator controlling Iraqi oil and using proceeds to secretly acquire weapons, bribe leaders, invade other countries, and build garish palaces in a world full of crazy Islamic terrorists is much preferred to having publicly traded companies dealing with oil with proceeds eventually going to the people. Evil in our time defined. El Diablo. Got it.