Chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard warns America [and by inference Israel] to not even think about an attack on their nuclear facilities, payback would be grievous - he then mocks America as a fading power - far as I'm concerned to view this rhetoric as simple bravado or as compensation by IRG for perceived 'moderation' of Rouhani would be mistake - this is Iran spiking the ball on deliberate plan by them and Putin and China to take advantage of Obama's foreign policy missteps and weakness and irresolution [and quite possibly his open dislike of American military power] to humble the US and indeed make it look like a fading power - knowing that Obama has no intention of using force on Iran a threat like this, when the agreement eventually falls apart and Iran reaches breakout capability and America does nothing, a threat like this will make it look like the US crumbled out of fear of Iran - perceptions like that are gold in the Muslim world.

Obama is cementing his place as worst foreign policy president the country has ever had - possibly if a brilliant leader ascends to the throne in 2016, a Reagan or Thatcher type, possibly the mess can be cleaned up - but barring that there will be nasty consequences to this disaster of a presidency - they may take ten or twenty years to play out, but there will be consequences and they won't be pretty.

[if I'm right about this it does call forth some intriguing potentialities, and I think first and foremost: if you're Israel, don't you have to do something to separate yourself from Obama's weakness or risk being dragged down into that enervating swamp with him? If Iran feels free to ridicule America either directly or by insinuation and given Obama's manifest ineptitude this calumny appears to stick, won't Israel be stained by that ridicule and the pernicious perceptions thereof too if they do nothing to repel it? Israel - both right and left by and large I believe - has made it clear that they consider the appearance of weakness on their part to present as an existential threat, an invitation to aggression and bad behavior from their enemies, of which there are many - and so how can they possibly not view an association with Obama's emasculated and befuddled foreign policy, even if it's only perceptual, as something to be abhorred?]   

Kerry insists Syria's future will not include Assad even though none of the other big players around the table really believe that and the Geneva I agreement on which the Geneva II talks are supposed to be based clearly does not say anything about Assad going bye bye as a necessary precondition - Kerry is talking out of his hat this way because he got the few 'opposition' leaders to the table by promising there'd be a no Assad stipulation don't you worry [and by of course offering them some cash] - and so, what can we say about this seemingly nonsensical Geneva II pantomime? The farce that is Obama's foreign policy continues unabated, indeed continues with such idiotic purpose and declamation that one can probably safely say at this point that the Obama administration is quite possibly the worst foreign policy administration the country has ever had. They've gotten nothing right far as I can see [and that includes with conditions the termination of OBL] and there's nothing they have done or are doing that in anyway inspires confidence in me - I don't see how the next president, even if they have a brilliant foreign policy mind [and what are the odds of that] is going to be able to clean up the mess that is being left behind by this administration. A vexing question [among many vexing questions] is: can it be Kerry is doing all this talking in the Mideast because he actually believes he's doing good and not in fact being taken for a ride by people who see Obama as weak and irresolute and ripe for abuse? Can they possibly be that naively stupid? God, that's a frightening thought - I sincerely hope [with much bathos] that all this talking is just window dressing meant to hide the fact that when Obama came on the scene he promised to change everything and the only way that promise still holds is in sense that everything is worse - I hope that all this absurdity from Kerry is just an attempt at image damage control because otherwise that would mean these people are indeed dangerously misguided and naive in their thinking and sympathies.

When you think about it, bad as the immediate practical effects of this farce are, one of the most disturbing things about the foreign policy disaster that is this presidency is how the media is not even remotely portraying it that way - hard to see how this illusion does not lead to bad things - how can corrective steps be taken if there's no perception amongst the voters that corrective steps need to be taken? Even if one wants to equate Bush and Obama as foreign policy disasters, leaving aside how legitimate a claim that is, the fact remains that the media with great, almost obsessive abandon portrayed Bush as a failure - but that is not even close to being the case when it comes to the portrayal of Obama and, again I ask, how does the fostering of this illusion not eventually lead to bad and highly troubling outcomes?

[look at the public's view of the NSA in the wake of the Snowden treachery - it's negative and utterly detached from reality - I'm not gonna make a blanket defense of the NSA, I'm sure improvements can be made there and some changes are necessary - but it's very hard not to believe that the public's negative view of the NSA and delusional antipathy towards it is a product of the left wing media's tendency to condone and sometimes even welcome if not extol what Snowden did and consequently downplay the threats that are out there and how the NSA is a vital force set against those threats]  

It's probably fair to say that it may come to be that the only thing that can moderate and defuse the growing political polarization in the country is an independent media and press that are unbiased and objective in their reporting, portrayals and criticisms and which accordingly foster balanced opinions in the electorate concerning the good and bad and middling takes or leaves of the competing ideologies and consequently has the effect of marginalizing the worst excesses of the far left and right and forcing a reasonableness on the whole process - and it is also fair if not indeed obvious to say that such a balanced state of affairs decidedly does not exist in America nor one imagines anywhere in the democratic West where liberal sympathies tend to more or less dominate, distort and in worst cases outright corrupt political narratives to the left's liking.

So what does that mean? Clearly, the left seems to think it means they win - there's a reason dictatorships seize control of media outlets: next to firing squads and secret police, control of the media is a pretty effective way of disenfranchising the opposition, the ideological infidels - and so with de facto control of media the left with some legitimacy imagines that their hatred of all things conservative will eventually translate into conservatism fading away.

Problem with that is, dictatorships don't simply control media in essence, they control it absolutely [this is where those firing squads and secret police come in handy] - which means that simple media bias, damaging as it may be, is not enough to suppress popular dissent and consequently unless you're willing to embrace the utter repeal of free speech rights and the attendant totalitarianism that goes with such a thing [a fancy that one disconcertingly imagines a fair number of the liberal elite would be willing to indulge] opposition to the misguided conceits of liberalism isn't going away - outcomes matter, and without the ability to control absolutely the people's perceptions of these outcomes dissent will survive and indeed flourish - the NY Times can carry Obama's water and try and put the lie out there that he simply misspoke about the realities of his health care law and wasn't at all perpetrating an outright fraud on the electorate, but they can't force the people to believe that lie no matter how badly the Times may wish it could.

Polarization in a free country will not lead, absent the embrace of absolute authoritarianism, to the abrogation of one's opponents - unmitigated, untempered by exogenous factors or the ascendancy of a free peoples innate love of common sense and compromise, it will simply lead to increasing polarization and the increasing extremism that naturally follows - until the polity breaks up, either in actuality or as a de facto reality on the ground - by which I mean media bias combined with changing demographics may indeed push national elections increasingly to the left, but if that happens, given America's federal nature, conservatives will then look to the states as places where common sense can be preserved - and then people and businesses can decide the issue with their feet: if California turns into a bankrupted nightmare where half the population is dependent on gov't handouts which are funded through outrageous taxation, then people and businesses will leave California and settle in a place where the American dream hasn't been gutted by liberal excesses and delusion.

[of course, that may be the way too optimistic take on what happens should polarization continue to spin out of control - the darker scenarios are not nearly so rational in their solutions - and what really worries me is what happens foreign policy wise should factors increasingly lead to naive, anti-military ideologues like Obama sitting in the Oval Office - something like that could definitely usher in some highly disquieting outcomes]

This a fascinating little article on what sounds like a fascinating little film, and probably must see stuff for any GOP candidate who wants an inside look on how not to lose a presidential election - ie, in short, if you think you can't best the other guy then why the fuck are you even bothering? There are many things to point to in trying to understand why Romney lost to an extremely vulnerable Obama in 2012 - changing demographics, media bias [Benghazi!] and the fact Obama's internal polling was much more accurate than Romney's stand out - but one thing that really puzzled was the mistake of, after having attained a clear victory in the first debate and with the wind now finally in his sails, why the christ in the following debates did Romney go soft and essentially hand the momentum back to Obama? I always blamed it on team Romney's bad polling, which I thought led them to mistakenly believe the thing was now won so let's play it safe and not look like we're shitting on the black guy. Turns out it had more to do with Romney being the wuss many believed him to be - he didn't think he could beat Obama in a debate - that's pathetic - personally I think Obama's verbal skills are highly overrated, but regardless, if you don't think you can beat your opponent in a debate then you probably shouldn't be in the race. That seems obvious.

Actually, this may point tellingly to my belief that the 'communications deficit' is the biggest problem for conservatives right now - I'm guessing that it wasn't so much Romney believing he couldn't best Obama in an argument that was the problem but rather his fear that he couldn't match up under the lights of a televised debate where style and optics matter more than substance that got to him. As I've said many times: you may be smarter than the other guy, have better ideas and more relevant experience - but if you can't get that impression across in a way that the TV viewer can immediately grasp, then you're in trouble. Sure, all liberals and Obama especially are helped immensely in this regard by a biased and in Obama's case an adoring media - but all the more reason why if you're a conservative you have to have a firm and indeed possibly arrogant confidence in your ability to mitigate or overcome that advantage - Romney clearly lacked that confidence, and that lacking quite possibly cost him the election.

I wonder if Dear Leader, in order to convince his liberal cohorts in the Senate to not push through the Iran sanctions addendum, will have to break down and admit to the truth regarding his Iran plans in order to get them to cooperate - ie, that since he has no intention of using force to thwart Iran's ambitions and therefore has no means to stop them since the sanctions regime is now for all intents and purposes toast - or, put another way, since he decided a long time ago on a policy of containment but is keeping it secret [aka lying about it] because he knows that neither Israel nor the American people will be much pleased by that decision, that in order to keep that secret secret the Senate can't be pushing through inconvenient bills that will in effect pull back the curtain on that secret [lie] - if they do, he'll have no choice but to veto it, which won't look too bloody good either, thank you very much.

When you think about it, since if one were to treat Obama's rhetoric on Iran as being serious his resistance to the bill would clearly make no sense, how else can he stop Democrats in the Senate from moving forward with it and thus revealing the unseriousness of his rhetoric other than by telling them the awful truth and bringing them in on the lie? I don't see what choice he has since the optics of a veto on this will not be good and so the veto in and of itself could be enough to unmask the charade - in order to get to the 'contained space' without looking weak and hopelessly compromised and without provoking Israel to unilateral action Obama needs an agreement in place regardless of whether or not it can be deemed legitimate according to any objective final analysis - the purpose of the agreement is not to stop Iran, it's to cover over the tracks of a move towards containment. 

Thomas Sowell gets what I've been saying about Christie for awhile now - I don't know whether the big guy would make a good president, I don't even know that much about his policy positions - and I'm not sure what to make of the 'traffic jam scandal', whether it ruins him, makes him stronger, ends up working to his advantage, or if maybe in the end it says something unflattering and disqualifying about the way he wields power and manages his people - I dunno - what I do know is that conservatives in general lack what he has and has in spades: the ability to talk in a clear and convincing and appealing and engaging way when the cameras are on and the ability accordingly to come across to a broad range of people as real, approachable, trustworthy and flat out damn likeable. In a political age defined by mass media and a popular culture that sees almost everything through that prism, and with that media inherently inclined towards a bias against conservative ideas and often openly corrupted by a politically motivated hostility to conservatism - to be a conservative and have the communication skills Christie has is like gold - and I firmly believe that if the GOP cannot find national candidates like this who have the ability to counteract and hopefully overcome the natural and often unnatural bias of the media, then the GOP is doomed to an increasing irrelevance.

And yet we see in the base's hatred of Christie and embrace of people like Cruz the incapacity or simple stubborn refusal to acknowledge this reality - the right wing base does not seem to grasp that what they see and hear when Cruz talks is not what most of the rest of the country will see and hear when Cruz talks should the GOP be foolish enough to make him their candidate. Now, I suppose you can make the argument that by the end of Obama's term the kind of liberalism he espouses will be so discredited that the country might be ready to tolerate a Cruz - possible, I guess - more likely though is that if what Obama represents is wholly discredited and the GOP puts forward someone like Cruz that will free up whomever the Democrats run to move convincingly to the center - which is why the GOP needs to run someone who can appeal to moderates and thus force Hillary et al to try and defend what Obama has wrought. 

One was expecting the orgy of scandal mongering that the liberal media let loose on Christie [although I do find myself regardless still somewhat taken aback by the brazen hypocrisy of it given the many and significantly less covered sins of Obama, sins of much more questionable veniality compared to those ascribed to the big guy] - can't say that I was expecting how badly some conservatives would want to join in on the fun, though. Seems the far right truly dislikes Christie, either that or so long for the coming of a hyper conservatism embodied in the likes of Cruz that they relish the opportunity to remove 'moderates' like Christie as obstacles to that great reckoning.

I find the fervid dreams of the far right to be quite delusional and oddly romantic in a disturbing sort of way - like finding the ramblings of a stalker romantic given their passion - but I must say that I increasingly am coming to view some of their criticism of Christie as vaguely legitimate - as in it's hard to believe that his underlings would engage in such foolish hardball behavior without Christie, either directly or by proxy, having indicated that he was fine with such hardball behavior regardless of whether or not he specifically signed off on this particular example of hardball behavior. That this stuff did happen may indeed say something negative about Christie and consequently that negative impression may be hard to shake given that so many on the left and less so on the right have a vested interest in seeing him not shake it.

That being said, I still say this episode says much more, in comparison, about the corruption of the Obama administration and the sympathetic submissive media that enables it than it says about the good and bad of Christie.  

Ah, I see that that jolly wise man of irrepressible good cheer, Ayatollah Khamenei, has called the way the US is negotiating with Iran over its nuclear doings an example of how America hates Muslims and Islam but that he's willing to tolerate the continuing discussions with Great Satan since such niceties are sometimes the best way to do Great Satan harm, or words to that effect - which is a rather interesting take on things, I'd say, certainly when measured against all the grand notions of comity and new hope that Obama and Kerry bring to the table.

Dear Leader's apologetic outreach to the children of Allah really isn't going too well, is it - although I guess his supporters would say that the failure of supine apology is a much better thing than the failure of war, which is all the evil Bush had to offer us - and on the superficial surface of things I suppose there's a kind of falsely comforting truth to that - unfortunately, at least for a cynic like me, that truth is very likely to amount to nothing more than a brief illusion wherein the seeds of a violence yet to come are sown.

There's another way of looking at the Christie dust up - I was a fan [?] of his because I believed he possessed in a unique way the qualities required to defeat or at least adequately push back against liberal media bias - he's now squarely in the rapacious maw of that bias - if he survives this feeding frenzy, and possibly even comes out looking in relative terms good because of his response to it [already many are contrasting his unequivocal taking of responsibility for this fuck up to Obama's refusal to take responsibility for anything that has gone wrong on his watch] then that will sort of prove my point: he's uniquely qualified to defeat or at least mitigate the pernicious effects of liberal media bias. Of course, this take will all depend on whether or not he can be directly tied to the scandal - if proof emerges that he signed off on this nonsense, he's toast - but I agree with some who are saying that the vehemence of his denials and the mammoth press conference he gave in his defense where he answered every question possible are strong indications that he truly wasn't a party to this nonsense or is at least quite confident there's no way it can be traced back to him. We'll see.

Fresh on the heels of in a provocatively unilateral fashion expanding its air security zone, an aggressive move that the US kindly in essence acquiesced to, China now has in the same manner expanded its claims in the South China Sea and in accordance with this decree is 'ordering' foreign fishing vessels to announce themselves and submit to possible boarding before entering into what China now views as its territorial waters. Nice.

People are of course fretting that this aggressive behavior could easily escalate into a confrontation - but think about it, it's becoming increasingly hard to believe that a confrontation isn't exactly what China wants - as this article points out, it looks like China wants to reap the spoils of a military victory without having to actually fight a war - ie they expect that if there is a confrontation their opponents will back down and they will in effect have gained control of the disputed territories. It's also getting very hard not to believe that this brinkmanship is a direct result of Obama's weak and submissive foreign policy - I predicted this might happen, that fearing the reprise of a strong Reagan replacing a weak Carter dynamic in 2016 China might conclude that now is the time to act while Obama's still in the White House - increasingly difficult not to see the shadow of that threat in what's going on here.

That article in The Diplomat also raises two other interesting points: without actual military victories, China can have no proud military tradition with which to rouse its people with; and without any real world experience in the practice of modern warfare, China cannot possibly master the means thereof - which amounts to a huge advantage for the US over China, a deficit which no doubt troubles the PLA to no end and again may lead to some decisions being made that will not bode well for any still holding out hope for China's peaceful rise. 

So, Christie lands in some PR trouble which conflicts enough with the image he's crafted of a no nonsense politician that it could prove a problem - by which I mean of course that because he's not a charming black guy beloved by the liberal elite the leftist media is going to like ravenous dogs feed off this screw up until nothing remains of the big guy's 2016 ambitions. Yep, Obama uses the IRS to suppress voter turnout, an impeachable offense, and the media just sort of yawns and turns away - but Christie, possibly the only conservative out there who can stop Hillary, makes a misstep [albeit a very stupid and petty one] and the media swarms to the feeding frenzy - they'll be chewing on the carcass of this 'scandal' for weeks now. No, forget that Gates' just released book has revealed that Obama apparently fought a war for no other reason than to protect his political interests - forget that, let's see how quickly we can kill off the GOP's savior in waiting.

Funny thing is, this is the whole reason I was a Christie supporter - I thought he was the only prospect out there that possessed the necessary attributes to counteract the utterly pernicious effects of media bias in this country - and now maybe he's toast, thanks to media bias. Kind of funny, I guess.

[which is not to suggest Christie doesn't bear responsibility - if he did indeed sign off on what was done, then that was a pretty foolish thing to do for a pretty petty reason]

Former SecDef Gates writes a book, slams Obama - but most importantly for me confirms what I have been saying for some five years now: Obama's embrace of the 'good war' in Afghanistan was nothing but a political calculation that he had no intention of following through on - his main, indeed possibly only concerns were beating Hillary in the primary by looking presidential with tough talk on Afghanistan and then, when he finally became president, of how to look like he was honoring that tough talk without actually entangling himself too deeply in a war he wanted no part of. I was saying this [and being ignored or pilloried for it] in 2008 - and again in 2009 when Obama was involved in his interminable discussions on how to proceed in Afghanistan and I labelled these deliberations as nothing but political theatre designed to make it look like he was serious about Afghanistan when all he was really serious about was constraining and then significantly hollowing out traditional notions of American power and foreign policy obligations and concerns - and of course getting re-elected, which would of course involve the spinning of narratives about how he had ended wars and was turning America into a kinder, gentler, more humbled UN friendly thing full of cooperation and goodwill for all.

The question Americans need to ask is: how is it an idiot blogger like me managed to figure this out about Dear Leader a full five years ago while the mainstream media missed it entirely? I think we all know the answer to that - in the crap shoot that democracy often devolves into you're gonna get bad presidents, unfortunately sometimes more bad ones than good ones - which is why I tend to think the real threat to this country is not the misguided incompetence of someone like Obama but rather the media bias that made it possible and indeed encouraged it and possibly has the means to make such misguided and fundamentally undemocratic rule a permanent feature of our politics. It's vital that Republicans find a way to counteract this threat - allowing the right wing base to control the debate with the hyperbole and sense of holy outrage it is wont to ply is not the way to go - the GOP desperately needs to put forward leaders who exude confidence and competence and can make the counter argument in a broadly appealing way - otherwise, I expect things will become increasingly messy until we get to the point where the country is lost to the enfeeblement and eventual ruin imposed by an unstoppable media enabled liberal oligarchy - or things just simply start falling apart, possibly violently so.

[I should note that my problem isn't about Obama not fighting to win in Afghanistan - I think one can make a convincing argument that for various reasons 'winning' was not an option in that war - my problem is that to me it was obvious that Obama was lying about his intentions viz Afghanistan both in the primary against Hillary and once he'd become president and the media, blinded by love for the man, either couldn't see this or saw it and decided to keep it hidden - I think it was mostly the former but disturbing either way - and of course like any clear thinking sane person I'm deeply troubled by fact Obama seemingly chose to fake fight a war he didn't believe in resulting in the deaths of many people and more damage being done to American foreign policy credibility for no other reason than to serve his political interests - that's repugnant - I don't fault the man for thinking the war unwinnable, if indeed that's what he believed - I fault him deeply for what he did about that belief]

Just curious - but how would Israel respond to a problem like Snowden? Israel has a well earned reputation for being somewhat ruthless when it comes to defending its security concerns - Israelis live in a dangerous part of the world, much of which is hostile to them, so they can't really afford sentimental posturing and abstract reasoning and lackadaisical equivocation when it comes to these life and death issues - so how would they have handled the Snowden problem? Being dramatic, one is tempted to think Mossad would have already brought the threat to a suitable conclusion with cold efficiency - but we must assume Snowden has protected himself against premature demise by disseminating his booty to various operatives - my guess is he would never have gotten out of Hong Kong, not in one piece anyways - and that raises the question that remains unanswered and indeed barely even asked: what the hell was the Obama administration doing in that week or so Snowden was stewing in Hong Kong to address the threat and contain the damage? I mean, jesus, they didn't even think to rescind his passport which I assume would have made his trip to Russia impossible - so what exactly were they doing?

I dunno, maybe I'm an idiot - but I keep hearing 'experts' talk about how to go about making a deal with Iran on its nuke ambitions, and to me this is absurd talk - Iran will only be amenable to a deal if they see a way forward for themselves given their proclivities that does not necessarily involve nuking up - but if on the other hand they feel it is essential given what they want and expect to nuke up then the only way to stop that from happening is to force it - it's that simple. All these people talking about 'avenues towards a settlement' are talking gibberish unless they can demonstrate evidence of Iran being open to a future that is not necessarily nuked up - I don't see any evidence of such out there and so to me the choice is clear: force Iran to give up its ambitions, or accept the inevitable of a nuked up Persia. And as I've said before, I believe Obama a long time ago accepted [out of cowardice or a pronounced antipathy towards American power] the latter and everything now 'negotiation wise' is just bull shit window dressing. 

Preacher at de Blasio inauguration litters his blandishments and rhetoric with references to slavery and plantations as if New York city, one of the most liberal and multi-racial places in America, is a hot bed of white supremacist fervor treading under foot the beleaguered unWASPy types crying out for freedom. These people are pathetic, and apparently quite shameless in their patheticness - you'd think the awfulness that is Obama would have knocked down this kind of lefty idiocy a notch or two - but, no, the moronic rantings of the enlightened still find plenty of purchase in the fetid ideological bile of the de Blasios et al making clear that charges of racism will continue to be the fulcrum the New Left uses to foist socialism upon the republic. One wonders where this all ends - is it to continue as a permanent feature of American political discourse no matter how much the ideas and sentiments under girding it are discredited and no matter how thoroughly this idiotic rhetoric is revealed to be the hollow demagoguery it is? That's a depressing thought. I guess one can sit and hope that de Blasio's term as mayor ends as badly as Dinkin's did - but that probably still doesn't kill the beast - hell, de Blasio could turn New York into a Detroit-like wasteland and these savants would still find some excuse that explains it all away - they're like spoiled rich kids living in daddy's pool house: ensconced and buried deep in a nurturing fantasy there's no reality they need answer to and therefore they can always manage to conjure up something or someone to blame for their ineffectuality and failings.