A very good day for those of us who believe it's vital Obama not win reelection. See this - the scheming scumbag Axelrod completely out maneuvered. This is what I've been saying - this is going to be an extremely close election - it shouldn't be, there's no way Obama deserves reelection, but regardless it will be - and I've been saying Romney will not beat Obama unless he and his campaign completely understand [unlike McCain who never got it] that they are dealing with a political animal, thoroughly schooled in the corrupt Chicago style of electioneering, who will say and do anything to win - Obama is nothing at all like the image he presents - Romney will not beat him unless he runs a very smart and very aggressive, very aggressive campaign. What happened today tells me that Romney and his team get it and that's good news for people like me. The election is still likely to be a coin toss, a handful of voters in a handful of states deciding things - but I always maintained that Romney would prove himself to be a much better candidate once he was freed from having to win over the GOP base - so far his campaign is making that look like a good call.

I was troubled to see Israel has revised its now obviously wrong prediction on how long Assad will cling to power [they originally unknown to me apparently predicted he had but a few months] - I'm troubled because I always look first to Israel for the to the bone story on what's actually happening in that screwed up part of the world - I'm troubled because all the other 'sources' I read for this kind of info insisted confidently that, just as with Libya, the superficial Western media was getting the Syrian question quite wrong, that Assad would be going nowhere, that the Alawite regime would be going nowhere [at least not without putting up one hell of a fight] and that the aggrieved Sunni opposition was an incoherent mess of squabbling Islamist factions who should be feared more than championed - which is exactly why the large non-Sunni minority in Syria was unlikely to turn on Assad, fear of a retributional blood bath that might follow in the wake.

So it troubles me Israel got this one wrong - if you can't trust them to have a grasp on what the hell's goin' on over there, then who do you trust? - although, not impossible they were trying to feed the perception of a weak Assad in hopes of spurring an outside intervention, not just from the US but Turkey maybe, the Saudis, who are already definitely involved - but I dunno, of course one can see a strategic gain for israel if Assad goes bye bye seeing as how he's an Iran client - but, so many bad things could happen here - to me I always thought for Israel it was a Mubarak-like 'better the devil you know' type scenario when it came to Assad - maybe not. I mean, if the Alawite regime starts to crumble or the Sunni insurgents evolve into a more credible force then the situation almost certainly degrades into a full blown civil war and no doubt a very violent one - that to my mind almost certainly then draws Iraq and Lebanon into a sectarian upheaval, and then probably Iran and Turkey - and then, who knows, maybe even Russia. The chance of this, should the insurgency start to make real progress, escalating into a gigantic shit storm is bracingly real.

Given that, you see how it troubles me that Israel got this wrong - you do have to ask yourself if maybe they see a wider Sunni/Shia conflagration brewing here and figure somehow this could work to their advantage. I dunno. Could be they just got it wrong.

Now that Romney has officially sown up the GOP nomination I guess it behooves me to address the many despairing and pessimistic musings I spilled forth during the unseemly process and ask if I didn't just get it all a bit wrong - ahh, maybe - I still say the primary was made singularly disturbing by fact, once Pawlenty had dropped out, that there was very, very clearly only one person in the race who could make a reasonable claim to being worthy of the nomination and yet the republican electorate seemed determined to ignore that fact for as long as possible - that's disturbing - and if Santorum does a better job of keeping his extremism under wraps till Ohio passed he possibly wins that vote and then who knows what hell breaks loose. And what if Herman Cain's sexual issues don't come crawling out of the woodwork? Sure, the man is such a buffoon it's easy to conclude some other indiscretion or misstep would have eventually upended him, but who knows? The point is Cain should never have even been in the conversation to begin with and yet he was and for a good month or so was sitting on top of the polls.

So, I think I was more right than wrong in my expressed anxieties - hell, let's face it, to any sane and objective observer the irrational aspects of democracy are always going to stir up feelings of doubt, despair and sometimes flat out dread - I mean, I can randomly listen in on any two average citizens having a political discussion and it's very hard to come away from such an encounter and not be muttering "my god, we're all fucking doomed". And it's not my point to be calling the average citizen stupid here - sure, of course, many in this society lack the intellectual wherewithal to judge effectively the finer points of a political debate - and absolutely a depressingly significant percentage of the electorate seems to be either locked into a view point they will not veer from no matter what or to be so lazy, misinformed or otherwise perjured in their perceptions that they are easy prey to grossly simplistic messaging - but I don't know if it's so much a question of intelligence or rather just simply an existential fact governing the way people process information, the way they come to believe what they want to believe. I remember back in 2008 having many arguments with people about Obama, college educated types, people who I would have considered smart, successful people, guys who owned multi million dollar businesses - I alone would be arguing against the Chosen One and they en masse for - but always, when you whittled back their arguments to the essential core of what was motivating them, it always came down to this: electing a black guy will change everything. They couldn't in any logical, coherent way explain to me exactly what the hell that was supposed to mean - I don't think they knew in any real way what it meant - all that mattered was that they believed it to be true and nothing I said had a chance of changing their minds.

Those arguments convinced me of something I had already for some time considered likely - that Obama could actually turn out to be worse than Bush. Welcome to democracy...

I'd call this well done and well said and pretty much on the money. Our culture's sentimental, fetishistic obsession with a vapid idealization if not adoration of a fantasy of youth incanted in the squalid, hollow minds of broken adults is almost certainly symptomatic of a something bad.

Of course, everyone understands the desire - there's not a middle-aged and counting soul in the world who doesn't wish they were eighteen again - god knows I do - but it's one thing to idly wish for it and feel the pang of something lost, and it's quite another to embrace delusion and try to reanimate those ghosts through sympathetic magic. This is what disturbed me so about Obama, not the man himself - although, granted I'm not a fan of the guy nor his putative 'ideas' - I think he's a charlatan, a pretender, an egotistical con artist and not fit for the job he has - but then one could have said similar things about Bush, so there ya go - I guess the democrats deserved equal time when it came to destroying the country by offering up awful nominees [hey, they gave us Carter for christ sake] - no, it wasn't so much Obama the lurking Fabian himself, objectionable as he might be, that disturbed but more rather I think the callow and almost willful ignorance that seemed to motivate the near adoration of him in 2008 [will David Brooks' reputation ever recover from his paen to the perfect crease in Dear Leader's pants?] - that so many people so easily bought into the simplistic, sentimental and utterly dissembling nonsense the man was spewing, that's what worried, or should have worried a thoughtful person.

Being a long time unfriender of Facebook as a rather sad excrescence of a possibly dying culture and having very much enjoyed its disastrous IPO and the gleefully ironic fact insipid liberals forever linked the name to a 'revolution' they thought was but very decidedly wasn't, or at least wasn't the was they thought it would be [Egypt] I'm compelled to repeat this quip from Rich Lowry that I just stumbled on since it so succinctly captures my feelings and no doubt much truth:

"Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is to uselessness what Henry Ford was to the automobile".

Very nice.

Political arguments increasingly amount to nothing more than data points interpreted according to a bias and manipulated thereafter to suit and further that bias in order to promote an agenda. It's rare that I will hear one of these debates and come away thinking 'well, that was thoughtful and really deepened my understanding of things' - much more likely it is that I will come away thinking 'well, A did a better job of lying than B and so I guess A won'. It's quite pathetic. I'm not sure how or even if democracy can survive a failure, a devolution of this sort. Now, of course, public debate has always been subject to the taint of shameless pandering and the pursuit of objectives unsullied by the burden of truth - but it's gotten worse, no? Certainly it seems like I can't hear or read anything in the public forum without my first post coital thought being 'I wonder just how much of that was complete bullshit?'.

Although, I do feel compelled to say - and this will unfortunately just sound like me adding my shovel load of crap to the pile - but I gotta say, Obama really takes the nonsense to a new level. Honest to god, the first time I heard him speak my most immediate impression was 'Wow, this guy is an exceptional liar'. And he hasn't let me down in that regard.

[I will allow that my perception that Obama has degraded further an already quite degraded form by being so smoothly efficient in his phoniness may in part be a consequence of the way the press is such a willing adjunct in this liberal pantomime - indeed, the most disturbing thing about the Obama presidency may in the end be how the press has behaved, seemingly abandoning even the mere pretension of critical objectivity in defence of their chosen candidate - the recent dust up over the abominable Rev Wright demonstrating clearly how scandalous this behavior is - for who doesn't believe that if Romney had such a disreputable character in his past that it'd be front page news everyday in the liberal press? Hell, MSNBC and CNN would create daily shows based wholly on beating that rug - but a conservative dare raise the topic of Wright and they are automatically cast a racist that must be hounded to the margins, and the reason for this is obvious: the sacrosanct, carefully constructed narrative of Obama would not survive a serious and objective analysis of his relationship with Wright - if you doubt it read this helpful review of Obama's 'Dreams of My Father' origiinally published in 2008 and ask yourself how on earth this guy managed to get elected president of the United states? Essentially the MSM is engaged as co-conspirators in a fraud being perpetrated against the American electorate - I really don't like extreme talk of that sort especially when the 'c' word is rolled out, but this is essentially what's going on here]

I'm amused by how two recent turns reveal Obama to be exactly what I've always said he was - to be kind [since I'm a bit of a fan of ol' Niccolo myself], a shameless Machiavellian in service to the uber left - to be less kind, an egotistical con man with a knack for selling ideological snake oil to naive white liberals - and of course I'm talking about how he pretended or allowed the misrepsentation to persist for quite sometime of having been born in Kenya in order I guess to burnish his 'exotic' post racial wonderfulness - and his putative change of heart on gay marriage which was in fact an entirely calculated and quite cynical bit of theatrics.

What's interesting is how the curtain being pulled back on the real Obama says something about those who will still vote for him no matter what come November - there are those who are so enthralled by the idea of him that they simply can't see the truth at all - these would be poor minorities, idiot youth, idiot Hollywood celebs, pacifist women - and then there are those who probably sense the truth about the man but are either too bought in to be that bothered by it or are in denial, they just don't wanna look at it, it makes them uncomfortable - college educated whites basically, the type that like to think of themselves as progressive but in the end this progressivity is more of an affectation than anything else, a comforting illusion as it were - and then there are those who see it, maybe always have [but probably not, more likely used to be amongst the blindly enthralled], but are completely fine with what they see because it serves the great liberal agenda - uber left academia and sundry other ideologues and the only slightly less uber left media.

What independent voters need to ask themselves - or what Romney is going to have to get them to ask themselves without actually coming out and saying it - is do you really think a president that needs and possibly very much wants to appease or serve a demographic like that - poor minorities dependent on big gov't, educated whites who work for that big gov't, foolish youth, moronic celebrities, socialist intellectual elites, pacifist women etc etc - do you really think making those people happy is like to result in an apt formula for the securing of a great and prosperous future for America? If you do, I have a European Union to sell ya.

But what if current demographic trends are distorting electoral reality in this disconcerting direction regardless of independents? That's a scary thought. Now, sure, Hispanics could eventually evolve into a more equitable demographic - as a cultural subset they're almost certainly going to do much better than blacks have because they are not hobbled by a resentment towards white, Western European culture - much as Asians do well because they embrace in many ways the best aspects of that culture - and so Hispanics, as their lot in America improves, could indeed evolve into more of a right leaning or at least reliably centrist demographic - but that's a process that I imagine could take 25, 50 years or more, who knows - be too late then, no? Certainly, if Obama gets another four years it's hard to see America surviving intact as a superpower long enough to allow for such a dynamic shift to occur.

"... Obama presents as something of a three headed monster... the first being that his appeal for people is defined almost wholly by the emotional rather than the rational, which is always problematic given the way such a thing co-opts or outright impoverishes the critical faculties... even those convinced that their love for him is based on an intellectual bond are really bound by an enfeebling emotional context... the second eminence would be his Machiavellianism... he's a rather shameless liar and manipulator in service of his agenda... now, whether that agenda honors himself or an ideology he devoutly cherishes, I dunno, but not sure it really matters in the end... although the fact that he's so bad at governing yet so good at campaigning may suggest that indeed he himself is the true object of his affections and thus his preference for the perpetual campaign... the third visage and possibly ugliest of the lot is the compliant press and related media, a ravaged countenance that really wounds the soul to look upon... in politics one can always expect to be abused by the grinning evil of the first two to some degree or another, and Obama truly excels at both... but for the beast to be contained you really need the third to not be there or at least be hobbled by weakened sinews... with Obama not only is it there, it is prominent and proudly so and emboldens the other two in a way that is quite disturbing..."

Remember this story next time some Hollywood personality offers his or her opinion on a subject or issue that actually requires the application of an unsullied and substantial intellect to understand - and of course I'm talking about Oliver Stone in this context given the way he's cheered and extolled the many supposed virtues of Chavez's Venezuela and lauded Chavez himself. How did we come to this sad, dispiriting place where a celebrity's opinion on something of real importance actually seems to matter? Have we become that stupid as a people? What's scary, with a leftist president who is running a populist campaign built around demonizing rich, successful people and promoting utterly bogus issues like 'fairness', and with the news about JP Morgan this morning, and with the reviled [by business leaders] Dodd/Frank bill moving towards reality and the much feared Volcker rule aspect of it still to be written - what's scary is that the average person's negative but grossly simplistic view of Wall Street was probably formed in part by Oliver Stone's movie - Oliver Stone, idiot ideologue and champion of Chavez, de facto wack job dictator of cesspool state described in story linked above. I don't see how a sane, rational person cannot be troubled by this. But at least Obama has gone gay and civilization is apparently now saved. Christ it's depressing.

"... ask yourself, what is Obama's demographic, his natural constituency?... and then ask yourself if serving, pleasing, satisfying the needs of that constituency would lead to actions and policies and commitments that make America's continuance as a great nation, a superpower, more or less likely?... because when I look at Obama what I see massed behind him are the systemically poor and resentful, dovish women, moribund unionists, delusional academics, naive college kids, vacuous celebrities and your basic run of the mill habitual liberal who is probably indentured for life to wasteful statism through employment and wandering meekly some wistful fantasy land where it seems a given that there's no problem in the world caused by evil entities like the Pentagon and Wall Street that can't be solved by thinking happy thoughts and taxing the rich... a desire or native suitability for the satisfying of a constituency like that may make you a good candidate for leader of Sweden or some such thing... but leader of America?... c'mon, that's like begging for decline..."

So sweet, the Arab Spring. Is there a greater testament to the naive idiocy of the modern liberal than how they actually talked as if democracy was breaking out all over the benighted lands of Allah a year ago? Pathetic. Although, probably unfair to only ridicule liberals - many neoconservative types also clamoured, engorged by the vacuous embrace of gross stupidity - they wanted to march into Libya, want to march into Syria, where the Muslim Brotherhood wait with giddy expectation - one despairs that the future of the West is in the hands of fools - either that or vain idealists clutching with besotted desperation the wilting dreams of their florid youth.

The funny thing about the gay marriage debate is that it really only natters if the 'negativists' are right - what I mean is, if as I understand it roughly 8% of the population is gay and let's say about half that minority cares about being able to marry like the straight majority do [given my own anecdotal experience, having worked with a lot of gays, I'm guessing the number is much less than half, but let's say half] then, should gay marriage become a general reality, the quality of life for about 4% or less of the population will be marginally improved and by and large in ways only vaguely different from the benefits offered by 'civil unions'. Of course the MSM loves to talk up gay marriage as if the very fate of Western Civilization hung in the balance, as if some grievous injustice was operating here and failure to address it would taint the value of all human life - but that's a raving absurdity ripe with the rot of political agendas - I'm guessing the attitude towards gay marriage of most heterosexuals who have read something other than the bible can be summed up with a shrug of the shoulders and a sarcastic guffaw along the lines of "sure, go ahead, what the fuck do I care" - and that most of them, should gay marriage become a reality, will simply stop paying attention.

The point being, if the advocates of gay marriage are right, that it's a harmless correction of a slight injustice against a small minority [my language of course - the advocates' diction would wax decidedly more animated here], then that's a rather insignificant thing as a measure of the implied impact on the common weal of the majority. Somewhat paradoxically the issue only becomes important, significant, if the nay sayers are the ones who are right - that is if those who see the existential imperative of marriage as a fecund vehicle for the propagation and maintenance of a vibrant and healthy society threatened, if they're right in believing this sustaining and necessary social convention is being hollowed out into near meaninglessness by those who insist on reducing it to a mere manifestation of sentimental 'amour', only then does the outcome of the debate become significant. Certainly one cannot deny that those who defend gay marriage do so with arguments that only make sense if one accepts that marriage is about love first and foremost and not procreation - the only way you can maintain that there's no difference between homosexual and heterosexual love is by removing the eucharistic imponderable of fecundity - therefore gay marriage can only make sense if you make all marriage simply an expression of abstract androgynous 'love' and not a solemnization of the mystery of procreation that is a unique function of heterosexual praxis.

Now, I'm not saying the 'negativists' are right - it's a complicated argument and one can make good points either way - I'm only saying that how one views gay marriage only truly matters if they are right because only then are the consequences significant relative to the common weal - but you would never guess that if ones opinion on this issue was forged in the liberal furnaces of CNN and the New York Times.

Ahh - Kelly Ayotte will be sitting in on the Meet The Press panel discussion tomorrow - I assume this means she's interested in the VP job since I don't recall her ever being on the Sunday morning shows before. I'll definitely be tuning in - the back and forth nature of these panel discussions will be a good forum for judging how she plays on TV. I tend to avoid MTP because Gregory to me struggles to hide his bias, although he's not nearly as bad as some - and they have EJ Dionne as a guest way too often - he's insufferably biased, so much so it's very hard to believe he's not on the Obama payroll - there are lefties one can tolerate because when they speak you at least have a sense they possess an open mind - Dionne is one of those progressives for whom it's clear his left wingedness is a creed he devoutly believes in and zealously adheres to - guaranteed this cretin wept copious tears the night Obama was elected - his type is just as scary and repulsive as the Santorumish religious freaks on the right.

[have I completely given up on Ryan as the VP choice? Love Ryan, wanted him to run for president although probably good decision on his part that he didn't - I just think he'll play his vital part best free from the rigors and distortions of the campaign - and should Romney lose, and there's a good chance he will, Ryan will then not be tainted by the loss - should Romney lose conservatives will be relying on Ryan and Rubio to rally the congress in opposition to an intemperate Obama agenda]

update: so, saw Sen Ayotte - liked her, impressive, certainly nothing Palin-like about her - but didn't sense the ability, when the cameras are on, to dominate a conversation, not only as a measure of competence and expertise [where she seems quite capable], but also as a matter of style, the way that Christie can or even Paul Ryan can - still, saw enough potential to remain interested. To me she sounded just a wee bit nervous - and so, as she does more of this stuff, the performance, the style element of the process should improve. Then again, as with acting or sports or any other performance based activity, practice helps, but in the end you either got it or you don't.

[another reason to put a woman on the ticket - what better way to throw into stark relief the enervating state centric ideology of the left made manifest in the 'Life of Julia' nonsense than by putting a strong and independent woman on the ticket?]

I'm still amazed how many conservatives seem surprised by Obama the politician, and by politician I mean shameless liar, self promoter, schemer, manipulator, fantasist, whatever - I've called him a horrible president, atrocious leader, but a superb confidence man willing to say or do anything in order to promote the thing he loves most, himself - well, truth is I've never quite figured out where the lines are drawn - is he a true believer in the leftist agenda or is the agenda just a convenient prop servicing his ego? Dunno - I suspect some combination of the two but leaning more to the latter than the former - I suspect he figured out quite early in life that he had the skill set and inherent attributes needed to inspire white uber liberals to fervently jump through hoops for him, and he's exploited this talent to its fullest. I mean, the guy wrote two god awful books about himself before he'd actually even done anything - why would a person do something like that? Personality disorder? Ego run wild? Or was it that he knew exactly how to manipulate the pathetic naivety of the white uber liberal? Read 'Dreams of My Father' - left wing screed spewing hatred for Western civilization or cleverly crafted manipulation of the effete white liberals he needed to promote his career? I'm tellin' ya, absolute disaster of a president, superb con man.

And Romney will not beat him unless he and his team fully understand how ruthless and cunning the man is when it comes to protecting his own political fortunes [remember how he cynically used and then callously cast aside the abominable Rev Wright when it suited his needs] - I've always said the only thing he's ever shown himself to be any good at is getting elected - governing he sucks at, but selling his brand to the naive and foolish? Easy. The race is gonna come down to a relatively few votes in a handful of swing states because we know that 90% of the electoral college is already settled and it favors Obama - add to that him having the power of the Oval Office to influence events, his absolute willingness to lie and shamelessly manipulate things to his advantage and the fact he can count on the press to play along and you can see how Romney is gonna have to run a very smart and aggressive campaign and then probably hope for a bit of luck. I mean, hell, just look at the NY Times this morning - complete fuck up in China over the blind dissident and bam! they roll out the race card - an entirely bull shit story on how some whites still reluctant to vote for a black guy [and this when many conservatives are calling for Condi Rice as the VP choice] - this just a farce of a story, meaningless aside from it's true purpose of pulling out the race card to divert attention from the fiasco in China. For the liberal press Obama is an ideal they will not relinquish or stray far from, no matter what - close to meaningless for them his performance as president, especially now that the fight is on - they deny him, they deny themselves.

Which is why more and more I think Christie has to be the VP choice - to defeat Obama and the media confederacy aligned behind him you're gonna need someone who the media cannot ignore, and just as important, someone who, when the media misrepresents something he or Romney says, can fight back in a way Americans will appreciate and find appealing, be drawn to - bad Palin memories seem to be pushing people towards a safe choice, increasingly I'm feeling that would be a mistake. I still have to hear more from Ayotte and Nikki Haley because, all things being equal, I'd prefer to see a woman on the ticket - but right now I'm leaning to Christie.

The world view really is a battle between the hard edged skeptics and the soft edged optimists - I'm thinking of how some Islamist faction in the Egyptian presidential election is standing up a 'moderate' as a candidate after their hardline choice was disqualified - and the optimists view this development as a positive sign viz the so called Arab Spring and the skeptics like myself view it as a game, a charade - something along the lines of the Islamists know the military is probably going to try and rig or steal the election and so putting up a putative moderate will make it more likely the West listens to their pleas of an injustice being done against them - I'm guessing the game goes something like that - regardless, I'm confident the putting up of a would be moderate does not mean at all that the Muslim Brotherhood etc etc are about to adopt Western norms - far from it, is what I'd say.

We see the same conflict between skeptics and idealists when it comes to 'negotiations' with Iran - hard edged bastards like myself look with a very jaundiced eye at these negotiations believing Iran, knowing Obama will not attack, is merely trying to keep Israel at bay long enough to make a strike by them pointless or impossible - whereas the idealists seem to actually think they're walking the world towards a new enlightenment.

Actually, rethinking the Christie 'problem' of his personality being too big and therefore possibly overshadowing Romney should he be the VP choice - rethinking that, one could argue that such a thing might prove advantageous - if Christie's doing the 'big' media pleasing, crowd rousing stuff that frees Romney to do the thing he's much more comfortable with - calm, serious, professional - the straight man, as it were. Whereas if Portman is the choice Romney will have to do the crowd rousing, media beguiling stuff since Portman is a virtual clone of Romney - so in this sense you can see that choosing Christie might be the clever choice. I have to hear Ayotte speak some more before making a decision on that. And I'm thinking now Portman should only be the choice if polls clearly indicate he can deliver Ohio - people seem to want to believe that Portman would emphasize Romney's positives [serious, professional etc etc], but the above argument would suggest a Christie would allow Romney to do himself what you would be asking a Portman to do. Yeah - unless polls indicate Portman can make a difference in Ohio I'm starting to think as a redundant choice he'd draw more attention to Romney's weaknesses than his strengths, contrary to what pundits are imagining.

And now to Obama politicizing the Osama kill - I predicted this - well, I predicted the OBL death photos would be 'mysteriously' leaked in the run up to the election - same thing - point is I predicted Obama would shamelessly exploit the killing for political gain, indeed I hypothesized that the reason he didn't release the photos was so he could release them later at a more politically opportune time - and at the time of the operation I also opined that there seemed to be more political calculation behind the killing than national security considerations - not that we of course shouldn't have been targeting Osama - but I've never heard a good, logical explanation of why he was killed and not captured [I can think of some very good political reasons of why he was killed and not captured, but no good national security ones] - I've never heard a good explanation of why the operation seems to have been put off for several months - I've never heard anyone successfully deny that the reason we were so willing to damage if not destroy our key strategic relationship with Pakistan in going behind their back is because Obama wanted to be able to announce a withdrawal from Afghanistan before the election, in other words reelection was deemed more important than strategic alliances [this political component made very clear with just signed agreement with Afghanistan that is so full of wildly optimistic assumptions about the current and ongoing state of affairs there that one can only assume this document has more to do with November than any long term strategic outlook] - and I've always found it odd that no one but me apparently thought it strangely convenient that in the middle of a very bad news cycle for Obama re the economy and Libya that Americans got to wake up bright and early on a Monday to a new news cycle suddenly looking a whole lot sweeter - the timing always seemed a bit too convenient to me, but that could be my cynicism pushing me overboard.

But, Obama has decided to go ahead and politicize it now [well, it is the anniversary] - and the response is looking none too favorable - conservatives are of course complaining, with the best dig being McCain's who said "I've had the privilege of serving with true heroes and the thing about them is they don't brag" - Navy Seals are complaining, which very decidedly ain't good optics - even some liberals have shaken the Obama stupor long enough to cry foul, which is really quite extraordinary and a good indication that this was probably a bad move by team Obama. Suggesting that Romney would not have pulled the trigger is not only an absurd almost defamatory reach, wholly implausible and indefensibly tendentious because every sentient American realizes giving the go on an op like this was, as one Navy Seal said, a 'no brainer' that even a president Kucinich would have signed off on - but also, worse, indicates disturbing arrogance because basically what Obama is suggesting here is that he was the key player in this momentous event - it's all about him, as this very good op-ed in the WSJ makes clear.

It's an odd conflation, no, the mixing of the fourth estate and tawdry celebrity at the White House Press shindig? Were there more of the cloyingly affected at this year's happening or does it just seem that way because Obama's most representative constituency is the nip and tucked botox crowd and he himself is for all intents and purposes more celebrity than president? Regardless, still odd that we so effortlessly conflate without a seeming sense of shame or even irony the press, supposed guardians of truth and integrity and rational oversight and civic virtue with celebrity, the very epitome of vacuous, superficial, self centered idiocy. Says something bad about about us, no? Hard to see how it's a good thing, anyway. The absurdity of it was brought home to me when I was watching briefly that idiot on CNN, Piers something, British wanker who spouts off moronically on all and sundry but because his foolishness is uttered in the green and pleasant tones of the inebriated isle Americans confuse it for intelligence - but to continue, the absurdity of it struck me when this Piers asshole says to Jonah Goldberg, who he was interviewing at time, says, as if the truth of it were self evident, that surely it's a good thing that Obama is perceived as 'cool' and Goldberg, who has just written a book on the liberal tendency to utter nonsensical gibberish as if it were perfectly sensible, had no answer - he just hemmed and hawed and sort of disagreed but without any gusto or decisiveness - I mean, my god, how can you not guffaw with scorn and call the man an idiot for saying something like that? I thought that was an intriguing exchange [that's all of the interview I watched, it was just so annoying - possibly Goldberg acquitted himself with more honor later on].

Surprising that China seems to have really turned down the screws on North Korea after their missile launch? Possibly not surprising - China no doubt very concerned that Little Pudgy not in control of things and therefore chances of a serious unwinding probably escalate as a consequence. But here's the question: take the bombastic theatrics away from an unstable regime like this, isn't it a bit like taking the meds away from a psychotic? Now, don't wanna be a hypocrite - I did counsel that we shoot the missile down which would also have ripped a hole in that ridiculous ritualistic bubble the wackos struggle to keep ever inflated and that would no doubt have unsettled things - my point is we wanna believe that there's a reasonable way out of this mess and I'm guessing there isn't - it's a classic rock and hard place scenario - China puts pressure on one end and I'm pretty sure something unpleasant is gonna spill out the other.