The Scalise problem and his somewhat or seemingly tenuous ties to racists points again to the biggest problem for Republicans being media bias, not perceptions of diversity, not changing demographics etc - although those two things remain problematic - and I should say I'm not quite sure why Scalise has not done the smart and honorable thing and stepped down as whip. 

But that aside, forget Obama reaching out to a truly awful person like Al Sharpton - that probably isn't but certainly could be nothing more than a cynical political calculation - but simply look at Obama's long-term relationship with a person with the extreme ideological proclivities of Jeremiah Wright and how without media bias throwing smokescreens across the quite worrying implications of that relationship there's no way he could've become president - certainly a Republican with similar baggage wouldn't even have bothered to run given the shit storm the media would've sent his way. 

In short media bias inflates sometimes in absurdly untruthful ways conservative flaws while covering up or simply dismissing those of liberals - and if Republicans cannot figure out a way to mitigate this problem or find a way to navigate around it convincingly then national elections will continue to be hard things for them to win. 

With hyperbolic incitement and dishonest propaganda from the racial grievance industry of America now having resulted in the killing of two cops in New York it's helpful to keep in mind why this problem is not going to go away quickly - and simply put that's because liberals need the racist narrative as the grievance industry spins it in order to not only win elections but to legitimize their ideological givens - they can't have the conversation about problems afflicting the black community in America be about the dysfunction of that community being the result of Liberal policies and therefore they need it to be about racism whether that's true or not - thus the racial grievance industry and the galling influence wielded by despicable charlatans like Sharpton etc. etc. - and as long as the media is going to support and endorse this nonsense it's going to stay with us for quite a long time. 

The interesting question for me is how long will Latinos and Asians continue to support this nonsense by voting liberal? Latinos I don't know, they have some conflicted interests here - but Asians? My guess is the Asian community is not impressed. The sad irony that underscores my point here is that the two cops killed were not white, they were a Latino and an Asian - some gut wrenching symbolism there. 

Obama's comments on the Sony hack were pretty weak and insubstantial and incoherent and misguided, no? And this from a guy who manages to be all those things just about every time he steps in front of a microphone, so to stand out in this regard seems to be of significance. 

What on earth was he talking about when he said Sony should have come to him before deciding to pull the film when in fact the National security apparatus should've been on top of this thing from the very beginning? And why the hell did he feel it right to accuse Sony of having made a mistake by pulling the film when clearly they didn't appear to have any options? Was he trying to scapegoat them, trying to make excuses for his own lack of action?

As I've said cyber attacks by one nation upon another are fascinating because there are no set guidelines and no history to define what an appropriate response should be - and this confusion is further complicated when dealing with a leader like Obama, a man who clearly disdains the use of American power and is much more comfortable in the role of American apologist and our great giver of progressively fluffy speeches.

Update: reports today of North Korean internet going down - ahh... that sounds more like the first line of a joke than a serious response by us - I suppose this could be the U.S. sending a cyber shell across the bow of NK but I doubt it - at least I hope not since it would be a wholly insufficient response and misguided I think. I'm not at all sure that a cyber response from us would be a good idea at all - us trying to set a deterrence precedent here I think is full of all kinds of problems - and I'm not sure it's a good idea for us to reveal what our capabilities are - and finally what amounts to a proportional response when you're talking about a bankrupt country like North Korea? There may be some value to a cyber warning shot but I think the punishment should be of a more traditional nature. 

Do I have a problem with Obama without any input from congress undoing a longstanding Cuba policy for no apparently good reason? I think so. Is it going to help the Cuban people and lead to more freedoms for them? Seems unlikely - in fact this may guarantee that another generation of socialist pricks is motivated to keep the abuse in place after the Castros soon depart. Obama claims he is now well sutuated to influence that next generation because his largesse has bought good will which strikes one as remarkably naive - reality seems to be rather you've surrendered your main leverage for bringing about such change and in doing so generated optics that say to all our enemies out there that under Obama American will remain weak, pliable, ingratiating and apologetic. 

In short  Obama's rationale for this gesture doesn't make much sense - unless of course the whole point of it is to keep the socialist loving base happy and related to that but of more significance possibly pave the way for getting rid of Gitmo - and my guess is, since the move is hard to justify otherwise, that's exactly what's going on here.

People who defend the action by saying the embargo etc. hasn't worked are missing the point - a statement has been made regarding what kind of regimes America will tolerate at its borders, if you back away from that statement without getting anything in return that is a capitulation that sends a message that is quite different. Yes Nixon went to China but we got something strategically in return that was valuable - yes we normalized relations with another questionable regime in Vietnam but again strategically we get something out of them - what does Obama's capitulation get us strategically? Nothing good or worth the bad optics that I can see. The only person's interests served by this action seem to be Obama's and his progressive acolytes - but then again I guess we should not be surprised by this. 

The successful cyber attack on Sony resulting in the scuttling of the reviled movie raises curious point Ive remarked on before: when is a cyber attack damaging and egregious enough to represent a legitimate act of war? Not saying the Sony case is that but it does show just how much harm can be done by a motivated enemy - yet there are no established guidelines out there indicating when an act crosses line separating criminal behavior from warlike behavior - and that lack of clarity can definitely lead to problems of encouraging the enemy because the victim is unsure of how to respond. 

Notice how the liberal media portrays Obama's 'executive' actions as being against wishes of a political opposition (read racists) and not the will of the people or at least the desires of the people. Polls show and the last election proved that the man's ideas and policies are simply not popular and yet liberals continue to act as if they have a mandate. I wonder if media bias which has served liberal interests for so long is now coming back to haunt them - ie they've tricked themselves into believing that since  the New York Times et al have no problem with Obama's progressive agenda being wielded with executive abuse that the American people are fine with it too. The latest example of this is now his move on Cuba which I'm guessing most voters will not look upon kindly even though most lack the wherewithal to realistically grasp foreign policy questions - but hell, even the lefty Washington Post has panned the move by Obama which may prove a watershed moment in the way the media portrays Dear Leader. 

I see Erdogan has arrested some more of the ever dwindling 'opposition' media - you really start to understand why Obama was such a big fan of this guy. And again I ask: why is Turkey still a member of NATO or at the very least why is no one in NATO saying something about what is going on there? Erdogan does not believe in the values that underwrite Western civilization, he does not respect or care for the fundamental principles that make up the Western tradition and therefore how on earth can you expect him to serve the interests of the West?

Torture against American values? Institutionalized torture, sure. Torture or forms of interrogation that seem excessively harsh - well obviously not depending on circumstances. What

would be against American values is being denied the right to ask the question in the first place. But when it comes to actions called forth under duress that seem to push the boundaries of what's right,  America has clearly gone there repeatedly, as have all great powers, democracies or not. This is not to equivocate or make excuses - it's to state an obvious reality of power: preserving it under challenging circumstances will often require actions that may prove hard to justify once circumstances return to 'normal'. This will be especially true if one is stuck trying to placate the hurt feelings of liberals whose delusions are not easily assuaged. 

Ann Compton's story about Obama and his sycophants launching into profanity laced tirades against the press behind closed doors because they weren't being quite fawning enough in their reviews of him is quite funny - this man very simply would have no political career and could never have become president of United States without the willing participation of a biased media and I'd say this invective is a reflection of that: like a true dictator he expects total devotion and so anything that looks even slightly disloyal enrages. Some are saying this was just a deliberate tactic to try and intimidate the press into a an even more subservient state as his presidency started to go bad - no doubt but I'd say it also sounds like the rantings of a spoiled child who expects to get everything he wants and cannot endure the insult of being disappointed. 

What does the Rolling Stone rape story debacle tell us about liberalism as the far left practices it? The same thing that the unfounded cries of racism regarding the Ferguson grand jury decision told us and the selling of Obamacare through lies told us and the Benghazi cover-up told us and what the entire Obama presidency and the media's open endorsement of it has been telling us - namely that liberals don't care about facts or reality or objective analysis or even open debate - all they care about is the narrative they want to perpetuate and if it's not actually true or even rationally defensible or just logically coherent in the most basic of ways according to, ya know, facts they don't really give a shit about that. When people who think like this ascend to a power that cannot be effectively challenged and contained and pushed back against by moderating forces that's when you end up with Stalinism and fascism and Maoism and Islamism and people lined up against a wall and shot for not believing what they've been told to believe or for being a threat to the sanctity of the preferred ideology. 

Not to suggest America is about to turn into a Stalinist state, but the tendency towards oligarchic fascism underpinning much of the liberal agenda and thinking is pretty evident. For the kind of closed liberal mindset that produced the Rolling Stone story quite possibly the most awful thing in the world is the white heterosexual male who has not been saved by the grace of progressivism and repudiated  his privileged status - that was the narrative that needed to be told and if the facts sort of got in the way well who cares because every good zealot knows truth is what you want it to be. 

Hillary says the US needs to empathize with its enemies - yes if only FDR had done a better job of feeling Hitler's pain we just might have won that war... oh wait. She calls this 'smart power' which I take it it is her version of Obama's 'don't do dumb things' which as far as I can tell means do nothing but dumb things but call those dumb things nuanced and maybe no one will notice.

Of course it is a fundamental rule of war and diplomacy that you must know your enemy and understand what they're thinking and why they're thinking it - but the connotations of empathy are to feel what another is feeling in order to better sympathize with them - that is a vastly different thing then the cold calculation of understanding.

Since she said this thing during a written speech I have to believe it was not a blunder and was done deliberately, the language is deliberate - worried that the progressive base is going to torpedo her campaign again as it searches for an Obama clone? Sorry, Cankles,  but you're going to have to join Code Pink if you want to out lefty Elizabeth Warren. 

With liberals now it seems willing with Obama's blessing to declare rhetorical war on white America as if Jim Crow were still alive and all the problems afficting the black community were the result of racist oppression with the pointy end of this oppressive spear apparently being the police forces of American cities - I have a solution: stop policing black neighborhoods. If liberals truly believe that the police forces of America's inner cities are the storm troopers of a new effort to keep the black man down then what they're  really arguing for is a withdrawal of those evil white forces from black communities - implied in what Mayor DiBlasio said yesterday is that very notion - so let it be done. 

All joking aside (and I'm not really joking) a semblance of this withdrawal will be the practical effect of liberals deciding that by far the greatest problem facing the country right now is white on black racism and that the leading edge of this plague are cops. 

So let it be done - and then we can all stand back and watch the fun that ensues. 

Rand Paul says regarding Obama's executive action on amnesty that he can't defend the indefensible - in other words he can't simply ignore logic and reality and the reasonable objective norms of common sense - ahhh... yes he can, he's built a political career on doing precisely that because if the press and media are not going to challenge your lies and gibberish then lies and gibberish become pretty effective political tools - and with no election left to fight he's doubly free to sling bullshit wherever he pleases.

All Obama needs is for the media to protect him just enough so that his approval rating hangs around 40% and then he can move forward as if he has some kind of legitimate mandate - he starts slipping to 35 or 30% approval rating then not even his friends in the media can save his credibility and Democrats in Congress will start to harbor grave concerns about how much irreparable damage the guy is doing to the party. But I tend not to believe his approval rating will sink that low especially with the media running cover for him - Romney said the number was 47% but I'm guessing that probably overstated things a bit, but certainly roughly 40% of the electorate doesn't care about facts and is gonna believe Obama no matter how full of shit what he says is and are gonna continue to support him. I mean look at the poll numbers regarding the Ferguson grand jury decision - more than 40% of people thought it was wrong - you either have to be an idiot or unmoved by facts and reality to think that - and so it is that Obama believes he can get away with whatever his ideological arrogance desires to attempt. 

People keep asking can racial problems in America ever go away - the answer is the

perception of a problem is not going away at least not easily - but that's  not because of entrenched racism, it's because liberals need the perception of the evil white overlord to persist in order to win elections and push their extremist agenda along - liberals need people of color to be poor and poorly educated and they need lefty whites to feel guilty about it so that the two can remain an easily manipulated voting bloc serving the progressive agenda - and as long as the mainstream media through silence and willful ignorance continues to endorse if not openly support this behavior it's never going away.

Which makes me think when it comes to the political process there's not a lot separating an extremist group like Hamas and the Obama presidency or the liberal elite in general - both feed off the poor and ignorant by stoking grievances that they know the left wing media and press are going to endorse and validate regardless of truth and reality because in Hamas' case the lefty media hates Israel and in America's case the lefty media hates conservatives or capitalism or white people in general or the colonial history of the West or democracy or God and guns and pick up trucks or the military or whatever  the hell it is liberals just simply cannot abide, which often seems to be anything that does not comport with the way they believe the world should be. 

Liberals are fundamentally and by nature, at least in their modern incarnation, not realists, not skeptics, not empiricists - they're idealists and quite naïve and delusional and vain and intolerant ones at that. 

Let's put aside the reams of idiotic words and thoughts being spouted by the left regarding Ferguson that have nothing at all to do with justice and everything to do with pushing forward an extremist liberal agenda - and let's put aside the flagrant and wholly dispiriting reality that demagogues like Al Sharpton do much much much more harm to the black community than they do good and that so long as the liberal elite need African-Americans to forever be an underemployed and under educated underclass dependent on big government and 'legitimately' blaming all their misfortunes on a brand of racism that disappeared more than a generation ago then their fortunes in America will continue to wallow in dysfunction and decay - let's put all that annoying nonsense aside and ask a more pragmatic and possibly more important question: how are the other two significant minority groups in America viewing this race baiting circus?

As for latinos there's certainly no love lost between them and blacks and so they may conceivably be turned off by the whole farce and therefore potentially be turned off by the liberal silliness  that props it up - on the other hand the way that the populist politics of racial grievance can bury the truth and distort debate and bring the giddy media clamoring to your side can also serve the interests of Latinos - so i'd be interested what the polls say but you could see some ambivalence there which in and of itself would be a curious development. 

The really fascinating group to watch as regards reaction to this farce is Asians. Little remarked upon but of significant importance is the fact that in 2014 the GOP won the Asian vote after losing it badly in 2012 - if this trend continues the key to stopping America from becoming the liberal autocracy Obama is so diligently trying to turn it in to could be the Asian vote.

Many have wondered why Asians seem so reluctant to vote republican given that their cultural predilections and sympathies lean right - this is especially true when it comes to issues of law and order - so it's certainly possible the race mongering circus playing out in Ferguson that seems intent on demonizing a cop for doing his job while treating a thug as some sort of hero may be causing Asians to a significant degree to question whether they've been backing the wrong party. 

If 2014 was the beginning of a new trend with Asian voters sure would be a good time to nominate someone like Nikki Haley - with one stroke you neutralize Hillary's only selling point and make a strong appeal to a voting bloc that could be key to the GOP's long term fortunes.