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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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