So, NY Times publishes article on Benghazi that wants to downplay or entirely debunk attack as result of a planned terrorist initiative and play up once again the whole notion the violence was a spontaneous reaction to some ludicrously inept putatively anti-Muslim video by some marginal wacko that had actually gone up on the web a few months before the aggrieved believers decided to defend their beliefs by screaming some curses, setting some fires and dragging some American corpses through the streets - and I guess what this means is that the dogged efforts of the left wing media to get Hillary elected president have officially kicked in regardless of any truths or realities that might negatively impact perceptions of whether she deserves the job or has what it takes to do it well or indeed, given her ideological predispositions, is at all a good fit for what the country needs at the moment. Nope, none of that matters - it made sense to these people in 2008 to make a black guy president of the most powerful country in the world simply because he was black and in 2016 it will make equal sense to them to make a woman president simply because she's a woman [well, a woman and fiercely liberal of course - just as in 2008 it wouldn't have sufficed for these people that Condi Rice become the first black president, so too in 2016 it will not at all do that the first female president is Nikki Haley or some such conservative abomination against the progressive light].

I consider this kind of media bias to be an existential threat to conservatism in America and is the reason why I see it as vital that the 2016 GOP nominee have the personality and other wherewithals to overcome or at least counteract this bias, which necessarily means also has the ability to inspire broad appeal - the dynamics behind the notion of 'Reagan democrats' needs to reemerge if the GOP is to survive as a national party. As well, if Hillary is indeed the nominee and the top of the conservative ticket isn't a woman, then the running mate must be a woman - if the nominee is Christie I wouldn't even bother vetting a man - just take the top five female prospects out there and choose the one who impresses most.

Amusing, the roil of Erdogan's problems in Turkey - and there are many salient things one could say about these problems - how it's more proof that Islamism [for that has always been Erdogan's desired end here] is nothing more than autocracy hiding behind a faux democracy and thus liable to all the issues of corruption and abuse that plague authoritarian regimes  - or how Erdogan's machinations are yet more reason to question the sanity of trusting Turkey under his rule with strategically sensitive info and technology - to wit, as said before, there's no way I'm letting Erdogan get his hands on any F-35s or advanced missile defense tech or any number of other sensitive things - Turkey under a man like him does not belong in NATO and should flat out not be trusted with anything of strategic import.

But to me the most amusing aspect of this dust up is how it further stains the already badly blemished facade of Obama the wise and thoughtful one - for coming into office Obama lavished much praise on Erdogan and made it clear he thought him a kindred spirit [which I guess is true if one thinks of them both as falsely enlightened autocrats carting about morbidly obese egos that leave them highly intolerant of dissent]. It's startling - far as I can tell, I don't believe there's a single thing Obama has gotten right in the foreign policy realm - true, some of his mistakes were deliberate in sense he didn't see them as mistakes: his ideological presumptions demand a demonizing and consequent emasculation of American power and that is what he's done - but a lot of what's gone on here is just a result of incompetence, ignorance, strategic muddle and naive pandering utterly unmoored from reality - his misbegotten love for Erdogan becomes one more sad feather in that unspeakably ugly cap.

[and let's not forget Obama/Kerry forcing Netanyahu into 'apologising' to Erdogan viz the Gaza flotilla debacle - at the time I suggested Bibi probably agreed to swallow that most bitter of pills because he figured eventually the truth about Erdogan would come out and at that point Obama would look the fool and Israel could dangle this misguided foolishness in the faces of Kerry et al when they tried to preach to Israel about how to proceed given the unhelpful proclivities of their enemies]

Interesting dynamic - the US needs to portray China as a threat in order to convince a wary public that the significant funds required to field a military capable of meeting that threat are necessary - large defense budgets must be validated by linked threats justifying those budgets - and, what's more, these threats must be easily graspable by the public, a public that is overwhelming made up of people who have never read anything having to do with military history or logistics, strategic thinking or the often confounding permutations of foreign policy impacting a superpower that also happens to be sole defender of the Western tradition, democratic freedoms and open markets. Sure, 9/11 and Islamic extremism kept the public interested for awhile in the intrinsic value of a powerful American military, but with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being seen as 'failures', and the perception rising out of these failures being that Muslim polities are beyond fixing, a perception strongly reinforced by the [utterly predictable] negative turn the Arab Spring took culminating in the mega fuck up that is Syria - well, the public is increasingly less willing to accept the perils of Islam as justification for bloated defense budgets. Which leaves us with China - and yet still many want to talk about the 'peaceful rise of China' and wax rhapsodic on how there's no reason our relations with them need be adversarial - indeed, many in the liberal elite talk about China with a pronounced envy much as the enlightened elite of the 30's often talked about communist Russia and Nazi Germany as political systems not just on par with American democracy, but superior to it.

Needless to say, this paradox is not lost on China's inner sanctum of strategic wizards - for them, not just Obama himself as a uniquely weak and unqualified leader when it comes to foreign policy, but also the naive ideological presumptions of the intellectual milieu he is a product of and that seems in many regards to be ascendant in America, are golden opportunities crying out for abuse.  

Many are criticising Abe's visit to the Yasukuni shrine, with China of course being the most archly aggrieved - and this criticism is probably well founded, I guess - not sure, as offensive as the shrine may be in some respects to the 'victors' of WWII, I find myself thinking it's really none of our business telling Japan how to honor its dead - but regardless, let's not forget, as much of the criticism does, that the reason this visit happened is likely as compensation for Obama's lack of resolve viz China's air defense zone - you wanna keep Japan in check and forestall unnecessary provocations, reassure them through strength - otherwise, expect more brinkmanship and sabre rattling, not just from Japan, but South Korea, the Philippines, maybe even Taiwan.  

Well, Tobin essentially gets it right: Obama is upset about attempts by congress to toughen the sanctions threats against Iran because these threats treat the current 'negotiations' as real, as in intent on stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions - but they are not, they're an illusion, a smokescreen designed to cover the fact that Obama has no intentions of stopping Iran, decided a long time ago on some vague, irresolute notion of 'containment' and has been lying ever since. So 'hawks' in congress treating the negotiations as real puts Obama in a problematic position: at the end of the six months, when Iran has sufficiently demonstrated it has no intention of abandoning its ambitions, Obama will be expected to get tough in accordance with congress' demands, which is not something that fits at all well with the smokescreen plan; or, what else could happen here is Iran decides to make Obama's life really miserable by treating the sanctions actions by congress as a breach of trust and runs off in a pout, with China and Russia of course defending their pique all the way - which again puts Obama in a very tricky position of having to act as if he seriously intends to stop Iran from getting the bomb. Tobin is right: Obama is acting as if he is the player with the weaker hand - and that's because he is - you can't win at poker if the other people at the table know you're bluffing - everybody at this table knows Obama is and always has been bluffing. Actually, more accurate - you can't win at poker if your intention was never to win but only to bluff long enough so as to maybe with some credibility blame your loss on the other guy cheating. Yeah, that nails Obama's Iran policy, I think.

    

Will the sacking of the Duck Dynasty dude prove a watershed moment in the push back against the new age tyranny of political correctness? For free speech to mean anything it has to be about people having the right to say things that might offend someone else - otherwise free speech, as liberals are wont to imagine it, becomes nothing more than another form of censorship designed to let the state control what people are allowed to think - and then the open marketplace of ideas and opinions, which is the whole point and lifeblood of democracy, withers away and dies. I say watershed moment because Duck Dynasty is a very popular show [they're probably bound by contracts, but what happens if the rest of the family walks off the show in protest?] and because Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, home of the duck dudes, has come out with a strong statement defending the boys and making the cogent point that liberals seem fine with free speech just so long as the speech being spoken adheres to beliefs they expect you to believe whether you want to or not - so, a notion of free speech that Orwell would have found quite amusing.

To state the obvious, it's not about defending what the man said but rather defending his right to say it - he's a devout christian, he has a right to be a devout christian, and as a devout christian it's pretty god damn likely that he's gonna hold some views that others including myself might find misguided - but you cannot order him to renounce those views simply because they offend you - that's a slippery slope - in relative terms it's reasonable for the man to hold these views just as in relative terms it's reasonable for a devout Muslim or devout Hindu to hold the view that women are inferior and can therefore be legitimately denied certain rights and privileges, never mind their opinions on homosexuality which would make duck dude's thoughts seem tame - yet the liberal jackals don't cry for blood over that - no, only white Christians, especially ones with a specific accent, get the politically correct juices flowing [I say white Christians... well, for obvious reasons having to do with the benighted enthusiasms and cherished conceits of liberaldom, but also because black Christians, quite possibly the most homophobic demographic in the country and the reason why Obama was so very slow in getting behind gay marriage, largely get a pass from the aggrieved left's thought police when it comes to these things, a nuance that fits nicely with the left's highly selective interpretation of free speech which, as I said, is not simply about controlling speech, but about controlling ideas and thereby serving specific political narratives and agendas - notice how there was never really a true debate in the country about the merits of gay marriage, rather what happened was that over time through the operations of the left's thought police it became illegitimate to question gay marriage and therefore to simply speak of ones problems with it came to be seen as offensive - and with that you're just a short step away from making it illegal to speak ones mind about gay marriage. Note the Briton who was put in jail for a day, had his rights thoroughly abused and his privacy wholly invaded, all because he wrote some innocuous joke about Mandela on a internet forum that offended some lefty dick brain in England who then reported his crime to the authorities - seems pretty atrocious, yes? And yet how easily it happened - and that's because England, birthplace of our modern notions of personal liberty, has surrendered away common sense and democratic principles that reach to the very heart of Western Civilization in order to accommodate the intemperate diktats of the left's thought police - slippery slope, people...

Actually, when you think about it, the most disturbing example of the left's desire to suppress free speech and thereby control political discourse and agendas, is the effort, now somewhat in abeyance, to portray criticism of Obama as implied racism - which is a short step away from labelling criticism of Obama hate speech - which is a short step away from making it illegal to criticise Obama - sounds absurd, yes, but that's the way these people think and you follow the things they say to their logical conclusion that's the dystopia you end up with - scratch a liberal and you'll find lurking not too deeply beneath the surface an autocrat longing to get out]

[but, you're not saying A&E has no right to reprimand duck dude are you? Of course not! They can do whatever the hell they want - cancel the show, fire the guy, climb a soapbox and scream outrage - whatever, that's their business - it's this mass manufacturing of outrage which leads to legitimizing offense taken as being actionable which leads then to the hobbling of free speech in order to protect the ever so easily offended which leads to political discourse being controlled and political outcomes corrupted - the point here is this outrage has a political objective and that objective is not about opening the political dynamics of the country but rather closing them down in order to serve the utterly paradoxical end of promoting the interests of liberalism - if I'm not free to offend someone by questioning what they say or believe or do then I'm not really free and the contracting freedoms I do retain will become increasingly subject to suppression - this is how a guy in England ends up getting thrown in jail for a day for writing an innocuous not very funny at all joke about Nelson bloody Mandela. Why do you think Muslim countries want the UN to legitimize offense taken by them over criticisms of their beliefs by making it a crime to criticise or even question those beliefs? Suppress speech and you control political discourse which allows you to manufacture political outcomes which ultimately ends with the abrogation of rights and freedoms - when you get right down to it the whole point of democracy is my right to offend you, but once your right to be offended is legitimized as something more important to defend than my right to offend you and thereby my rights to free speech are superseded by your right to be offended by that speech then of course what happens next is my right to offend is suppressed if not in fact abolished, and when you reach that point your democracy is essentially dead, hollowed out, gone bye bye and the people will have left themselves with no choice but to surrender their remaining liberties to the whims of those ruling over them. Freedom of speech is enshrined as the first amendment because democracy is absolutely impossible without it and therefore it is the right that must be protected above all else because all else is utterly dependent upon it. Does that mean there should be no limitations on speech? No, of course not - absolutes are against the whole point of democracy - but you have to be very, very careful about what you're limiting, the why of it and the how - allowing a simple offense taken as just cause to limit speech is not being careful, that's being reckless, that's being destructive to the very essence of democracy.

So, yeah, duck dude has a right to say what he wants and A&E has a right to then fire him for it if that's how they feel - but if you don't see it as a disturbing thing the speed with which liberals want to turn an offense taken into an actionable crime by legitimizing the offense as so hurtful a thing that the cause must be suppressed and that the whole point of this endeavor is to control political discourse so as to control political outcomes - if you don't see that, or see it but are not troubled by it, then, sorry, you're either naive, delusional or sympathetic to the cause, which I guess means both naive and delusional with a little bit of stupid thrown in for good measure]  

Wonderful article by Cooke over at National Review - the greatness of America is certainly under threat from the sickly ideological menace that Obama and his maenads are a near perfect manifestation of - but maybe what saves us is that these people are so incompetent, so enfeebled by the loose sands upon which their dream castles have been built, that the ruin they promise cannot possibly survive the insipid, weakly dysfunction of their words and actions thereof.  

"... I'd say that it's a strong indication of how utterly lost America is at the moment that there are no doubt more people, probably many more people, who are willing to take time out of their day to think it a very good thing that Obama is sending some openly gay delegates to the Sochi Olympics nonsense in a frivolous attempt to thumb nose at Putin's homophobic antics than think it a very bad thing that Obama, in response to China's recent aggressions in the China Seas, has essentially backed down from that challenge and for all intents and purposes signalled to the Middle Kingdom that, yes, indeed, when it comes to American power he's all about the talk and not at all about the walk... yes, a perfectly succinct summation defining the malady of the times that... times wherein the liberal media can easily find one unified outraged voice to decry the abomination of a Fox news reader declaring the obvious of Santa being white for christ sake and then drone on about this heinous offense against humanity for an insufferable week and yet when it comes to Obama openly lying to the American people about his health care law or his Iran policy or the IRS scandal or Benghazi or etc etc etc, well, when it comes to those outrages truth becomes a much more pliable thing... or shall we say that the best writing on the wall was done by David Brooks, the sole would be 'conservative' working for the New York Times, who obviously traumatized by his unrequited love for the Obama and his perfect hem and stung by the embarrassment thereof, decided to cleanse himself of this shame by burrowing deeper into vain rationalizations of Dear Leader's incompetence and misguided drivel than any Obamaphile has yet dared, coming to the conclusion that the cure to the awfulness that is Obama should be more Obama... yes, unable to square his idolatrous circle Brooks decides that to gain sanctuary from the scourge of doubt we should remove doubt altogether by simply making Obama's rule absolute... ah, the glorious repose of serfdom... forgive my cynicism and how it must insult and injure your sensitive genius, David, but does that not seem a bit like passengers in an out of control car hurtling towards an abyss consoling themselves by imagining that the answer to all their problems is to go faster...?"         

Possibly incendiary and ill advised, but wouldn't it be a good move, in response to Chinese aggression with its hegemonic air security zone, to start up the F-22 line again and sell it to Japan and South Korea and Australia? They want the plane and it would definitely send the message to China that escalation, no matter how they may hide it behind incremental actions and shallow legalisms, is maybe not such a good idea. Besides, America must keep its technological edge - but budget cuts threaten that imperative - an arms race in the South Pacific helps. Of course, encouraging an arms race in order to pump our military R&D is to play with fire - but I imagine that arms race is coming no matter what - look how South Korea, in response to a show of weakness by Obama [a show of weakness? The man is like a frickin' festival of enfeeblement] has taken upon itself to aggressively enlarge its own security zone - that's just the beginning, far as I'm concerned, which means three things happen here: we disincentivize China's predations with a show of strength; we don't and conflict becomes inevitable; we surrender. I choose the first option - start building those F-22s again. Of course, the F-35's a nice plane too... but much nicer I think when working in concert with Raptors, which is the way it was always meant to be.

My, the whole Mandela funeral spectacle has become a giant ideological orgy for the left, hasn't it? The death of a famous African communist has given them license to vent all the things liberals hate about the West - oh, sure, they love their Shakespeare and Beethoven and Da Vinci and nice stuff like that - they'll even tolerate Newton and his ilk - but capitalism and all that nasty business? No, no.

We truly are fucked, aren't we? Success has turned the West into a refugium for morons and sentimentalists. No wonder the Chinese think they can push us around.

I wasn't anxious for proof that my take on Iran is right - to me it's simply obvious what Obama is up to here and I find it a little startling that so many are and have been in denial about it, especially supposed professional analysts treating or thinking of Russia and China as honest brokers in these negotiations, which is absurdly naive - but Rubin at Commentary draws attention to story that does indeed seem to prove what I've been saying all along.

I can't explain the foolishness of people when it comes to judging Obama's foreign policy - are they so invested in the dream that they can't bring themselves to contemplate the truth? Or have they convinced themselves it's okay to lie and spin false narratives in the name of the great cause? Or is it simply that they're idiots? I don't have an answer - to me what Obama is about, not just viz Iran but as regards his entire foreign policy posture as well, is obvious - the short version, he does not believe in American power and indeed, as far as his private conscience goes, may be utterly hostile to it - that would not be a surprising thing since such is the default perspective of the intellectual milieu that gave him life - regardless, once you understand that about Obama it becomes a rather straight forward matter seeing the truth behind his foreign policy words and actions - consequently, the Iran 'negotiations' become a charade designed to save face for Obama viz the use of force and to hopefully keep Israel on the sidelines - or, to use nicer language, it's now all about containment, as Jen Rubin points out in blog today.

The logic of this has been obvious for awhile far as I'm concerned. Why ostensibly smart people have not been able to see that or have refused to see it, I don't know. Interesting question becomes: do I feel more comfortable thinking of Obama/Kerry as naive fools or as misguided liars? Not sure it matters, since I reckon the consequences will prove unfortunate either way.

Safe to say that until Iran does what it intends to do viz the putative deal dangled before it by a desperate Obama administration we simply won't be able to say for sure who was right and who was wrong and who got led down the garden path - still, I do notice that those inclined to defend the negotiations routinely tend to ignore two known unknowns that are provisionally knowable that once known [provisionally] render the negotiations in a none too favorable light - namely, that Russia and China's intentions and goals here are antithetical to America's and therefore should [when inevitably] Iran choose[s] to play the part of devil in the details they will be most willing advocates of the theocracy's interests thereof - and that Obama has no intention and never had any intention of embracing the military option and that consideration alone, regardless of all else, should thoroughly subvert optimism since it bequeaths to Iran all leverage, ie Obama needs 'a deal' or at least drawn out negotiations as much if not indeed more than they do.

Once you accept these two provisional realities [provisional in sense that time has yet to prove them as real as they assuredly are] it becomes virtually impossible to view the Obama/Kerry tack viz Iran as being anything but naively misguided or cynically disingenuous.

[of course there are those who see this as a deliberate attempt to rework the strategic map of the Mideast in a profound way - I have a great deal of trouble buying that. I don't deny that the Obama admin may be attempting an embrace of such a notion and it may be 'deliberate' in that sense, but if true I'd see it as less deliberative and more desperate or just simply gullible - this type of thinking is of the naive kind that thought it obvious that the Ukraine would side with the EU and not Russia - these people look at Iran and see a moderate intellectual elite buried beneath all the religious fervor and antipathy and think 'well, we can work with them' - removing religion from the equation and asking if Nixon could go to China why can't Obama go to Iran would be unwise. Plus, there's many other problems here - turning your back on Israel and the Saudis, climbing into bed with the bloody regime in Syria and the best organized terrorist outfit in the world, Hezbollah - I mean, how the hell would that work? And then there's the consideration of how much such a move would piss off Sunni extremists who already hate the West - there's gonna be some awfully dangerous radicals wandering back to Europe from Syria already plenty motivated to do ill - a deal with Iran that enables Assad and Hezbollah is hardly gonna sit well with them.  Then there's Russia and China who see this as an opportunity to weaken America and have things lined up right now to do that - so why would they play nice here? So to me this 'strategy' makes no sense, or makes sense only in the abstract - which is no doubt why those who talk about it in a serious way all tend to be liberals. As Ukraine has reminded us, and China's recent aggressive actions in the China Sea too, when it comes to foreign policy liberals tend to view the world not as it is but as they fancy it should be - this leads to the making of some very dangerous assumptions designed to prop up that view for as long as possible regardless of reality's ceaseless efforts to drag it down]     

I suppose it officially makes me a horrible person that my only thoughts on the passing of Nelson Mandela are to wonder how liberals in America will spin it as an offense to the man's memory to criticize Obamacare. I'm guessing that already someone at MSNBC has attempted the magical rhetorical feat and that Dear Leader's dutiful speech writers are hard at work figuring ingenious ways to insinuate this message without looking crass. Yeah, I'm a damn awful person - but, hey, let's admit it, my cynical take is probably bang on. Worst part is, there's no doubt many a lefty out there who would consider the linking of the two things entirely legitimate - hell, would consider it gospel truth to imagine Obama as nothing less than an extension of Mandela's noble cause - this is why you'll often hear liberals talking about the Obama presidency as if his performance in the job is beside the point.

Well, you make a left wing academic president of a superpower and I guess one shouldn't be surprised that you end up with a foreign policy that's all about weakness dressed up as enlightened forward thinking. Obama administration now essentially saying to China viz its security zone: we don't agree with it but will accept it so long as you improve the optics of the thing a little bit - in other words, we can accept your imperial overreach that shits on our regional allies just so long as you do it with a smile. This is exactly what China wanted and no doubt expected - that in the name of 'calm' Obama would blink and essentially legitimize China's regional claims while at same time embarrassing Japan and fracturing our relationship with them - just as with Iran and Israel, we put an ally in an untenable position in order to make concessions to an enemy all in the name of the illusion of peace and comity that serves the interests of the aggressor.

Oh, my. Worst president ever. As I've said before, I don't know how the person who follows him is going to be able to clean up the prodigious mess this man will leave behind - and the most dispiriting thing is the liberal media is still desperately trying to come up with ways to present this mess in a positive light - it's almost farcical - I think the country will have to be reduced to a smouldering pile of rubble before we'll hear them finally admit "ahhh... ya know what, maybe after all Obama wasn't the best choice for CEO... but at least amends were made for all that slavery stuff and we liberals can pat ourselves on the back for that... although, sure, a little bit sorry that the change part of hope ended up being inevitable decline..."

[Obama apologists will try to promote idea that this is a clever move by Dear Leader that encourages a Chinese aggression that drives the other players in the region further into our arms - that sounds like fantasy to me, sweet nothings from catamites - simply by announcing the zone the other players were sufficiently motivated to cling to us and the proper move would be to cement that bond by clearly rejecting China's claims - instead, the only clear messages sent here are that incremental hegemony by China will be rewarded and that US allies should doubt the resolve, true intentions and fealty of the Obama administration - these people have witnessed Obama's foreign policy - the naivety of the Russian reset, half measures in Afghanistan, leading from behind in Libya, embrace of the noxious Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, equivocation and retreat in Syria, concessions to Iran at Israel's expense - and are legitimately reaching the conclusion that Obama is not about defending the traditional aspects of American power - indeed, a cynic might well conclude that he is all about unwinding that power as much as possible]