This in Jerusalem Post a pretty bleak assessment of current state of affairs in the Mideast - and quite accurate assessment in most ways, I'd say, pointing out how both Bush's disastrously flawed plans [or lack of a plan altogether] for post invasion Iraq and Obama's utterly misguided foreign policy as a whole have pushed all the wrong buttons and precious few right ones when it comes to dealing with the dysfunctional Muslim polities of the Mideast.

It's a sad tale - and I tend to agree: so many mistakes and misjudgements have been made that I don't know if there's a way out this mess that won't worsen and complicate America's [and by implication, Israel's] security calculations and scenarios no matter which path forward is chosen.     

This comports with my opinion on the blame Bush chatter viz Iraq - assumptions are made that have no basis in facts because the facts do not exist. Liberals can say stupid things knowing full well the media will treat those stupid things as stuff that makes sense and many unthinking voters will accept that as the truth - but of course the truth lies somewhere else. Can you argue that things might be better or at least more manageable if Saddam were still around? Yes - you can also legitimately argue things might be roughly the same or worse - it's all conjecture, some of it more informed than others. The only thing we know for sure is that Bush fucked up the occupation, this led to significant problems - those problems had been addressed at long last by the surge - one can argue about the degree to which those problems had been addressed but there is no doubt that they had been addressed - and then Obama walked away from that 'success' we now know not for sound tactical or strategic reasons but rather simply because he wanted to be able to say he got us out of Iraq, ie that he was 'ending wars'. A year after walking away Maliki asked him to come back and Obama said no - six months ago Maliki asked for help viz ISIS and Obama said no. Probably a year or so ago Obama no doubt received a security briefing saying something along the lines that if we didn't get involved in Syria the bad stuff that is happening right now might happen, and Obama did nothing.  And so here we are.

Churchill didn't get to ignore Hitler simply because he disagreed with the policy choices of Chamberlain, and no one would have excused him had he tried - even if you believe, wrongly as far as I'm concerned, that the Mideast looks as bad as it does right now mainly because of the 2003 invasion, how on earth does that excuse Obama from the choices he's made that were quite obviously deeply flawed?

And as I've said before, if you're gonna argue that we would be better off with a ruthless tyrant like Saddam still in power then that has implications, implications that liberals completely ignore when making such a claim - as in the 'Cairo speech' and the naive welcoming of the 'Arab Spring' and the soaked in delusion welcoming of the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt and sundry other things are all utterly incompatible with what's implied by the notion that if only Saddam were still around practicing his form of Ba'athist fascism everything would be fine.     

It occurs to me that there's something to look forward to should Obama's presidency go right off the rails - I mean, I believe it went off the rails day one, but realistically if the media is going to throw smoke across the truth then that perception becomes the reality regardless of how unreal that reality may be, realistically speaking - but if his presidency devolves into such an unmitigated disaster that it causes Hillary's association with it to become a very toxic thing thus compromising severely her presidential ambitions, possibly so much so that maybe she doesn't even run - well, then, the Clintons will be out for revenge, won't they? To their thinking, Obama will have 'stolen' 2008 from them, ruined 2016 for them, and by being such an awful president that Hillary is irrevocably associated with he will threaten their reputations and legacy as a whole - the Clintons aren't gonna put up with that, especially since it's the worst kept secret in Washington that Bubba can't stand Obama, has despised the man since he accused him of being a racist in the '08 primary [c'mon, Bill, is there a straight white male in America that Obama hasn't called a racist or implied as much?]. No, fierce political animals that they are, the Clintons will be lookin' for payback, if only in an attempt to preserve their reputations by putting rhetorical space between themselves and the awfulness that is Dear Leader- and that could be a fun show to watch.

[although, Obama could objectively be judged as an absolute disaster of a president and yet still be viewed as a hero by the far left, which could make payback difficult for the Clintons - I mean, look at what's going on with the surge of amnesty seekers in Texas right now, a problem deliberately created by Obama - I believe that after the midterms Obama, whether he's a lame duck or not, is gonna unilaterally move on amnesty - I have no idea if he can get away with something like that , but if he does and so manages to change the demographics of Texas that it becomes inplay viz presidential elections, then you will never see another conservative president in this country - which will of course be ruinous for the country, but given the delusional insanity of the far left make Obama a living God for them]

Although of course you can make the argument that Bush is to blame for what’s going on in Iraq right now just as you can also make the argument that Bush's plans offered the only real hope to overcome the sectarian mediaevalism of the region, a hope that was lost when Obama squandered the gains wrought by the surge by walking away and leaving Iraq to its own dysfunctional devices and acting as if he could ignore Syria and nothing bad would come of that - just as you can also argue the merits of other scenarios and what ifs including the cynical but quite possibly true idea that in a place as dysfunctional and rife with entrenched hatreds and suspicions as the Mideast what is happening now was inevitable and all Bush’s invasion did was at most expedite that inevitability - but, whatever - point is if you're going to make the argument that the 2003 invasion is the root of all evil here then I need to ask: are you talking about just the invasion itself or the botched occupation? Because those are different things with different implications - if you’re saying the invasion itself then seems to me you're also saying that the only way to keep sectarian idiocy and extremism under control in the mideast is through dictatorial thugs like Saddam - and if you’re saying that does that also mean you were opposed then to the ousting of Mubarak and the attempt to oust Assad, indeed that we should have moved in early to save Assad? And if you’re saying that, are you then also saying that Islamism and democracy are not compatible, that Islamist societies can never be truly pluralistic, representative, open societies free from forever being undone by corruption and sectarianism? I certainly think one could make that argument - but the thing is all those trying to blame Bush for Iraq never make that argument - rather they tend to believe that the vain, stupefied delusion of Obama’s Cairo speech represented the best way forward and that all that was necessary to push Muslim polities into the 21st - hell, the 20th century and make all Islamic extremism magically fade away was the deploying of pretty words, the rendering of heartfelt apologies for the implied evil of America and then the flouncing about as if all that was needed to move forward was doing the opposite of what you think Bush might have done and everything would just be oh so fine.

Those wanting to blame Bush are attempting to draw a straight line from one thing to another in a region where there are no straight lines, only bent, broken and corrupt ones - they're of the type who lauded unquestioningly the Arab Spring [delusional] and yet now want to somehow blame Bush for this wonderful spring turning so nasty in Syria - they never talk about how leaving Saddam in power and free of sanctions would have produced a whole other set of problems that if not handled adroitly could have ended up with the region looking pretty much as it does right now - they want to draw straight lines in a place where there are no straight lines except possibly one: show weakness and you will be targeted - in short, they're of a type fond of embracing the unreal so as to protect the pleasing perfection of their dreams - they're the people for whom the Cairo speech was intended and therefore they have no right to be lecturing anyone about anything when it comes to foreign policy.

I laugh with great sadness at those suggesting Putin is retreating on Ukraine because he seems to be winding down a wider military threat - with sadness because of the strategic ineptitude now regularly evinced by the besotted leaders of The West. As far as I can tell, Putin has what he wanted or was angling for from the start: Crimea and the beginnings of a political compromise that he can exploit over the coming months and years to his advantage [not to mention a new strategic alliance with China that can be used to isolate the US] - an actual invasion of Ukraine was never in the cards except as an absolute last resort and then possibly not even then -  it was always about bringing pressure to bear through growing upheaval and the threat that this unrest could bring about an actual invasion until intimations of a political compromise emerged - Putin has acted all along as if he was in the driver's seat, as if he had the only real leverage and nothing has happened to suggest that wasn't true - Putin had expertly cultivated the idea that he indeed was willing to invade if it came to that and Obama and the EU wanted absolutely no part of a military confrontation, especially if the prize was gonna be a dysfunctional and heavily indebted Ukraine - EU dependence on Russian gas and all the Russian money flowing through the EU banking system meant that the EU could petulantly stamp its feet but do little else - and because, as said, Ukraine was hardly a prize worth the effort he could read the US and the EU as by and large bluffing - if you don't care about super power prestige or the strategic uses of America being perceived as something to be feared and respected, which clearly Obama doesn't given the in retreat mess that is his foreign policy, then Ukraine was always going to be worth more to Russia than to the feckless, desultory, addled West.

The truly disturbing thing about all this is that even before Putin had entered Crimea it was clear that one of the ways this could all play out is the way it played out and yet Obama and the EU leadership seemed to have not the slightest clue of it - I fully expected Putin to enter Crimea, made complete sense to me - Obama, Kerry and the sad rest were apparently shocked by it - that's disturbing.

[I do agree that probably Putin has come up short of what he hoped to get when all this started - but I do think he's attained the minimum of what was required and that's enough since it's my opinion he has a much better grasp than Obama et al of where the real leverage lies here and what this all will look like a year down the road]

[although maybe I've got this entirely wrong since the EU has just signed a 'partnership' agreement with Ukraine and Putin is apparently all pissed off about it - not sure of the details - that says to me the EU thinks Putin is in retreat and they're calling the bluff - but I've said all along that Putin cannot be bluffing because he cannot afford the political fallout of a bluff being called - he had to be all in for the win - so, I dunno - the EU has acted all along like they can push east and there'll be no repercussions - I still think that a serious misreading of the situation - I just do not believe that Putin started down this path without understanding that it was a very high stakes game and to win he'd have to willing to ride it to the very brink - clearly Obama and the EU leadership never saw it in those terms and have acted throughout as if it was all perfectly manageable because Putin was 'in the wrong' and he'd eventually have to come to terms with that and back down - that's naive - to me Putin has always been committed to the long game]

"This is not America. It is like most failed states abroad, which also are not America"

Very nice article by Vic Hanson summing up the corrupt nature and noxious emanations of the progressive plague unleashed by Obama and his minions on a stupefied nation - stupefied in large part because the media is a co-conspirator in the quiet coup, which the non-reporting on the IRS scandal, dwarfing the already quite disturbing non-reporting on various other things like Benghazi, blatantly makes clear - it does seem like a ruinous nexus - you have a president who clearly believes a progressive oligarchy answering to the ideological whims of people like himself is the best future for the country and anything that can be done to make it happen, legal or otherwise, true or not, factual or distorted by self serving fantasy, is necessarily good regardless of whether or not some objective observer might disagree - you have an opinion manufacturing media that by and large is onboard with this agenda - you have a large, invasive, manipulative, punitive bureaucracy acting as the wehrmacht of this agenda with the footsoldier bureaucrats of course on board because they are so well rewarded for this loyalty - the royal court may be a corrupt and dysfunctional mess of self regard and vanity but better to be in its favor than stuck out in the street shovelling shit. And then finally you have an electorate, the only thing capable of stopping this menace, that is supine, ignorant, misinformed, uninterested or just already too far indoctrinated into the progressive orthodoxy to be bothered or just even capable of imagining that maybe there's something wrong with this picture - idealist ideologies like today's progressivism do not encourage dissent for the assumptions that underwrite their beliefs would not survive honest scrutiny and therefore to hope for apostasy amongst its adherents is to practice a delusion equal to the cause.

This can't end well - I'm not sure how the badness will manifest itself - one can certainly conjure up several disturbing scenarios that could take a generation to fully play out or could be jarringly immediate in their effect - but barring the coming of a significant correction that moves the country back towards a sane path, this quite simply cannot end well.

[to make an attempt at a sort of optimism, polls are, despite the best efforts of the NY Times et al, finally indicating that the electorate is at long frickin' last starting to figure out that 'hope and change' was a vacuous tagline conjured up by progressivism's used car salesmen to unload a lemon on the gullible - it is still possible that the Obama presidency could devolve into such an unmitigated disaster that not even the zealots will be able to sustain the notion that everything's fine and just ignore all that smoke billowing out of the tailpipe - hell, even Peter Beinart, stalwart progressive and long time idolater of The Obama has written an article sharply criticising his handling of Iraq - that's a definite indication of porcine aviation brewing - if we get to the point where the Times is writing IRS in a big, juicy font on page one then look out, swine will be filling the air]     

This Scott Walker story is interesting, I mean aside from the obvious reason of the liberal media, as with Christie, once again spinning a narrative that is either falsely twisted and inflated or utterly untrue in order to kill off a promising GOP candidate and further prepare the way for the coronation of Hillary - that's all juicy and disturbing stuff - but I'm thinking rather about how do conservatives push back against this corruption of the media and unwind these debilitating narratives? That's the key - going on FOX and complaining about it does nothing for you - you have to find a way to replace the false narrative with not only the true one, but with a narrative that also makes clear what the corruption is and why the average person should be troubled by it. How you do that without benefit of the media is the trick republicans need to learn and learn well - because although this bias has been with us a long time it has gotten profoundly worse under Obama and we're gonna see the same thing with the attempt to crown Hillary - no lie will be too big to tell nor no narrative so false that it can't be spun in some way in service to the great cause. Republicans need to come up with effective, effective counter measures - just going on FOX or Rush or whatever does little for you because that does nothing to replace, subvert the the offending narrative when it comes to the average voter who in general is not paying a lot of attention or going too deeply into things.

Jonah Goldberg makes this very good point about the IRS scandal and the self generating noxious parasite of bureaucracy -  if the corruption and abuse was not roused and enacted at the behest of Obama and his maenads - which I think it was otherwise, in the wake of the lost emails absurdity, heads would be rolling in order to protect themselves from the growing perception that it was - but if not done under orders from Washington then that would mean the IRS all on its own has morphed into a rights and free speech destroying monster lashing out at all those who do not share in or bow down before its ideological preferences - and that might be a scarier thing than if this abuse is just another manifestation of lawlessness and disdain for democracy from Dear Leader and his sycophants.

In much the same way that a cancer propagates itself by destroying its host, bureaucracies serve their own interests by promoting the cause of big government at the expense of everyone else and the body politick which sustains it. I'm sure many of these bureaucrats believe they're doing good - indeed, they would have to believe that for to think otherwise would be self defeating and so as with any absolute faith the suppression of dissent, of impure thoughts becomes an obligation - but the small good they do serve is achieved with such great inefficiency that the harm done is not worth the benefit - any attempt to change or impede this dynamic would immediately be seen as a threat for the fact is inefficiency is necessarily baked into the system, bureaucracies need to be bloated in order to protect themselves - five people doing a job one person could do easily or even worse doing a job for which there is no need equals power at the ballot box. That's the evil empire Democrats are busily constructing in order to enshrine progressivism as something of a state religion that cannot be challenged - and the IRS has either been enlisted as or volunteered to become its storm troopers.

There are various points in this article I have doubts about or outright disagree with, but the central point is right on - the one thing we can take away with a quasi certainty from our adventures in the Land of Allah since 9/11 is that Western notions of representative secular governance, personal liberty and tolerance are not good fits with Islam and whether it's a continuing naive delusion or the inane, detached from reality political correctness of multiculturalism that keeps so many from  the embrace of that truth, it's true regardless. As the article states, this notion that extremism is an aberration of true Islam is absurd - all religions by the very nature of their controlling belief systems are prone to extremism if given the right circumstances, especially if they have a pronounced political component to them - and all that's true of the Mideast today just as it was more or less true of the Christian West 500 years ago - that the West was able to shake off this extremism while the Muslim world remains trapped by it is as far as I'm concerned a testament to how fundamental to its beliefs the political component of Islam is - yet many in the West insist on living in denial of this - David Cameron just gave a speech the other day in parliament about involving ourselves in dysfunctional Muslim polities that made it sound as if he hadn't paid attention to anything that has transpired the last ten years. Does he just not listen to intelligence briefings on what has gone on in Libya since he and his fellow EU idiots decided to be led from behind in the ousting of Qaddafi?

I get that in the immediate wake of 9/11 the thought that fundamental changes needed to be wrought in the Mideast had an appeal to it - it's why I reluctantly supported the invasion, I simply wasn't convinced that just chasing AQ and the Taliban across the mountains into Pakistan was gonna suffice - some more permanent changes needed to be instituted and given it's somewhat secular nature and the fact that Saddam was slipping out from beneath the sanctions and hungry to stir up who could say what kind of trouble, Iraq made sense - not to mention the unexploited oil wealth that could be used to grease the skids of the necessary changes. I suppose I viewed the first gulf war as never having ended but rather put into an increasingly untenable state of artificial suspension - I did not share the sanguine opinion that a Saddam returned to full power would be a manageable thing and in light of the changed metrics of 9/11 came to conclusion that an invasion would bring things to their proper end. If Bush had actually had a post invasion plan, who knows, maybe it would have worked - but reflecting over all that's gone on the last ten years and now with a better understanding of how the Muslim world functions it's hard for me to escape sense that even a well thought out and executed occupation may still have come up short of producing the kind of changes we were looking for - but we'll never know - and so here we are.

[does this mean you have no problem with Obama walking away from Iraq in 2011 as if everything was just hunky dory? Ahhh... no. As someone said a while back, if you're America you don't get to just walk away - if you're the lone superpower, the lone force capable of defending Western values and interests, you don't get to just walk away - not at least without having eventually to deal with the dire consequences of it - that may not sit well with Obama, such a reality may not conveniently comport with the worldview he'd prefer to embrace - indeed, his presidency has shown he very much doesn't appreciate that reality - but it's the reality all the same]

This Lois Lerner dog ate my emails story has gone from absurd and galling to infuriatingly absurd and emetic - republicans needs to get off their ass and put the wheels in motion towards threatening people with jail time if they don't speak up and tell the truth - as I believe Sharyl Attkisson has pointed out, you start threatening tech guys with jail time if they lie under oath and the truth will come scrambling to the surface pretty god damn quickly. But of course the truly infuriating thing here is the behavior of the non-FOX media which is desperately trying to find some way to spin this or pass it off as not that big a deal or talk as if maybe it was just an honest accident - the only way those emails are lost is if Lerner was using her personal computer as a local server that wasn't being backed up and wasn't communicating with other servers and when it crashed the hard drives were thrown away - and even if that incredibly unlikely scenario was the case there'd still be tech guys who responded to the crash and would know exactly what happened and are no way in hell gonna go to jail to save Lerner's ass.

I swear, Obama could kill someone in the Lincoln bedroom, video of it could be uploaded to YouTube and the MSM would still be looking for some way to pass the murder off as not that big a deal or just some conspiracy hatched in the diseased racist minds of paranoid republicans. It's a god damn travesty what's going on in this country under this administration. I'm starting to feel that in order to have any hope of a kind of correction or rehabilitation of the political malaise infecting the country it's vitally important that Obama leave office under a cloud of shame and scandal with the media's complicity in the shame and scandal being obvious to anyone willing to pay attention - this IRS bullshit seems to fit that need perfectly and Issa or whoever in the House is handling this nonsense needs to make it happen - there's some tech guy out there who knows exactly what happened to those emails and it's time to start beating the bushes and threatening people with jail time - because this is ridiculous, it's banana republic stuff, and not just because of Obama's lawlessness or disdain for democracy - it's the media, the press behaving in the way you'd expect to see the compromised media and press of a dictatorship behave - it's truly disturbing and the fact that so many on the left don't seem particularly disturbed by it tells you they'd probably be okay with a progressive oligarchy, they'd have no real problems with Obama just rolling up congress and declaring that he and his retinue of catamites were now in charge of everything.

As a person who after some reluctance and much debate supported the invasion of Iraq for what I thought were tentative yet still logical reasons, I have regardless been willing, really since Rummy was foolishly running around dismissing ‘dead-enders’, to condemn the Bush administration for utterly screwing up a war that made some provisional sense to me by failing to plan or plan intelligently for what to do once the shooting stopped. Eventually I came to explain this screw up by believing Cheney and Rumsfeld had way too much control over the decision making process, which may have been Rice’s fault, and that led to a bad case of tunnel vision viz the post hostilities environment - and that this dangerous dynamic was emboldened by the relative ease with which the Taliban was routed in Afghanistan which engendered much wishful thinking which then encouraged someone in the administration [Rove?] to put way too much emphasis on the political windfall the toppling of Saddam would bring at the dire expense of ruinously shortchanging a coldly realistic analysis of what the ‘occupation’ would and should look like. This serious breakdown in thoughtful planning and analysis possibly could have been amended, compensated for had we not disbanded the Iraqi military - but once we made that fateful and foolish move, with the too small for post op security force that we had, it was essentially game over until the surge sort of repaired things.

So that’s the very short version of my thought’s on Bush and Iraq - which I bring up for, well, obvious reasons - but also to counter this idea that Obama, by opposing the Iraq war, got it right and Bush the warmongering idiot got it wrong. Let’s put aside that in cutting out of Iraq as if all problems were solved there and Islamist extremism was dead Obama displayed at least as much delusion viz Muslim politics and polities as Bush did - let’s put that aside and simply get this straight: Dear Leader opposed the Iraq war because, one, as a state legislator he represented a very left wing district that would have expected him to oppose the war; two, for the uber liberal elite and academic left, whose continuing adoration he needed to stoke to fuel his political rise, hatred of the American military and all it does was and is their default position and therefore they too would have expected, required him to oppose the war; and three, he was ideologically predisposed [remember his good buddy reverend chickens home to roost Wright?] to agree with that uber left elite. He didn’t oppose the war because of some brilliant strategic insight or some keen understanding of military history that a bumpkin like Bush could never hope to grasp - he opposed it because it was a political necessity that happened to fit quite nicely with his ideological pretensions.

For me to even begin to give Obama some credit for opposing the war he’d have to answer questions which far as I know he has never essayed response to and no doubt the lackey press has never asked - namely:

- the sanctions regime that had existed against Saddam since the end of the first gulf war was falling apart - absent an invasion to topple him, as president would you have let those sanctions slide away or would you have pushed to renew the effort? If you let them slide could I then infer that you also considered the first gulf war illegitimate? Let’s remember that two of the complaints by Osama used to justify 9/11 were focused on those sanctions - to wit, that they were killing thousands of Iraqi children and necessitated the stationing of infidel American troops in holy Saudi Arabia, an affront to all Muslims according to OBL - so if you let the sanctions slide and pulled out of Saudi Arabia leaving Saddam in power, doesn't that amount to giving Osama exactly what he wanted?

- since all intelligence organizations believed, we now know mistakenly, that Saddam had an ongoing WMD program - and since Iran and Libya had nuclear programs which the former suspended and the latter disbanded after Bush invaded Iraq - in a post 9/11 world where Islamic terrorists had demonstrated a complete willingness to do whatever was necessary to bring down America, absent an Iraq invasion, as president how would you have dealt with those threats? Sanctions again?

- since we know from your primary against Hillary in 2008 that you viewed the Afghanistan war as legitimate, 'good' I believe you called it - does that mean you supported nation building there? And if there, why not Iraq since in retrospect one of the best arguments that one could have made against the Iraq war was that democracy promotion in the Muslim world is very much a fool’s errand? Certainly, Iraq was far more fertile ground viz cultural evolution than Afghanistan so I’d be confused if you supported nation building in the one and not the other - or was it your position that what made war in Afghanistan legitimate was simply the presence of Al Qaeda and so once they were chased over the hills into Pakistan we could pack up and leave and everything would be fine?

- as we now know, decimated in Afghanistan, Islamic extremism didn’t fade away but rather decentralized and reconstituted itself in various ways and in various new places - if you were president in let’s say 2006 and Saddam, still of course in power thanks to you and possibly also now free from sanctions, started to welcome in these roving extremists for whatever reason [he’d certainly supported terrorists in the past], what would you have done? And let’s remember, since we would not have invaded Iraq we therefore would still be under the impression he had a WMD program - so, given what your opposition to Bush’s invasion of Iraq implies, if such a thing had happened, would or wouldn't that have justified action against Saddam? If not, would that mean that you considered the fight against Islamic extremism over once Afghanistan had however temporally been purged of the pricks? [this admittedly in a sense not a fair question - but still legitimate since those who opposed the invasion tend to just assume Iraq with Saddam still in charge would have somehow remained a 'manageable' problem] 

 
Off the top of my head, those are a few of the questions I’d need answered before giving anyone, Obama or otherwise, credit for having opposed the Bush invasion.

In the end the point is Obama’s foreign policy is not brilliantly inspired - rather, it amounts simply to doing the opposite of Bush, giving some pretty speeches and then acting as if everything will be fine because apparently the only thing he really seems to believe in is that less America is an inherently good thing - that’s not a foreign policy nor even remotely strategic - that's delusion and empty rhetoric posing as enlightenment.

[in actuality the only invasion opposing opinions I respect are those that argued that establishing democracy in Iraq would be difficult if not impossible, a failure to send enough troops and commit to an open ended occupation would almost certainly make it impossible, and the comeuppance of this failure would be a much more well position Iran which might complicate things in a worse way than just leaving Saddam in power would have and here's why... etc etc - that opinion I'd respect - that's not what Obama argued - and regardless, if that was your opinion then as I said you must also have believed that nation building in Afghanistan was a waste of time and therefore support for that war raises some difficult to answer questions. Those who try to say that the decision for or against invasion was obvious are fooling themselves or lying or are just superficial in their thinking - as I said in 2003 and still believe today: anyone who was more than 60/40 against or for toppling Saddam was either glossing over the problems of an occupation or glossing over the complications of leaving Iraq under a crumbling sanctions regime under Saddam's rule and not thinking through how 9/11 had changed the math for everything - the math may seem clearer now - though no less disturbing - but it wasn't clear then and those who act as if it was are spewing bullshit]

The story of Lerner's emails being lost because her computer crashed is a remarkably absurd lie, so ludicrous it's brazen in its willful implication of lawlessness since no one would tell such a ridiculous lie so easy to prove false unless, one, they had something really bad to hide and, two, utter contempt for those seeking to find it. I mean even a remotely intelligent high school student probably knows that emails are stored on servers that are backed up to other servers and so the only way to lose emails is if there's a catastrophic system meltdown and then there'd be plenty of evidence of such a thing happening - meaning, you can't tell a lie about it happening without that lie being easily exposed. So this Lerner business is absolutely absurd and demonstrates an astounding contempt for the law and accountability in governance.

But the really astounding thing about all this is that as far as I know the NY Times has yet to report on the story. I'll beat this dead horse again, but such profound media bias will destroy your democracy because it will destroy the legitimacy of your democracy leaving behind a corrupt bureaucracy that serves only those who foolishly share in its delusions and eventually not even them - like Kafka's castle, it will exist merely to serve the absurd incoherence and increasing dysfunction of its dark self.

To me, the willingness with which the media has allowed itself to be corrupted in service of Obama is the most disturbing thing about the Obama presidency - and there's one hell of lot of stuff there to be disturbed about - way I see it, this corruption in essence amounts to a denial of free speech, a subversion of the whole meaning and import of the first amendment, and that amounts to an existential threat to the republic. There's a very good reason why the first amendment is the first amendment - ya can't have a democracy without it.

As some have pointed out and liberals can't seem to grasp or simply refuse to acknowledge the logic of since such an acknowledgment would cloud their perfect dreams - even if you are right in thinking Bush's move into Iraq the worst foreign policy blunder ever, that would in no way make simply walking away from the problem as if by scorning it so time is reversed and all unpleasantness undone an acceptable response - unless of course as a liberal in your vain self righteousness you've convinced yourself that the dire consequences of inaction pale in comparison to the value of once again pointing out how evil was Bush.

For the uber liberal, the only real dangers out there are conservatives, Wall Street and the military machine that props them up - get rid of all that ugliness and everything will be fine. If the price paid for getting rid of that ugliness is chaos breaking out on several fronts and America's reputation as a reliable ally and superpower in tatters, well... as the old lions of a promised universal socialism used to say, gotta break a few eggs...

Which raises interesting question: what will it mean if Obama doesn't involve himself in what's going on in Iraq because to his way of thinking upending his foreign policy goals to fix a problem he no doubt believes is all the fault of Bush would not serve the greater good, which we would be left to believe is him and his ideas? Given his performance as Commander in Chief to date, it's not inconceivable that he views the practice of foreign policy in such messianic terms.

Take aways from the great Iraqi shit storm part 3... or is it 4 … 5? Whatever.

Is it Obama’s plan to continually sow disorder and dysfunction that he can blame on Bush and therefore distract attention from his own awful record ad infinitum?

Jokes aside, the inability of liberals to see the practice of foreign policy as anything other than doing the opposite of what Bush did is quite disturbing - I’m not gonna defend Bush and his fucking up of the Iraq adventure, but if the prosecution of that war evidenced a deep lack of understanding of how the Muslim world works, then so too did Obama’s Cairo speech and his approach to the putative Arab Spring and his abandoning of Iraq as if Maliki could be trusted and the drawing of red lines that aren't red lines and his readiness to intimate that Israel was the main barrier to peace with the Palestinians and etc etc etc - if your defence is gonna be 'well at least Obama didn't invade a country' then… is Libya the better for that? Syria? Since your presumed candidate for 2016 supported the Iraq invasion I’m not sure how you're planning to finesse the logic of blaming Bush for doing what Hillary endorsed him to do. And how without embarrassment can liberals embrace the utterly magical thinking of if only Saddam or one of his sick, crazy sons were still in power the Mideast would just be humming along perfectly right now? One can imagine scenarios where things might be better with an Iraq still under Saddam's thumb, if such was even possible regardless of Bush - but one can just as surely imagine scenarios where things might be worse or roughly the same - only thing for sure was that since the end of the first gulf war most everyone rightly or wrongly thought it likely necessary or at least inevitable that you were going to have to get rid of Saddam to have any hope of effecting positive change in the region, including Clinton, and this was especially so after 9/11, a fact which many people conveniently forget - with 9/11 as the pretext Bush did it, he just didn't have a good plan [or any plan at all] of what to do once he'd done it - that huge screw up, Obama’s failure to argue for an enduring American presence in Iraq once Bush had sort of corrected that screw up and the general fucked beyond repair nature of the Muslim world which may have by itself rendered whatever Bush or Obama did moot explains the current pile of shit.

Can it possibly be true that Obama and his national security team of buffoons did not see this coming? Can anybody here play this game? Not only was something like this predicted by many when Obama pulled out and declared the Iraq war over, but since the beginning of the Syrian mess one of the great fears has been that it would exacerbate sectarian trouble in Iraq and eventually draw Iraq into the conflagration. It boggles the mind if indeed they've been 'shocked' by this turn.

Is this just the beginning of the crap we're gonna see spewed from the diseased fount that is Syria? Even if the ISIS threat can be brought under some kind of control, you still have this festering swamp of Jihadists that isn't simply gonna dry up nor content itself with just waging war against apostate Shia, not with all those juicy Western targets out there - this has the makings of a toxic epidemic just waiting to slip its borders and creep into the wider world. I mean, how many of these guys are gonna end up back in Europe? And if Obama comes to Maliki's [and thus by inference Assad's] rescue here, how pissed off are they gonna be? Alternatively, if ISIS does manage to hold its gains, what kind of magnet will they become for every discontented 16 year old Muslim boy out there hungry to blow something up for the greater glory of Allah? 

Iran does what now? Will a truncated Shia Iraqi state become a protectorate of theirs? If so, can you just forget about any nuke deal [if one was even possible] because Iran's leverage viz causing trouble just spiked? Will Obama see this as an opportunity to form some sort of alliance with Iran - or indeed might we be forced into such a thing regardless of wanting it or not if the violence really starts to spiral out of control? Things play out a certain way, Iran could be the big winner here - which I think would be good for no one other than Iran.

What is it with the Muslim world and its inept militaries?  What's that about? As we see also in Afghanistan, ten years of training and tutoring from the most professional army on the planet gets you nothing. Or is this yet more sectarian idiocy? Shia had no stomach or desire to fight on Sunni land in order to protect Sunnis and therefore when the going got tough they simply got the fuck out of there. 

Can we now speak openly about the obvious, that Islam and democracy do not go well together and it's about time we in the West have an intelligent debate about why that is and what it augurs viz our security needs? [Islamist apologists used to be able to point to Turkey but Erdogan has effectively shown what a shallow boast that was - as he was always willing to intimate to anyone paying attention, Islamist democracy is just a more progressive friendly way of saying Islamist oligarchy or outright dictatorship - no doubt why Obama was so fond of the man since uber liberals of Obama's ilk would love to turn America into same kind of faux democracy that is in reality a progressive oligarchy - isn't that the whole point of Obamacare and open borders? Create enough poor, non-white voters who are dependent on the gov't in various ways and essentially you'll have a liberal majority that can never be defeated - a progressive oligarchy] 

We could be seeing the beginning of the great Muslim meltdown that I've tentatively been predicting must be coming, for better or worse. Sunni and Shia in the best of circumstances distrust each other and in the worst of circumstances hate each other and that’s a big, big problem in a place where religion is still the chief organizing principle of polities - as indeed was the case with Christianity and the battles between protestants and catholics over power and influence hundreds of years ago in the West.

But here's the key - the West had several advantages the Muslim world doesn't have and those differences probably explain why we have prospered and they have most decidely not. In short I'd describe those key differences as:

1 - geography.

2 - the mostly secular nature of the formative institutions of the Greco-Roman world upon which the West was built.

3 - a history of commerce and trade and exploration and migration that was outward looking by necessity and therefore dynamic and predated the rise to dominance of Christian orthodoxy and therefore that history became perforce a relatively easy fit with that orthodoxy once it rose to dominate things.

4 - an intellectual tradition that again existed before the advent of Christianity and that placed much emphasis, however primitively, on discursive elements of thought that tend to push back against narrow dogmatism or at least mitigate over time the noxious effects thereof - elements like deductive reasoning, observation and analysis, empiricism, pluralism, open debate, rhetoric and aesthetics and the acceptance of the individual conscience as a phenomenon worthy of discussion and contemplation - a tradition that was preserved through the misnamed 'dark ages' and brought back to life by the Christian clerisy and oddly enough some important Muslim scholars - a pretty unique set of circumstances, all in all.

5 - and finally, no doubt more or less because of all of the above, Christianity, although often of course used for political purposes, indeed beginning with Constantine whose goals were more political than devotional when he embraced the faith, is regardless not an inherently political religion - it is ultimately focused on personal revelation - this is quite distinct from Islam and no doubt explains much regarding how the two cultures have evolved - again there is nothing in Islam like Christ’s admonition to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto god what is god’s - which basically means that the salvation of your soul is not dependent on the politics of your habitat - a point of view which I believe the Koran judges if not exactly heretical then at odds with the true practice of Islam - which is in keeping with those who believe Islam was developed specifically as a political tool which again makes it markedly different from Christianity which during its genesis was suppressed and persecuted and grew up in the shadows and therefore the nurturing of a political component was not an option and consequently in essence became meaningless to its practice. It's difficult if not impossible to imagine Islam without a political component - not so Christianity, which is no doubt one reason why millions of Chinese are rushing to embrace the cross and not the crescent. In short, religions don't like change - but if your political and social institutions are subservient to the requisite needs of your faith, then they cannot evolve, your culture cannot evolve because change must necessarily be seen as something evil in order to preserve the purity of the faith's dogma - religions with a pronounced political component are all about protecting the purity of the faith from challenge through regimented public acts [beards for instance] which makes them quite antagonistic to change which means they're not a good fit with democracy since democracy is all about mitigating extremes through the embrace of constant change and the toleration of personal liberty that goes with it.

Again, more than 400 years ago Elizabeth said she had no interest opening windows into men's souls - is there a leader of an Islamist country today that could make the same claim and not at least be severely chastised for it, at worst be accused of blasphemy? Thus is the fundamental difference between the two cultures defined.

Agree wholeheartedly [well, mostly] with Thomas Sowell - and I've been saying a version of this since 2008 when I declared Obama's support of and promise to fight and win his so called good war in Afghanistan an absolute lie he needed to tell in order to look presidential [he knew he couldn't simply be known as the guy who opposed the Iraq war] and enable his defeat of Hillary - in my opinion once president he'd do only what he had to do to make it look like he was keeping his primary promise and protect his political capital but had little desire to fight a war that was of no interest to him and did not serve his agenda of shrinking America as a global power - I believed this because having taken the measure of the man I had concluded he was a consummate and committed dissembler when it came to promoting his interests and also because there was clearly nothing in his ideological past to suggest he put much stock in the winning of such wars or in the value of American power - indeed, the philosophical underpinnings of the leftist intellectual swamp he crawled out of strongly suggested he was much more likely to see the American military as nothing more that a grotesque manifestation of white privilege employed in the service of evil capitalists. The hamfisted way he tried to turn Bergdahl into a hero in order to serve his political needs was surely an expression either of his contempt for the values that define the US military or an utterly abject lack of understanding thereof.

So I agree with Sowell that those who claim 'incompetence' in explaining the awfulness of the Obama presidency are missing the point - not that incompetence doesn't play a part because the man is quite clearly an inept chief executive - but such trivial stuff as management doesn't matter to him - it's all about ideology and exploiting his deified persona, celebrity status and favored standing with the indentured media in order to push the country as far left as possible by whatever means possible, legal or otherwise - like a true socialist ideologue Obama believes that the end absolutely justifies the means that the fevered conceit of his imagination has so constructed and the end he and his swooning catamites seek here is a vision of America that most Americans would not much appreciate if they could see it, which they can't because as Sowell says we're being driven to the edge of ruin by frivolity.

[I would expand on that viz how Obama gets away with this: one, true, the electorate is at fault for being either stupid, naive, uninterested, uninvolved or ideologically predisposed to make vain and quite superficial assumptions about things - and I'm not at all sure what to do about that because it's a problem that plagues all democracies; two, as said before, Obama is a superb liar with zero qualms about spewing bullshit in order to serve an agenda; three and the key to all this as far as I'm concerned, the media enables Obama by either agreeing more or less with the agenda and thus becoming co-conspirators or by being blinded by the ignorant, near childish sentimentality of thinking him as the first black president trumps all other considerations; and finally, the failure of conservatives to nominate people who have the wherewithal to mitigate the noxious effects of this media bias - simply complaining about it does nothing for you - you have to put forward candidates who have the attributes required to beat it down and this the GOP consistently fails to do - indeed, so convinced am I of the ruinous effects of media bias and the way it subverts the legitimacy of a democracy that I've got to the point of seriously joking or joking with all seriousness that my only requirement for the 2016 GOP nominee is that they have the ability to go on The Daily Show and not only hold their own against Stewart, both from an ideological and entertainment value point of view, but also come away looking the clear winner - any candidate who can pull that off would be telling me they've got the media chops required to win. In short, it's all about defeating, if not wholly at least to a significant degree, the off putting caricature of conservatism that the liberal media has spent years now crafting - no easy task, but vital I think]

[on the plus side though - a plus built out of a huge negative so not really a plus I guess - searching for a silver lining the prospect is definitely out there that the Obama presidency is now going so badly that even an indulgent press can no longer manage the heavy lifting of saving the narrative - unfortunately that doesn't mean for one second that they won't all snap right back into line when it's Hillary's turn - one can already imagine the spin: Obama's problem was lack of executive experience, but Hillary's got that... sort of... anyway, just look at her as being Bill's third term...]

Pentagon released its report on the PLA's military expenditures and buildup and strategic designs - and it's definitely an eye catcher for anyone still harboring the delusion of a peaceful rise for China - but I was struck by charge by some analysts that pictures of the weapons systems central to the hardware build-up and of confrontations with an increasingly aggressive and assertive China like the Cowpens incident have been suppressed because the Obama administration doesn't want to feed notions of a cold war with Big Dragon - which seems a bit silly since we clearly are in a proto cold war with China - it's different from the USSR version, what with our deep economic ties to Big Dragon and the fact that they have yet to really develop a system of client states that serve their interests [although that's coming I think] - still, this is a cold war and I'm not sure about the reasoning behind trying to pretend it isn't - unless of course it's your goal to shrink the US military and the threat of a cold war with China doesn't fit such an agenda.

Maybe this is why Obama often seems to approach foreign policy problems as if they're conceptually malleable things that can be controlled better through language than actions - possibly he's naively liberal enough to believe that by not for instance calling Islamic extremism Islamic extremism and instead deploying smart strategic phrasing like 'workplace violence' a real problem is solved - without sitting down and talking to him I can't know if he's that misguided, although the Bergdahl bullshit seems to suggest the man is indeed laboring under the delusions of a worldview in desperate need of adult supervision - but I do know that if you've convinced yourself that a less powerful America would be a good thing then hiding real threats behind fake language would be an excellent way to go about it.

Pope popes in a dark wood

Ahhh… the Pope’s prayer of peace with Israeli and Palestinian leaders was, let’s just say it, idiotic - I think any clear thinking person knows this, yes? It’s not just that this idiotic prayer is coming from the leader of an organization that has through its history got itself involved in all kinds of unpeaceful misadventures, many of them for sheer profit, and therefore having to sit through pompous paeans to peace from these richly robed charlatans does gall one’s sense of rational coherence and intellectual decorum - but what really annoys is that people take it seriously as a progressive step forward, which it most decidedly is not, especially because we all know this putatively noble gesture will be used to paint the Israelis as evil war mongers blind to the light of peace the funny hatted one is kindly flashing in their eyes when the utterly obvious happens and peace does not suddenly break out all over the frickin' place. And what galls even more than that is people who should know better cutting the funny hatted one some slack because his intentions are so good - how does that matter one little bit? I know we're all supposed to think nice thoughts about the socialist Pope spewing unfettered from reality nonsense, but, ya know, when idiot parents give their screaming child the toy it’s screaming for it doesn't matter if their intentions were good according to their rather limited understanding of goodness - all that matters, big picture wise, given the realities of parenting, is that they're idiots who have just made a bad situation worse and decent people should be able to stand up and say so. And that’s what I think about the socialist Pope involving himself in the politics of the Mideast.

I suppose the things to watch for now viz Bergdahl are: how fiercely will Obama admin try to spin this and to what lengths might they go? Already voices within the admin have referred to Bergdahl as being 'swiftboated' which sounds like an extremely ill advised thing to do, so who knows how ugly this could get.  Will the media relent and help sell the spin? Part of the reason this story took off is because liberal media outlets treated the complaints about Bergdahl as legitimate - in particular Tapper at CNN and The Daily Beast - which made it hard to bury it as just more Obama hating racist nonsense from FOX - but having sown their somewhat wild oats, will the liberal media now back it up and come to Dear Leader's rescue? And finally, will military brass yield to the coming Obama admin pressure to whitewash what clearly appears to have been a desertion and quite possibly worse and if they do, will any officers, outraged by such a breach of faith, break ranks and publicly complain? If Obama had some good will built up with the military there might be some room there to cut him some slack - but I'm guessing a large majority within the service are pretty much sick and tired of this Commander in Chief and being asked to cover-up a desertion in order to save his political ass would for many of them I think be an insult they're not willing to endure, not quietly anyway.

The other thing to watch for is what the Taliban does - this was already a big win for them, but seeing how it's playing in the US turns it into a huge win - what if they go for a kill shot now? What I'm thinking in particular is since, according to reports, Qatar is letting the five bearded bad boys wander around unfettered, what if they're smuggled out of the country and back to Afghanistan and a week from now we're watching a video of all these happy warriors running around crying allahu akbar and death to America? I mean, talk about a decisive win for them and a withering defeat for Obama - although I guess Dear Leader might be able to drone them into oblivion and claim that was his immensely incoherent plan all along.

I know as a closeted socialist Obama is a big believer in false equalities, fanciful equivalencies drawn out by rhetoric but not supported by reality or even simple common sense and therefore is like to be confused by a military ethos that is all about performance and exceptionalism, it's not about being given something in order to attain some phony equality, and that's because without a focus on performance people die, your platoon mates die - you start rewarding mediocrity and half assed effort and a failure to honor one's duty in the military and people die, missions fail - still you'd think it wouldn't need saying that you start rewarding deserters and people who sympathize with the enemy and you might as well just close up shop as a superpower - but apparently the saying of it was absolutely necessary in Obama's case because his understanding of the military and the mindset that fuels it seems so thin or maybe thinned by disdain that thoughts on how trying to score PR points by treating a deserter who may have collaborated with enemy as a 'hero' could end up pissing a lot of military people off didn't occur to him or his people - nor did they seem to get that then going on to scold those pissed off soldiers who live and died by the creed of 'no man left behind' that they just didn't grasp the implied socialist intentions of that creed was really gonna piss a whole lot of people off.

In order to cover up the egregiously lopsided and quite possibly illegal nature of the swap and give Obama the PR boost he was looking for they needed Bergdahl to be seen as a hero and therefore I don't see how this was just an oversight or miscalculation - this fuck up has to be a manifestation of a complete lack of understanding of military culture and history or an overt disdain thereof by Obama and the people he listens to - or they just didn't know about the significant question marks hanging over Bergdahl's actions which to me seems pretty god damn improbable.

That the president of the United States could be that detached from or disdainful of all that makes the US military powerful is a pretty disturbing thought.

So the question remains: what were they thinking? Well, apart from the distracting PR boost they were assuming and relying on, my guess would be they needed to get Bergdahl out in order to officially bring the war to a close but they knew congress was never going to agree to the swap - according to Feinstein, that was made clear to Obama two years ago - the Levin amendments to the law forbidding the president from unilaterally dumping Gitmo prisoners gave Obama some constitutional loopholes to exploit - the pretext came up to do just that and never shy about going all imperial with the presidency Obama jumped on it without anyone apparently thinking about the consequences or maybe with Obama just ignoring objections - and there ya go. Again, other than the Taliban agreeing to a peace deal in exchange for its five lost leaders [a deal which I don't think would hold much water, but whatever], the only way you could possibly sell this trade is if Bergdahl is seen as a 'hero' and thus his return celebrated - why no one in Obama's inner circle seemed to grasp how that was not gonna happen is the mystery - or maybe not so mysterious given the demonstrated ideological predilections of Obama and people like Jarrett and Rice - they have much more in common with Bergdahl's idiot Allah praising father than with the average patriotic American.

[this fuck up could also be consequence of one of the damaging and dangerous effects of media bias I predicted cropping up awhile back - not only does media bias essentially subvert free speech and work to delegitimize your democracy, but it can also worryingly encourage, enable bad decisions because a leader protected by this bias will be led to believe they can't make mistakes since no matter what happens the media will spin it to your specifications - in essence, consequences of bad leadership are muted which of course enables bad leadership - this Bergdahl fuck up could be perfect manifestation of that dynamic]

Obama decides he's gonna instruct real soldiers on the true meaning of 'no man left behind'. I dunno, I am very well read in military history and lore, and I have several friends who've served and so have a good sense of their point of view  - but I never served myself and therefore maybe I'm wrong about this - but seems to me most grunts are not gonna be too impressed by Obama trying to lecture them on the meaning of 'no man left behind' - because for those who have and do live by that creed they realise it's not some privilege handed to you without conditions or expectations but rather an honor you earn by doing your job - it is conditional - which means it may apply to all soldiers,  but not to all by the same degree - like everything in the military, it's a respect you earn - which may be why an uber liberal like Obama is having trouble understanding the concept.

Is there a better way to express the inane idiocy and shallow self regard of modern liberalism than Obama's effort to with a stroke of his arrogant pen undo much of America's coal industry in order to felate the enviro fascists of the left? It hurts the US economy, will take money out of peoples pockets, will kill jobs - and will have virtually zero effect on reducing the climate change threat if one actually believes in the climate change threat - in other words, will do absolute real harm to America so that the liberal elite can with empty gestures congratulate themselves on being so wonderful.

It's a red letter day for all those out there who hate America and would love to see it undone - Obama singlehandedly decides to make the US economy much worse than it already is for the sole purpose it seems of making George Clooney and his idiot ilk happy at the expense of pretty much everyone else in the country - and then we go out of our way to give a helping hand to Islamic terrorists by one, saying we will work with the 'united' Palestinian government which means working with the avowed terrorists of Hamas, a decision which so utterly confounds common sense that your brain starts to hurt - and then of course the cherry on top, two, the giving up of five Taliban heavy weights, real bad ass Islamist pricks in order to get back a deserter who hates America, may have collaborated with the enemy, is it seems universally despised by his fellow soldiers and whose father managed to insult essentially the entire Afghan war effort by in the Rose Garden for fuck sake thanking Allah for this great beneficence - and all this done by executive fiat that was quite obviously [well, probably] illegal.

I mean, you can't call this incompetence, can you? Or even grotesquely misguided? This has to be a deliberate effort to turn America into an afterthought, no? Either that or these people are so infatuated with the image of themselves as a new progressive ruling class so astoundingly clever beyond reproach that the critical spirit is entirely dead to them - they are wholly incapable of objectively judging their own actions - as far as they're concerned, they can do no wrong. It's frightening - it's as if you have an obnoxious posse of fatuous yet utterly self satisfied adolescents running the country.