I think this is an apt, nail on the head little piece from Peter Wehner that zeroes in on the ugly, disturbing reality that is Obama and keys in on the thing that truly troubles me here and has all along: the media and press as indentured supplicants under Dear Leader. That Obama is a lying left wing ideologue willing to say and do anything no matter how dishonest it is in order to promote his agenda is not the problem - you're gonna get people like that in a democracy, people guided not by a rational pragmatism, the quality that most defined the Founding Fathers, but rather led astray by an excessive belief in the dubious merits of a chauvinistic ideology, or an excessive, megalomaniacal fondness for the sound of their own voice - or both - Ted Cruz is one far as I'm concerned - no, the real problem here is that if the press and media are captive participants in this charade and have willingly surrendered their objective critical voice in order to serve a specific agenda which is a bad thing in and of itself but grievously bad, tragically bad when that agenda happens to also be horribly misguided and riddled with lies and falsehoods then you've got to a point where the first amendment has essentially been undone and you no longer live in a proper democracy. That is where we are right now under Obama - and if you don't see how troubling a thing that is then, sorry, your intelligence has been sacrificed in the name of ideological comfort. 

Here's my suggestion  on what to do about immigration reform and more specifically amnesty - propose to do substantial reform now [because let's face it the system is broken regardless of one's views on the over represented Latino influx] but leave amnesty as something to be taken up after the 2016 election. Two reasons for this, and I'd just come right out and state these reasons: one, don't trust Obama, hell, can't trust Dear Leader - the disaster that is Obamacare allows you to make this charge legitimately, ie make it without immediately being called a racist by the New York Times; and two, assuming the GOP does not succumb to a suicidal urge and nominate someone like Cruz or Paul in 2016 but rather intelligently goes with a broad appeal candidate that may also be a minority and possibly even a woman [I'm thinking of Martinez, Haley and Jindal here] who says all the right things on possible ways forward viz amnesty - having done that, let's see how Latinos vote in the election - if after having put forth a near perfect candidate Hispanics still overwhelmingly vote left, then that will be it, that will tell us that the doom sayers viz amnesty granting etc etc are right - that granting amnesty would forever move the country left and essentially ruin us.

That seems reasonable to me - if conservatives [mainly the business community seeking cheap, reliable labor] who support amnesty do so because they believe the GOP can appeal to Latinos with the right candidate, then let's put that belief to the test in 2016 before we agree to something that could radically change this country and not for the better.

Of course, two problems here: getting that perfect candidate unsullied through the Republican primary is going to be difficult, especially if Cruz is in the race throwing ideologically intemperate bombs everywhere [which is why I suggest taking the man on now and not waiting till the primary season is upon us]; and then the other vexing problem is an irreversible push of the country left is not the only issue with amnesty - there are a lot of studies out there showing the deleterious effect all this cheap labor is having on upward mobility in this country - and also, possibly related, studies showing that Latinos do not embrace higher education or education period as a way to improve one's lot in life the same way as Asians and other cultures do - so amnesty could prove a huge problem in a country that no longer has the industrial and manufacturing jobs available to support a low skill middle class.

In the end, hard to see any sane reason why a conservative - aside from the businessman searching for cheap, reliable labor for his gadget factory - would want to rush ahead with amnesty. Instead, let's state the problems associated with it openly and clearly and then propose a reasonable way forward. Again, the disaster that is Obamacare has created a rhetorical opening for the GOP despite Cruz's best efforts to ruin it - it'd sure be nice if conservatives could put that opening to good use.

Lowry and Ponnuru note the obvious that so many on the right seem incapable of acknowledging or simply refuse to acknowledge: 

The tendency arises from legitimate frustrations. The federal government seems constantly to expand even as — and sometimes because — it proves itself incompetent. Republicans have done precious little to reverse or even halt the trend. Obamacare is a disastrous and unpopular law; but if the Republican party has a strategy for bringing about its eventual end, it has been kept well-hidden.

So it is entirely reasonable to search for new ways to tame the welfare state rather than keep doing what has been done before. The Republican consultant class has often seemed to suffer from an almost clinical deficit of imagination. And the Republican party’s leadership could certainly use the occasional poke with a cattle prod. If the conservatives behind the defunding crusade now turn back to fighting the Senate’s immigration bill with the same passion and commitment, they will again be denounced by Democrats, the press, and some Republicans as a mindless wrecking crew. It shouldn’t stop them.

The key premise that has been guiding these conservatives, however, is mistaken. That premise is that the main reason conservatives have won so few elections and policy victories, especially recently, is a lack of ideological commitment and will among Republican politicians. A bigger problem than the insufficient conservatism of our leaders is the insufficient number of our followers. There aren’t enough conservative voters to elect enough officials to enact a conservative agenda in Washington, D.C. — or to sustain them in that project even if they were elected. The challenge, fundamentally, isn’t a redoubling of ideological commitment, but more success at persuasion and at winning elections.

It's natural for extremists to have a Manichean view of the world - in fact it's no doubt necessary for them since strict dualism serves best the unreasonable argument detached from coarse reality - and the extremes of the left are just as bad as the extremes of the right in this regard. But as above points out, similarities of cause and effect end there for two very good reasons that put the GOP at a distinct disadvantage and that conservatives need to come to terms with if they hope to survive as a political force: one, the culture increasingly leans to or is openly tolerant of the left in its sympathies; and two, this lean left is especially true of the media and press and that particular bias is never going to go away. It's not that the extreme right is wrong in perceiving liberalism as a threat since untempered by conservative pragmatism and realism it definitely is a threat - what they get wrong is belief that the shallow comforts of outrage that translate into ideological rigidity are an intelligent or even simply a viable way to combat the threat. If we get to the point where such extremism is our only way forward against the predations of the welfare state, then the country will already be lost since such extremism is fundamentally undemocratic in nature.

No, the smart way forward is to nominate people who know how to get elected given the current environment and just as importantly know how to effectively govern given the current environment  - look no further than Reagan and Obama as telling examples: they both we're pros when it came to knowing how to get elected, but only one of them knew how to govern - and that's the difference between a country living up to its great potential and a country in seeming decline on all fronts.

[I will say this though, if it's Christie vs Hillary in 2016 and Christie unlike Romney runs a great campaign that any objective observer would wholly agree was the superior campaign relative to Hillary's and yet she still wins because the media, as with Obama, refuses to acknowledge her flaws and weaknesses - well then, all bets are off - we'll be entering dangerous terra incognita at that point where one half of the country will start to see us as having fallen to a liberal coup enabled by the media - and I have no idea what happens then]

I must say that I find it offensive, galling in the extreme that Jon Stewart is winning kudos for his attack on the Obamacare rollout - reasonable people unstained by ideological bias have known all along that this thing was trouble for many reasons [ie not just implementation], so why is Stewart being credited for being either too stupid or too blinded by bias to have figured this out long ago? But more than that, let's remember it's because of the shameless cheerleading of Obama in the 2008 primary over Hillary by people like Stewart that we're stuck with this mess in the first place - I think naive fools like Stewart, who acted as if by simply electing the black guy president we'd be ushered into a golden age of absolute wonderfulness, should be held accountable in some way for the damage they've wrought, which at the very least should amount to not lauding the misguided idiot for finally having the good sense to curse the shit he so went out of his way to step in.

Furthermore, let's look at what he said in his little monologue: he bewailed the great misfortune of this botched rollout denying us a perpetual left wing domination of our politics, which aside from making the curious and rather incoherent point that somehow it's a bad thing that liberal incompetence has denied us a future of never ending tyranny under liberal incompetence, reveals two significant truths viz the liberal elite: screw the poor and downtrodden, they consider the real value of government controlled health care to be the vast political benefit it rings up for liberals; and that come the end of the day they'd really prefer it if the country were ruled by a one party oligarchy instead of a democracy where you're forced to actually do horrible democratic things like engage with and tolerate people who don't happen to agree with you. The instincts of liberal idealism are fundamentally autocratic in nature, that's what Stewart's belated bellyaching reaffirmed to moi.   

Army Chief of Staff Odierno says budget cuts have reduced readiness to a mere two brigades, which doesn't even amount to a whole division - okay, I know it's absurd and no doubt not gonna happen and so forth and so on, but this sad state of affairs hobbling America's military combined with fact now clearly evidenced that Obama's view of that military is ah, how should one put it, decidedly not inclined to see it as an indispensable force serving American interests in a dangerous world but rather tending towards a 'hey, imagine all the cool stuff I could fund if not for those bloody aircraft carriers' take on things - given that, the PLA really must be wondering on some level that this mess is presenting as an opportunity it'd be foolish not to exploit. I mean, last time America looked this weak and vulnerable was with Carter and he was followed by Reagan and ten years later the Soviet Union was no more - so, I mean, someone in China must be thinking about that and wondering 'Obama has opened a door, ten years from now are we gonna regret not walking through it?' - yes, let's not get hysterical here, sure - but there are moves China could make that do not necessarily risk or threaten 'hostilities' yet would still amount to being strategically significant if Obama chose not to respond. Just saying.

With Cruz having this whole 'Huey Long of the right' thing going on [I guess the entire ranting right wing radio world would stand in as his Father Coughlin] - given this and Cruz's very clear intention to go to war on conservative common sense [just as FDR wasn't left wing enough for Long even though he had a communist in his cabinet whom he'd eventually set a heartbeat away from the presidency, so too with Cruz merely being opposed to Obamacare just isn't good enough - you have to hate it and be willing to sacrifice the ideologically impure on the altar of your righteous rage] - given all that, when can we expect a lion of the reviled right wing establishment to step up and seriously take the man on before he destroys the GOP and for all intents and purposes inaugurates Hillary as the de facto next president? Jeb Bush made a tentative effort yesterday at push back - but it's gonna take more than that. I'd be very surprised if Christie is not sharpening some verbal knives. I know these guys are worried about making themselves the target of the enraged uber right come primary season, but that carnage is coming regardless, Cruz has made it clear he's out for blood and there's nothing and no one he won't throw under the bus if it serves to glorify he and his cause - so way I see it you might as well go out and meet the challenge head on and thereby clearly establish yourself as the electable choice and Cruz as the utterly unelectable charlatan.

[of course this is the battle that goes on between base and so called establishment during every primary season - but I think there could be differences this time - I think there's a possibility Cruz becomes so popular with the base - think intelligent version of Palin - that he could push all the other base favorites off to the side, which means the base vote is not split which makes it much more difficult for a moderate to slip in - so there's that. But I also think Cruz is really going to go to town with the 'ideological purity' nonsense and will hammer home idea that anyone who doesn't think and talk and act like him is a 'coward' etc etc - we already saw a preview of that rhetoric in the shutdown farce so I think it's gonna prove important to confront the boldness of that charge with equal boldness - make argument that what Cruz is promoting is nothing more than the same partisan absolutism that Obama peddles - make argument country cannot be effectively governed that way, indeed was specifically designed so as not to be governed that way - make argument that you're all about governing the country as a whole, that that is the only way America's true potential can be unburdened from the dysfunction hobbling it now - I think Christie is well positioned to make that argument and has the personality and media savvy to make it forcefully]

It does appear that the followers of Cruz et al are drunk on their delusions, stumbling incoherently in right wing echo chambers where the comforting sounds of their cries of anger are repeated back to them carrying assurances that they are indeed absolutely right in their thinking and therefore need not fear the losing of their faith. These people read the same WSJ article by Henninger I did and came to the conclusion he got it all wrong - Cruz et al are savvy 'social mediates' leveraging that forum to great effect etc etc so go their claims.

Okay, yes, a more savvy approach to modern messaging forums and outlets was indeed part of Henninger's point - but the larger point was that the problem goes much deeper than that and begins with the central irreducible reality: the media is biased to the left, that is never going to change, and Obama has shown how to with ruthless thoroughness exploit that advantage to withering effect. That's the point. I have no doubt Cruz et al expanded greatly their 'social media' following through their asinine antics - but to what useful end? And within what meaningful demographic? People who wouldn't vote liberal to save their lives and who throw around moronic insults like 'surrender caucus' when pragmatic people like Ayotte insist on playing the smart game, the game that may win conservatives back the White House? How on earth does that amount to a significant challenge to the Obama way? It wins you nothing other than slaps on the back from people already strongly inclined to like you.

The people mouthing these inanities are not idiots I'm assuming - so I have to believe they're either charlatans, peddlers of ideological snake oil - or they are indeed trapped in the echo chamber, hearing only what they want to hear - because the point surely isn't how many Twitter followers Cruz has but rather given the daunting advantage of media bias that is never going away and in fact will be buoyed by changing demographics, and given that Obama has put in place the means and agents and network needed to thoroughly exploit that advantage,  how if you're a conservative do you win national elections, how do you win elections where broad appeal matters and is indeed the deciding factor? If you think the answer is cheering on demagogues like Cruz who are so easily, easily portrayed as extremists by biased media and Obama's narrative twisting machine, then, sorry, you're mired in a delusion that sacrifices common sense on the altar of ideological vanity - in essence, you're no better than the besotted fools who gave us Obama in the first place.

Someone please explain it to me 'cause I don't get it: what the hell is Cruz up to here? The man makes no sense, none at all, if his goal as a Senator is to contribute to the governance of the country and try and maintain a conservative effect on that governance as much as is possible given the unfavorable circumstances, which I assume is what by and large his Texas constituents want. But by what the man does and says that goal doesn't seem to be his intention - so what the hell exactly is the man up to? Is he just trying to make a name for himself so that he can turn that name into money later? Rather dishonorable and deceitful behavior that, but he'd hardly be the first to have come to Washington for such a purpose. Is he planning a run for governor of Texas and thinks talking tough to all and sundry on the hill no matter how foolish, misguided or untruthful that tough talk is is a damn good way to get there? Okay, fine, whatever - but seems to me damaging your party as a whole on a national level in order to serve a much more narrow and self serving end is more of a career killer than a career booster - but then I know nothing of how things work in Texas, so who knows, maybe he's on to something there. Still, in the general scheme, hardly amounts to laudable behavior I'd say.

Can it really be he thinks he's making sense or that what he's doing is credible? I know he talks like it is, but everybody says he's a really bright guy so he can't actually believe that's the case - well, unless of course he's nuts. Is he nuts? Is he bat shit crazy? He kind of looks crazy, that's true - but I have a hard time seeing how a person can get to the US Senate if they're wacko bird crazy without someone along the way standing up and saying 'hey, in case you haven't noticed, this guy is frickin' nuts!'

Or is it he's a true believer and like all such souls drunk on the seductive grandeur of his delusions? In that case I guess he could indeed believe he has acquired some viable power with his antics - he hasn't of course, the man has zero chance of becoming president and given that the majority of his colleagues must thoroughly despise and distrust him at this point his Senate career is like to be a one off affair - still, if indeed delusional, he may have convinced himself otherwise. Hey, maybe he's gifted with second sight and has seen a future where America is saved from the evils of liberalism by a right wing coup and he's setting himself up to be the natural leader of that revolutionary redux - that at least would be a level of crazy that might help explain what the hell this man think's he's doing here.

Henninger over at the WSJ gets what so many Republicans apparently do not: Obama has changed politics in America and if the GOP doesn't figure out the how and why of it and accordingly adjust their thinking, behaviour and tactics they may never win another presidential election. Unfortunately for us all [for it is the country as a whole that will suffer, not just Republicans] the recent shutdown farce and the redoubtable 'defund Obamacare' idiocy of Cruz et al that made it possible would seem to indicate that such an adjustment could prove a long shot.

I've always maintained that the whole key to Obama is his shameless willingness to exploit the populist allure of identity politics, both to beguile low info voters and of course flatter the naive sympathies of the enraptured liberal elite, and then manipulatively leverage a pliant and submissive media to wield that quite hollow but wholly effective demagoguery with a ruthless Machiavellian glee across the electoral landscape. But as Henninger rightly points out: expressing outrage over this state of affairs [which, let's face it, is a form of proto fascism and certainly worthy of outrage] does not amount to a strategy and worse merely plays right into Obama's hands. I still hear, amazingly enough, conservatives speaking with disdain of Christie's infamous hug of Dear Leader as if that disdain, that outrage in and of themselves were proof of something legitimate - these fools seem incapable of understanding or accepting the reality that that hug was a demonstration of Christie knowing how the game must be played if you hope to win - that hug was Christie winning over moderates, winning over independents and most importantly of all, winning over the media.

I have no idea what kind of president Christie would be - I tend to believe good, but who knows - regardless, as of now he seems to be the only potential candidate who has a grasp of what will be required to defeat the challenge Obama has thrown up and if the 'outrage caucus' led by fools like Cruz can't figure that out and continue to sabotage conservative fortunes through idiotic stunts like the 'defund' then, I dunno... expect calamity... 'cause every Democratic presidential candidate from now till whenever is gonna follow the Obama playbook and if all the GOP can manage to do in response is stamp their feet in anger, well... a generational hold on the White House by liberals of Obama's ilk will essentially at best turn the country into a sadder version of Europe, at worst break it apart.

I find myself almost hoping for a deal between Iran and America et al in much the same way I came to sort of welcome Obama winning the presidency - in 2008 I became quite tired of being labeled a knuckle dragging racist for having the temerity to question the implied brilliance of Obama and concluded that the best way to solve the debate would be by the guy becoming president and being awful at it and thereby shutting the idiots up [he was awful but unfortunately the idiots didn't quite shut up, although their rationalizations have become increasingly threadbare]. And so it is tending with Iran - as negotiations begin one already senses that Iran is indeed gonna wheedle a deal out of this, which I'm convinced will prove a complete sham - but, unfortunately, for my irksome cynicism to be validated I need the bad thing to happen. Ah, what a sad world it is - cue Hamlet and his quintessence of dust - or should we go with Macbeth and his besotted hour on the dire stage?

This from Will Galston in the WSJ I found interesting for a couple of reasons. One, how much, surprisingly I think, I share in general with the 'Jacksonian' crew as he calls them [actually a term originally coined by W. Mead] about the nature of the current threat to the republic even though I would never consider myself a 'tea party' type - which reinforces idea that the divide in the GOP right now is more about tactics and temperament [aka wisdom or the lack thereof] than core beliefs - and also I would suggest the notion that true conservatism should distrust not embrace extremism, and that in the end is really what separates a 'moderate' Republican from a Ted Cruz type. The other interesting thing Galston suggests is something I've said repeatedly: that so enraging the Jacksonian wing of the right, whether it's deliberate or merely a byproduct of a push left [I strongly lean towards both deliberate and logical consequence], will not lead to a liberal wonderland where the right has been rendered irrelevant by internecine upheaval but rather to a bitterly divided country that is ungovernable.

I've always maintained that a country like America, at least as far as the executive goes, can only be governed successfully from the right with intermittent forays into pragmatic, moderate liberalism as with Kennedy or Clinton - and accordingly one of the main reasons I thought Obama would be a disastrous president was because I considered him a far left ideologue hiding cleverly behind a moderate mask who was not at all a good fit for the country but who would nevertheless with grave consequences be 'empowered' by the naive delusions of identity politics and a fervently biased media.

[a little sidebar here - I've noticed increasingly Kelly Ayotte taking lead as voice of moderate, reasonable conservatism when it comes to media parade - this interesting: I of course thought she could be a VP candidate in 2012 but moved away from her when I judged her presence in front of the cameras lacking - now, it's not like she's lighting it up here but she's definitely improving and this is important because I believe if it's Hillary in 2016 the GOP is going to have to put a woman on the ticket, either at the head or as VP - and right now the three most likely candidates are Martinez, Halley and Ayotte - so, Ayotte being out front this way I think is interesting]

"... we have to be able to admit to the obvious here... with an ignorant electorate and politicians ever willing to manipulate truth to serve purposes less than truthful the necessary intermediary between these two is an objective press willing to ask difficult and objectively purposeful questions of power... if the press is absent in this regard because of a mitigating preference for a specific outcome that favors the ruling power, then you have a problem... the people for various reasons are incapable of coming to just conclusions without help... if the help is tainted by prejudices that have nothing to do with what is just and are only meant to serve an agenda that the people do not fully understand, then of what use is your democracy?..."

Wondering who or what's to blame here, imagine it this way: invert all the dynamics roiling the political landscape in America right now and then ask yourself, what would be the result of such a shift? What I mean is, imagine that the media and press are overtly biased towards the right and on top of that imagine that changing demographics tended to increasingly favor a conservative point of view. Then put in the White House a staunch conservative ideologue that the right wing adores as some sort of savior from the evil doings of the left but who also possess a quality that makes him or her an especially sympathetic figure to a broad spectrum of voters, even those who don't particularly see themselves as leaning right - maybe he or she is a war hero - hell, make them an amputee while you're at it. Then give this imaginary president an extreme agenda that he or she pushes forward under the protective guises and auspices of biased media, gullible voters and the beguiling effects of identity politics shamelessly exploited. Now, ask yourself, given the above, what would happen to the Democrats? Would they not fracture in the exact same way the GOP is fracturing now, as outraged leftist radicals decrying the end of abortion and the demise of the promotion of social welfarism and wealth redistribution leveraged on the back of a perpetual racial demagoguery etc etc battle with pragmatic moderates over the best way to combat and turn back this existential threat from the right? Would we not see, verging on the horizon, the rising menace of one party rule and the gutting of the very essence of democracy? And, just as importantly, would we not also see in our imagined other world this growing right wing oligarchy faced with the very same vexing question any liberal still possessing some vestige of perspective and objectivity should be asking themselves right now, that being: how the hell, short of the instituting of autocratic measures, do we expect to govern this bitterly divided mess we're busily with blind enthusiasm creating?

I don't know the ins and outs of making policy work, nor how robust and innovative 'tax reform' can actually be - but as a conservative who doesn't like the idea of raising taxes because of the government's clearly demonstrated excellence at wasting those revenues, building up debt, using it to essentially buy votes through pork barrel politics and all in all just in general hurting the country - despite that, I don't know why it is some enterprising Republican doesn't put forward an offer that stipulates that in return for cutting spending and reining in entitlements, the GOP will agree to a tax increase with the understanding that that tax will be a specific surcharge  and that the revenues from it will be used for no other purpose than to reduce the debt; and then once the debt is brought down to an acceptable level the tax will be voided - in effect, almost like a specially targeted 'war tax'. To me that's reasonable and counters the liberal charge that refusal to consider tax increases is example GOP extremism - don't know if it's at all feasible, but personally, as a fiscal conservative, I'd have no problem paying a tax like that, especially if smaller government were part of the deal.

US suspends aid to Egypt... ahhh... what's the word we're looking for here? Idiots. Yes. Can anyone make sense of Obama's foreign policy at this point? It's as if the thinking is guided by the conceit that if you don't act like a superpower even though you are a superpower then eventually indeed you won't be a superpower, which is the goal. Is that the thinking? Or is it even simpler than that: let's support whomever or whatever undercuts American power and influence because, well, ahh... America is bad and, ahh... whatever? In a region where there are few good options and you're merely looking for the least bad option the Egyptian military getting rid of the pernicious Muslim Brotherhood is one of those least bad options so... does Obama really not see that? Or is there an agenda in play here that is much more disturbing?

Okay, what I don't really get is what the hell is the end game for these Obama ilk uber liberals? After you've leveraged the power of your media co-religionists to bring ruin to the GOP as far as being a national party goes and you've wrangled into existence your left wing oligarchy, what then? How is it you're imagining you'll have a governable polity at that point, what, with one half of the country absolutely despising and distrusting the other half of the country? Do you feel your media cohorts will be able to make it all magically manageable through endless lie crafting and studious narrative spinning? China can get away with that because it's a police state that is still mostly poor and the poor live in fear of what little they have being taken away from them by that police state - regardless of which, there's a long, rich history of the Chinese people quietly submitting to dictatorial rule, so, yeah, there's that. How exactly does the earnest uber liberal plan to pull off the repression of one party rule in liberty loving America? 'Cause, I gotta break the bad news to ya, lefty: in this country, the military overwhelmingly leans right in its sympathies so, if it comes to civil war, you guys ain't gonna win. If it's Texas against California, I don't care how many illegal immigrants you line up as cannon fodder, Texas wins. Might wanna keep that in mind.

Is this possibly the ultimate manifestation of the pure, detached from reality idiocy of the liberal urge towards the grand but hollow gesture, the naively symbolic good? Speaking here of Woody Allen's new film being pulled from India because Woody wouldn't allow anti-smoking ads to be superimposed over scenes where someone was smoking, which I take it is the law in India. This what India wastes its time on? A country where the plague still exists? A country drowning in soul killing poverty where a young girl can still be sold into marriage by needy parents? A country where some 600 million people, almost twice the size of all of America for Christ sake, do not have access to proper toilets and just daily do their filthy business in open fields?!! Are you fucking kidding me?! I would imagine a good smoke would be one of the few things a poor soul could look forward to in a bloody awful place like that. But of course the crowning glory of this insanity is that it's a Woody Allen film!!! Is it really such a huge problem in India that impressionable teenagers are rushing out to fucking Woody Allen films to be corrupted into the evils of smoking!!? My God. The world is just too stupid to tolerate. I need to find me a cabin in the woods and just go all Thoreau on this bloody idiotic mess.

"... well, of course there's nothing especially new about media bias in the sense that special interests have always sought out access to power and power has always sought out special interests to aid in the furthering of agendas... the difference in these times is that in the past the special interests involved were all about business concerns or security concerns, the stuff that moves and makes greatness... but now the bias serves what, gay marriage?... occupy Wall Street?... the demonization of American power?... if it's true that power is always more or less corrupt then best that that corruption inspires greatness, which is how America became supreme... but what greatness is inspired by the present corruption of liberal sympathies?... it's all about the extolling of weakness in order to flatter the delusions of a sanctioned few... and to what end?... an enlightened liberal elite governing over failure and congratulating themselves amidst the ruins on having had nothing but the best of intentions..."

This fascinating little piece on the putative 'Asia pivot' perfectly sums up the Obama presidency as far as I'm concerned. When the pivot was announced my immediate reaction, uber cynic that I am, was 'bull shit - no way that's happening' - some more refined defense specialists shared my scepticism but politely were willing to give Obama some benefit of the doubt with the understanding that such a strategic shift would require a larger navy and therefore a funding commitment and if we didn't see that happening then at that point it would be fair to conclude Obama wasn't serious - but that was my point from the beginning: there was absolutely no way Mr Lead From Behind was serious about expanding our defense profile when it was very clear he was all about reducing it. To me, the Obama campaign saw that Romney was going to come after them on defense, judged they were maybe vulnerable there and the pivot was just a campaign calculation without much real substance beyond the utility thereof - and the linked article says essentially that that indeed looks to have been the case.

We're talking a serious strategic statement spoken as mere theater in service of a political calculation - your allies are watching that and your enemies are watching that and coming to conclusions, serious conclusions - that's extreme and that's Obama: a man with an extreme left wing agenda and a fanatical willingness to lie and mislead and falsely propagandize in service of it. Now, he's not the first politician to be less than honest and somewhat unsavoury so I'm not gonna get hysterical about what he is especially since what he is has been obvious for a very long time - no, what's truly troubling here is the press and media's complicity in it - that complicity encourages and enables bad behavior, bad governance, bad ideas and bad blood, all of which are thoroughly on display in Washington right now. Obama may be an awful president - history will make a decision on that and I for one am confident history will not be kind - but the truly troubling thing here and the real threat to the nation are the things that have made that awfulness possible: when the pivot was announced I don't remember a single mainstream media outlet questioning the seriousness of it, the sincerity of it, the logistics behind it [and in an infamous debate encounter the media even mocked Romney for accurately pointing out that Obama's pivot rhetoric was not in keeping with his views regarding the size of the Navy] - and yet just about every serious defense specialist I read on a regular basis viewed the announced pivot with skepticism. That says a lot about the nature of this presidency I think.

That so many left leaning foreign policy voices are trying desperately to convince themselves and anyone who will listen that there is indeed a deal here to be made with Iran viz its nuclear ambitions is pretty much all the proof I need that Iran getting the bomb or developing a breakout ability to do so is essentially a fait accompli at this point, at least as far as Obama is concerned [actually, what happened in Syria probably settled the issue, but this makes it official I think]. I don't believe for one second that Iran sees negotiations and any deal that may come of them as anything other than cover that allows them to finish their work and forestall an Israeli attack - and so the question becomes: given that, will Israel then take it upon its lonely self to attack even though the sham of a deal or negotiations thereof would cast such an attack in an ugly light and undermine the Obama presidency? All depends on the conclusion the inner sanctum of Israeli strategic thinking has reached about possibility of living with a nuked up Iran: if the answer is it's possible, then no attack; if the answer is not possible, then expect an intervention sometime within the next year regardless of the unfavorable optics and potential repercussions. Of course the strong preference for Israel [and most Arab states] is a nukeless Iran - but that doesn't mean, all things considered, that come the end of the day they haven't concluded finding a way to tolerate such a thing is the least bad option when measured against the fate they'd be tempting with a solo intervention. There are a lot of unknowables here, the central one being: if Iran gets the bomb, how will that alter their behavior and how will that altered behavior impact the troubled dynamics of the region? It's not impossible that Israel could see an upside to a nuke enabled Iran in so much as the disconcerted Arab states might then be inclined [sotto voce of course] to view Israeli power as a good thing, ie a constraint on Iranian aggression.

How could a government punish and therefore stop a large act of civil disobedience involving millions of people? I mean, Stalin and his like of course could manage it, China etc - but how would a democracy deal with such a thing? Could a democracy deal with such and thing? I'm just trying to imagine how things might play out should Obama and his maenads succeed in destroying the GOP as a nationally viable party, which is clearly part of what they're thinking - Washington would by default become a bastion of deluded left wingedness drowning in debt and inefficiency and conservative power would necessarily migrate to the states where like thinking right wing governors would increasingly work together to confront the rapacious social welfarism of the erstwhile capital. So, imagining a scenario like that - far fetched, sure, but not more or less impossible I think - if it played out that way, such dynamics would obviously be the precursor to a 'civil war' of some sort - not necessarily actual war, but some kind of strife and resistance - and so you might see, under the implied aegis of sympathetic states, large groups of citizens rejecting Washington's authority and accordingly engaging in mass civil disobedience, doing stuff like not paying taxes, so on and so forth

Yeah, far fetched - but, enabled by an indentured media and press, if the next president is a Democrat who decides to build on the damage Obama has wrought and in much the same way Obama wrought it - well, far fetched as it may seem, if such a thing happens you're gonna find yourself with a whole hell of a lot of people who no longer look upon America as a place where they belong, and then it becomes a question of what happens next. I mean, even if the next president is a Republican who also if we catch a break manages to be both a skilled and persuasive executive, even that person is going to have trouble governing this mess because an outraged, roiled right wing, fearful for the survival of the republic, will probably only be happy with or assuaged by something of a counter revolution if you will that purges the land of the malingering malaise of Obamaphilia, a sort of metaphorical or rhetorical reign of terror if you will.

I dunno - I just think that eight years of the divisiveness Obama has deliberately encouraged and sought out because it serves his political interests - and worse, as far as I'm concerned, eight years of the press and media being revealed for the corrupted left wing political tools that they are, which to me is the root of all that is going on here because Obama cannot play the divisiveness to his advantage without the willing participation of the media backing him up and accordingly also because I don't think a democracy can survive an environment where truly objective commentary and criticism are not only lost arts, they're scorned arts and 'reporting' necessarily devolves into nothing more than propaganda served up in the name of a specific ideology - way I see it eight years of this mess will have perched the country on the edge of something quite bad I think and whether or not we fall from that perch will depend on what follows Obama - Reagan may have saved us from Carter, but we only had four years of him, regardless of which, Obama is a whole other level of awfulness from Carter [which is in large part a reflection of the level of media bias under Obama compared to Carter, or, put another way, the level of adoration that liberal elite feels for Obama that they did not feel for Carter] - so you take eight years of Obama and tack on another four or eight years of someone driving forward the same agenda in the same divisive way - well, what seems far fetched now, is going to start to seem all too real I fear.

In short, the way I see it, the whole point of democracy is to mitigate extremes and force compromises through open, public debate - when extremes are controlling the process, something is wrong - Obama is an extremist who cleverly hides behind a facade of reasonableness and in turn his extreme [albeit incrementally so] agenda incites the extremist rancor on the right - extremes are controlling the process and that means something is wrong - that something is the media, the press, they're the enablers - these people act and have acted from the beginning as if Obama is a great president regardless of his performance as president simply because he's the first black president - ask yourself a simple question: if Condi Rice had been the first black president, would they have granted her the same indulgence? There ya go - it's not just that he's the first black president, it's that he can leverage that identity, with the help of sympathetic media, to push forward a specific agenda - that is not democracy, that is a form of fascism. I don't blame or fault Obama for being the thing he is, which is a liberal ideologue who wants to push the country irretrievably to the left - as a person with a fondness for Machiavelli I can in ways almost admire the guy - Dear Leader knows what his advantages are and he ruthlessly manipulates and exploits those advantages like the cunning politician he is - problem is in a democracy one of those advantages should not be the media and press which are the only things standing between an ignorant, low info electorate and tyranny - it's the liberal elite, shown forth most clearly through the various mediums of mass communication, that fell on their knees in blind adoration of the man in 2008, that is to blame here.

Disturbing thing is, I'm not sure there's a way to fix this problem - and now that Obama has demonstrated the way to perfectly exploit this incestuous matrix of media, press and identity politics, you're going to see the same playbook enacted when the Democrats put forth the first female presidential candidate and the first Hispanic candidate and then no doubt the first gay candidate - and there's no reason to expect the results will be any different from what we've seen with Obama - for the left, identity trumps competence.

[well, there is in fact a potential remedy of this situation - that would involve Republicans understanding the nature of the threat and addressing it in a suitable way - which to my mind would begin with not stigmatizing media savvy moderates like Christie and not manically lauding ideologically driven demagogues who have absolutely no chance of winning the presidency like Cruz - but of course we're seeing the exact opposite of that, so...]