Celebrating The Profane

The Tide of the Culture War Shifts - NYTimes.com:

For a younger generation of voters, the old right-wing nostrums about the “sanctity of life” and the “sanctity of marriage” have lost their power, revealed as intrusions on human freedom. 

Yes, as the NYTs celebrates, morality is indeed an "intrusion on human freedom" --  as are a lot of things. Death, disease, our corporeal selves -- requiring air, food, water, sleep, etc.. To be human is to deal with many "intrusions on freedom". "Sanctity", sacredness, that certainly ought to be stamped out, 



No morality, or "morality of currently in power" ALSO turns out to be an "intrusion" unless you are able to meld your will 100% to that of The Party and it's wholly approved positions as described in the NYTs. 



As philosophers have known forever, without God, there is no morality outside of power -- or rather, no morality with teeth, and let's face it, that is the only kind that has any effect on humans. Nietzsche's claim "God is dead" was a lament, not a boast -- without God and a religion like Christianity, "might", "the will", became morality. Hitler providing the most obvious example of what morality without God is like -- Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. provide others. Thus, the celebration of the profane as opposed to the sacred.



Humans are moral -- we were either endowed by our creator, or were randomly selected over a few million years to have arrived at having an internal moral compass. It can be set in a lot of different directions -- beheading, marrying 9 year old girls, and killing infidels to get a bunch of virgins in heaven is a current setting in the news, but it will be set. The NYTs gleefully looks to the worship of The Party and The State as the ultimate moral arbiter ... the new profane as sacred.



So "sanctity" becomes outlawing Big Gulps, smoking, guns, gas burning transportation, etc, etc. Or maybe driving a high milage car, eating organic and even voting for The Party. Heil BO!



The NYTs celebrates the removal of restrictions on killing the unborn and monogamy. The old moral code created Western Civilization and took us to the moon -- but it took most of a couple thousand years to catch on and really get the job done. So the "sexual revolution" really got going in the '60s, "gay marriage" in 2001 in Denmark. One of the hallmarks of the "new morality" is ME ME ME with NO KIDS! (or very few).



I wonder how "no kids" works out in even a few hundred years? Well, the NYTs might be right here:

The shift in public opinion might not be enough for Democrats to keep the Senate this year. But over time, it may help spell an end to the politics of cultural division.

One way or another, totalitarianism or just the silence of a culture leaving the stage because it has no children to carry on, I think it is pretty certain that TP will "end the politics of cultural division" -- or as it used to be known, Liberal Democracy (the kind of "liberal" that meant pluralistic)





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Climate Change, We Need a Beheading

Obama Lies, Punts at Climate Change Summit | Power Line:

An excellent article that points out that on Climate Change, reality is yet to break though to BO. One wonders how cold it really has to get before he at at least shuts up about Climate",  but it is an area with enough variability that the band can likely play on for a long time. It is almost always warmer or stormy somewhere -- that somewhere may not be in US, or even where there are very many humans at all (S Pole, N Pole, vast areas of ocean), but all the better -- the government funded "scientists" can pick any baseline, select or reject any data set that fails to fit their model, and the show can play on.

In this area, BO is still in "JV Mode" as he was in January relative to ISIS, or in "If you like your healthcare you can keep it" as he was prior to parts of BOcare kicking in last fall, so the lies come thick and heavy with nary a concern that anyone in the TP controlled MSM will do what this column does and debunk them one by one.

A little long, but he lied a lot!

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Barry W Bush, Mission Relaunched !

Politico: Say, that Obama UN speech sounded a lot like … « Hot Air:

Good column pointing out that our fantasist in chief has yet again been mugged by reality. Some of the lines were downright amazing ... "Network of Death" vs "Axis of Evil". The on the job training is really really expensive and embarrassing to the apparently few remaining Americans with memories and enough brains to do some simple pattern matching.

“There can be no reasoning – no negotiation – with this brand of evil,” Obama said of ISIS after reciting a list of atrocities still unfolding where they control ground. “The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.”

Well, DUH! Most kids figure this out after they have had their lunch stolen a couple of times or after a few times being beaten up on the bus -- apparently Barry is a VERY slow learner! Does he REALLY get it now, or is this just posturing for the sake of November? I'd guess posturing -- one doesn't really go through life as a feckless weasel and suddenly understand that not everyone is a weasel! 

Definitely worthy of the read.  BO is at least being forced by events to face up to a few of the obvious realities of the world -- very late, very reluctantly and extremely incompetently as evidenced by his constant need to telegraph to the enemy what he WON'T do! 

Will it be enough to head off a tragedy of 9-11 proportions or worse? There is always "Hope" -- not a lot of it, but our president having some contact with reality is much better than none! 

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NYC's de Blasio Murders Cross-Gender Fake Weather Analyst!

GroundhogGate: a sordid tale of sex, murder, and cover-ups in New York City | Human Events:

My God! Read it all, it is a lurid tale so nasty it is hard to even imagine!

On the brighter side, our resident Cuck was spotted today looking perky on hind haunches surveying the pond area, so there is still some decency left in the world!

I'm afraid we are looking at a whole lot more than 6 weeks of winter from here -- Chuck has been hitting the apples hard and is looking a bit portly -- probably wise given the outlook for another cold winter based on Global Warming!

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Censorship US Style

News Flash: The Press Is Helping Obama Censor The News - Investors.com:

Trying to censor the press is bad enough. But the fact that reporters have repeatedly and meekly acquiesced provides clear evidence of their willingness to put partisanship ahead of the public's right to know. 

If you don't think so, just try to imagine the White House press corps agreeing to such demands from any Republican administration. 

While the Post deserves credit for exposing this, it hardly gave the story the prominence it's due. Instead, the editors buried it below the fold in the paper's Style section next to a piece about a famous concert violinist performing in a Metro station. 

The reporter himself cluelessly dismisses the White House demands as involving "mostly trivial issues" — a claim contradicted by the White House's very attempt to hide such facts from the public.

Story broken in STYLE SECTION of WaPO ... ho hum. As mentioned in the article, it was the WH "Pool" that broke the "HW Bush doesn't understand supermarket scanners" blockbuster in '92 that helped defeat him. Seems reasonable that a president would like to have control over that sort of story -- and since BO is TP, it **IS** ... but as the article says, if there is ever an R in the WH again, see how that kind of control flies THEN! 



BTW, if there is an R in the WH, what IS a "trivial issue"? Misspelling potato? How well you understand current grocery store operations? If you make up a word "misunderestimated"? 



My view is that if there is an R in the WH there is no such thing as "trivial" -- every single action, no matter how small can and will be pulled out of context and the maximum negative effect possible will be extracted from it. 








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Kill The Poor, Personified

‘We Only Whisper It’ | National Review Online:

Evil doesn't always display itself openly, but after many years in the soul, it does have a tendency to become apparent ... look deeply into those eyes, they are hardened to their purpose, they know what they want to accomplish. She really could take the role of the old Spectre hag in a bond movie or the Wicked Witch of the Left with no makeup required!

The column documents the Vader Ginsburg connection to eugenics and genocide, but it is as old as statism. First you remove religion -- that which gives life meaning beyond mere drawing of breath, then you create a "brave new morality". The specifics really make no difference -- say "the greatest good for the greatest number" (utilitarianism). Sound pretty good?

How about "deformed children"? ... say Downs Syndrome like Trig Palin? Certainly they can't possibly be happy. Right? Many on the left have screeched in anger at the "criminality" of the the idiot Sarah Palin bringing the "retard" into the world -- sometimes a big too aggressively for the current level of "brave new morality", but it is clear they KNOW what OUGHT to be done!

I liked this quote from a Clinton advisor -- when you are The Party (Democrat) and you control the media, you don't have to whisper too much -- they are experts on what the "bitter clingers" can handle, so they will keep it quiet if you get a little carried away!

“You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country,” by making abortifacients cheap and universally available. “It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it.”

Once you take God out of the equation, humans lose inherent worth and become "assets and liabilities", at which point the State will apply some maxim like "the greatest good for the greatest number", which gives a lot of flexibility. How many "liabilities" can a State really afford? Isn't it just "reasonable" to minimize "liabilities"  and maximize "assets"?

So those in power -- THE PARTY, make the "choice". Abortion for some moves from a "right" to a "responsibility" to a "law" ... after all, the State has the interest of ALL in mind. Well, especially the "assets" -- and who are those? Well, THE PARTY!!! Certainly not "the bitter clingers", the gun toting zombies in fly-over country, the poor, the "less intelligent" -- come on, we are among friends here, no real reason to hurry.

Mankind has always known this force -- the force of death, destruction, malevolent power -- well, of Ruth Vader Ginsburg ... sometimes it is really easy to see without even looking hard.

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How Is The Yemen Strategy Working Out ?

Bret Stephens: What Obama Knows - WSJ:

We were endlessly schooled on the idiocy of W and on the brilliance of BO, but this article points out a few concrete examples of where the BO pronouncements are dead wrong when compared to reality -- something that our media is not very interested in pointing out. The list covers Asia, South America and a few others, but I'll include the "Yemen Strategy" since it was used again recently as an example of how he would manage policy against ISIS.

The following is from his address to the nation on how he intends to proceed against ISIS ( I do not recognize their claim to the Levant as he seems to want to, so it is ISIS):

Now, it will take time to eradicate a cancer like ISIL.  And any time we take military action, there are risks involved –- especially to the servicemen and women who carry out these missions.  But I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.  This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground.  This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.  And it is consistent with the approach I outlined earlier this year:  to use force against anyone who threatens America’s core interests, but to mobilize partners wherever possible to address broader challenges to international order. 

So how is that strategy working in Yemen? The following is from the linked article:

Now turn to Yemen. In 2012, after the Arab Spring, the president singled out Yemen as a model for a prospective political transition in Syria. Mr. Obama was at it again just two weeks ago, citing the fight against al Qaeda in Yemen as the model for the war he intends to wage against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Whoops. "Over the weekend," noted McClatchy's Adam Baron on Monday, "the growing gap between administration rhetoric and reality came to a head, as the acerbically anti-American Houthi rebels—who American diplomats allege have close financial and military ties with Iran—took control of many areas of the capital, Sanaa, with minimal resistance from the U.S.-supplied Yemeni armed forces."

As even Leon Panetta acknowledged on the 60 Minutes interview this last weekend, what W handed over to BO was a stable Iraq -- and BO blew it. Contrast the credulous media treatment of BO's constantly incorrect assessments with the fact that W doggedly worked through the problems in Iraq against howling from all sides to "cut and run" to succeed and hand over a stable Iraq to the incoming BO, and it would seem to be enough to get people to look at reality relative to W in somewhat the same way as the fall of the Berlin Wall forced many to re-assess Reagan.

But not quite yet I guess. It is going to take more significant real events for many to wake up and smell the true scent of BO!


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No Coal Lumps for Naughty Energy Production?

BNSF pressured to deliver more coal | Star Tribune:

Happened to hear some of this on NPR this week. It seems that coal supplies in the Midwest and East are very low -- like 2002 low, and back then our belief in the likelihood of a mild winter was a lot higher, as well as our rail capacity to correct it.  We know coal is bad, we know our use of electric power is bad -- we ought to be ready to slide quietly away into the night heat-less and powerless in a frigid Midwestern winter, freezing to death with a clear conscience,  fully devoid of and sense of irony as we sacrifice ourselves to keep the planet from getting warmer.

But are we? Even MPR was concerned that the burden of much higher power costs might hit "the most vulnerable" harder as utilities paid high costs for transportation including trucking in the coal.

Shades of "Atlas Shrugged", the production of oil that could have been transported via the blocked  Keystone XL Pipeline now has to use rail -- like all resources, a limited one. That same limited resource has to be used to transport the grain harvest. Then, there is the significant factor that hit hard last winter -- when temps are low and snow heavy, the capacity of the rail network is further reduced -- power producers like Dairyland Power in W WI had to truck in coal last winter because they could not get enough via rail.

We are mostly focused on giant climate marches in NYC complaining how warm it is and how warm it is going to be in 100 years, as well as some actions that may or may not be war against a foe that may or may not be Islamic half way around the world rather than out own coal stocks for this coming winter.

What was that old nursery rhyme about the ant and the grasshopper again? Oh wait, kids would likely protest being taught such a thing .. and we REALLY need to listen to such wisdom!


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Google and RDB Mated, TP CATALIST Is Their Offspring

Rule of Law » ‘CATALIST’: Obama’s Database for Fundamentally Transforming America:

A few years back we heard a decent amount about "Carnivore", an FBI terrorist search program that scanned vast amounts of data -- emails, texts, voice, etc looking for terrorist connects. The Party (TP-Democrat) hated it, W was president back then and it is always "chilling" if there are any "privacy issues" with an opposition president in the WH.

Small matter that 90%+ of those building and operating Carnivore were dues paying union TP members.

Well, there is a semi-private version of "Carnivore" now called "CATALIST" that is a "Big Data" program -- claimed to be fully legal, and may well be, that is wiring elections for TP. The linked article is pretty fair on the subject, I'll try to be really brief on the synapsis of the threat.  A lot of formerly thought to be brilliant pollsters and pundits were blind sided by BO in '12 ... the numbers looked like Romney ought to win. The analysis is that CATALIST is the big reason he didn't and it may be a big reason why this election is another "surprise".

The big picture here is that we can understand the import here since the left already went bonkers on this as far back as Reagan in the form of the "Religious Right" was getting out votes for Reagan -- never mind that Unions, The Sierra Club, Black Churches, Universities, etc had been doing this for Democrats for eons. Word of mouth and peers is the BEST way to get your voters active and out -- negative advertising is like junk mail. It moves the needle a few percentage points AT BEST, and it costs a lot -- it is a shotgun approach, little targeting.

But programs like CATLIST that know if you shop at Whole Foods, have a family member with a mental illness, don't attend church, own a Prius, etc are able to target you in a way that was never possible without what the computer industry calls "Big Data" -- at a very simple level, Google and Relational Data Base (RDB) mated and their offspring is Big Data / CATALIST.

The ability to gather vast amounts of data on people, identify their "hot buttons", and LINK THEM to like minded political workers is HUGE.  "God, Guns, Gays" was the old cry from the left as to how evil Republicans got elected. On the left it might be "Environmentalism, Atheism, Veganism, Pro "gay marriage", anti-gun ...".  But the funer the appeal, and who it is that makes the appeal, the more powerful it is.

There are reasons that this is an asymmetric battle space with a huge advantage going to TP,  I'll touch on a few here.

• TP owns the universities and government. The brainpower to create and operate this kind of operation is pretty much in their camp. 
• The agencies that hold the data are government and government IS TP. We likely see a tiny fraction of the situation with little hints like the IRS scandal.  Your IRS financial data, your FBI data, your medical data -- they are all sitting in big government data bases. At the VERY LEAST, this can be "mined" (scanned for trends, correlations, etc without direct use of your ID) -- in the very likely case, items can be "leaked" across data bases with no record of "how we got that" WITH Idenity. We are only talking about "helping the voter connect with TP" after all -- a very good purpose if you are TP. 
• Conservatives may well have an easier time building a big data operation to track terrorists or make a profit. Like ALL technology, there is a lot that can be done here that is "good" or at least innocuous, but when used by the government, conservatives tend to get nervous. Their level of trust of the government is FAR lower -- and in fact their trust of large organizations of people is FAR lower. It likely stems from remembering things like the USSR and Nazi Germany were government operations, and the core belief that mankind is fallen and not infinitely perfectible in this world. 

The simplest aspect here is that since over 50% of the population is now getting a check cut from the government in one form or another, all that is really required is for some especially dedicated TP "public servants" to be sure that those names are leaked to CATALIST so that the correlations have a good "seed".

Domination of their true enemy -- conservative opposition in this country, is what TP does best. They may be unwilling and ridiculous when it comes to foreign enemies (like telling them what we WON'T do, eg "boots on ground") but against what they see as domestic enemies, rest assured they are positively ruthless.

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The Totalitarian Impulse

Liberals Want to Throw Us All In Jail. Or Worse. | Power Line:

We are living in perilous times. For the first time in America’s history, one of our political parties–the one that loses all the arguments–has given up on debate and threatens to use naked power to jail or otherwise silence those who point out the flaws in its theories. If we conservatives remain passive, there is a grave danger that our freedoms may be lost.

Nothing new in that paragraph for regular readers of this Blog, but even iconoclasts like myself occasionally like to have some corroboration that our ideas haven't slipped the surly bonds of sanity.



I'd caution the guys at PL on "the one that loses all the arguments" -- as Orwell (and a host of real totalitarian leaders in the 20th and current century) showed us so well, while it is very true that "The Party" (D) is losing the argument compared with reality -- on Global Warming, on the efficacy of big government, on their effect on the US and Western economies, on Iraq, etc, reality is only part of the case -- especially as TP gains more power.



North Korea has certainly lost horribly on the reality front, but for the inmates in that asylum, questioning their Mad Hatter of a "Dear Leader" is definitely a LOSING proposition -- as the column points out, being right in the real world can very well mran being dead in a TP controlled environment.





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MAVEN Mars CLimate Change Explorer in Orbit

MAVEN spacecraft enters Mars orbit - CNN.com:



Earth scientists are excited to try to understand why climate changed on Mars -- they believe it used to be wetter with more atmosphere, but something changed. The satellite will be looking for evidence of ancient Koch brothers oil refineries and the potential that there was a previous evil ruler there approaching the planet killing malfeasance of W Bush.



Scientists are baffled what could have happened to Mars. Prior to W and the Koch brothers, we know earth was graced with a 100% stable climate -- no heat waves, no droughts, no floods, no cold periods,  just a perfectly stable Garden of Eden environment. We are 100% certain and settled on what happened here, and know that transporting 100's of thousands of people to NYC to carry signs on Socialism, Indian Rights, etc is certain to fix our problem.

Perhaps in a century or so we can organize a march on Mars to fix the climate there.



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A Nation Without Thrones

Progressives Enthroned | National Review Online:

I Samuel 8, 6-9: But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”

The US was founded as a nation without a king, but the natural desire of man is to crown a king. 

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports….Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”- George Washington, Farewell Address 1796

The FDR series is a good example of the natural desire of the populace to exchange their freedoms for the worship of an earthy king. As Power Line said on the subject:

The Roosevelts leaves us in the realm of hagiography. Seventy years after FDR’s death, it is apparently too soon to ask Burns et al. to strive for a balanced perspective on the Roosevelts. My mom was a teen-age girl who cried when she heard that FDR had died; Ken Burns essentially wants his viewers to retain the perspective of a teen-age girl circa 1945 on the Roosevelts. This is “history” for wide-eyed innocents.

The perspective of a free people can not be allowed to be that of a crying teen, freedom demands much more responsibility than that. There was a time in the late 1700's when a group of men looked at history to date, the Bible, the world, and gave a people the great gift of a nation founded on rights of INDIVIDUALS endowed by THEIR CREATOR and UNALIENABLE, as Franklin warned:

The deliberations of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were held in strict secrecy. Consequently, anxious citizens gathered outside Independence Hall when the proceedings ended in order to learn what had been produced behind closed doors. The answer was provided immediately. A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” (Benjamin Franklin) 

Or even more to the point:

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. ” (Benjamin Franklin)  

We have crossed that magic Rubicon where over 50% of the population takes from the other 50% and maybe more importantly, future generations. A Republic demands mature thinking people looking to the creation of a better future, not the corrupt looting of current and future producers in the name of more consumption for today. The Roosevelt's won, the "progressives" have been enthroned.





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Big Money Swaying Election

Karl Rove: Money Main Reason GOP Senate Majority Still in Doubt:

Swaying it to The Party (TP-Democrat), so very little is said about it. We do know that poll numbers are tightening while BO's numbers are tanking and the situation in the world as described by our SecDef as "exploding all over", SOMETHING must account for it.

I can only report on what I see directly. In IA, Joni Earnst is taking a 3 to 1 or worse negative ad hammering from TP ... and it STILL remains close!

For now, he writes, Democrats are spending more in such key senatorial races as Alaska ($6.4 million to $3.6 million), Arkansas ($6.2 million to $4.6 million), Colorado ($8.5 million to $7 million), Iowa, ($8.5 million to $5.6 million), Louisiana ($5.7 million to $5.6 million) and North Carolina ($17.6 million to $7.8 million).

$5.6 vs $8.5 don't fully account for that, but I'm sure that all the "Dark Money" is not counted in those figures either.

TP relies on it's media arm doing most of the heavy lifting to keep the low information voter in the dark -- and then they have the steady stream of "Undocumented Democrats" living and dead that reliably come out of vote thanks to "mail it in", "no ID allowed" and a host of other techniques to (eg. bogus legal actions .

It's a miracle that there are still any opposition candidates elected ... a miracle that TP tirelessly works to suppress.

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Mass Intelligence, 1982, 9-21-2014

Busy Days Precede a March Focusing on Climate Change - NYTimes.com:

Lack of perspective and hubris, two hallmarks of humanity that are often starkly displayed in the large -- hundreds of thousands of agitated, morally certain, angry, self righteous humanity displaying their certainty that the mob has to be right.

The linked article about the Global Warming (GW) march in NYC scheduled for this Sunday mentions a couple of times that this is expected to be the largest march since the nuclear freeze march in '82.

I was very alive n '82, it was my 4th year at IBM. There were people at IBM "10%?" that were VERY afraid of the "Reagan the madman" ... some had "bug out shelters" in NW WI, most were just afraid, honestly afraid. The HATRED of Reagan and Thatcher in the early '80s for a large segment of the population -- close in size and even more vocal than even the GW segment today was significant. Reagan was maligned by the press and intelligentsia worse than the Tea Party today -- there was no Fox News or Talk Radio to defend him.

"Reagan was going to get us all killed". They were CERTAIN of it. They were ABSOLUTELY certain not only that the USSR was going to be around "at least as long as the US, and likely longer", but they and NPR, NYTs, etc had a good deal of glowing coverage of life in the USSR -- free education, free medical care, total equality for women, abortion on demand for free ... only the "closed minded" in America could not appreciate the many advantages of their system. Daniel Ortega, Marxist dictator of Nicaragua was a cool celebrity -- a modern Che Guevera. He hobnobbed with Bianca Jagger.

All those 100's of thousands of people marching were absolutely certain that things like the MX missile, and any sort of missile defense system, "Star Wars" or other would absolutely get us killed! To think otherwise showed delusion, a total unwillingness to understand reality as it actually was. Intellectual weakness -- having been brainwashed by the evil Reagan and the "Military Industrial Complex" -- the elite in "The Party" (D), education and the MSM all KNEW that Reagan's proposals COULD NOT WORK. The USSR was (in their view at the time, thankfully) with us forever -- we would be better to learn from the many good points of their system than to malign it and pretend that it could be defeated as the idiot Reagan proposed.

So here we are today. Some of the same people that organized that march, certain then, and STILL certain -- their ability to question their predictions has not changed a bit in over 30 years. They were certain that folks that disagreed with their World View and predictions then were "stupid, deluded, not willing to see the real world, etc). They feel the same way now, and I'm quite certain they, and their intellectual offspring, will be just as certain on a new front 30 years from now.

There is a reason that our founders distrusted democracy and founded a REPUBLIC. Hubris and lack of perspective would be two of those reasons.

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Stopped Clocks and Time Machines

Obama Beyond Bush - NYTimes.com:

The mental pain and gyrations that liberals are going through as they come to realize that BO is and always was a disaster, the world is blowing up all over, and the domestic economy is disastrously stuck in late '70s mode, is interesting to watch. I started this with a somewhat hopeful note for dawning reason in an obviously "progressive" ideological brain.

And with the Middle East, those defenders sometimes turn Bush’s epic mistakes into Obama’s hall pass. Perhaps he hasn’t figured out what’s right, but he isn’t guilty of the original wrong, which is constantly being litigated anew, as if a fresh verdict on the events of 2003 could alter the challenges and stakes of 2014.

It looked like this guy had figured out that any policy which requires a time machine to be successful is not very likely to be successful, but alas, this columnist is still stuck in his ideological cave, staring at shadows on the wall trying to make the shadows he sees fit his ideological model. He is in a bad way.

The I.R.S. scandal was not as bad as Watergate. (Nothing’s ever as bad as Watergate, which serves a nifty historical function as the gold standard of executive malfeasance and mendacity.)

NOTHING is ever as bad as Watergate? It is true that everyone believes in something -- Christians believe in the deity and saving Grace of Christ, some folks just "believe they will have another beer". I submit that "I believe I will have another beer" is INFINITELY better on the "gotta believe in something" front than "nothing's ever as bad as Watergate"!

Nobody died in Watergate, nobody even had their donor lists released or summarily audited on an ideological basis. Yes, yes, I understand that if your ideology rules all else in your brain, it is OK to see those that don't agree with that ideology punished by your party, but even worse than people dying? Try another beer

If we’re determined to glance back at a figure who flatters Obama, let’s really have at it and look all the way to Warren Harding. Golf wasn’t his only distraction. He also had a thing for poker. And when it came to seeming and feeling overwhelmed, the 29th president, an Ohio Republican, reputedly confessed to friends that he was lost in the job.

By that measure Obama is a rock. But it doesn’t make him a boulder.

How far the mighty have fallen. I understand that someone with the ideological model of this columnist MUST find a Republican rather than the actual 20th century gold standard for failed presidents, Carter, but to see the mental gyrations required is almost painful.

Harding and Coolidge presided over the "roaring 20's" a period of peace and prosperity in America. "Progressives" easily forget the harm an activist president can do, especially one that fails the Outlaw Josie Wales test ("A man's got to know his limitations"). This means they lack the understanding that a stopped clock is at least right twice a day, but a clock that is actively off is NEVER right.

"First do no harm" is an EXCEEDINGLY wise maxim, impossible for "progressives" to understand because they demand that "SOMETHING be done!". One would hope that maybe they won't forget it quite so quickly after BO., but I'm quite certain that is a vain hope.

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