Chris Matthews Other Leg

CPUSA - Now Where Have I Seen That Before?

2010-02-27T10:43:00.019+00:00

It took some time for the penny to finally drop in the profound vacuum that is the Leftist mentality but finally it has happened. The ever-vigilant Allahpundit informs us that the long-awaited, much anticipated, cunningly crafted counter-offensive has just been launched against the hated Tea Party. I can hear the solemn sullen thud of their blog posts even as I write. The Coffee Party USA is engaging the hated foe. The Kool Aid is put on ice - plenty of that about these days - and the Noble Bean of Enlightened Progressivism has been pressed into service to take the fight to the Wretched Leaf of Redneck Reaction!!!

Go to their website. Smell that Joe. Mmmmm! It's brown, it's strong, it has a powerful odor. OMG its...never mind. Let's just say that if pigs could fly this is where they'd all want to land.

The whole thing is not only a depressingly unoriginal rip-off - an instinctive response with these guys who have been re-threading Marx's rubber all their lives - but it's as phony as Jeremiah Wright's Christianity. These are the soi-disant shock troops of the Obama Revolution - just like ACORN, except, you know, "articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking" - but they're pimping themselves as a bunch of ordinary, decent, middle-of-the-roaders disillusioned with the vicious partisanship that is hobbling the legislative process. "We are not Democrats," they chant. Laugh! I almost watched the curling.

Still not convinced? Look again at their name - The Coffee Party USA. The CPUSA. Now that's somewhat familiar. Let me think. Where have I....Of course! CPUSA. How could I be so dumb. The beloved acronym of that mighty pillar of the American democratic tradition, The Communist Party of the USA . Go to the Communist PartyUSA website to drink of the elixir of freedom they purvey. Here's an invigorating mouthful, suitably redacted to combat Sudden Somnolence Onset Syndrome :

The CPUSA views the election of the [sic] Barack Obama, a bourgeois blah...blah...blah...defeat of the right-wing ....blah ....blah.... blah...blah ...blah...changes will not come blah...blah...blah blah...blah. Our focus therefore is on building up a broad people's coalition of progressive forces to defeat the blah...blah...blah... of the capitalist blah...blah...blah advanced reforms blah...blah imperialist blah... blah...blah. This is not simply a goal for the future. This movement is coming into existence before our eyes. It is a moment of opportunity for deep change if the masses of people seize it.

Gee, it's real hard to distinguish between the CPUSA (Reds) and this other "movement that is coming into existence", CPUSA (Dead Heads). In fact the similarities are quite inexplicable. One is a radical revolutionary organization of Hard Left Marxist-Leninists dedicated to the transformation of America into a Socialist state while this other, newly sprung from nowhere group is an authentic spontaneous non-partisan grass-roots organization of moderate, concerned citizens dedicated to transforming America into a Socialist state.

Obviously the fact that these two parties share an acronym is nothing but a coincidence. Sure, they're both gnashing their teeth at Obama's ineffectiveness. Sure, they're both eager to see radical legislation pushed through Congress. Sure, they're both seeking to create a "moment of opportunity for deep change". Sure, they're both engaged in recruiting "the masses" to accomplish this. All just a coincidence.

As a final observation, I would like to put the CPUSA (Dead Heads) on an equal footing with the Tea Party from the get go. The members of the latter movement are conveniently identified by the charming soubriquet "tea baggers". I suggest that that this new group of "grass roots" can with equal convenience be designated "coffee grinders".

And the Party anthem? How about "They've Got An Awful Lot Of Guano In Brazil"?

As I say, it's real hard to spot the difference. Take a quick guess - and no peeking.

Nobel Prize Committee: "May The Farce Be With You!"

2009-10-09T15:45:00.006+01:00

Over a thousand years ago the Vikings reduced the civilized world to tears. Today, they did it again!

I feel like I’ve been biffed in the belly by one of those huge rusty wrecking balls so beloved of demolition crews the world over.

The Nobel Peace Prize!

For Obama. President Zero of Zilch Gulch. La Nada Nueva del Circulo Grande. That cold, smooth marble slab ever in search of a cadaver worthy of its emptiness. That sack of wind always in need of a teleprompter to ease the bloat within. That ideological Black Hole into which all our hopes and dreams are remorselessly sucked. That O that Chicago spat into Washington. The con in conjuror, the hood in hoodwink, the ray in betrayal. This spoilt priest who would be Pope. This soggy canapé who would be main course. This paltry resident who would be awesome president. This woeful accident who would be shining essence. This little one who would be the Mighty All. This Judas who would be Jesus. This mess who would be Messiah. The Preener as Redeemer.

As for the therapy group that is the Nobel Committee, their collective delusion is surely the tipping point when all men, women and suckling infants of common sense will decamp to Tora Bora and rise up with Osama to sweep away the squalid stumps of what is left of a great civilization. For what is worse than living in the very midst of the tendentious triviality that is now our lot? Our worst nightmares have been surpassed.

We feared the soft tyranny of welfare state totalitarianism but find ourselves overwhelmed by the soft-headed tedium of the terminally trite. Our politics have become an endless Princess Di funeral complete with troops of caterwauling hysterics and squads of soap opera narcissists. Vital legislation is penned with less care than a thirteen year old with a spray can gives to his assinine defacements. The Moguls of Malibu beat their grotesquely enhanced breasts and rend their shimmering Armanis in defence of a fugitive child rapist while regarding babies in the womb as disposable as so many crumpled tissues. Kilimanjaros of citizens’ money are wasted daily - hourly - on socialistic schemes of social engineering which even the most addle-pated ideologue knows have failed time and time again and left millions upon millions the world over both despairing and destitute.

We have all become characters in an Ionescu skit.

Yes, this Nobel Peace Prize marks not the beginning of the end, nor the coming of the end. It is the end. The terminus ad quem beyond which it is not possible to pass because even the darkest absurdity has its bounds and we are at them.

We started with Homer those long centuries ago. He gave us the Illiad and the Odyssey.

We end with Gomer. He gives us gas.

Shazam!

Chelsea For '20

2008-05-22T12:04:00.012+01:00

Seeing the writing on the wall of his wife’s Presidential campaign, former Prez Bill Clinton did what any self-respecting Arkansas yellow dog Democrat would do in the situation: he threw the connubial also-ran under the bus and reached out to the next generation. Yes, the mantle of First Woman President has passed from Mom to Girl Child. Chelsea’s the one.

“If you asked me (if Chelsea would run for office) before Iowa, I would have said, 'No way. She is too allergic to anything we do.' But she is really good at it," quoth Bubba.

The era of the twelve year Presidential campaign is upon us. This one will culminate in 2020 when the former First Daughter will break the mystical 40 year barrier and become politically eligible to inherit what was really her mother’s by right of putting up with her father through all those horndog years standing by her man in Little Rock and Washington.

She’s already got twenty eight years experience at the heart of the Clinton ménage, eighteen of them as First Kid. She’s also on record as sharing her mother’s death-defying sprint through deadly rocket and sniper attack in Bosnia, an episode which in and of itself establishes her credentials as a Democratic contender alongside Internet Inventor and Global Salvator, Lord Al of Gore and Cambodian war hero and triple purple heart (go ahead, count them) recipient, John Kerry. It’s no wonder she’s up and running already.

She shares her name with a South London suburb and its football team but she was actually named after her mother’s favorite song, Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning”. She was also named after the world famous Chelsea Flower Show which her parents visited the year before her birth. No wait, she was really named after the yacht Schell See which sailed past Sir Edmund Hillary as he was resting on a beach chair in his native New Zealand after conquering Everest. In fact she was originally named Armstrong after the first man to walk on the moon but her parents changed it after the little tot was teased in pre-school. Among family and close friends her nickname is “Armee”. Any similarity to Napoleon's Grand Armeé is purely coincidental.

An accomplished ballerina and varsity soccer player, she is a fluent German speaker and Volkswagen Beetle owner. She also plays a mean piano! She makes the list of New York’s most eligible batchelorettes and was voted “The Gutsiest Kid in America” in 1999 though most of the credit for this must go to her father’s impeachment ordeal.

For all that, the road ahead is not smooth. The Clinton camp has already put out feelers for a Senate seat in two years time when Chelsea will be thirty and thus qualify for a family seat in the hereditary Upper Chamber. A short list of baseball teams she “was always a fan of” has already been drawn up in order to narrow the range of choices. Her election will break another barrier as she and Hillary will be the first mother/daughter pairing to serve in the history of the Senate.

She will, of course, have to play second fiddle to HRC in ’12 and ’16 as her mother strives again and then again for the Democratic nomination. These campaigns, while doomed from the beginning, will give her further invaluable experience of the rough and tumble of Presidential politics and enhance her already impressive Senate resumé. Her parents’ acrimonious divorce will also garner her a great deal of sympathy and support.

The fateful year 2020 will dawn as she and her mother face each other across the snowdrifts of Iowa. Chelsea loses narrowly to Hillary but rallies dramatically in New Hampshire when she tears up on the campaign trail on seeing a little dog that “reminds [her] of poor Buddy who had the same cute little tail, all waggly and stuff”.
In South Carolina the campaign goes negative as former President Clinton informs reporters that “Uh never had sexual relations with that woman, uh, Ms Rodham, since muh daughter was conceived”.

Meanwhile in San Francisco Senator Hillary Rodham, addressing a private gathering of the Bay Area Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trangendered Forum, is caught on tape declaring that she only tolerated Bill’s “fumblings” in order to “get a kid” since “the small bitter minds in those small bitter towns will only vote for ‘normal’ people, people like themselves with guns, Bibles, family and all that.”

This is seen as a master stroke since, the previous year, the DNC had mandated that half of the party’s pledged delegates should be drawn “from the LGBT community”. However the next day Matt Drudge publishes a photograph of Chelsea from her Oxford days dressed in a tuxedo and smoking a cigar as to the manner born. The issue fades from the news.

Its nip and tuck all the way to June when Chelsea eventually passes the 33,587 delegates necessary to achieve a majority in the Democratic Convention that will be held in Mexico City’s Grand Bull Ring in late August. Chelsea accepts the olés of her Party alongside her husband Salvador Allende Chavez while she hugs her five year old daughter, Armstrong (the pre-school teasers were led away in handcuffs this time round).

On the Republican side Texas Governor Jenna Bush Limbaugh handily defeats Arizona Senator Meghan McCain Buchanan to set up an enthralling Fall campaign.

Meanwhile in an Oprah Special Senator Hillary Rodham and one time actress and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell announce that they will marry in a beach ceremony in Malibu the following weekend. “When I first met her and couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” confides O’Donnell, “I knew right away she was the one.”

Senator Clinton declares that, whatever the outcome of the November ballot, she would be seeking the Democratic nomination for President again in 2024. “The time is right for America to have its first other-oriented President,” she said.

“And I’ll be the first First Womyn,” gushes a teary O’Donnell.

The GOP - On The Road To The Little Big Horn

2008-05-17T14:42:00.010+01:00

There is a rotting corpse in the Republican well. It's juices are leeching into the water this election year and poisoning the party's candidates all over the country even in the conservative heartlands. The decomposing carcass is the political remains of George W. Bush, titular leader of the Republican Party and Dead President Walking of the United States.

If the polls and the results of special Congressional elections are anything to go by the Republican Party are the Seventh Cavalry all saddled up and about to head out for the Little Big Horn of the November ballot. The electorate are the Lakota, Oglala and Hunkpappa Sioux now gathered about their campfires swapping tales of how they'll trap and overwhelm the Longknives and slay their intrepid leader, the impulsive egotistical Yellow Hair.

It may well come to pass. By the Fall the electoral Badlands will surely be strewn with the stripped and mutilated bodies of Republican candidates, victims of the wrath of a people long abused by the Great White Father in the East and his many Congressional minions. They promised peace and prosperity, the people cry. They gave us a vicious yet farcical war with no end in sight. And a tottering economy burdened by a national debt only a raving psychotic would have dreamed possible a few short years before. They preach virtue and restraint yet wallow in a steaming slurry of fornication, sodomy and financial corruption undreamed of since a landslide of fire and brimstone swept the ruling regime from office in Gomorrah all those millennia ago.

Yes, like the Plains Indians of Custer's day, the electorate are in an ugly mood. They ain't gonna take it anymore. The knives are honed, the arrows fletched, the spears gleaming in the moonlight. The morose Republicans, shifting uneasily in their saddles, trot inexorably on under a blazing sun, all but leaderless, with nothing left but the courage of the doomed and the ploys of the desperate. Every so often along the trail a smouldering cabin and the unburied bodies of the savaged homesteaders provide a grim prologue to their own fate.

They tell themselves fables to embolden their fainting hearts. The price of oil may tumble. An economic boom may fall from out the clear blue sky come October. Crippling mortgages may melt away in the July sunshine. Bin Laden may slip into the Vatican to be baptised by the holy Pope's hands. Iraqis may turn into Swiss and resolve their differences through gruff guttural arbitration and endless plebiscites. Their various Democratic opponents may be found with a pleasing multitude of dead girls and live boys. The autumn rains may wash the people's memories clean and purge their souls of vengeful thoughts producing a compliant electorate of simple-minded amnesiacs just in time to avoid a November bloodbath.

Only by such absurdities can the Seventh Cavalry of the GOP manage to keep themselves sane through the endless months that stretch ahead before they're declared officially DOA.

But what then, sang Plato's ghost, what then? - as the poet Yeats might say. It is well to remember that though the Sioux warriors won a stonking tactical victory at the Little Big Horn, a victory that shall be forever memorialized in the annals of military conflict, their essential strategic position remained hopeless. Crazy Horse and Young Man Afraid Of His Horses were brave and skillful fighters but their people eventually had to surrender. Sitting Bull, the legendary Hunkpappa chieftain, died in a petty quarrel on the reservation years after his momentous triumph.

So it is with the electorate. They may wreak a terrible and well-deserved revenge on the Republicans but it will be but a phantom triumph, a mere wraith that like King Hamlet's ghost must flee the coming dawn. As those that survive of the Great and the Good of the GOP preside over the obsequies of their fallen comrades, the victorious Democrats will flood onto the floor of Congress, cram the halls of the Government and throng the Federal Agencies, as thick as locusts, as deadly as gamma rays.

They will smother the nation with their programs and policy initiatives, gigantically wasteful of treasure and human resources and productive of nothing but even more political correctness and social and economic stagnation. They will carpet the rest of the world with their pieties and protocols, while the enemies of America will smile and smile and still be villains.

Identity politics, the oxygen of the Democratic party and the mortal bane of such a diverse nation as the US, will flourish more virulently with even more venomous results to the civic order and the body politic. The rehabilitation of the Supreme Court, in its present form the greatest threat to the democratic process ever tolerated by a nation of free citizens, will be forestalled by the appointment of "progressive" justices eager to legislate in the teeth of the people's will and commited to the perversion of the Constitution through the blind exercise of partisan zeal.

True, the GOP will retrench and after a journey through the wilderness for four or eight years will again be able to plausibly present themselves as worthy of decent people's support but in the meantime the country will be bucketing down the broad, smooth road to perdition beloved of the demons that have for so long possessed the soul of the Democratic Party.

So it is not for their past crimes and misdemeanors that the present shower of Republicans should be damned to hell but for the devastating future to which they have all but condemned us.

The Old Order Changeth

2008-05-12T11:55:00.004+01:00

West Virginia has already made electoral history. Maybe that's why the Mountain Staters are not so all fired up to do so again. Back when Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert H. Humphreys and the like roamed the earth West Viginia gave victory to John Kennedy in the Democratic Primary of 1960. A portentous moment. The received wisdom was that, like Al Smith in '26, JFK's religion and ethnicity would do for him.

The good, hardworking, God-fearing white Protestant folk of America were not about to hand the White House to a Catholic Irishman who despite the detergent power of his pappy's money still had the smell of the boghole about him, the stain of Popery in his blood. West Virginia, crammed to the gills with good, hardworking, God-fearing white Protestants, unreceived the wisdom and handed the young, handsome, Catholic Irish senator from Massachusetts a spanking win.

A taboo was broken. John Kennedy became the first Catholic President of the United States. Make that the only Catholic President. Strangely, shattered taboo and all, no Catholic has been elected to the highest office in the land since, though Ronald Reagan became the second descendant of the "mere Irish" to be so honored. The fear that Kennedy would rule in secret league with the Pope of Rome seems laughable now but was taken seriously back then even if it was based on a radical misunderstanding of both JFK and John XXIII, two men who history has shown had a somewhat elastic interpretation of Catholic dogma. Indeed Catholic politicians in the US and elsewhere have shown a remarkable capacity to adapt the supposedly unshakeable verities of their faith to the demands of their careers and still remain within the fold.

All this is very relevant to the greatest taboo breaker of them all, the junior senator form Illinois. If religion can be a hurdle race is a pole vault. Yet if Obama has achieved one thing it is to demonstrate that being black is no longer a bar to the Presidency. It may still be a disadvantage with some folks but so are baldness, shortness and coming from Pittsburgh.

This is not something brought about by Barack Obama himself. Like the Wright (that name again!) brothers' Flyer he merely shows that it can be done if the candidate, like the airplane, is constructed according to the laws of political aerodynamics. Unlike their physical counterparts these laws are contingent and once upon time the color of the fuselage rendered flight impossible and later caused crash landings. Now Obama has shown that long haul journeys are not only theoretically possible but altogether feasible.

I first came to this realization long before I even heard of the same Barack. I was watching 24. David Palmer became President. Ten minutes later it struck me. Hey, this guy's black! I was of course aware from the start that the actor playing the part, Dennis Haysbert, was black but I now realized that the President was a black man. In other words I was not at all struck by any incongruity, any straining of reality to accommodate the script to some Liberal ideal completely at odds with plausibility.

I'm talking about Demi Moore as G.I. Jane or Geena Davis as a CIA hit-woman or a senior high school class of thugs and thugettes turning into so many Henry Thoreaus and Marie Curies simply because the newly arrived charismatic teacher believes, I mean reeeeaaallly believes in them! No such absurd suspension of common sense was necessary for me to accept Palmer as a viable contemporary American president. The rise and rise of Barack Obama has subsequently validated my instinctive reaction.

This is a cause for rejoicing. Martin Luther King was right and will continue to be right "till rocks melt i' the sun": we should all be judged individually by the content of our character not the color of our skin. No American should be excluded from any office because of race. Now no one is. All Americans can and should be proud that this is so. And grateful to Obama for demonstrating it so dramatically and irrefutably. A crushing historical burden has become lighter as a result.

Does this mean that Obama will be elected in November? No, but he could very well win. That's the point. Will some vote against him because of his color? Of course. The same as some voters couldn't support Kennedy because of his Catholicism. But, as with JFK, they do not now constitute a critical mass that would deny Obama a plurality. The country has changed on this issue. And for the better.

All the signs are that West Virginia will give Hillary Clinton a handsome win on Tuesday and pump more futile oxygen into the corpse of her campaign. Kentucky will most likely do the same next week. As may Puerto Rico next month. Yet she will remain the Leader of the Undead of the Democratic Party as she rallies her fellow zombies among the Super Delegates. She rages against the dying of the light but she rages in vain. Ask not for whom the sun sets, Hill, it sets for thee.

In the absence of a July Surprise Barack Obama will be the first African American to be nominated for the Presidency by a major party. This will formally mark the beginning of a new period in the tumultuous history of the United States, a period which really began in Iowa all those months before.

Whoever wins America will never be the same again.

Hill's Lost The War But Must Battle On!

2008-05-07T20:02:00.009+01:00

All of us who have frittered away our time in school goofing off, hanging out, chilling with a Bud, thinking the long, fuzzy, wingéd thoughts of youth, have calmed our inner prefect by promising to get down to study tomorrow, next week, Christmas vacation, next semester, Easter for sure. Then the hour arrives when we break open the books, beg, borrow and steal class notes, sharpen the pencils, set the coffee pot on the stove and get to work.

After an hour doubts are rustling in the wainscoting. A couple of hours later a swarm of dreads are knocking furiously on the windowpanes, fear is scratching at the door.
Then at the very witching hour of night full blown terror swhooshes down the chimney and takes possession of the room liked a poltergeist with a three week old toothache. We stand rigid in a goggle-eyed panic before collapsing on a bed that's as stale and unmade as our mind.

Through the chaos one thought emerges as clear and sharp and unwelcome as broken crystal: You have left it too late, it says. There is too much to do and too little time to do it. Your failure is assured. Your golden future will never happen. You have proved yourself a little man and are now doomed to live a little man's life during which your early promise, your wasted talents, your broken dreams will never cease to mock you.

This is where Hillary Clinton is at. If North Carolina blew her away Indiana cruelly just broke her fall enough to allow her to limp away from the disaster with too few injuries to grant her a merciful death but enough broken bones and internal bleeding to guarantee that no future treatment will do anything other than prolong the agony. Obama holds the centre of the ring while his opponent, heaving on the ropes, blind in one eye, jaw dislocated, one eyebrow a bloody gash, pleads through split lips with the referee not to stop the fight.

If this were a World Championship bout the referee at the very least would call in the doctor and he, after a mere glance, would end the carnage. But this is politics, the cruellest bloodsport of them all and one where the cornerman has no towel to throw. The candidate alone decides when to quit and Hillary blindly staggered out of Indiana straight into the West Virginia arena where she hopes the crowd will be more supportive and Obama less surgically devastating with his right jabs and southpaw uppercuts.

This election isn't fun anymore. Rather than being a substitute for warfare this particular political process has transmuted of late into a series of bloody battles where the only thing missing are actual firearms. It's become as much a meatgrinder as Hamburger Hill and is bidding to last longer than the Somme. After each bruising encounter a handful of delegates are exchanged, leaving each side bloodied, unbowed and occupying essentially the same strategic ground.

The demographic terrain is cruel, unyielding, impenetrable to either combatant. Obama is secure among the white elite, the youth and the blacks. Hillary is dug in with the white working class, white women and the seniors. Any attempt to charge across the no man's land in between grinds to a halt under withering defensive fire.

Obama's strategic advantage gained in Iowa and consolidated among the causus states after Super Tuesday has held against the tactical blunders of Flag Pin Hill, Wright's Salient, the skirmish at Bitter Clinging Valley and the assault on Ayre's Redoubt. Clinton failed to turn any of these opportunities into a breakthrough, merely forcing Obama to make an orderly retreat at times but never being able to turn his local difficulties into an overall rout.

Like all wars of attrition this one will be decided by the resources which each side has still in hand. Obama's coffers are full. His forces, though fighting an essentially defensive war, are in excellent spirits. Those watching from the sidelines are more and more tempted to enter the fry on his behalf. And as time ticks away and Hillary's assaults necessarily flag, it's becoming increasingly probable that he will carry the day.

Hillary, on the other hand, is weak where he is strong and weakest where he is strongest. All her treasure is spent and she's sinking deeper into debt. Her followers talk a good fight still but heads are being to hang and crests to fall. Some hitherto staunch supporters are eyeing the chance to defect with dignity, if not honor, intact. Energy and morale are swiftly ebbing in spite of the steely determination of an increasingly desperate general. The uncommitted are now turning away, some reluctantly, others with no little bounce in their step. Her Chief of Staff and Consort is undoubtedly contemplating an end-game strategy which will leave open the opportunity for another campaign in more favorable circumstances.

Like the many Prussian, English, Russian and Austrian generals so often outmanoeuvered by Napoleon, Hillary's only hope is to stick it out on the chance that a random bolt of lightning will strike her opponent dead from out his saddle and give her victory by default. This is no doubt a forlorn wish but in this year of years it is slightly less impossible than one might otherwise imagine. Who of us foretold such a creature as William Ayres rising from his little puddle of history to trouble Obama's dreamings? Or the exotic pastor rampaging from his pulpit to loose a whirlwind of invective against the white race and the nation to which they gave birth?

Are there other dark genies in yet uncorked bottles that lie still undisturbed waiting for the fateful rubbing that will release their havoc upon an unsuspecting presumptive nominee already in the flush of near certain victory? Is there somewhere a tape of Barry and Jerry, drunk on Communion wine, cackling over the vengeance they will wreak on the traditional oppressors of their people? Or a recording of Obama empathizing with Bill Ayres' chagrin at not having thought of a 9/11 thirty years before bin Laden? Or a photograph of Tony Rezko slipping a fat brown envelope to Obama in some shady Chicago nook while burly "associates" with broken noses and bulges under their armpits look unsmilingly on?

These are the visions that smooth Hillary's sweaty brow as she surveys the latest battlefield strewn with the shredded body parts of her lifelong hopes and dreams. This is why she'll hang in there as long as she can. What a galling prospect if she raised the white flag and a week or two later that random bolt of lightning struck leaving the Dems to strap the political corpse of Obama to his trusty steed and lead him as best they could all the way to an inevitable McCain landslide next November.

Now God surely wouldn't play such tricks on a Clinton!

Ya think?

Angry Black Icon Angered By Even Angrier Blacker Icon!

2008-04-30T18:09:00.018+01:00

Jeremiah Wright has broken out of the cage his illustrious congregant, Barack Obama, artfully, gently, with sedulous concern constructed around him in his Philadelphia speech last month. The reverend could have picked the lock and stolen quietly away nursing his wounded pride at his former protegé's precisely worded attempt at quarantine, and offered up the humiliation in a spirit of Christian forebearance and for the greater (viz. Obama's) good.

He chose instead to go the well-worn Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye route and snapped the bars into smithereens like so many lengths of uncooked spaghetti.

Revenge is a dish best served cold they say, but the Chicago pastor obviously prefers his nourishment sizzling hot and spicy enough to set the most jaded palate atingle. Yes siree, jouncin' Jerry's morphed into King Kong and come next week he'll be swinging off the top of the Empire State Building with a screaming Michelle clutched in his hairy paw while the doughty Barack strafes him from a buzzing bi-plane.

Obama - He Who Would Talk To Tyrants - is floundering, grasping at straws, stuttering and stumbling, bumbling and blustering when confronted by a mere cleric with attitude who is but one Rorschach Test away from being declared clinically insane. Presidential timbre indeed. He now condemns Wright for expressing the same rabid off-the-walleries which we've all seen the reverend utter from his pulpit with considerable more panache and pespiration for the last two months.

At the NAACP on Sunday and also at Monday's Q & A the Pastor, though as much an anti-American Hard Left racist kookaroo as ever, was at least engaging as a personality. You could imagine him carving the Thanksgiving turkey without having to fight back the urge to cut the throats of the impatient diners just for the heck of it. Yet Obama calls this a "performance" and a "spectacle" which left him "shocked", "saddened" - "outraged" even. "The person I saw", he declared with a kind of strangled solemnity, "was not the person that I'd come to know over twenty years".

Of course not. The Jeremiah Wright of recent days is as urbane as Cary Grant compared to the raving, flailing, spittle-flecked hate-monger Obama saw every time his "spiritual mentor" mounted the church rostrum and re-enacted the Nuremburg rallies "Shee-caag-ooo style". Yet these are the very "performances" and "spectacles" at which the Senator nary batted a proverbial eye. And for the aforementioned twenty years to boot.

Not to mention the many tete a tetes the two of them avowedly had as the reverend "counseled" and "guided" his favorite wannabe in that meek emollient way of his. We are to believe that such a fluent pontificator and demented obsessive as Mr. Wright never, ever, ever launched into one of his trademark rants on one of his many idees fixes while the two of them whiled away a slack hour in one of Hyde Park's latte lounges? That's akin to believing it won't rain in Kerry on your vacation!

What profound metaphysical change has transformed the nature of the man whom Obama was so careful to clasp to his well-tailored bosom in The Speech a short month ago and for whom he chose to make his grandmother a national joke - literally - rather than "disown"? What devious alchemy has turned the views which Obama then airily characterized as merely old-fashioned or eccentrically avuncular into what he now calls "a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth"?

What indeed!

Wright has not changed. Rather he has simply revealed himself more deliberately of late for the benefit of the slow learners amongst us who apparently found the videotaped sermons too intricate and subtle to interpret in a meaningful way. The same folk, one presumes, who persist in stroking the tiger through the zoo bars until they get their arm chewed off at the shoulder and then declare plaintively in the recovery room that he reminded them of a stuffed toy they played with long ago in kindergarten.

So why is the Transcendant One so seriously p*ss*d? Political expediency cry those from whose misty peepers the scales have newly fallen. I wanted to have his babies, they wail, but he's just another cynical politician, boo hoo hoo. If only that were true. The choice then would be simply between Hillary with Bill and a smoother, slicker Hillary without Bill. No such luck, my friends.

The real reason for Obama's sudden rage is to be found in the mysterious 24 hour delay between Wright's NAACP "performance" and the Senator's expulsion of him into exterior darkness where there is heard only weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth from those excluded from the Lambent Presence of the Paramount Leader Of Us All.

What happened in those lost 24 hours? What new element arose to devastate Obama's carefully balanced equation? Why, Pastor Wright indulged in his Q & A "spectacle" on Monday and along with the usual son et lumiére he purposefully exposed the tumor that is eating away at the rotting heart of his former friend's political existence from the very moment he entered upon his White House bid.

The reverend stated quite bluntly that "politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls". In other words he endorses the views of the Senator's fiercest critics and we've been quite a small band, even among the right, for most of this sorry saga.

Obama, the pastor is saying, is coming from essentially the same point of the ideological compass as Wright himself but he must posture and pander - lie and deceive - in order to attract enough votes from the gullible to achieve power.

From then on, unencumbered by the need to dissimulate, he will be free to pursue his real agenda and if he strays from the path of Hard Left righteousness Reverend Wright promises Obama that "[i]f you get elected...I'm coming after you, because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people".

This is what impelled Obama to hack away so furiously at the man who married him, baptized his children, inspired his book and, in a bizarre prelude to the main event, prayed with him and his family in the basement of the building from the steps of which moments later he launched his Presidential campaign with the Pastor's anointment fresh upon him.

Obama can co-exist quite comfortably with Wright while the preacher goddamns America, accuses a genocidal Federal Government of infecting blacks with AIDS, compares US troops to Christ’s' executioners, canonizes the unholy Louis Farrakhan, glories in 9/11 as justified retribution, mocks the way white people talk and think. None of this sorry litany, in part or taken as a whole, is a deal breaker for the man who exhorts us to joyously embrace him as the next President.

Remember Philly and The Speech which, we were breathlessly told, consummated what Lincoln had merely hinted at in that rain-drenched Gettysburg graveyard.

"I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community." But, hey, here's my granny. Gnaw on her old bones if you're feeling peckish.

But now even the terminally well-meaning know the truth of it.

It is only when Obama is personally the target of Wright's viciousness that a thoroughgoing repudiation is called for.

"That's a show of disrespect to me," the Senator hisses tellingly. "It is also, I think, an insult to...this campaign.''

So, Jeremiah Wright's mortal sin, his one truly reprehensible act is dissing Barack Obama!

What a worm this man is. What a toad. And what a total fraud. If the Fed ever gets around to issuing a three dollar bill they should stick his smug mug on it.

President? This guy should be selling the Brooklyn Bridge to Japanese tourists.

The shills and the flacks of the MSM, whose reputations would be in tatters except they were journalists to start with, the party political spinners and weavers, all the pundits, both personable and grotesque, continue to talk of polls and perceptions, delegates and popular counts, of demographic imponderables from Indiana and North Carolina through to Puerto Rico, but all is wind, a tornado of just talk.

No matter how many decks are shuffled or how many dice are cast Barack is a busted flush who’ll come up snake eyes in the end.

He started off last January at the head of a great army of acolytes and he still marches at their head. Listen carefully and you can hear their purposeful tramp.

Left, Wright...Left, Wright...Left, Wright...Left, Wright...

...straight off the cliff!

Epitaph For An Election

2008-04-29T14:52:00.020+01:00

Having denounced the anti-Obama North Carolina Republican ad (see previous post) in the most portentous, self-righteous terms since Bill Clinton last wagged a finger at the media, John McCain dismounted from his favorite high horse, Driven Snow, a silver gelding by Ego Polisher out of Peacock Preen, and took a pot shot or two at the Democratic front-runner's connection with Jeremiah Wright.

He did this not from any sordid considerations of common sense or the squalid need to hold his opponent up to proper scrutiny by the electorate. No, he was guided by the always pure and noble principle of following Obama's lead. You see, the freshman Senator from Illinois had graciously declared his pastor problem a "legitimate" political issue.

With that Our Johnny was out the gate baying for blood. Well not for blood exactly and it was more a kittenish miaow than a full-throated hound dog in full pursuit of an escaped felon, but still in McCain World it's billed as a Tomahawk into the bridge of an enemy carrier. Yowza, yowza!

McCain apparently thinks that he can tiptoe like Tiny Tim through the tulips all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

What a tosspot! Like every other candidate in this execrable election the more you get to see, hear and smell him the more repellent he becomes. [UPDATE: Think I'm a bit OTP? Go here for Pat Buchanan's devastating exposé of Mac's mentality.] How can a nation of 250 million souls - that's a quarter of a billion, folks, - end up with such a wretched cohort of candidates to choose from: Hillary Fishwife, Barack Slimeball and John Crawthumper! It's like putting some ordinary innocent looking everyday object under a microscope and recoiling in horror at the death-dealing bugs swarming about.

In short, it's a bloody disaster.

Believe me, whichever of these thrown-togethers manages to hoodwink their way into office it won't take long before we're all looking back nostalgically to the halcyon days of Bush 43's wise and wondrous rule. At least the guy could laugh at himself we'll say in retrospective awe. Hey, he kept us safe for seven years. Sure, Iraq was a fiasco but, say what you like, it was no Vietnam. And his spouse was an actual human being! And you could still have a beer with him.

The terrible trio we're now faced with are individually and collectively an appallingly dysfunctional lot. As are their life-partners, Bill, Michelle, Cindy. Not one of this six-pack is...you know...normal! In fact they're all disquietingly peculiar.

Obama is poster boy for the truth of the aphorism "By His Friends Shall Ye Know Him", an individual who turns out to be the polar opposite of what he brazenly sell himself as. He sprouts - a la Pallas Athene - fully grown from the unlovely brow of the New Left and smoothly leverages his race to become a mainstream political superstar whose cloudy pieties mask an extreme ideology which can only find expression in furthering the Hard Left social engineering project that has blighted the country for forty years.

Hillary is a crook but these are politicians so we can't be too picky. She's also a pathological liar who parades her delusions on prime time TV. An obvious hysteric, she attempts to hide her emotional turmoil under a facade of ruthless ambition, elitist entitlement and Marxoid control-freakery. For her the Presidency is the only proper pay-off for the years of Bubbafication which she has endured. It has colonized her very being just as the thought of Jody Foster took possession of John Hinkley's twisted soul.

As for McCain, he's a simpler case because a less intelligent one. But what he manifestly lacks in brains he makes up for with ego. He is in the wrong party because no party would satisfy him. He cannot submit - he sees it as submission - to the demands of group membership at any level. He is not a team player because being a member of a team - even its captain - endangers his fragile sense of self. In Freudian terms his Superego is only vindicated by making a secret deal with his Id.

Thus he veers between obsequious "respect" for his opponents, otherwise known as fawning, and an abiding rage against members of his own party who by their very existence circumscribe his profound and ever urgent need to stand out, a man apart. The Straight Talk Express runs on very narrow gauge tracks and zig-zags willfully between strange, far-flung stops.

As for the spouses - oy vey! Cindy is gobsmackingly rich, and an out and out stunner. Twenty five years old when he met her, she was a true Arizona Princess and surely a fitting reason for Honest John, Heroic John, Honorable John to dump his wife, Carol, the mother of his three eldest children and a former model who was crippled and disfigured in a car crash while he was a POW in North Vietnam.

Yet, though pleasing - rich, beautiful, elegant, neither a slut nor a schemer nor a sanctimonious virago -what's not to like? - and infinitely preferable to her two co-consorts, Cindy has an eerie clenched-fist air about her. There is nothing of Laura Bush's "soccer mom" normality in her.

She always seems between nervous breakdowns. On stage she is immobile rather that still as if balancing upon an inner tightrope rather than simply being there for her man. Mostly her smiles are second hand like moonlight, borrowed to little purpose and less effect. The odd flash lights up her face and reveals a true loveliness that fascinates rather than seduces. For all that she seems diminished and sad, lonely. A remote and uninvolved figure even with herself, she stands before us yet is almost somewhere else, as if her presence is a kind of alibi for her far away thoughts and wandering soul.

Michelle, of course, is completely present, body, mind and furious soul. There is nothing but surface about her. No hidden dreams, secret sorrows, skulking hurts disturb the titanic tenor of her way. She is a volcano with the magma all on top. She drinks gall and spews bile. Like a teenage princess only smugness or resentment animate her strangely adolescent features. Her self-willed fury is nothing but pettishness given a podium to pout from. Her highly buffed sense of grievance is merely entitlement turned inside out, the frustrated longing of the stubbornly immature.

The more she is given what she has not really earned the more she proclaims herself deserving of everything else. The little she has been denied is inflated into a monument to an overarching injustice which sets all the trappings of success at nought. She identifies with those who truly have little or even less because not to have it all is as great, as unpardonable an offense as not to have anything at all. She is the Solipsistic Sixties come home to roost.

And Bill? What is there left to say except like the pathetic punch drunk has-been of so many boxing dramas "he coulda been a contender". Undoubtedly the Greatest President We Almost Had, he spent his life relentlessly playing Iago to his own Othello. The remaining years stretch bleakly ahead allowing him ample time to contemplate the still-born glories of a Presidency that never was. His desperate shills will continue to peddle the paltry excuses and tawdry lies, but the man himself, unique among his acolytes, is too intelligent to believe them.

Yet he had his brief Camelot. Without him Ireland would still be at war. There are people moving about that troubled isle right this very minute, laughing, drinking, loving, swearing, sipping tea, nursing an infant, driving to the seaside who would be under the sodden earth except for William Jefferson Clinton, the only American President, despite all the March 17 maunderings over White House shamrock, that gave a toss for the Irish who stayed at home.

When he dies set his body in his native soil but bury his heart in a quiet valley on the great Atlantic's eastern fringe where the drifting rain will keep its resting place forever fresh, forever green and the growling seas stand guard - eternally.

Whoever of the three unlovelies becomes the forty third successor to George Washington next January it is more than improbable that they will earn such an epitaph.

Of course we can always hope.

And pray.

McCain - A Dyed In The Wool...Liberal!

2008-04-23T22:12:00.020+01:00

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor, Bev Perdue, and State Treasurer, Richard Moore, are like most Democrats these days: they can't stand each other. Lusting after their Party's gubernatorial nomination the two Raleigh insiders have been smearing, catcalling and sniping at each other for the past year and a half like bitter spouses bent on mutually assured destruction in a divorce case that went thermonuclear from day one. They have only one thing in common, their commitment to the Great Unifier himself, Barack Obama.

With the North Carolina Democratic primary looming the state GOP saw an opportunity for a spot of creative meddling and were onto it like a hare through a gap. Here is their ad.

John McCain, who admits he hasn't seen the ad, immediately mounted his white charger and set out, sabre rattling, shield aglint, after his favorite targets - fellow Republicans! He lobbed a deadly e-mail into the “enemy” camp:

From the beginning of this election, I have been committed to running a respectful campaign based upon an honest debate about the great issues confronting America today. I expect all state parties to do so as well. The television advertisement you are planning to air degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats. In the strongest terms, I implore you to not run this advertisement.

This ad does not live up to the very high standards we should hold ourselves to in this campaign. We need to run a campaign that is worthy of the people we seek to serve. There is no doubt that we will draw sharp contrasts with the Democrats on fundamental issues critical to the future course of our country. But we need not engage in political tactics that only seek to divide the American people.
Once again, it is imperative that you withdraw this offensive advertisement.

The RNC entered the fray on the Senator’s side: "[W]e do not believe the ad is appropriate or helpful and have asked that they refrain from running it,” proclaimed spokesman Danny Diaz.

Linda Daves, North Carolina GOP Chairwoman was unmoved. This is not about the RNC," she stated. "It is about North Carolina, our values and two Democrat candidates who are out of synch with the values of North Carolina." In response to subsequent rumors that the ad would be scotched, she didn’t yield an inch: "I can't be emphatic enough that we're running the ad. We are not pulling the ad. It has never been a consideration for us to pull the ad."

It will air from Monday next, April 28.

The responses to all this unnecessary brouhaha have been varied.

McCain is a wily old pol. He wants to be seen to distance himself from negative campaigning so as to burnish his image with independents and conservative Democrats who this year of all years are vital to his chances come the Fall.

McCain is a duplicitous genius on a par with Machiavelli. He denounces the ad, covering himself in high-toned moral glory while at the same time ensuring the maximum publicity for and widespread free airing of the offending ad.

McCain is a straight shooter. The image is the man. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t smear. He doesn’t do guilt by association. He stands on the issues, all the issues and nothing but the issues. A blessed throwback to an era before the sleazebags colonized both parties and reduced the process to a confrontation between packs of rabid dogs over a hunk of poisoned meat.

McCain is a self-serving po-faced craw-thumping windbag who likes nothing better than to stroke his ego with holier-than-thou displays of his own righteousness in contrast to the ethical ineptitude and stunted moral sensibility of all other members of his own party.

McCain is an idiot. Whether his attitude is mere posturing or reflects a genuine repugnance towards political hardball he’s missing the point big time. He’s got a real fight on his hands and here he is not only pulling his own punches but attempting to shackle his friends and allies to his own high-minded but out-dated gentility.

McCain is a bumptious busybody and should butt out. This is North Carolina not Arizona. These folks know which way is up in their own backyard. If he believes that the states should individually decide on such an overwhelming moral issue as abortion, then he should not interfere with Republicans running ads tailored to what they see as their own state’s political requirements.

I’ve written on McCain’s approach to campaigning previously but here he is entering upon new and very dangerous territory that goes beyond questions of principles, style and tone. His permission for the NC ad was not asked because it is not needed. It is quite bluntly none of his business. It concerns an internal North Carolina primary contest and has nothing whatever to do with his presidential bid which is all that should concern him. If he disapproves, as he does, he could say so in a few short words - if and when he is asked for an opinion - and leave it at that.

That’s not our Johnny’s style, though. Before the ad in question has become even a regional issue, before he’s even seen it, he turns it into a national controversy at the presidential level by immediately firing off a condemnation freighted with more high-flown rhetoric than an Inaugural Address.

In this way he sets himself up as not only ready and willing but eager to ride herd over every section of his party in all 50 states in respect of anything and everything that any and all Republicans will say and do in any campaign, local, state or general, between now and polling day.

This means that when some local pol breaks campaign wind in Methane Gulch, Idaho, the MSM pack will be all over McCain to hurl another Jovian thunderbolt upon the transgressor. In other words they’ll expect him to do their job for them i.e. to rubbish Republicans dawn to dusk

This has two very significant consequences. McCain’s comrades in arms are tainted by their own presidential candidate’s condemnations, and the candidate himself, while earning faint and worthless kudos from his sworn enemies in the media, is in a constant low-intensity conflict with his own party, frustrating his friends and alienating a none too enthusiastic activist base wary of him from the get go.

The implications of his condemnation of the NC Republican party go even further.

Pastorgate is plainly a very legitimate issue and acknowledged as such by everyone of whatever political persuasion except, for obvious reasons, the Obama faction of the Democratic Party. It not only goes to the question of Obama’s character, judgment and integrity, it raises grave concerns, as I have argued constantly, about his essential ideological orientation.

This, surely, is exceptionally relevant to where Obama stands on McCain’s much-vaunted “issues”: the ad is right, the Democratic front-runner is too extreme for North Carolina and everywhere else this side San Francisco’s Billionaires Row. And the two Democrats pilloried in the ad support him instead of Clinton.

Therefore it is not a smear to suggest they share his extremism, it’s merely rational political judgment. In so roundly denouncing it as a smear tactic McCain is not only selling the pass himself he is severely circumscribing the strategic capacity of his party to engage with the opposition on ground very favorable to Republicans.

Furthermore, McCain has – with breathtaking inconsistency – taken on Obama’s Weatherman connection, as he should. However, the Illinois Senator, if he is clearly tied to Ayres and Dohrn, is joined at the hip to Jeremiah Wright as not only his twenty year pewship shows but as his two books explicitly celebrate.

It is said that McCain wishes to stay away as far as possible from the radioactive issue of race and is therefore as wise as an owl in all this. What piffle! All Republicans at all times have been and will continue to be smeared with racism. It’s the Democrat way. None but they are free from such deplorable atavisms.

Between now and next week, next month, next August, next October McCain will also be thus maligned - as sure as a newborn’s diaper needs changing. It is the way of things. Immutable. Ordained. Writ in the very stars. The only commandment the Liberals acknowledge. O, Senator, do not forgive them for they know exactly what they do!

But McCain, the Straight Talker, the Fearless Maverick, the Grinch Who Doesn’t Flinch, rolls over and plays dead like a trained puppy. He plays the game by the enemy's rules, a bizarre approach for one whose military prowess is touted as being his paramount qualification for being Commander in Chief. And he does so because they’re also his rules.

He still gives credence to the long imploded pieties of the post-war Liberal Age in which he himself came of age. He is in fact an Old Style Acheson Liberal who seems to have wandered into the Republican Party because the Democrats were no longer what FDR had bred them to be. His big buddy, Joe Liberman, is now in the process of doing the same.

In an article in the WSJ, written after his Pennsylvania defeat, Karl Rove likens Barack Obama to Adlai Stevenson as does E.J Dionne of the Washington Post. However, it is McCain who in terms of sensibility, values, self-image and an ineradicable primness is more the Stevensonian legatee though with the street cred of an heroic military record.

McCain is Adlai, shall we say, with more than a soupcon of JFK toughness to give the added dash of vinegar necessary that makes him palatable to the GOP.

Jack Kennedy scraped home and then only on foot of vote-rigging shenanigans McCain would shrink in horror from.

And Adlai lost.

Twice.

Chaos In PA Poll As Small Town Voters Turned Away!

2008-04-22T17:58:00.009+01:00

The electoral process has been thown into chaos across wide swathes of Pennsylvania today as Democratic voters cast their ballots in the Keystone State’s much ballyhooed primary. Reports are coming in that officials are turning away thousands of would-be voters, especially in the western part of the state regarded as vital to Hillary Clinton.

“There’s no denying that we have a problem,” admitted Justin Case, Deputy Assistant-in-Chief of the Pennsylvania Electoral Board which oversees the process statewide. “A great many voters in all those small towns for which we’re justifiably famous are insisting on carrying their guns into the voting centers. This is in clear breach of a late 18th century local statute which bars anyone but signatories to the Declaration of Independence and their direct descendants to the third generation from bearing arms ‘within 2 furlongs, 8 chains and 3 perches’ of any properly constituted balloting area.”

In the town of Bitterton, acknowledged far and wide as the buckle on the Pennsylvania ‘rust belt’, the line of frustrated voters stretched over two hundred yards down Ram’s Hackle (formerly Main) Street as far as the now-derelict Sour Grapes bar which was in its hey-day a favorite watering-hole for workers from the 75 local steel mills and four dozen coal mines which have since gone to The Wall, an area in northern China that has proved a favorite spot for heavy industry to relocate. The empty plants and warehouses have all since been converted into churches while the strip clubs, casinos and five star restaurants of the boom times are now shooting ranges and bowling alleys.

A grim-faced Earl “Early Bird” Earls, 75, who lost his job as Head Coker in Robust Iron & Steel twenty six years ago, spoke for many when he said “This ain’t right”. Choking back the bile, the burly 350 pound great-grandfather held up his double barreled, pump action shotgun, saying “I’m exercising my Second Amendment rights and there ain’t no one gonna make me lay down my weapon so as I can mark a ballot.”

His wife, Muriel, a wizened, wispy 77 year old, wept as she told reporters that she just couldn’t let go of her .32 Smith & Wesson revolver. “No matter how hard I try i just can’t part with it. It’s like it’s glued to my hand.”

“I know what she means,” echoed Wilbur Eideldaze, an unemployed 47 year old machinist who has lost twelve jobs in succession as plant after plant closed around him. “ I find myself reaching for my Winchester every time I step carefully off my creaky porch. I just can’t stop myself. It's like it’s deer hunting season the whole year round. But,” he added wryly, “without the free meat.”

In a bizarre incident over the county line in nearby Hix Neck a man in his fifties collapsed and died of an apparent coronary while attempting to evade watchful election monitors by wriggling through a small window in one of the utility rooms in the voting centre. According to as yet unconfirmed rumors the paramedics who arrived within minutes were unable to prise the gleaming pearl-handled Colt 45 from his cooling, freshly dead hand.

His name has been withheld until local trackers succeed in locating his next of kin who are believed to be itinerant preachers among the primitive hill country folk of Mc Kean and Potter counties in the remote northern reaches of the state.

In a further twist that is sure to add to the confusion Scranton judge, Ruth Ginsberg-Kennedy-Bader, has granted the ACLU an order mandating that all voters in rural areas and in towns, townships and “agglomerated communities” with populations of less than 15,000 be bodysearched “to ascertain whether they are transporting, carrying or otherwise transferring contraband material” to the ballot. Gated communities are explicitly exempted in the court order.

ACLU spokesperson, So Su Me, described the measure as “vitally necessary in the ongoing battle to ensure the separation of church and state.” Almost immediately the polls opened many incidents had come to light, she confirmed, of citizens from disgruntled small towns, outlying areas and “mountainous terrain” attempting “to gain admission to voting centers while in possession of Bibles, prayer books, hymnals and even rosary beads” which were sometimes “brazenly held quite openly in their hands,” but more often “cunningly concealed in pockets or handbags. One woman even had ‘God Bless America’ embroidered on a particularly ghastly red, white and blue padded windbreaker,” asserted an incredulous Ms Me.

Speaking from On High, Saskatchewan, where he has gone for a speaking engagement, ACLU Chief, Hugh Sczmuk, noted that while the organization is “unreservedly committed to the full and free exercise of the franchise by every citizen – and hopefully in the not too distant future by the immigrant community as well, irrespective of legal status – we are above all else determined to utterly remove all religion from the public square. The complete sequestration of all forms of theistic belief to the privacy of the bathroom is the paramount principle upon which the nation was founded. The Constitution has quite clear emanations on this.”

Newly appointed Clinton Campaign manager, Ann E. Oake-Leigh, described the New York Senator as “shocked, dismayed, horrified and dadblamed hornswoggled” at the fact that “simple, God-fearing, chronically unemployed yet hard-working Americans were being compelled to choose between the Second Amendment and casting their vote for an experienced candidate who will be ready from Day One to launch nuclear Armageddon to protect the way of life of the simple, God-fearing, chronically idle yet vastly wealthy people of the United Arab Emirates, especially our good friends in Dubai.”

The Obama camp, meanwhile, expressed satisfaction with its get out the vote effort. “Our voters are serenely lining up waiting to experience the transformative power of casting a vote for the next President,” a highly placed source within the Campaign said. “They’re passing the time reciting The Speech to each other and pointing out the places where they felt particular rapture at the time and discovering new sublimities to concelebrate.”

The Senator himself, while visiting twelve widely scattered polling places simultaneously, declared that he was “feeling quietly zen about [his] prospects”. When asked by a reporter to explain his relationship with unrepentant terrorist, Bill Ayres, Obama replied that the question was “so bitter, so clinging” that it amounted to the “uttering of a stereotype” that made him “cringe”.

At a nod the Secret Service agents frisked the reporter for weapons. None were found but a driver’s license identified the man as Stephan Gorgeopolous. On hearing this, the Candidate merely shook his head slowly and murmured “Timeo Danaos et rogationes donatas ferentes” (I fear Greeks bearing gifted questions).

In other news Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, met with senior advisers at Campaign Headquarters in Glote, a Phoenix, Arizona suburb, where in a re-enactment of an ancient Apache ceremony called sh’ah dihn froid they rubbed their hands together vigorously as they intoned an obscure animist chant (the meaning of which is lost in the mists of time):

“The more the Donkey kicks, the louder the Elephant trumpets!”

Obama - Bringing The Weathermen Above Ground!

2008-04-21T22:06:00.010+01:00

Let's get it straight from the get go. There is no such thing as a terrorist properly so called, the way, lets say, serial killers are murderers. Violent sexual psychopaths kill for the sake of killing. The death of their victims is of the essence of what they're about. Terrorists on the other hand are political cadres who choose violence as a means of advancing their cause.

Apart from some lunatics - not many for they are of very limited use - whom they attract simply because of the prospect of mayhem, they are dedicated, coherent, purposeful operatives as capable of strategic and tactical judgments as anybody else. And, for the most part, perfectly at ease with the moral choice - and they make a moral choice - that now defines their life.

Though they may, at times, succumb to what the old Irish heroic tales call confadh catha or 'battle frenzy' - a well known phenomenon - they are not foaming at the mouth caricatures, drinking in their victims screams and glorying in their inhuman blood-lust. If they were, the authorities would be frogmarching them all the way to the penitentiary by the baker's dozen every day of the week.

Nor are they obviously any different from the rest of us. They are not Lex Luthoresque masterminds or Hannibal Lecterish geniuses. If they were, they'd have far greater success, far more quickly and far more often. They are run of the mill folk who exhibit a run of the mill range of abilities and weaknesses. Some are highly intelligent, some middling, others semi-literate ignoramuses.

They are not part of some well-oiled, slick, utterly efficient death-dealing machine. Their organisations are like every other organisation, peppered with incompetence, blockheadedness, nepotism, petty jealousies and disloyalty, and kept going by the capable, overworked and frustrated 10% who actually know what must be done and know how to do it properly if they could only attract a better quality work force.

In other words when someone becomes a terrorist he doesn't undergo a weird form of confirmation where he is annointed with a Satanic chrism that transforms him into a ccombination of Dirty Harry, Adolf Hitler and Hercule Poirot. He's just another guy but one who's now been given a gun and a bomb and a transcendent reason to use them and is supported by a network of other guys as wonderful or as woeful as himself.

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" is an aphorism that has many people reaching for Mitt Romney's varmint gun but it is half-true. Some terrorists are freedom fighters. The Mau Mau in Kenya, Umkhonto we Siswe (Spear of the Nation) in South Africa, the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, ETA in Spain, the Irish Republican Army (the longest-lived of them all) in Ireland, the various separatist groups in Chechnya and elsewhere in the Caususus.

The aim of such groups is the overthrow of a foreign regime or a goverment imposed by non-native elements in order to achieve political freedom for the people of the nation i.e. they are physical force nationalists in orientation and principle. Though they may espouse some form of socialism that is always negotiable. In the end many of the more prominent terrorists and their fellow travelers become political leaders as part of a settlement: Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins, Jomo Kenyatta, Nelson Mandela, Robert Mugabe, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness.

There is another kind of terrorist quite distinct from movements of national liberation and having little or nothing politically in common with them. These are groups who attack and seek to destroy the society in which they live on the grounds of ideology alone. In the West they took the form of far left urban guerrila groups. The Brigate Rossi in Italy. The Rote Armee Fraction/Bader-Meinhof Gang in West Germany. The Japanese Red Army which, despite its name, operated internationally.

Flourishing in the seventies and early eighties, they were small tightly organised highly motivated and very violent ideologues. Their strategic aim was nothing less than the destruction of capitalism and the capitalist way of life. Fully aware that they could not accomplish such a task on their own they sought to 'seed the revolution' through consciousness-raising acts of extreme violence - bombings, assassinations, the kidnapping and murder of prominent politicians, judges and businessmen and their families.

In this way they attempted to destabilize the state and goad 'the ruling class' into an oppressive over-reaction which would radicalize the 'masses' and bring about the Marxis/Leninist/StalinistMaoist/Trotskyist/ Anarchist Revolution about which they fantasized. The participants in this well-directed mayhem were invariably scions of the well-to-do bourgeoisie who were their prime targets. They were the children of the university educated academic and professional elite which ran the societies which they were seeking to destroy in the name of a proletariat whom they only knew as domestic servants in the homes of the hapless parents they so despised.

The Weather Underground was such a group and William Ayres and Bernardine Dorhn were such urban guerillas. This terror group wasn't just another tiny splinter from off the many radical left wing logs that were set rolling through Western society with such vehement fervor in the Sixties. Unlike the far more notorious Unabomber - a single, mentally ill 'crusader' - they did more than cause fitful disorder and fatalities. This was a serious network of very sane violent revolutionaries who mounted a sustained and viable campaign from within against their own society and people.

Weathermen leaders such as Mark Rudd were smuggled into Cuba where they were welcomed by KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine and whisked away to secret camps for advanced indoctrination and training in urban terrorist techniques. Calling for war against what they always termed "Amerikka" - sounds familiar, don't it? - Bernardine Dohrn - aka Mrs Bill Ayres - hailed the murderous Manson Family as the precursors of the coming revolution: "Dig it. They first killed those pigs, then ate dinner in the same room as them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild."

Wild, indeed, sister!

Bernardine Dohrn

Lady Macbeth in
a purple mini-skirt

With such fingers on the trigger it is no wonder that the Weather Underground record of destruction and death is formidable, as the Chicago Daily Observer outlines:

7 October 1969 – Bombing of Haymarket Police Statue in Chicago, apparently as a “kickoff” for the “Days of Rage” riots in the city October 8–11, 1969. The Weathermen later claim credit for the bombing in their book, “Prairie Fire.”

8 October-11, 1969 – The “Days of Rage” riots occur in Chicago in which 287 Weatherman members from throughout the country were arrested and a large amount of property damage was done.

6 December 1969 – Bombing of several Chicago Police cars parked in a precinct parking lot at 3600 North Halsted Street, Chicago. The WUO stated in their book “Prairie Fire” that they had did the explosion.

27 December-31, 1969 – Weathermen hold a “War Council” meeting in Flint, MI, where they finalize their plans to submerge into an underground status from which they plan to commit strategic acts of sabotage against the government. Thereafter they are called the “Weather Underground Organization” (WUO).

13 February 1970 – Bombing of several police vehicles of the Berkeley, California, Police Department .

16 February 1970 – Bombing of Golden Gate Park branch of the San Francisco Police Department, killing one officer and injuring a number of other policemen.

6 March 1970 – Bombing in the 13th Police District of the Detroit, Michigan. 34 sticks of dynamite are discovered. During February and early March, 1970, members of the WUO, led by Bill Ayers, are reported to be in Detroit, during that period, for the purpose of bombing a police facility.

6 March 1970 – “bomb factory” located in New York’s Greenwich Village accidentally explodes. WUO members Theodore die in t. The bomb was intended to be planted at a non-commissioned officer’s dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The bomb was packed with nails to inflict maximum casualties on detonation.

30 March 1970 – Chicago Police discover a WUO “bomb factory” on Chicago’s north side. A subsequent discovery of a WUO “weapons cache” in a south side Chicago apartment several days later ends WUO activity in the city.

10 May 1970 – Bombing of The National Guard Association building in Washington, D.C..

21 May 1970 – The WUO under Bernardine Dohrn’s name releases its “Declaration of a State of War” communique.

6 June 1970 – The WUO sends a letter claiming credit for bombing of the San Francisco Hall of Justice; however, no explosion actually took place. Months later, workmen in this building located an unexploded device which had apparently been dormant for some time.

9 June 1970 – Bombing of The New York City Police Headquarters .

27 July 1970 – Bombing of The Presidio army base in San Francisco. [NYT, 7/27/70]

12 September 1970 – The WUO helps Dr. Timothy Leary, break out and escape from the California Men’s Colony prison.

8 October 1970 – Bombing of Marin County courthouse. [NYT, 8/10/70]

10 October 1970 – Bombing of Queens traffic-court building . [NYT, 10/10/70, p. 12]

14 October 1970 – Bombing of The Harvard Center for International Affairs [NYT, 10/14/70, p. 30]

1 March 1971 – Bombing of The United States Capitol . ” [NYT, 3/2/71]

April, 1971 – abandoned WUO “bomb factory” discovered in San Francisco, California.

29 August, 1971 – Bombing of the Office of California Prisons . [LAT, 8/29/71]

17 September 1971 – Bombing of The New York Department of Corrections in Albany, NY [NYT, 9/18/71]

15 October 1971 – Bombing of William Bundy’s office in the MIT research center. [NYT, 10/16/71]

19 May 1972 – Bombing of The Pentagon . [NYT, 5/19/72]

18 May 1973 – Bombing of the 103rd Police Precinct in New York

28 September 1973 – Bombing of ITT headquarters in New York and Rome, Italy . [NYT, 9/28/73]

6 March 1974 – Bombing of the Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare offices in San Francisco

31 May 1974 – Bombing of The Office of the California Attorney General.

17 June 1974 – Bombing of Gulf Oil’s Pittsburgh headquarters .

11 September 1974 – Bombing of Anaconda Corporation (part of the Rockefeller Corporation).

29 January 1975 – Bombing of the State Department in (AP. “State Department Rattled by Blast,” The Daily Times-News, January 29 1975, p.1)

16 June 1975 – Bombing of Banco de Ponce (a Puerto Rican bank) in New York .

September, 1975 – Bombing of the Kennecott Corporation .

October 20, 1981 – Brinks robbery in which several members of the Weather Underground stole over $1 million from a Brinks armored car near Nyack, New York. The robbers murdered 2 police officers and 1 Brinks guard. Several others were wounded.

As late as 1984 two former Weathermen, Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans were arrested with 740 lbs of explosives intended for further bombs. They received 58 and 40 year prison terms respectively but were pardoned by Bill Clinton just before he left office.

Pardoned by Bill!

Now works for Hill!!

Reviewing this sixteen year record, Ayers proclaimed, "I feel we didn't do enough" , enough shooting, enough bombing, enough armed robbing, enough killing! Note that here he is endorsing all the activities of the group, not just his own direct participation. He was indicted on three of the above 'actions' and God knows how many others he was involved in or helped to plan, approve or aid and abet as a member of the leadership. (His wife, Dohrn, was titular head of the organisation. Neither were they teenaged hotheads during these activities, being in their late twenties/early thirties at the time.)

"Memory is a motherf**ck*r."
-Professor William Ayres

Ain't it just!

Ayres is a criminal who escaped justice. "Guilty as hell," he crowed. "Free as a bird. America is a great country." He is now well feather-bedded in the elite that he and his fellow urban guerillas sought to overthrow by violence and death. He has not changed his views, he has merely ducked martyrdom for a snug professor's chair. The snake is still venomous. It simply chooses not to bare its fangs.

All terrorists are political animals. It is by their fundamental political motivations that they are ultimately judged, for some causes are worthy - a nation's freedom from occupation and oppression - while others are decidely otherwise. Bill Ayres' politics are that of the hard revolutionary left. His aim now, as in his bloody past, is the overthrow of the American way of life. Whether he ever primes another bomb or squeezes another trigger is quite beside the point. He is the same political creature now when he addresses an academic symposium as he was then lurking in the shadows with his ticking cargo.

This is Barack Obama's problem. It is not that Ayres and his femme fatale are unrepentant terrorists; the Senator isn't likely to don a balaclava and issue forth to kidnap Bill Gates anytime soon. It is rather that Ayres and Dohrn are unrepentant revolutionaries, a quintessentially political position.

Now politics is Obama's stock and trade and this is the couple who's rings he kissed in order to launch his own political career. But, we need to ask, how was the obeisance from such a weedy unknown as Barack so readily, indeed so spectacularly successful? Bill and Bernie are dedicated radicals. They risked life - their own and others - and liberty for their beliefs.

Such people, take it from me, do not lightly give their blessing to any vaguely leftish wannabe, fuzzy as fresh candy floss, least of all for the reasons his fans are now swooning over him. The Ayreses are hard-core and proud of it. it defines them. They are not going to waste their hard won political currency on woolly-headed idealists so naive as to believe that the evils of capitalism can be vanquished by uniting Blue States with, of all outlandish suggestions, Red States. For such revolutionaries politics is - must be (read your Lenin) - the continuation of war by other means.

But Ayres and Dohrn endorsed Obama handsomely and were able to open doors for him because of their revolutionary cachet, authenticated as it is by their terrorist history. They talked the talk and walked the walk, as it were. This in and of itself tells us an immense amount about the Democratic candidate's ideological orientation, the engine room, so to speak, of his politics.

True, Obama talks a very different political talk but, to judge by his sponsors and his own - to them - congenial record, the American people would be foolhardy in the extreme to give him sufficient votes to allow him to walk his ideological walk.

Obama Commemorates The Heroes Of The "Pueblo" !

2008-04-18T17:50:00.035+01:00

Faced with Hillary Clinton's newest incarnation as a rootin', tootin', rifle-shootin', moonshine swillin', bear-wrasslin' mountain gal, Barack Obama immediately went into offense mode with a stirring new war cry - "Remember the Pueblo!"

And we do indeed remember her.

The Pueblo is a US Navy spy vessel which was captured by North Korean warships in January 1968, an incident which made President Lyndon Johnson, already stuck in the tar pit of Viet Nam, look like a toothless old lion weakly pawing at a circling pack of snarling hyenas.

The captured crew had their own problems - none of them metaphorical. They were humiliated, tortured and made to "apologize" for their imperialistic blood-lust. Sounds just like a Code Pink rally in Berkeley, though lacking the fetching radical lesbian chic and aging baby boomer whimsy which help those gatherings put the sigh firmly back into asylum.

This chick's got some chic!

Meanwhile, back in the cells, Kim Jong Il's goons were taking photographs for the purposes of propaganda which, as its major export, is what still keeps the economy of that feisty little nation booming. This allowed the resourceful sailors to pull a fast one on their grinning hosts, as you will see for yourself in the famous photo below. Look closely now, this will be in tomorrow's quiz.

DPRK photographer's flipping bird's eye view of captured seamen

Now Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) was a mere pup of six and a half when all this was going down, as we say in the 'hood. Yet he must have caught sight of this picture alongside autographed photos of George Wallace and "Bull" Connor as he rummaged through his racist Grandma's dresser drawers. It had a lasting impact on his young, impressionable, yet already noble mind.

It is no wonder then that in his time of trouble dealing with the cynically manufactured 'Bittergate' uproar and his clunky performance in the Philadelphia debate, it is not to be wondered at, I say, that he would reach deep down into his soul and do a Pueblo with a subtle dash of Pastorization. See for yourself. The video is quite unambiguous.

Just awesome. He da Maaan or what? What style! Such aplomb! The sheer sheerness of it all! Gives ya goosebumps in the brain, don't it? The classy way he brushes one of the crumbs of comfort thrown by the audience from his cheek with a deft but gracefully languid flick of his elegant middle finger while at the same time pointing Heavenward to indicate the ultimate destination to which he intends to lead Americans.

Observe with awe the manly yet strangely sensitive manner in which he mimics opening the door to America's new Golden Age with his clenched but always supple fist, a technique that's obviously second nature to him after twenty years of studying Jeremiah Wright, the past master of oratorical fisting.

The crowd, obviously hypnotized out of their true selves, yowl with a laughter rarely heard from mature adults when confronted with such a display. A smiling middle aged lady glances appraisingly at her companion to judge the propriety of her own mirth. Others applaud rapturously. Still more cry out for an encore. Obama chortles along with them, his features set in the sly, knowing look of saucy glee we all remember from the moments of our adolescent enlightenment.

I'm aghast. Agog. Agape even. I knew that we had but scratched the surface of the Senator's phantasmagoria of talents, had not yet even begun to plumb the depths of him. He would, I knew, continue to reveal more and more of his quite unique character. Sure enough, he here puts on show a side of him which leaves the much berated ex-President Clinton and his wife far far behind in terms of the behavior and attitudes for which they were heretofore considered untouchable.

No more. The crown has been swiped from the collective Clintonian head. The lurid torch has been passed on to a new generation of Americans born in the Sixties, tempered by the Hawaiian sun, disciplined by a hard and bitter Ivy League education, proud of their country for the first time in their adult lives.

Up till now the mere mention of the name Clinton has inspired millions to beseech the Lord to relieve the indefatigable couple of the awful burdens which they have taken on with a zeal last shown only by certain well-remembered European politicians in the last century.

After this extraordinary exhibition, which truly sets him apart from any political leader we know, it is certain that Barack Obama will be the object of even more devout prayers on the part of many mesmerized Americans. Surely in their wildest dreams they never imagined that such a one as he would seek the highest office in the land and the most powerful position in the world.

Yes, now we see what his devotees have always proclaimed: Barack Hussein Obama is truly unique. One of a kind. We all look forward with increasing longing to either the Democratic National Convention in August or election day in November, when we can fervently echo Hamlet's epitaph on his father: "All in all we shall not look upon his likes again!"

And a lusty amen to that.

It's Divorce, Captain, But Not As We Know It!

2008-04-16T06:56:00.022+01:00

This is one of these "only in America" stories which makes the country so beloved of all those who glory in life's rich, varied, ever-new yet strangely unchanging cavalcade. Americans, it can safely be asserted, never do anything by halves. Take ball games. Every other nation on earth divides each match into two equal time periods. In the US you gotta have four.

Even baseball takes its officially ordained break not as logic dictates in the middle of the fifth inning of nine but in the seventh! And of course patrons get an opportunity for a hefty amount of shut eye at every pitching change as well. When the best two teams in the country slug it out each Fall the winners, without the slightest hint of irony or concern for semantics, are hailed World Champions!

Nothing is authentically American until it evolves into a gigantic version of what it should be. Football, a college runabout that lasted a measly hour, only became a national obsession when wiser heads came up with idea of stopping the clock every time a fan cursed one of the officials thereby turning it into a 3 hour plus butt-punishing marathon.

Other lands have dales, vales, fissures, ravines. The Land of the Free's got the Grand Canyon, Everest turned on its head. And there's Mount Rushmore - which is to chiseling stone what the same Grand Canyon is to erosion. There's even the world's fattest ball of twine that's still agrowin' courtesy of the good people of Cawker City, Kansas. Almost as awe-inspiringly huge as the amount of free time the good people of Cawker City have on their hands.

I blame it on Manifest Destiny. After setting up governance over a 200 mile strip of a land mass 3000 miles wide it takes some chutzpah to declare within two generations that the annexation of the other 2,800 miles was merely a matter of hitching up some covered wagons and giddy-uping in a vaguely western direction until you ran out of real estate. That kind of thing tends to get passed on in the gene pool. If the notoriously sex-shy Panda bear had been naturalized to the Oregon forests during the Carter Administration they'd have overrun the West as far as Colorado by now and be happily humping their way across the Mississippi by 2025 at the latest.

The same can be said for the Sixties, the decade when Timothy Leary was appointed the new Wizard of Oz and none of us - including the residents of Cawker City - were in Kansas anymore. Or have been since. This was the period when the United States was turned into a wrecking yard where the traditional social, legal and political structures of the Western World were dismantled and melted down for souvenirs, at first chaotically and then with an increasingly emboldened totalitarian thoroughness.

Martin Luther King's civil rights agitation - a completely constitutional movement to fulfill the Constitution itself by applying it unexceptionally to black citizens - became the paradoxical blueprint for the prolonged gang rape of the Founding Document that followed. What should have been the moment the Union transcended its historical origins and achieved the universality it had at its establishment claimed - "that all men are created equal" - became instead the starting point for a philosophically fraudulent and morally repugnant descent into the rancorous exceptionalism and relativist chaos we see today.

The speed with which America went from a virtuous engagement with its fundamental principles in LBJ's Civil Rights Act to the theatre de l'absurd of the prevailing social and judicial dispensation is staggering. Never have so few badgered, bamboozled and bullied so many to acquiesce in the total destruction of so much of what is necessary to live a civilized and civilizing life.

And so the most dangerous place most citizens born since the seventies have been or are likely to be is in the cradle of our race - the mother's womb. Around it cluster the medical thugees of the New Order, honing their scalpels and oiling their cranial vacuum cleaners. A grisly crew of self-styled "reproductive rights advocates", anti-death penalty politicians, puerile media hucksters, lethal feministas and airhead Hollywood engagés look on from the bleachers ready to applaud the grand slam home run of a "partial" birth abortion - hitherto known as murder in the first degree.

Motherhood, fatherhood, childhood have all been seized and broken on the wheel. Robin Hood was spared only because of his policy of enlightened wealth distribution. Marriage is now languishing in the progressivist dungeons, being daily stretched on the rack of social engineering.

It is here we enter the dark Zone of Irrationality, that bourne where the flagging Liberal Mind goes for some chow. This is a place "where nothing is but what is not" (Macbeth I, 3). However, instead of having "function...smothered in surmise", as the horrified Macbeth puts it, any surmise, however fantastical, outlandish, macabre or just downright silly, is invested with a multitude of functions.

The issue of marriage, a concept and practice easily understood because so widely practised, perfectly illustrates the reductio ad absurdam inherent in the Liberal mindset. It also demonstrates the deadly postmodern combination of unfettered self-centered emotionalism (i.e. irrationality) and ruthlessly goal-directed logic (i.e. ideology).

It invariably starts from some basic tenet of paleo-liberalism to which virtually all of us subscribe, viz. individual freedom is a sine qua non of a civilized society. From this is derived the proposition that, for instance, homosexuality should be decriminalized and homosexuals allowed to get on doing that thing they do as long as "they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses". (Which, incidentally, is why San Francisco passed an ordinance in the eighties forbidding the presence of any equine within the city limits unless suitably blinkered.)

Homosexuality enjoyed a very brief period of simple non-illegality before irrationality kicked in. Sexual deviance became rapidly valorized. Homosexuals are not, as was initially argued, "just like the rest of us" except, ahem, for a slight dissimilarity which only the terminally rednecked tend to dwell upon. Homosexuals, repackaged as 'gays', (only group members, after the pattern of 'nigger', are permitted to utter the pejorative stereotype 'queer' ) are now discovered to be in fact superior in every significant - and umpteen trivial - ways to normal men. These latter are promptly labeled 'straight' and in this way reduced to just another competing social group rather than the biological engine room of our species.

This marks the point at which the irrational and ideological merge. In the quest to normatively reconstruct social reality, normality (heterosexual relations, gender differences, marriage properly so called) is deconstructed (i.e. rendered essentially meaningless) as a mere cultural fabrication. At the same time this same normality is ingeniously recycled as a means of legitimating the abnormal. Thus gender differences have no objective reality yet women are set up as superior to men in actuality and so legally, morally and socially privileged on the sole grounds of their gender, the same category already denounced as a mere conceptual construct alone.

Though marriage in respect of heterosexuals (the only context in which it has meaning) is similarly denounced and disprivileged, the Neo-Liberal grandly declares that it is a fundamental human right of homosexuals to be allowed to enter into it! So, while less and less of the biologically capable plight their troth, great rafts of the absolutely unmarriageable are clamoring at the altar rails to be pronounced Chuck and Larry, Linda and Sue Bob.

Any such "marriage" is an ontological and physical impossibility. It is a squalid nominalist sleight of hand, abetted by brain-addled Massachusetts's judges playing the part of conjuror's assistants, complete with drum rolls, spinning bow ties and the abbracadabra of judicial mumbo-jumbo. It is the equivalent of painting a prune yellow, declaring it a lemon and popping a slice into your gin and tonic. A veritable witch's cocktail.

But the cavalcade rolls merrily on. Well, not quite merrily as it turns out. Hoodah thunk it! The one thing Massachusets Matrimony has in common with the real thing is that ever-lurking threat in all human interaction - buyer's remorse. Queer folk, having tied the knot, are no less eager to slip their leash as square folk, it appears. Divorce causes abundant problems and not just about who gets custody of Fidel, the remaining incontinent octogenarian chihuahua, his sibling, Ché, having gone to a farm in the country long ago as a result of a brave foray against a neighboring Bolivian tiger hound.

States which haven't yet passed the New England Hitching Post Law are refusing to grant "divorces" to matrimonialized gays because their union has even less legal standing than a loving father in Family Court. And Massachusetts requires that they live a year in the commonwealth before acquiring residential rights. This is causing great gay anguish.

Yahoo News reports that Cassandra Ormiston, a lesbian from Rhode Island, "who is splitting up from her wife, Margaret Chambers," is caught in this bind. "We all know people who have gone through divorces," she laments. "At the end of that long and unhappy period, they have been able to breathe a sigh of relief...[But] I do not see that on my horizon, that sigh of relief that it's over."

So here we are aboard the starship USS Boundless XS. Having already penetrated beyond the limits of the stellar dust cloud of Absurditas Extremis, it now begins its journey into the black hole named after its discoverer, Commodore D. N. Sayne. In his last transmission before he and his crew disappeared, the doughty Commodore urged all earthlings to follow him into what he called "this brave new world" of respect, harmony and unrelieved rapture based on "a socially equitable ontology" where each one of us "can be whatever it is we want to be at the exact moment we want to be it, anytime, everywhere".

Until that great day dawns hapless homosexuals like Ms Ormiston will continue to agonise over being trapped in a marriage that does not, because it cannot, exist in the world of brute facts while pining for a divorce that cannot be granted because the union it would break cannot as a (bio)logical reality be established in the first place.

The famous poet A. N. Onimous captured perfectly the painful metaphysics of such an exquisite dilemma in these poignant line:

Yesterday upon a stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today;
Oh, how I wish he'd go away!

Obama's Wine Turned Into Water...Eventually

2008-04-13T18:44:00.025+01:00

The other night I was looking at the Cards playing the Astros in Houston. (I prefer the National League. The designated hitter rule is for sissies.) Anyhow, as the camera zeroed into home plate I caught sight of an old guy sitting in the front row over the batter's shoulder.

Gee, I thought, that old geezer's the spitting image of George Herbert Walker. A dead ringer for Bush 41. Bedad, says I to myself, it's true, we all have doubles running around out there somewhere ruining our reputations. Before the next pitch the camera zoomed in again and there sitting right next to the doppelganger was a grandmotherly figure who looked exactly like Barbara Bush, former First Lady and current First Mater!

I then realized that the guy who looked exactly like former President Bush was former President Bush.

Still crazy - about each other! - after all these years

The same psychological process has happened to many of us in respect of Barack Obama. When he first floated into my ken after his victory in Iowa he seemed aloof, a teeny weeny bit too pleased with himself, too nonchalantly in control. The kind of guy who would take time to brush a speck of lint from his lapel while receiving Holy Communion. I was however overwhelmed by his oratory. He had the cool easy presence and verbal mastery of John Kennedy and the moral passion and power of delivery of Martin Luther King, the two paramount English language political orators since Winston Churchill in his long ago prime.

Unlike Kennedy, King and old Winnie his appeal and impact were exclusively emotional though his essentially dispassionate persona helped him avoid the bombastic drivel speakers of that kind invariably drown in. Yet he was a phenomenon. Yes he was! Yes he was!! Yes he was!!! Against the grim humdrummery of the rest he shone like Betelgeuse.

Hillary plods along like a schoolmarm on valium before turning randomly into a screeching weird sister fresh from stirring her bubbling cauldron on Macbeth's blasted heath. For light relief she throws in her trademark goggle-eyed honk that's straight from the psych ward. McCain sounds like he's reading a translation of the Belgrade and Districts telephone directory and can't quite get his head around why anybody would be remotely interested in what he's saying. His sparse tenor marches to its own drum, rising and falling with utter disregard for the natural rhythms of the words and phrases. His pauses, when not entirely random, come either a beat too late or a beat too early to effectively underscore his points. In other words he's a truck where Obama's a De Lorean as John De Lorean's imagination meant it to be.

Edward's simply an idiot. Even if he spoke as Demosthenes of old we'd all still be infinitely more uplifted by the yowling of raunchy cats. Of course he doesn't speak like Demosthenes, he simply motormouths and the less said the better. Huckabee is an excellent stump speaker and would make a great warmer-upper but he's too deliberately aw-shucks folksy to achieve anything other than conning you into liking him for the hometown boy he most emphatically ain't.

And Romney - well, Mitt doesn't do speaking as such. He just talks. And talks. And talks. And never says anything that you believe he believes in. Nor anything that you believe he believes you believe he believes in. It's all a vacuous waste of God's good air. As for Rudy - remember him? The quondam sure thing. He's that unique, once in a lifetime creature, a real live genuine Noo Yawkah who actually gives a toss what people think of him.

He's like an old time carney outside the Headless Boy tent on Coney Island pleading with the distracted candy floss munchers strolling by to step in and see the most fantastical, the most stupendous, the most mind-boggling sight ever seen by man, woman, child or Denis Kucinich. In other words he too whiny, too persistent and way too needy to give any thought to the mechanics, not to mention the art, of public speaking.

That's my excuse for being bowled over by Obama's victory speech in Des Moines. What's yours? He seemed the real deal. I overlooked the fuzzy generalities and, as I was meant to do, supplied my own details to fill the policy vacuum. I pushed aside the almost sinister way he'd pause and peer through slitted eyes down his nose at the adoring crowds like a hungover Shaka Zulu surveying his Impis the morning after the night before.

I even thought himself and Michelle looked the part - young, handsome, dynamic, in love. A bit like Al and Tipper in '92 before Bill, Hillary, Inventing the Internet, Global Warming, the Oscars and the Nobel Prize had taken their toll. I wasn't yet on the bandwagon, mind you. Obama was, after all, a Democrat. Yet he didn't slither like a snake, snap like a crocodile and lie like a used car salesman so maybe he was a New Democrat like Bill Clinton was supposed to be but , dare I to hope, sincere. A triangulator who had transcended triangles and now dealt in more complex, more inclusive, more insightfully subtle political trigonometry. A guy who genuinely had the good of the country - all the country - and its people - all its people - at heart.

Al and Tipper
feelin' kinda chipper

The brave new world which now seemed even distantly possible gladdened my soul. I realized how sick we all were of the tawdry politics that is the stock and trade of Washington and all the varmints, small, large and gigantic, who infest the place. The sniveling lies, the monumental hypocrisies, the mean stratagems, the cynical ploys, the piddling personal power plays, the partisan parliamentary ambuscades, the prancing, promenading and posturing, the phony sympathy, the banal pandering, the whole three ring circus of fakery, fornication and fortune hunting, the sheer and utter persiflage of it all! Not to mention the galactic waste of money distrained from the pockets of the tens of millions who by their daily toil actually keep the country going.

In the midst of all this George W. Bush seems - is - a obelisk of decency and honor. For all his faults he is a sincere man and as honest a leader as can be considering the Gommorah over which he presides. This, despite his limitations, is the reason the American people chose him - twice.

Obama also seemed sincere, decent, honorable but without the limitations of the increasingly ineffectual President. The junior Senator from Illinois had the soul of a visionary, the heart of a healer and the tongue of a poet. He promised to bring us to a place in which we had long ceased to believe, a Shangri La - but a real one - where harmony, mutual respect and brotherly union were not only possible but so palpable we had merely to reach out and pull the lever for him in the Fall and such a transcendant renewal of the Nation would come to pass. How our palms began to itch for that shining lever.

Then spake Michelle. "For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country!" We frowned, bemused momentarily, but like a husband who hears his loving wife call out the name of another in her sleep, we shook off our unease. The alternative was too appalling. It was a thing of nothing. She misspoke. Over-egged the pudding in the heat of the campaign. Happens all the time. However those who never felt the power of Obama's vision or were professionally required to ignore it clamored for an explanation. We thought them mean-spirited, petty. Way too cynical.

Ain't she sweet?

Michelle, reluctantly, spoke again, dignified, defiant. She "clarified" her remark by repeating it! We frowned some more. Our tiny newly born unease, mewling in its basinette, grew suddenly into a pre-school misgiving, sturdily toddling about our living room. Like my catching sight of the former President's "look-alike" we refused to accept what our mind was telling us. We fashioned an array of convenient fables to explain it away.

Then instead of the familar comforting features of Barbara Bush, our attention was rivetted by the bizarre rage-contorted countenance of Jeremiah Wright spraying his savage spittle. It was like being slapped in the face with a catfish still slick with the slime of its native habitat. Our toddling unease became in a flash a college going disillusionment. Obama's Philadelphia speech was its graduation ceremony.

Isn't it wonderful how reality intrudes like a foreclosure notice into our carefully, dare I say willfully, fabricated dreams of borrowed bliss? As we looked at the macabre spectacle unfolding in the pulpit of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago all the straws in the wind came together and buried not our belief in politics and politicians - that had long since breathed its last - but rather our desire to believe.

And there were enough straws to make a hefty hay rick. Obama's haughty demeanor and attitude of inbred condescension. His disinvitation of his pastor, mentor, friend, and "uncle" at his campaign launch. His cosying up to Weatherman Bill Ayres who makes Ted Kaczynski seem quite a decent sort. His awkward tango around the Farrakhan endorsement in the debates until Hillary nailed him on it. His declaration that he had never heard Wright say boo to a goose. His subsequent declaration that he had been present at several quite energetic goose boo-booings. His ritual sacrifice of his white grandmother with a calculated coldness that would have made an Aztec High Priest proud.

William Ayres, distinguished
Professor of Education
at the University of Chicago.

"I can't wait to set the timer...I mean, pull the lever next November 4 for my comrade in arms, Barack Obama."

The passing days have subsequently served only to confirm this reality to all but the terminally self-deluded and those many for whom political exigencies are always greater than the duty of truth telling. Barack Obama is indeed a New Democrat but only in the sense that we haven't seen his likes rise so high for a very long time. You have to go back, way back as far as George McGovern to find such a Way Out Far Left Dem rise to such Presidential prominence.

The Irresistible
Force Meets The
Unelectable Object

To give his due to that strangely effete Son of Erin, poor George wasn't a monumental hypocrite. In fact he wasn't a hypocrite at all. He was one hundred per cent WYSIWYG: a naive Left Wing Idealist who believed that the essential milky goodness of a noble humanity would triumph if only the nasty war-mongering capitalists would go away, far far away, and take their horrid running dogs in the GOP with them.

George of course lost in the biggest landslide since the one that wiped out the dinosaurs but there is little comfort there for us. Not only is Obama a specious and remarkably proficient political operator with an arresting presence and a natural talent for grand set-piece oratory he is temperamentally and intellectually well suited to the great masquerade in which his whole campaign is grounded.

Unlike McGovern who regarded himself as a mere standard bearer around which the disaffected Democratic masses would willingly and actively gather, Obama sets himself up as an Uber-Leader come from on high to create a grand coalition not so much of the willing as of the willing-to-be- enchanted, a docile yet fervid mass of fanatical supporters for whom nothing he does is wrong because it is he who does it.

Now, where have we seen that before? Here's a clue.

Even more significantly, the country, nay, the world has changed fundamentally since McGovern floundered haplessly into oblivion in 1972. The Western Tradition of free, informed and rational political discourse still prevailed back then. The essential institutions of state and society were still coherent and interconnected by an agreed and cogent system of moral, social and civic values and norms in which the population at large not merely acquiesced but which were an integral part of the personal ethos of the vast majority of citizens.

Today the soul-eating viruses from the Sixties have had ample time to do their terrible work. The public discourse has declined so much from rationality that Al Gore stands as a Nobel laureate alongside Albert Einstein and Willie Yeats. Global Warming is not merely one of many scientific hypotheses but rather an hysterical quasi-religious cult complete with dogmas, incantations and solemn excommunications which even the likes of George Bush and John McCain feel constrained to engage with.

Dear Old Willie looking especially grand.

The greatest poet of the 20th century won the Nobel Prize in 1923 long before it began to rival a Ché Guevara T-Shirt as a Left Wing fashion accessory.

Marriage and consequently fatherhood are mere remnants of a savage paternalism which the tide of progress will shortly sweep away. Self-help gurus are the new hierarchy of an infantile postmodern spiritualism while God and any mention of Him or any sign, symbol or artifact likely to connote His existence are excluded from the nation's classrooms with a zeal heretofore exhibited only by the brainwashed apparatchiks of state sponsored atheistic Communism.

The schools themselves are fallen prey to the suffocating group-think that permeates all the federal and state bureaucracies from sole to scalp and the curriculum is expressly designed to indoctrinate America's children in the fractious factional socialist verities of modern pedagogy. This can only be done, of course, by denying them a real education which would by its nature enable them to easily see such a squalid exercise in social engineering for what it is.

This, therefore, is the Age Of the Easily Duped and Obama is its King.

And we are duping ourselves if we fail to take seriously the likelihood that come next November he may also be its President.

Postcards From The Edge...The Ethnic Cleansing Of America

2008-04-11T15:35:00.027+01:00

Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) floating above a monster rally of heavily armed, Bible-wielding white trash protectionists outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Having rebuked the awestruck mob for their religious sectarianism, racial bigotry and murderous gun mania, the future President instructed them all to bathe in the cleansing waters of the nearby Susquehanna river while singing the inspirational Civil Whites anthem "We Have Been Overcome".

Declaring "first you shall see me, then you shall not see me", the Senator, taking advantage of a fresh tail-wind which had miraculously sprung up, set off for the Mid-West where he is confident he can wean the white masses from "the destructive reliance on guns and God which has been the plague of this mean country of ours since its ill-starred foundation so long ago in slavery and theistic dogma".

The Susquehanna, named from an Algonquin word meaning "Secular Mind-Broadening Waters Of Disarmament".

It was here that native Susquehannock warriors, as part of a traditional ethnic purification rite, immersed their white captives prior to using them as beasts of burden.

Senator John McCain (R-Arz) together with his wife Cindy and daughter Meghan bursts into spontaneous applause as Senator Obama passes overhead on his mission "to bring ethnic cleansing to fly-over America".

The Democratic front-runner is careful to maintain an altitude of less than three hundred feet at all times to conform to FAA regulations concerning non-mechanical, self-propelled aerial bodies.

Afterwards before a small lukewarm crowd of distracted supporters, McCain said that, though the result can "never be in doubt", he is determined to continue his campaign to the "inevitable bitter end". Speaking in an uncharacteristically exalted fashion, the Republican no-hoper declared that it is "vitally important that the American people are given a choice in the Fall so that there will be no doubt about Senator Obama's overwhelming democratic mandate when he enters upon his great work as President".

Mrs Roberta McCain, 96 year old mother of the Arizona senator, pictured here signing up to a 12 Step Program to help her overcome the baseless fears and narrow-minded dread that has blighted her life as a Typical White Person.

She told reporters that "John said that if I didn't enrol in the program Senator Obama would insist that one of my grandchildren throw me under that danged bus they all keep talking about".

As part of her recovery the "typical white grandmother" is introduced to basketball greats Shaquille O'Neill and Kobe Bryant.

"Once she can pass these dudes on the street without swallowing her dentures," chuckled Program director, Jamaal Ali Ka Shazaam, "she'll be ready for what we call 'The Jesse Jackson Experience'. This is where gangsta rappers stalk her on the empty backstreets of Chicago from midnight till 2 a.m. If the old lady can get through that without hoping the guys crouching in the shadows behind her are white, she graduates."

The infamous "Star of Bethlehem" photograph.

It was e-mailed from inside the McCain campaign to the Drudge Report in an attempt to lay claim to the Messiahship which is in fact the unique possession of Senator Obama alone.

Within minutes of its publication by Matt Drudge, the notorious Republican shill, eagle-eyed astronomy experts on The Daily Kos, the renowned independent political blog famed for its objective and nuanced reporting, revealed the picture to be a fraud.

"By means of a painstaking comparison with imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Giotto Probe," said Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas "we were able to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that the object above McCain's unpleasingly narrow conservative head is not in fact a bona fide heavenly body but rather a crass and crude attempt at replicating a particularly mediocre solar luminosity in the Alpha Centauri galaxy."

A crestfallen Rick Davis, McCain head honcho, expressed his "full, abject and absolute contrition" for such "a blatant, unforgiveable breach of etiquette" which he pleaded had been carried out without the knowledge of "the candidate or anyone else in the campaign". The guilty staffer, Rem Brandt, a sophomore from Texas Christian University, has been fired.

UPDATE: It has since emerged that Rem Brandt is a nom de guerre of Van Ryan, an executive member of the National Committee of the NRA and author of the red states bestseller The Immaculate Conception: How The Daily Rosary And Your Family Arsenal Can Seal The Borders And Keep America White.

Senator Joe Liberman (I-Conn) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-NC) are forced to admit that John McCain insists on at least one of them accompanying him everywhere he goes because of the GOP candidate's overwhelming fear of encountering people of color.

"His tendency to utter racial and ethnic stereotypes all day every day," confessed a shamefaced Lieberman, "would even make my typically Jewish grandmother cringe."

Lindsey Graham was equally forthright stating that McCain's "utterings" have so repelled his own grandmother that she is voting for Barack Obama even though "she hasn't held down a job since her sixty fifth birthday, keeps a loaded revolver on the nightstand alongside her Bible and is as white as processed flour".

In a further development all three senators agreed that between them they have the charisma of three month old washed up seaweed. A campaign spokesman further explained that Senator McCain "as just a reg'lar white guy" completely accepts that "he don't have no mojo".

Obama Spanks His Monkey Lady

2008-04-09T14:44:00.000+01:00

In Carpentersville, Illinois, the magnolias may not exactly be made of steel but they come generously festooned with political razor wire as Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski found out. Linda is by way of being a local Village Trustee and obviously moonlights as a neighborhood busybody.

Seeing two local kids playing Tarzan in a nearby magnolia tree, the horrified Trustee, eagerly exercising her Trusteeship, bustled over to the watching parents and remonstrated. The little whippersnappers could get hurt. Worse, they could damage the tree which "is not there for them to be climbing in there like monkeys".

Just another spat with the next-doors except for one small thing. The little whippersnappers weren't Typical Rebukable Whippersnappers. They were African American Whippersnappers and therefore carried about with them secreted in their melanin count the Suffering, Humiliation, Degradation, Discrimination and Torment of Centuries which can Never Be Sufficiently Atoned For.

And so at the very moment the fateful Word "monkeys" was uttered the stars stood in their courses and the planets ceased to spin. The sun dimmed. Nature itself shriveled. Beneath the neat pavements the earth grumbled. The Word took wing and like the Angel of the Lord passed over the whole land. Freeway traffic halted. Workers laid down their tools. Planes made emergency landings on the nearest airstrips. The Stock Exchange stopped trading. Kindergarten children grew still and silent. Captains of industries canceled meetings, withdrew takeover bids, left off ogling their personal assistants. Some even phoned their wives.

A Gay Parade in San Francisco did not end in an orgy. The New York Times hired a real reporter. John Edwards remembered his wife is ill. Bill Clinton made a genuinely innocent remark to a pretty girl. Mitt Romney shot an actual varmint. Office workers in Manhattan threw an estimated 32 tons of specially blackened ticker tape from their windows. Professors on every campus across the country immediately ceased lecturing on "The Evil That Is America: The Jena Six" and announced a new course on "The Evil That Is America: The Carpentersville Monkey Woman".

Levitating in his hotel room as he relaxes between rallies, Senator Barack Obama on hearing the news sighs audibly and mutters, "Another Typical White Person. There are so many of them. So many. And I am so few." On being informed that this particular TWerP was one of his own delegates, the Senator's halo darkened ominously. "Have I not decreed," he thundered, "that those white people on whom I bestow the honor of supporting me must be thoroughly vetted. How can I, I, I say I bring unity to this troubled fragmented sinful land if every one is not of the exact same opinion as I."

"How wise. How true," stuttered his aide. "There's just one problem. This woman is a Latina."

The Senator smiles a cold yet strangely inspirational smile. "Have I not said that any one who is not of my Father's people is of my Mother's people," he says with quiet forebearance. "She is therefore virtually a Typical White Person in everything but the Wetness of her Back which is," he continues, waving an airy palm, "completely irrelevant in this situation."

"Yes, of course," gulps the aide, "and what do you wish to do with this Typical Virtual White Person who has dared transgress?"

Michelle, Revered Consort of the Chosen One, her eyes still filled with the suffering she endured in the cracker hellhole of Princeton, looks up from her copy of Jeremiah Wright's Sermons For Your Children vol. 3: God Damn America and purses her lips.

"Grandmother her," she says.

Obama rises and floats over to his wife, a beatific smile rendering his countenance even more radiant.

"Of course, you're right again, My Sacred Beloved," he murmurs. As he bends down to kiss her chastely on the cheek, the rays of light emanating from about his head cause her to blink rapidly. She suppresses a sigh. A small price to pay, after all.

"Grandmother her?" asks the aide, seeking confirmation.

"Yes," says the Senator, straightening up to his full 12 feet. "Let it be done. Throw her under the bus forthwith."

"It shall be done, Oh Bama," says the aide and scuttles away.

Back in Carpentersville, Illinois, a frustrated Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski turns on her heels and marches back to her house, muttering ferociously to herself about irresponsible parents and spoilt kids. Suddenly with a wail of sirens and the screech of rubber on asphalt she is surrounded by a dozen or more black SUVs from which jump a small army of agents in full body armour with the designations FBI, DEA, ATF, MAD, AS, HELL printed on their jackets. Each and every one of them is a veteran of Ruby Ridge and Waco and so highly skilled in the use of minimum force and the necessity of allowing crass political considerations to ignore common sense and ride roughshod over a citizen's rights.

From the forest of assault weapons aimed at her the flabbergasted Village Trustee sees a tall black man approach. He looks very like the guy who played President Palmer in 24, she thinks.

"Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski," 'President Palmer' intones, "I'm arresting you on charges of being a suspected Typical White Person (Special Designation -Virtual) in violation of Penal Code 666 of the Federal GUMPI Statutes."

"Grumpy?" asks an increasingly alarmed Ms Ramirez-Sliwinski before the breath is driven out of her body as three burly agents slam her to the ground and cuff her..

"G-U-M-P-I," responds 'Palmer' brusquely. "Guilty Until - Maybe - Proven Innocent." Turning to the other agents he barks, "Take her away."

In a flash she's bundled into one of the vehicles and they speed off, sirens whaa-whaaing into the distance.

In his Philadelphia hotel room Barack Obama is doing press ups on the ceiling. "Seven hundred and one," he pants, "seven hundred and two..." The phone rings.

"I'll get it, dear," cries Michelle.

"Seven hundred and three, seven hundred and four, seven hundred and five..." The drops of sweat falling from the Senator's brow form little shining silver pearls on the carpet below before they dissolve and fill the room with the delicate fragrance of lilies-of-the-valley.

In the lead SUV 'President Palmer' speaks softly into his cell phone. "We got her. Everything went like clockwork."

"Good. Good," Michelle murmurs. "The neighbors told me she was weakening. Any day now they said."

"They had her dead to rights. Typical Virtual White Person."

"You said it, bro."

"I dunno, Michelle. One at a time. We'll be at this till the White Sox win the World Series."

"No worries, DooShawen. Remember what the coach told you in college, you win the game one basket at a time."

"Yeah. He was a nice old guy. I feel kinda bad about getting him fired. When he said you'll never succeed without doing the spade work, I don't think he meant any...."

"A Typical White Person. Say it. A Typical White Person."

"A Typical White Person. A Typical White Person. Yeah, you're right."

"You know I am," coos Michelle and hangs up. Obama wafts down beside her, mopping his shining brow with a damasked silk hankerchief, a gift from John Edwards.

"Was that DooShawen?" he inquires. "How'd it go?"

Michelle grins. "Like clockwork." She frowns suddenly. "I know you said for every Typical White Person that's destroyed another ten thousand are scared into silence, but still, as DooShawen was just saying, it seems awful slow."

Obama pauses and looks at her, his dark visionary eyes twinkling. "It's worked a treat so far, hasn't it?"

"That it has, lover, that it has," Michelle agrees and they both burst into uncontrollable giggles.

Standing outside the hotel room door, Patrick Magillacuddy and Sven Olafsson, the two Secret Service agents on duty, look at each other and smile indulgently. It sure is a pleasure to guard such a nice unassuming couple.

The Prematurely Presidential McCain

2008-04-06T05:07:00.000+01:00

Below is the new web ad the McCain campaign has released. It's entitled 'Tolerance' and it pleads with us to be...er...tolerant. Of each other. Nay, it urges us to go beyond mere toleration of those who differ with us on the great questions of the day. It is our moral duty to respect each other no matter how profoundly we may disagree.

Right across the political spectrum from Arianna Huffington to Rush Limbaugh we are all sincerely dedicated to the betterment of America, just coming at the issues involved from diverse perspectives. Vigorous, principled but always civilised debate between rational men and women of unquestionable good will must be the order of the day.

Here endeth the civics lesson! Niceness guru Dr. Forni will be chuffed.

What a load of twaddle and what a dreary, dreadful ad. The horse manure piling up here is so fresh if you look closely you can see the steam still rising. It is so much pious nonsense. Tone and attitude in an election are determined only by the cut and thrust of the campaign itself, the pivotal events both staged and sudden, the ebb and flow of support, the attacks and responses, the inevitable October surprise and not by anodyne aspirations that each of our moms will bake equally swell apple pies.

The imperatives inherent in a candidate's overall strategy and the varying tactical approaches that grow from it, some of them premeditated, many made up on the fly, are - or should be - paramount. If gentlemanly discourse works, fine, if not, well so be it. This is as it should be, indeed as it always was. Democracy by its nature is a rollicking robust rambunctious affair and the intensity of the passions aroused are directly related to the importance of what is at stake.

In Presidential electoral politics, apart from George Washington's unopposed elevations, there were no 'good old days' when opposing pairs of bewigged grandees or top-hatted dandies promenaded about the public square exchanging philosophical pleasantries with each other while dispassionate and judicious citizens gravely made their choice between a Republican Kant and a Democratic Hegel!

In every election from John Adam's first triumph to John Kerry's defeat the contending parties all ended up, in Johnny Cash's immortal words, "kickin' n' gougin' in the blood and the mud and the beer". McCain, an irascible and contrary critter, knows this of course and is temperamentally well suited to it. Click the menu button on the clip below and view some of the torpedos his campaign launched broadside against Mitt Romney's Presidential yacht that ended up being all sail and no rudder.

These ads are pugnacious, merciless and bloody. And rightly so. Romney is such a phony he should have gatecrashed the Dems' debates and given those triplets of tendentiousness, Edwards, Clinton and Obama, a real run for their money. Did McCain take the high road when confronted with Mitt's puerile posturing on a par with John Kerry's 'reporting for duty' salute? Did he hell! He tore into the Pro-Life abortion defender and left the life-long rifle-toting gun control advocate as dead as one of his imaginary "small varmints".

The ad is also self-satisfied and self-indulgent and way too wordy. The internet is cheap as spit and encourages verbal and visual flatulence. The voice over is repetitious and quietly hectoring like a Politically Correct uncle telling you not to talk to strangers but to take care not to hurt any leering pervert's sensitivities at the same time. Refuse interaction with a friendly smile before you run like hell away.

In addition to the funereal pacing the visuals are clunky, static, samey and weirdly old-fashioned as if directed by some old codger who cut his teeth on the Donna Reed Show way back when Christian Archibald Herter was Secretary of State. If this is any indication of the dynamism we can expect for McCain's assault on the White House it's gonna be a long long summer and a dismal autumn.

Indeed McCain seems bent on taking the high road, no doubt in contrast to the Dem's daily display of midget mud-wrestling but also - and more worryingly - because it appeals to his inner smug, of which he has more than a wee smidgen. It makes him look presidential but it also enables him to feel presidential. Hence the self-serving magnanimity of the ad. He is graciously exhorting the rest of us to strive to achieve to his high standards.

This is also the reason why he can be so vicious to fellow Republicans but so emollient with Democrats. Indeed the more extreme the Democrat the smarmier the Senator from Arizona becomes. Teddy Kennedy, Russ Feingold, take a bow. Such anomalous and, at times, reprehensible behavior shows his moral superiority to the world but also and more importantly to himself. John McCain is a man who believes he has a lot to personally live up to and he spends much too much time and energy living up to it.

This psychological flaw was the cause not the result of his over-reaction to his association with the Keating Five scandal in respect of which even the New York Times agrees he was completely exonerated. That would be enough for most of us. We did nothing wrong and we were seen to do nothing wrong. Case closed. Not Mac.

The mere breath of scandal about him sufficed to make McCain react as if he were actually contaminated. Like an hysterical bride fixated on some tiny flaw in her gorgeous gown, his sense of immaculateness was violated. His compulsive-obsessive need to reach across the aisle on the most inappropriate of issues was the result. The Maverick of the Senate was born! What better way to display one's sinlessness than high-minded cooperation with the bitter enemies of one's Party and noble, though at times brutal, at times snide, repudiation of one's own colleagues? If this is integrity it has its own peculiar pathology.

Thus the silliness of his crypto-Leftist stand against tax cuts "for the wealthiest 10% of Americans".

Thus his quasi-totalitarian impoverishment of the democratic process with the ludicrous McCain-Feingold Act which in the name of restricting the evil influence on political campaigns of unlimited funds ensured that only multi-millionaires are in a position to even contemplate launching a Presidential bid.

Thus his unlooked for apology on Martin Luther King Day for having opposed its establishment, a strangely irrelevant distraction which is completely superfluous to his current political requirements.

This is John McCain's Achilles heel and both he and we are stuck with it. It is a serious political weakness and it could prove his downfall. Whichever opponent he faces will have at their back the wind leaking from George Bush's tires. Nor, despite the predictable pieties, is there anything remotely gentlemanly or gentlewomanly about either of them.

They both secrete a ravenous ambition in their bodily fluids. They each have no scruples about exploiting, manipulating and inflaming the worst partisan passions of the electorate. They are both past masters at recruiting substantial millions of useful idiots and/or innocents to their 'cause'.

And one or other of them will stand at the head of a chronically failed party which, whenever entrusted with power, has unsurprisingly spawned spectacular failure both at home and abroad with the profligacy that only the congenitally unprincipled can achieve. The last successful full-term Democratic Executive was the Truman Administration and even the redoubtable Harry had the dogs in the street whimpering at the end.

Their last moment of real glory was when the Kennedy brothers faced down tyranny and Nikita Khruschev in October 1962. The surviving sibling is a ghastly measure of the degradation of what was once a mighty, wise and generous political party which in its day nurtured the American melting pot and from it forged a Super Power that kept the world free.

The present Democratic candidates are to their great forebears what Warren Harding was to Abraham Lincoln on the other side of the political divide. JohnMcCain is, I'll hazard, no Lincoln but, as man and politician, he is orders of magnitude both better and greater than those who now face him.

The party which he leads is by orders of similar magnitudes better and greater not only than their domestic opposition but is far and away the greatest and the best on the face of the globe in terms of philosophy, principles and personnel.

For all these reasons Senator McCain needs to do vigorous and unremitting battle against his opponents from now until November 4. Let him quell any neurotic urges he may feel to treat kindly a treacherous enemy simply because they are his the enemy. Let him resist any temptation he may feel to fashion a toothless Presidential persona more aloof than alluring. He need not get down in the gutter with his opponents but neither should he make believe that this will be anything but a bitter, bloody mother of all battles. He is in for the fight of his life and he needs to be ready to throw his best punches "from day one", so to speak.

Then when it's all over he will be in a position to display the only magnanimity that it's safe to show in politics - the generosity of the victor.

The Senator, The Pastor And "The Juice"

2008-04-03T16:41:00.000+01:00

In the matter of People of the State of California against Orenthal James Simpson....We, the jury...find the Defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder ...upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being....We, the jury...find the Defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder...upon Ronald Lyle Goldman, a human being....

Thus on October 12, 1995 did a nervous Deirdre Robertson, Clerk of the Court, publish to a bated world the verdict of the jury - also human beings who proved to be all too human - which "set the Juice loose", as the argot of those heady days went. At that moment the great mass of humankind that is the American people split in twain, like the Red Sea at Moses' command, creating an empty arid gulf in between far, far different from the miraculous escape route to the Promised Land which the ancient Hebrews so gratefully crossed.

The African American community performed what black novelist Dennis Williams aptly called "an end-zone dance" of jubilation. The white population just stood there, properly gobsmacked, like a cartoon character who, running straight off a cliff, stops frozen momentarily in mid-air as he struggles to grasp that the once so solid ground has vanished from beneath him. The subsequent fall was from a dizzying height and the impact shattering.

They were appalled at the terrible injustice done to the victims of a brutal butchering, for such it was, and at the witlessness of a jury, each of whom, whenever they opened their mouth, which they did early and often, gave vivid proof that they were suffering from Fulminant Cerebral Pneumonia, a highly contagious condition hitherto unknown to medical science.

It was caused, tests later showed, by exposure to Sequestria Itosiosis Nonomensis and made lethal by opportunistic infections such as Cochranus Racecarditis Blatantioris and the deadly Fuhrmania Furiosa Verbia (colloquially known as Niggra-Niggra) with accompanying hemorrhagic fever.

The prosecutors, Marcia Clarke and Chris Darden, played bumbling, bewildered straight men to the slick comedians on the Defense team while the judge, Lance Ito, perched in cathedra, made like he was auditioning for the title role in a surreal remake of The Wizard of Oz, written and directed by Berthold Brecht, with additional dialogue by Tom Stoppard.

All rational Americans had to deal with the unconscionable wrongness of the verdict but whites in particular were further presented with the explosion of exultation by their African American fellow-citizens more appropriate to a Super Bowl win or an unexpected electoral landslide than the setting free of a brutal double murderer. The black O.J. partisans seemed eager to do a Riverdance jig of joy on the graves of the white victims. Short of an actual lynching this was racial triumphalism at its most crass.

And it is no exaggeration to say that the jury's 'Not Guilty' was instinctively celebrated as a racial triumph despite the universally perceived "whiteness" of Simpson himself. Other blacks saw his life-style choices as a rejection of his own kind, a sin of which he could only properly cleanse himself by the slaughter of two innocent people who deserved their fate solely through their membership of the oppressor race. 'Cynique', a member of Thumpers Corner, a black internet Forum, in a 2006 post states baldly

...the root of OJ's black support was that in spite of his white-woman-loving reputation, he had in a way, redeemed himself with the black community because he had avenged all of the innocent black men who over the centuries had been lynched for crimes against white women that they had not committed; not to mention the Rodney Kings of the world who had been brutalized by the LAPD. tsk-tsk The blind-folded lady of justice may just have got it right.

'Crystal' in response reminisces fondly:

I still get a laugh remembering the faces of the white folks I worked with at the time of the verdict. Mad as hell! Walking around looking like it was their own kids that had been killed. It was hilarious! I had to close my office door so they wouldn't hear me laughing and lynch me or something.

The fact that these are educated members of the middle class with white-collar jobs and not feral, bling-encrusted, drive-by gangsters from the 'hood sends a chill up the spine of all white Americans not already rendered zombies from decades of radical
Liberal brain surgery designed to turn them into Politically Correct dittoheads eager for their own racial subjugation. In other words, Typical White Persons of the Future.

Which brings us to Jeremiah Wright. The road between the Running Back and the Pastor is long and arduous and full of twists and turn, ups and downs, rest stops and diversions, but it is the same road. The same dynamic is in play. The same gulf of moral expectations yawns between the two same groups of citizens. The whites feel the same bewildered outrage, the blacks the same racial righteousness that justifies every thought, word and action, however reprehensible, if conceived, spoken or carried out by a member of the African Diaspora. Reverend Wright's triumphant Return to Chicago as if he were a conqueror of worlds is eerily similar and as dismayingly, disdainfully in-your-face as those tumultuous celebrations of yesteryear.

There are other parallels.

Obama like O.J. is extremely elegant, exceptionally personable and preternaturally charming. Like O.J., pre-Bundy, he strives to be 'postracial', a black man whose blackness is incidental to his life, achievements and promise. He too was coolly regarded, disdained even, by his own - though lionized by everyone else - until he became the butt of white 'aggression'.

Both have been the very reluctant means by which the white population, racially quiescent and willfully determined to see no black evil per se, have been forced to confront the unappeasable otherness of Black America; a place where Johnnie Cochran and Jeremiah Wright and by extension Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Malik Zulu Shabazz and all their unlovely tribe are not perceived as huckstering opportunists blowing smoke to puff up their egos, advance their careers and line their pockets.

They are, on the contrary, respected, even revered leaders not of a few extremists but rather of the multitude of blacks in America at all social levels whose innate hatreds, collective vindictiveness and rampant sense of grievance they correctly articulate and deftly mobilize. Those whom the whites simply tolerate as the price of continuing freedom blacks empower in the cause of ultimate retribution.

Thus white America is beginning to dimly grasp that Jeremiah Wright & Co. are not just a few bad apples but the tip of what is a dark, deadly and very determined iceberg. That Barack Obama is riding this iceberg to the Democratic nomination is now obvious.

What is not so obvious - though now becoming increasing discernible like a great vessel looming out of the fog - is that, after four decades of exercising political power vastly disproportionate to their actual numbers, African Americans have created an African America, a hostile, rival entity that has grown unseen within the regular America to which it is radically and consciously opposed in every conceivable fundamental way and whose very nature it seeks to subvert.

Senator Barack Obama now stands at the head of this African America to which - witness his refusal to "disown" Wright - he owes his primary allegiance and from which he derives his essential world view.

"I had begun to see," he declares in Dreams Of My Father, "a new map of the world....We were always playing on the white man's court...by the white man's rules."

His enemy - as we saw with the O.J. jubilators - is the undifferentiated white race who are made morally indistinguishable by the color of their skin, the cross-burning, nigger-lynching white maniac from Georgia and the loving, politically incorrect white grandmother from Kansas meld together seamlessly to impose a racial oppression, as cunning and subtle as it is comprehensive, upon each and every black.

"Whatever [the white man] decided to do," Obama teaches, "it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning."

This is as complete and as dispassionate an expression of radical black disaffection and resentment as you're ever likely to come across. It also clearly lays the theoretical groundwork for the hostility and hatred to white America that first came to light with the Simpson verdict. When Louis Farrakhan described the white race as the "skunk of the earth" this is what he meant. When Jeremiah Wright spoke of "the U.S. of KKK A." this is what he meant. They both just lacked the necessary analytic skills of their Ivy League fellow-traveler.

Fellow-traveler no more. In all but name Barack Obama is the President of African America.

The decisions we all take between now and November will determine whether he rules it - and the other America - from the Oval Office.

Requiem For The Lot Of Us

2008-04-02T18:39:00.000+01:00

Scraps of ancient scholarship
mildew in my brain.
I am Western Civilization.
I jog in the rain.

I am Western Civilization
and I love foreign climes,
pictures with no people,
poems that don't rhyme,
stories with no ending,
heaps of metaverbal fun.
I am Western Civilization
and my race is run.

Casablanca is my movie,
I only groove to jazz.
I am Western Civilization,
I'm not one of the lads.

I accentuate the female,
keep a teddy made of patches,
I weep when I get e-mail,
at earthquakes or cup matches,
I am deeply moved by everything,
sunsets, warfare, pumas,
inflation in the Orient,
and other people's tumors.

I am Western Civilization,
believe in sensibility not sin.
Abort, divorce, screw everyone,
it all helps to keep you thin.

I am Western Civilization,
on the Internet I'll dwell
upon the fax I microchipped
via satellitic cell
to sign up the Tamil Tigers
to play in the NFL.
I am Western Civilization,
and, boy, I'm shot to hell.

I am Western Civilization
I am Politically Correct.
Blacks, gay men, dyslexics,
and those paralyzed at the neck,
and each one with a clitoris,
the many traumatized by Jaws,
shall find me most miraculous
in funding every cause
with money from the white male pigs
who led us from the caves,
painted the Sistine Chapel,
raised the Gothic naves,
wrote Hamlet, Wilhelm Meister,
penned Beethoven's Fifth,
discovered penicillin,
fought at Rorke's Drift,
built bridges, roads and cities,
and walked upon the moon.

I am Western Civilization,
this deadwood I must prune.

I am Western Civilization
I'm having a last fling,
the circumferentially challenged showperson
is just about to sing.

I am Western Civilization,
it seems no time at all
since I saw intriguing shadows
dance on dear Plato's wall.
Still, I had a good long innings,
several thousand years.

I am Western Civilization,
hey man, I'm outa here!

This poem is the copyright of liamascorcaigh (the Author) and cannot be reproduced in any way without explicit acknowledgment. Any commercial use is subject to the author's permission.

Iraq - A Needless War That Needs To Be Won

2008-04-01T05:47:00.000+01:00

I have one thing in common with Barack Obama. Back when neither of us was a member of the US Senate we both vehemently opposed the Iraq War. Barack, no doubt, had sound geopolitical reasons grounded in his deep reading of learned foreign policy papers and the wise counsel of experienced diplomats as well as Bill Ayres and Jeremiah Wright hissing into either ear.

I just thought it was dumb.

No, not just dumb. It was sheer madness. Reagan – whom death and Rush Limbaugh have transformed into a mythic figure akin to Moses with a sense of humor – invaded countries. But he didn’t start wars. There’s a difference. The great and good Gipper was a wily old pol, not very Mosaic maybe, but utterly, relentlessly necessary if you’re the leader of a democratic country sending other people’s (i.e. voters’) family members into harm’s way. So he picked small, weak, corrupt countries that no one gave a tinker’s curse about, invaded them, kicked tyrant butt and skedaddled as quick as dammit covered in (Teddy) Rooseveltian glory.

Some good was done, the Munro Doctrine given a timely polish, other tin-pot Napoleons put on notice, troops, highly trained but virgins to combat, blooded. And at a militarily modest cost in the lives of the good and the innocent which is now a matter between the affable ex-President and God into which I am not equipped to intrude.

Compared to the length of skinny string which is Panama and the cuckoo’s spit of Grenada, Iraq is enormous, with a population in the teeming millions and a terrain which even the natives find inhospitable. Saddam was a tyrant with nothing tin-potty about him. The country sat on Great Lakes of oil which guaranteed that everybody on earth had a vested interest in what happened, even Amazonian Indians who have long swapped their paddles for gleaming Honda 4-stroke outboards.

To top it all off the whole region is as volatile as nitroglycerin in a food blender and will continue to be so “till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, and rocks melt i’ the sun”. Iraq in particular is a poorly glued Humpty Dumpty. Hacked arbitrarily out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire its inhabitants owed allegiance only to tribe, clan and sect and in the case of the Kurds to a dream of nationhood. They viewed the sands which surrounded them merely as a handy means of soaking up the blood of their 'fellow citizens'.

This goes some way to explaining why it required a despot of Saddam’s rugged moral sensibilities to bind Iraqis together with hoops of blood and iron. It also more than demonstrates why anybody who gave the question a moment’s thought would expect, no, predict the sectarian, tribal and racial chaos that would inevitably occur once the Fuhrer of Baghdad was eliminated.

The only reason I can think of – apart from rampant megalomania infecting the upper reaches of the Bush Administration – for this misbegotten adventure was a frustration on the President’s part with his father’s refusal to take Baghdad in 1991 and his own determination to finish the job. His expressed desire to spread Freedom and Democracy by armed might is so outrageous as to defy any rational attempt to understand it. And all the talk of WMD was of course purposefully generated claptrap.

The only proper justification for the invasion – as it was for the Afghan War – would have been if Saddam was providing succor to Al Qaeda. In that event all people of good will would have been four square behind the US. Of course bin Laden and Saddam Hussein would have only supported each other in the same way that the rope supports a hanged man.

Unforgivably this terrible war was not planned for. The whole escapade was to be George W’s Grenada, a reprise of Bush pere's Desert Shield triumph. In like Flynn and out like Slim, leaving smiling freedom-loving Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds skipping to the polling booths, fuzzy all over with warm feelings of brotherly love while Iraqi Democrats (symbol: the Hawkmoth) and Iraqi Republicans (symbol: the Dhub-Dhub) thrashed out wonkish policy details and traded barbs over gun control and gay marriage.

The war just happened the way a drunken argument about baseball stats ends up in a lethal stabbing. Unpremeditated mayhem. The military top brass dickered and bickered, the political leadership puffed and postured and all the while Donald Rumsfeld did his Kirk Douglas impression to packed houses of the increasingly disaffected before exiting stage right to a smattering of dutiful applause. It seemed that only the President kept the faith. Perhaps he was the only True Believer all along.

It was John McCain’s finest hour to urge the Surge because however criminally injudicious the Administration was in creating this Gallipoli it is imperative that the US emerges victorious. The country has committed its honor, its power, its standing to the creation of a stable viable Iraqi state free of tyranny and terror. Militant Islam has chosen this as their battleground. This in and of itself has changed the whole meaning of the conflict. What began as willful adventurism has become a strategic confrontation with immense political, security and moral issues at stake for the whole of the Western World. Having gone in America must win.

Despite the Surge, a telling metaphor because surges are of their nature transitory, despite General Petraeus’s upbeat report, despite the very significant decrease in violence, the signs are again ominous. One sign in particular. Last week Iraqi Premier, al Maliki, a Shi’ite, gave in to pressure from the Americans, and decided to confront the Shi’ite militias who control the very strategic city of Basra. These militias, the so-called Mahdi Army, are headed by Muqtada al Sadr, a radical cleric, who has found refuge over the border in Iran. This was the much hoped for battle between the ‘good’ Iraqis and the ‘bad’ Iraqis, a pattern for the future, if the wretched country is to have a future to speak of.

The results are now in. The ‘good’ Iraqis are, in fact, no good. The militiamen are willing to fight and die for their cause. The Government forces, highly trained and excellently equipped, are unwilling to die and therefore willing only to fight as long as they don’t put themselves in too much harm’s way. They have, it appears, no cause worth dying for. Having been fought to a standstill by the militias, they began to throw in the towel. One military source reported that "[a]n Iraqi army commander was told by the local Madhi army commander to lay down all their weapons, surrender all their uniforms, surrender their equipment and then there would be no trouble. The Iraqi army did just that." Striking an ominous note, he added, "we lost Basra faster than we lost Da Nang in 1975".

In order to stabilize the deteriorating situation US commanders sent in special forces and aircraft. A stand-off ensued as the Americans were reluctant to commit enough troops of their own to ensure success, fearing another Fallujah and judging the likely level of casualties unacceptable. On foot of subsequent official negotiations with the Baghdad Government al Sadr has declared a ceasefire. Militiamen already imprisoned by the authorities will be amnestied and released. Al Maliki’s much trumpeted re-occupation of Basra has failed ignominiously. By imposing a tactically advantageous stalemate al Sadr has achieved a stunning strategic victory.

The implications for the future are appalling. The American trained Iraqi troops have proved to be so many paper tigers. The American backed Prime Minister looks like a busted flush. Bush’s – and by extension McCain’s – strategy was aimed at building up a civil administration, capable of winning the people’s confidence and allegiance, buttressed by an Iraqi defense force capable of maintaining law and order and suppressing terrorism. This clearly is not anywhere near accomplished.

An eerie calm will probably now descend on Iraq. In Baghdad al Maliki will continue to go through the motions as will his security forces now that the enemy is on vacation. Al Sadr knows now that each day that passes is his friend. The American public has no stomach for another thousand deaths on top of the four thousand already in their graves. A Democrat may likely be elected next Fall solving the only problem he really has.

Even if the stalwart McCain gets the nod what more can he do to stiffen the spine of the Government side in Iraq? How can it be politically possible for him to continue to supply the wants of his lukewarm allies with more and more of his citizens' lives? The refusal of the US commanders in Basra to countenance the further shedding of American blood is more than a straw in the wind. The example of Vietnam still provides powerful encouragement to those who bank everything on the failure of US resolve.

And Osama bin Laden, untouched all the while by the misdirected bedlam in Mesopotamia, lurks in his wretched cave rubbing his hands and smiling that gentle deadly smile of his.

Obama - Putting The Mess Into Messiah

2008-03-31T17:16:00.000+01:00

Uh uh, Senator Barack [...] Obama (D-Ill) is having a 'senior moment'. The Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization - rolls of the tongue, don't it, kinda like Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti - is a Democratic Party deep-space satellite that's so far out there it's orbit intersects with the Earth only once every four years. To celebrate these episodic transits IVI marks the cards of local pols to vet their ideological purity - partial-birth decapitation, gun control, anti-death penalty, pro-ERA, the UN is the best hope of the Earth, USA stands for Uncontrollable Sadists Amalgamated - the usual savory menu of Far Left delicacies designed to titillate the palates of anyone hoping for a career in Democratic Illinois politics. Remember this is where domestic terrorist Bill Ayres is revered as a local boy made good.

Obama was quids in with this group of committed Americans. According to IVI State Chairman, David K. Igasaki, “our chapter basically was his field operation. ... Those people [IVI cadrés] were already working for him, and it was important for him to identify with us". In 1996 Obama in answering the pressure groups questionnaire passed his ideological purity test with flying colors - none of them red, white and blue.

Support state legislation to “ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns"? Yes.

Death penalty? No.

Abortion up to and including birth? Yes.

Minors should be required at the very least to notify parents before an abortion? No.

The Senator, since it was revealed to him on a secret midnight ascent of Mount Rushmore that he is in fact our Messiah, has endeavored to nuance these bald yeas and nays. 'Nuance' is a French word meaning "to obfuscate or fudge an issue in order to conceal your real position for the purpose of enhancing your viability with an electorate far broader but, you hope, even dumber than the original coterie of Far Left dingbats you found so congenial when you could let it all hang out".

He has now discovered a penumbra in his personal constitution that favors 'counselling' by somebody or other if the girl wanting an abortion is a virtual child and in danger of 'abuse'. He now supports "common sense" gun control laws while also respecting the rights of "law- abiding gun owners" - as if anybody had urged him to champion the rights of felonious gunslingers.

He is now in favor of the death penalty for certain crimes - as opposed to the rest of us who want the death penalty for all crimes right down to running a red light - but, nuacedly, wants no executions to take place until, no doubt, the process can be made infallible.

How does he defend this timely migration from Nutt County, Illinois to what he hopes is Middletown, USA? He listened to focus groups? He grew half a brain? He fell out of his Porsche on the way to Damascus, Virginia with Mikki and the kids? No. No. And hell no. You see, he never, ever, ever held the views he told IVI he had. In fact he never told them anything, you know "those people...already working for him" who were "basically his field operation". He declared that staffers - ignorant serfs incapable of fathoming their master's bewildering array of sophisticated nuances - filled out the IVI questionnaires for him, answering 'yes' and 'no' without appending the lawyerly 'wherebys', 'neverthelesses' and 'hithertofores' necessary for serious political masquerading.

Now Politico.com has unearthed a copy of the questionnaire covered in annotations in the Senator's own hand! A "liar, liar, pants on fire" situation, you cry. Not a bit of it. Obama says that though he wrote on the document he didn't read it, approve of it or fill it in! When I heard this at first I was dumbfounded. Surely this cannot be. As the man himself says of the present gun control regulations, it flies in the face of, well, "common sense". Then it dawned on me. I fell off my porch, as it were, and saw the light. Obama had smoked the questionnaire, yes, but he hadn't inhaled! He didn't have consensual relations with that document, the..uh..IVI questionnaire.

Let joy be unconfined. All is explained. The First Non-Racial, Post-Racial, Inter-Racial President - for so it is written and so it will be - is the Living Reincarnation of the Most High, Most Revered One, The First Black President, Wily William the Winsome, who issuing forth from the Sacred South did scatter His Seed broadcast upon the hungry soil so that there did spring up a veritable White Water of Suicides, Chinese Donors, Blue Dresses, Travel-Office Firings, Jailings of Friends, Perjurings, Impeachments, Pardons for Gift Givers, Furniture Filching, yea, till throughout the land a vast Niagara of Public Treasure did cascade into the calculating coffers of all who did praise His Name.

In other words, Barack [...] Obama is not the first Democrat to put the hype back into hypocrisy but he is the latest.

And, for the moment, the most dangerous.

Even Obama Has To Salute This!

2008-03-30T18:14:00.000+01:00

The Cactus Cuties hoist The Star Spangled Banner in all its Old Glory. Be still my beating heart!

The Sorry State Of The Black And White Union

2008-03-28T21:12:00.000+00:00

Like your ailing rich Aunt Mabel the Irish language has made a career out of dying while never mustering enough decency to actually cease to be spoken, a sine qua non, you would agree, of language death. This never-ending death-watch has inevitably drawn many well-meaning souls - I am numbered among them - to the cause of restoring such a beautiful and ancient tongue to its former glory - and glory indeed it was. Cuideachd Ghaedhilge Uladh (The Ulster Gaelic Society) was founded by Belfast Presbyterians in 1830, yes, 1830, to accomplish this purpose. Some 60 plus years later Conradh na Gaeilge (The Gaelic League) was established and what is called An Athbheochain (The Revival) was up and running. In 1922 the brand new nationalist Government declared the restoration of Irish a fundamental principal of what is now the Republic of Ireland, still the only free and independent Celtic state in the world.

A further eighty six years have flown by. The Last Post and Reveille have been bugled for the language many times over yet it lives on, tenaciously dying. Organizations, foundations, authorities, agencies, branches, committees and every other organ of social combination known to man have formed, flourished and dissolved or limped on well beyond their use-by date. Laws have been passed, amended, repealed and reinstated. Generations of rabid enthusiasts (me again!) and tepid sympathizers have budded, bloomed and withered. Seminars, conferences, colloquia and symposia, both sacred and profane, have gathered, discoursed and dispersed. Countless school children have puzzled over irregular verbs, memorized conditional tenses, guessed at the inflection of nouns and scattered initial mutations about with the profligacy of the terminally mystified. Vast quantities of public treasure and private energies have been expended.

To what avail? If endless talk, feverish endeavor and decades long government support worked, Irish would long have regained its place as the day-to-day speech of the people. This, it is now clear, will never happen.

And so as I viewed clips of Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union held last February in New Orleans I was overtaken by a fatigue as dreary as it was familiar. Here was a huge hall packed with Gaeilgeoirí (Irish language enthusiasts) like myself only they had donned new skins and more vivacious personalities and instead of banging on eternally about Ceist na Teangan (the language question) they were yammering on incessantly about the Race Issue! On stage were the Great and the Good of the Movement - Dick Gregory, Cornell West, Julia Hare, Louis Farrakhan - all with their own particular analysis long since set in stone. They spoke with eloquence and passion and enunciated obvious truths. This was their life's work, the cause by which they measured the rising and setting of suns. They were fascinating, engaging and sometimes mordantly witty. And, like so many African-Americans, vivid with life. Anger, sorrow, laughter, rage, hatred, amusement, irritation and love kaleidoscoped throughout the hall.

Yet for all that the overall tone was shrill. The mood veered between an intense unfocused disaffection and a brooding desire for both personal and communal vindication. The platform party, seated in comfortable armchairs and totally at their ease, were by way of being Keepers of the Sacred Flame which burned not to commemorate the terrible sufferings of the past but rather to re-kindle the sense of outrage and commitment to racial identity which those sufferings naturally and justifiably gave birth to. The battles of long ago were still being fought by people desperate to believe that the building was surrounded by George Wallace and Strom Thurmond in their pomp at the head of a yowling multitude of bloodthirsty crackers complete with hown' dawgs, burning crosses and lengths of sturdy hemp. There was, in a word, something willful about it all. And aimless.

What could come of all this pontificating, air-punching and breast-beating? The general purpose seems to be to get everyone and anyone riled up. The rileder up, the better. The raising of hackles was the solemn duty of anyone within a bull’s bellow of the microphone. The name itself, The State of the Black Union, is as idiotic as it is pretentious. But even if we "suspend disbelief" and take it as a kind of accounting of how things stand with African Americans from one year to the next there is no profit and loss sheet presented as we would expect. The event is one long bellyache. To be black is to be beaten down from out the womb, woefully educated, chronically unemployed, personally persecuted, professionally thwarted, jailed out of pure spite, have cocaine thrust up your nose at every turn of the road and be forever left cabless in New York. Yet, strangely, every one in the audience is living testimony to the robust unreality of this Hieronymous Bosch scenario while a goodly moiety of the 'living legends' on stage are multi-millionaires wallowing in their racial misery all the way to the bank.

And the cause of all this wretchedness? Well they don't say it's 'Whitey' anymore. That's so Malcolm X. If a finger is directly pointed at a specific villain it is, it has to be 'George W. Bush'. I use quotes to distinguish this scheming racist tyrant - whose sole purpose is to impoverish every working stiff in America and return blacks, who are beyond impoverishment, to bondage - from the current resident of the White House who, by an unfortunate and confusing coincidence happens to have exactly the same name. In fact it is the only thing the two Dubyas have in common.

'George W.' cannot perform his vile herculean labors alone of course. He is enabled by 'the Big Corporations' which develop drugs to cure people of disease and produce and refine oil to enable the Gross National Product to burgeon and Mom to drive to the Mall to buy little Susie a doll for her birthday. This is just a cover of course for the real work of Corporate Executives viz. to impoverish every working stiff in America and return blacks, who are beyond impoverishment, to bondage. Oh yes and destroy the delicate ecological balance of the earth thereby wiping out the endangered Yellow Bearded Colorado Snow Snail as well as ending all human existence. They will then retire to a planet of pristine purity, heretofore cunningly concealed and utterly devoid of working stiffs and blacks, where they will live a life of sybaritic ease secula seculorum.

As you can imagine this whole business is as paternalistic as a Victorian papa lecturing his daughters on the evils of the female suffrage. Whatever topic the speakers expounded upon they each ended up sounding like a fanatical high school coach giving a locker room pep talk to a reluctant team of one-legged footballers who were selected to prove that if the coach inculcated in them a sufficiently inflamed sense of grievance about their misfortune they could go out and win the State Championship for Martyrdom High.

Between litanies of past injuries ranging from the slight to the atrocious and boilerplate attacks on 'The Man' it was obvious that even the revered icons on the stage had very divergent views on a whole array of issues that affect everyday life. The audience was equally diverse. Single mothers, old ladies on welfare, regular lunch-pail guys, stony faced fanatics rubbed shoulders with prosperous businesspersons who had never raised a shovel or a mop in anger and Ivy League types who could teach Obama a thing or two about elegance and sophistication. Their reactions to the rhetoric from on high also varied greatly. Some folk frequently shouted, applauded vigorously and long, rose to their feet in approbation while at the same time others shook their heads, frowned or sat resolutely with their arms folded. Yet there they were all willing themselves to feel the crack of Massa’s 19th century rawhide whip on their pampered 21st century flesh.

This stultifying boondoggle is needless and corrosive. It also achieves absolutely nothing. It will continue to do so. Not a single African American in genuine need will benefit. The historic wrongs have been righted. Needed legislation has long been passed. European Americans have acknowledged and denounced over and over again the injustice of slavery which even in its hey-day many of their ancestors deplored and fought to eradicate and from which many did not benefit in any way. Since the Sixties white racism has been ruthlessly suppressed by force of law and the highest moral sanctions of society.

All organs of government at every level as well as private agencies, businesses, universities, corporations, foundations, clubs, neighborhoods, families and individuals have comprehensively mandated, supported, encouraged, funded and put into practice every conceivable program, scheme, plan, proposition, proposal and design that the human mind and heart can draft, dream up, envisage, imagine, cobble together, divine and structure in order to make good on the past and provide an opportunity for all persons of color to make a real go of their lives.

Social engineering on a vast and hitherto unthinkable scale in a free democratic society has been undertaken to bring this about. Grossly unfair racial quotas have been both mandated and self-imposed in every viable arena both public and private. Forcible busing of school children has been ordained from on high, a tactic worthy of the “great engineer of souls” himself, Joseph Stalin. Draconian speech codes have become the order of the day. A Political Correctness mania, in effect socially monitored self-censorship, has fundamentally curtailed the freedom of speech and action of all but the congenitally contrarian. Self-selected and officially appointed grievance invigilators have made life a misery in myriad petty ways for countless millions of hardworking, decent, law-abiding white men and women of good will.

As the genuine grounds for complaint have given way to a level playing field and transparent regulations and then to a stacked deck and loaded dice a great horde of hucksters, charlatans, confidence tricksters, scam merchants, cynical opportunists and run of the mill chancers – not to mention the unlovely brood of grievance industry lawyers - have been conjured into existence to keep the good times rolling. And all this time veritable Grand Canyons of money – which as we know doesn’t grow on trees but is created by the sweat of brow and brain - was first invested, then merely expended and eventually and for many years plain squandered originally in pursuit of a noble dream but now just because to turn the gushing spigot back a bare notch would require the combined political courage and moral rectitude – not to mention the personal guts - of all the Founding Fathers on their best day.

Take a look at our present supply of political leaders, Left, Right and all points between. Neither severally nor in the aggregate could they muster as much honor and courage as still reside untapped in George Washington’s wooden dentures.

Yet turn that spigot we must and not just because of the rampant corruption of the process nor for the very sound reason that it isn’t delivering on the bright early hopes we all shared. This approach has re-indentured entire socio-economic echelons of the black population. The projects are the new plantations, fatherless households the new Uncle Tom’s cabins, the swarms of social workers, public defenders and judges the new overseers, gatherings such as Travis Smiley’s the new auction blocks and all – I mean all - Democratic party grandees of every shade and hue the new Massas.

Thinkers, commentators, even bloggers can be the new John Browns but this Second Emancipation needs a Second Lincoln, one who like the original will free those in bondage not simply for their sake alone but for the sake of this great Union so that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall once again thrive in what is still the freest nation on this earth.

The Dems Throw Their Toys Out Of The Cradle

2008-03-26T13:40:00.000+00:00

As the Democrats' labyrinthine nomination process becomes more convoluted, more obnoxious and more drastic the two remaining candidates increasing blunder about wildly wielding any instrument, sharp or blunt, that comes to hand like two blind gladiators hacking more in desperation than hope at each other in the blood-soaked sand of Rome's old Colosseum. A sight that would have gladdened the heart of the Emperor Gaius, a psychopath known to history as Caligula, who, appropriately enough, appointed his horse a member of the august Roman Senate. And all this time there we were fondly thinking John Kerry was the first.

After an initial burst of euphoria at the "uniqueness" and "vigor" of the contest, Planet Pundit has for long prognosticated gloomily on the dire consequences for the Dems of their internal strife as it degraded inexorably into the kind of tit for tat bloodletting more akin to the robust methods favored traditionally by Sicilians to compose their differences. Uniquely in this campaign year the pundits have proved to be correct. The subterranean rumbling you hear in the night is not an earthquake in the making, it is instead the sound of the Democratic Party splitting apart.

The immortal phrase "chickens coming home to roost" springs to mind because the Dems have labored mightily and long to bring this dies nefas about. It is conventional wisdom to view the two major American political combinations as 'Big Tent' coalitions. This is true in respect of the Republican Party as we see the various shades of opinion in the party gradually coalesce around John McCain despite obvious disagreements on issues, priorities and emphases. This is what a coalition, properly so called, does. Though allowing for sometimes considerable differences within its elements there is a strong elastic bond of principle and sensibility which keeps any divergent forces within the bounds of what is viable. The GOP is therefore essentially coherent and centripetal in its tendencies.

The Democratic dynamic is entirely different. Since 1968 the Party has devolved from the old FDR coalition into an agglomeration of client blocs which compete each with the other for a greater and greater share of the largesse, political, legislative and monetary, which the Party has in its gift. This might seem a version of old Tammany Hall patronage but, unlike that system which encouraged loyalty to a hierarchy of Party chieftains based on self-interest, this model promotes dissension, division and distrust because each of these blocs is a self-selecting separate entity which of its nature demands total loyalty to and complete identification with the specific group rather than the Party, which ceases to exist except as a formal assets-delivery system.

Thus the array of special interest and single-issue voting blocs - African-Americans, Latinos, feminists, gays, welfare dependents, illegal immigrant advocates, unions, special pleaders, far left activists, avowed libertines and so forth - see themselves as uniquely special and therefore uniquely entitled to special consideration. This creates an auction without an auctioneer where individual Democratic politicians are forced to make any number of contradictory and increasingly outrageous bids to secure the support of the competing blocs. In this way the Democratic political currency becomes grossly devalued by a galloping inflation of promises, positions and runaway posturing. This devaluation renders Democratic assets virtually worthless to every one other than the successful bidders. So it is that 22% of both Obama and Clinton supporters want the other candidate to quit already, while 19% and 28% respectively say they will switch to the GOP if their particular patron loses out.

This is also reflected in the iron-clad compartmentalization of the vote, the real reason why Clinton cannot take advantage of what would otherwise be Obama's lethal relationship with his pastor. The blocs that instinctively abominate the reverend - white women, white working class men, Latinos - are voting for her already. Those who support Obama - blacks, college educated whites, the MSM - look upon anti-Americanism as a legitimate position if not indeed an undiluted virtue. Like the great George Jones Hillary may be hailed as a one of the best ever by her own but she has no cross-over appeal.

Thus two great aggregations of special interest blocs, having split the Democratic primary votes down the middle, face each other across a Gettysburg strewn with the dead (Gravel, Kucinich, Dodd, Biden, Edwards, Michigan and Florida primary voters, party unity), the dying (Bill's legacy, Obama's Messiahship, Hillary's 'experience', Rev Wright's reputation), the maimed (Geraldine 'Gerald' Ferraro, Samantha 'Monster' Power, Patti 'The Incompetent' Solis Doyle, Andrew 'Shuck 'n Jive' Cuomo, Austan 'Wink and Nudge' Goolsbee) and the walking wounded (the Heavy Brigade of Superdelegates in its entirety, Democratic leaning independents, pundits whose income depends on their unerring insights, anyone who faints at the sight of blood).

War is hell, but Civil War is manna from Heaven to your enemies and the Republicans have gone from looking down the double barrels of a Democratic blow-out to viewing through their field glasses the brightening prospects of another four year occupation of the White House.

This was always a mess waiting for a Persian rug in order to happen. The stars merely needed to fatefully align. And so they did. Along came two paramount icons who in and of themselves represented hugely inflated competing Entitlements, the denial of either of which would be an act of intrinsic evil. The Democratic Party now quails "before the devil it raised and cannot lay". It gave birth to Entitlement, nursed it, cradled it lovingly, sent it to kindergarten, high school, college, the workplace, the projects, insisted on enrolling it in every and all organizations, public and private, in the land. In the end like a spoilt child grown strong it batters its parent and sets about burning its home down.

Now, Richard Dawkins, tell me there isn't a God.

Hill Has Another Vision, Bill Dreams The Same Old Dream

2008-03-25T16:10:00.000+00:00

Just when Democrats were thinking it was safe to come out of their carbon neutral dens to pander some more to their array of special interest voting blocs, Hillary happens. Again. The junior (how that designation must grate!) Senator from New York, named after Sir Edmund Hillary, life-long Yankee fan, whose jogging daughter barely escaped annihilation on 9/11, and who herself was central to the Irish Peace Process, reminisced on St. Patrick's Day about her brush with death in war-torn Bosnia.

It is 1996. HRC has been Co-President four years. The Bosnian civil war is winding down. A White House presence is deemed appropriate. The situation however is still too dodgy to send in the First Draft Dodger himself. What more seemly compromise than a visit by his wife and daughter to the war zone? Hey, this is an Administration where a good ol' boy from Arkansas can before our eyes morph into the First Black President. Anything goes.

Tuzla - where Hillary and the fruit of her womb land - is a battlefield which would make even grizzled veterans of Omaha Beach blanch. The official reception has of course been canceled. The welcoming party cower in their reinforced concrete bunkers hardly daring to peer out as the plane and its precious cargo weave their way through rocket and anti-aircraft flak before juddering to a halt on the ramshackle runway that is dotted with bomb craters and littered with the body parts of what were just moments ago cheering, expectant crowds.

The growling engines whine to a stop. An eerie silence descends, broken only by crackle of machine guns, the screaming of bullets and the nerve-wracking thud of relentless mortar fire. Nothing moves except Death, his bloody scythe flailing amid the acrid smoke. Suddenly the plane door opens and there stands the First Lady, bareheaded and wearing only a military style gaberdine coat, black trousers and polo neck. An aide appears briefly behind her, holding some body armor. She ignores him. High velocity bullets pepper the fuselage. The aide flings himself on the floor whimpering. Hillary just stands there, obviously enjoying the fresh air after being cooped up so long in the stuffy cabin.

She glances back at her daughter. "C'mon, let's go, Darlin'" she mutters, "can't keep these good Muslim folks waiting." Just as they step onto the ground a mortar explodes so close by they can smell the burnt flesh of a Labrador retriever, the base mascot, renamed Buddy especially for the occasion.

"Gosh, Mom," cries Chelsea, "I'm glad we didn't bring Socks along."

"So am I, Darlin'," replies her mother grimly, "but you know Daddy gets awful lonely when I'm not at home and needs to have a little pussy around to console him."

At that they both stride, heads held high, towards the crowded bunker. The rest of the party deplane and stumble after them, hunkered down, crying imprecations to the Almighty as the deadly fire rains down all round them. One by one shamefaced soldiers emerge from cover, their battle honors glittering sheepishly on their breasts. As they gather round the tall erect figure of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the enemy guns fall sullenly silent.

On the Serb infested hills all about white flags begin to flutter, first one, then ten, twenty, fifty until eventually it seems like winter in Vermont. An awestruck major scratches his head and says in wonder, "My God, this is incredible. Just incredible." The First Lady rounds on him savagely, "Incredible, you say. No, it's completely believable. It's real, totally real, I tell you. I was there for God's sake. I know what happened."

Hillary jerked herself up in her narrow uncomfortable bed and looked into the kindly bearded face of Dr. Guzzuntite. "It happened", she cried piteously, "it really happened". She burst into uncontrollable sobs. The doctor smiled sadly. "There, there," he said soothingly, "you've just had one of those nasty dreams again. Here, take ten of these little yellow pills and three of the lovely blue round ones, your favorites, remember, and everything will be just fine."

After gulping down the tablets between sobs she gazed up at the doctor. "Why are the walls so soft in here, doctor, and why am I kept in this contraption," she asked, nodding at a device which was wrapped around her body and fastened at the back with sturdy buckles. "It's for you own safety, Mrs. Clinton," he replied patiently. "Remember that time in the Day Room when you gave that speech, you injured yourself quite badly ramming your fist through the television screen and frightened all the others."

"But that was my First Inaugural Address, Doctor, don't you see, and they wouldn't listen. They just kept looking at that damn 'American Idol' on Fox, Goddamn it, Fox!" As he wiped some drool from her chin, Hillary, growing drowsy now, murmured, "and how can I answer the red telephone with my hands all tied up like...listen, I can hear it. It's ringing, ringing, ring..."

As he shut and bolted the reinforced steel door behind him, Doctor Guzzuntite turned to a tall, dapper gray-haired man beside him. "Incurable, Mr. President, I'm afraid," he said, sorrowfully shaking his head. "She gone way over the line this time and she's not coming back."

The elegant man flipped open his cell phone and pressed the speed dial.

"Calling in another psychiatrist won't help," said the bearded medic, bridling somewhat. "The case is quite hopeless."

"Psychiatrist hell," growled the man, his face growing red with excitement. "Hello," he bellowed hoarsely into the phone. "Yeah, it's me. How're y'all. Been a while, I know. Hey, honey lips, you know that box of cubans you told me way back you were savin' for a special occasion..."