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.