One take on Obama’s antagonism to BP: Obama dislikes Britain and the British. Dreams From My Father was an exercise in Anglo-phobia: none of the accusations therein have been substantiated yet they colour his diplomacy. His immediate return of the Churchill bust that sat in the Oval Office was a slight but subtle statement of intent. Obama deals with British politicians contemptuously. No matter how absurd, foreign politicians deserve respect on the international stage: having Gordon Brown chase around after him was as callous as it was hilarious. In the case of BP, contempt has become hectoring. Initiating a criminal investigation denotes Obama’s political impotence, vanity and arrogance. His divisive conduct offends the dignity of his office, but it also shows a complete disregard for the globalised world in favour of narrow political interest. BP should fight back, both for its British and American shareholders and employees - the leader of the free world has other things on his mind.
Via InstaPundit.
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
President Obama's prejudice
The Alien in the White House
Insightful article from the Wall Street Journal, that captures what many I know feel: It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.
It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Republicans Abroad Radio
Expats living abroad have usually relied on the regular media to provide them with information of what happens back home. This "regular" media is usually slanted, and has failed to report the news in an unbiased and neutral way. Fortunately, the Internet is the new competition. As Rush Limbaugh says, "there is competition from other venues, such as Internet and satellite broadcasting. It is not an exaggeration to say that today, more than ever, anyone with a microphone and a computer can broadcast their views."
Check out Republicans Abroad Radio for their weekly broadcasts with interesting guests who provide the latest information regarding what's going on in the US.
Conservative resources...
Here's a list of radio programs that one can listen to and get information that does not appear in the mainstream media: Conservative radio.
The radicalization of Islam.
From Mark Steyn:Among the growing population of Yorkshire Pakistanis is a fellow called Lord Ahmed, a Muslim member of Parliament. He threatened "to bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the House of Lords" if it went ahead with an event at which the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders would have introduced a screening of his controversial film "Fitna."
Read it all.
Britain's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, reacted to this by declaring Wilders persona non grata and having him arrested and returned to the Netherlands.
Smith is best known for an inspired change of terminology: last year she announced that henceforth Muslim terrorism (an unhelpful phrase) would be reclassified as "anti-Islamic activity." Seriously. The logic being that Muslims blowing stuff up tends not to do much for Islam's reputation – i.e., it's an "anti-Islamic activity" in the same sense that Pearl Harbor was an anti-Japanese activity.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Regarding more government regulation...
Walter Williams explains the financial crisis:The blame for our current financial mess rests with government, with the major player being the Federal Reserve Board keeping interest rates artificially low and the congressional and White House market interference in the name of more home ownership. In the clamor for more regulation over our financial institutions, has anybody bothered to ask whether people in government know what they're doing?
President Obama's emancipation.
Charles Krauthammer:Obama's unapologetic celebration of Washington and the Founders of the original imperfect union was a declaration of his own emancipation from -- or better, transcendence of -- the civil rights movement. The old warrior Joseph Lowery prayed for the day when "white will embrace what is right." Not Obama. By connecting himself in this historic address to Washington rather than Lincoln the liberator, Obama was legitimizing the full sweep of American history without annotation or mental reservation. If we ever have a post-racial future, this moment will mark its beginning.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The National Prayer Service sermon to President Obama and Vice President Biden.
Excerpt:Mr. President and Mrs. Obama, Mr. Vice President and Dr. Biden, and your families, what an inaugural celebration you have hosted! Train ride, opening concert, service to neighbor, dancing till dawn . . .
And yesterday . . . With your inauguration, Mr. President, the flame of America’s promise burns just a little brighter for every child of this land!
There is still a lot of work to do, and today the nation turns its full attention to that work. As we do, it is good that we pause to take a deep spiritual breath. It is good that we center for a moment.
What you are entering now, Mr. President and Mr. Vice President, will tend to draw you away from your ethical center. But we, the nation that you serve, need you to hold the ground of your deepest values, of our deepest values.
Beyond this moment of high hopes, we need you to stay focused on our shared hopes, so that we can continue to hope, too.
We will follow your lead.
There is a story attributed to Cherokee wisdom:
One evening a grandfather was teaching his young grandson about the internal battle that each person faces.
“There are two wolves struggling inside each of us,” the old man said.
“One wolf is vengefulness, anger, resentment, self-pity, fear . . .
“The other wolf is compassion, faithfulness, hope, truth, love . . .”
The grandson sat, thinking, then asked: “Which wolf wins, Grandfather?”
His grandfather replied, “The one you feed.”
There are crises banging on the door right now, pawing at us, trying to draw us off our ethical center—crises that tempt us to feed the wolf of vengefulness and fear.
We need you, Mr. President, to hold your ground. We need you, leaders of this nation, to stay centered on the values that have guided us in the past; values that empowered to move us through the perils of earlier times and can guide us now into a future of renewed promise.
We need you to feed the good wolf within you, to listen to the better angels of your nature, and by your example encourage us to do the same.
...and most of all, he was our President...
TIME Magazine photographers reflect on having photographed President Bush for 8 years.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Tigerhawk says:
"In a just world, who should be the better known parent of an American soldier killed in action: Bush-bashing surrender activist Cindy Sheehan, to whom Maureen Dowd famously ascribed "absolute moral authority," or Dr. Bill Krissoff, who at the age of 60 gave up a lucrative medical practice to join the Navy in honor of his son, a United States Marine who died in Iraq?"
So true.
I got a phone call from somebody I knew [in Iraq] who personally survived an I.E.D. attack on one of these vehicles:
Former Navy S.E.A.L. Christopher Berman built a better armored vehicle to help prevent the tragedy that befell his friend, Scott Helvenston, whose car was ambushed by insurgents in Fallujah in 2004. Helvenston’s body was defiled and hung from a bridge.
Hero of the Hudson.
"That guy is one cool customer," said a police source. "He was a rock star. He had saved everybody and was behaving like it was just another day at the office."
Check out the video Gateway Pundit has that shows the plane landing in the water and the ensuing rescue.
Tags: Hudson miracle disasters Chesley Sullenberger III
Friday, December 19, 2008
Yes, shoes were thrown at President Bush.
Some in the West have seen it as a joke. Yet, that vulgar, despicable action, is a result of a deeper pathology. Dr. Sabah Salih, explains:There has always been a coarse side to Iraqi culture, made much coarser by decades of tyranny under Saddam. Saddam essentially erased the life of the mind. Under his watch, public language was transformed into a gruesome instrument for demeaning and demonizing all opponents. Overtime, that language became as brutal and as vulgar as the regime’s other means and methods. Argument, persuasion, debate, and respect for words were replaced with denunciations, crude name-calling, wild accusations, and bombastic statements. Language use became like combat: the enemy was to be subjected to a ferocious linguistic attack until he would be left speechless. Next came the more gruesome part: the person’s head would be shaven, part of his ears would be cut off, in some cases part of the tongue as well; the poor fellow would then be paraded in public, kicked and spat at repeatedly.
This pattern was repeated in less gruesome forms at virtually every level—the workplace, the school, the university, the neighborhood, the security checkpoint, because everyone with a little power felt entitled to act and talk like the dictator himself. A hapless kid in class would be kicked, called a dog, donkey, or monkey amid the roaring laughter of his classmates. A citizen, without political connections, visiting a government office, would be rudely asked to wait outside or come back another day without being offered an explanation.
.....
My point is that, in various forms, what was done to Bush has been done to the Iraqi people a million times over; it continues to be done. It was done to me by my parents when I was too little to fend for myself, later by some of my teachers, in particular, my foul-mouthed, stick-wielding English teacher; and when I became a teacher myself I felt the position gave me the right to be as mean and as cruel as I wanted to be towards my student. Meanness and cruelty, I was told by colleagues, would translate into respect. Sadly, they were right. At home, I felt my male gender gave me the right to treat my little sisters in the same way. This social disease was the norm.
Iraqis can smell a Saddam loyalist a mile away, even as in this case the employer is a Cairo-based television station funded by the late dictator’s former henchmen. This hooligan, Muntadar al-Zaidi, tries to portray himself as the champion of the oppressed, but most Iraqis hear a familiar tune in his words, one, amazingly, much of the western media either can’t or doesn’t want to hear: it is the language of victimhood, liberation, and anti-colonialism in whose name Saddam justified his decades-long occupation of Iraq and turned genocide and village burning and mass graves into acts of heroism.
Try for a second to imagine this shoe-throwing hooligan as a father, husband, brother, neighbor, school teacher, policeman, judge: I don’t think the general pattern of his behavior and thinking would be any different, because his ugly deed pretty much defines his character; it also defines the milieu that cheers him. Regrettably, the social disease that gave us Saddam and his crudeness and cruelty continues to infect much of the Arab world.
If it is such hooliganism that gives the noisy part of Arab and Islamic political culture reason to feel good about itself, then another century will have to pass before shoe-throwing gives way to language as a means of debate, questioning, and understanding.
Thanks to Gateway Pundit.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
A C-17 Globemaster III from the 14th Airlift Squadron, Charleston Air Force Base, S.C., leaves a smoke trail after releasing flares over the Atlantic Ocean during a local exercise above the Charleston area, May 16, 2006. The vortex from the Globemaster engine created the image of a "smoke angel" in the sky. U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Russell E. Cooley IVAce of Spades has an awesome collection of the latest military artifacts and weaponry.
Amazing description of an incredible battle...
that was fought for nearly seven hours last April, on an Afghan mountainside. 12-man Special Forces team and some Afghan commandos killed an estimated 150 to 200 insurgents. Read it here.
Hot housewives in action and Chinese characters.
Ann Althouse: "Like those idiots with their tattoos, the Max Planck Institute was seduced by the allure of Chinese characters"...
On the anti-kidnapping "expert" who became a kidnap victim himself...
Gateway Pundit reports :Mr. Batista, who was frequently quoted in media stories about kidnapping, ignored the State Department's Mexico travel alert. In Mexico organized-crime killings soared to 5,376 in 2008, more than double the 2,477 deaths in Mexico in 2007. Somebody probably should have told Felix that Mexico is more dangerous than Iraq.
Rush Limbaugh's answer to Colin Powell.
Interesting description of Washingtonians in Rush Limbaugh's reply to Colin Powell's comments that the Republican Party should not listen to Rush:What's going on here with this Colin Powell thing is that the Washington establishment -- Powell's not a Republican. McCain's not a Republican. These guys are not even mavericks. They are Washingtonians. Washingtonians have their own culture and their own desires, and it is to matter. They don't care who's in power, they just want to be closely associated with whoever is. That's the name of the game and they want press adulation. They want to be loved and adored by the media, they want fawning treatment, they want to be thought of as something special, unique, dignified and so forth, and that's the Washington establishment. These guys are Washingtonians. And what is a Washingtonian? Who are these people? Ladies and gentlemen, they have driven this economy into the toilet. Washingtonians are tone deaf in terms of how you and I actually live and the things that matter and are important to us. Washingtonians are grabbing as much power for themselves right now as possible. Washington does not live in the rest of the country, does not live in the same world we do. What they're doing now is looking for ways to silence opposition. They don't care about the timid ineffective opposition. They like Republicans and conservatives who are ashamed of their views and their fellow citizens. What they want to do is silence people like me because they can't abide debate or opposition or challenges to their status and their authority.
So General Powell, let me explain something. The fact is Republicans did not listen to me. They listened to you. They have not been listening to me for years. The Republican Party nominated your ideal candidate. They nominated your guy, a moderate, who's willing to buy into an endless array of liberal causes, from global warming -- there's an AP story out today that says we are cooling this year, and by the way, record lows in Denver, we have record lows in Montana. We actually have a story on global warming from the AP today, and in the last couple paragraphs it says -- Rachel, you'll love this, because I know you think Algore is a genius -- it says here that this cooling perfectly illustrates how the world is warming. Folks, we got more problems than you can possibly imagine. That's just lunacy. That is just insanity. And that's modern journalism. We're freezing our butts off. We have our fifth cold front that went through here, and we normally haven't had the first one yet. Five cold fronts! Cold for us, but I mean look it, weather is weather. Record lows in Denver. And all of this freezing cold points out how the world is so rapidly warming, it perfectly illustrates it, the guy says.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
...why voters were so hot for this hope’n’change mush...
Mark Steyn suggeststhat it’s the dominant vernacular of the age. Go into almost any American grade-school and stroll the corridors: you’ll find the walls lined with Sharpie-bright supersized touchy-feely abstractions: “RESPECT,” “DREAM,” “TOGETHER,” “DIVERSITY.”
Obama's post-racial promise.
Shelby Steele's opinion:In running for the presidency -- and presenting himself to a majority white nation -- Obama knew intuitively that he was dealing with a stigmatized people. He knew whites were stigmatized as being prejudiced, and that they hated this situation and literally longed for ways to disprove the stigma.
***
Obama's post-racial idealism told whites the one thing they most wanted to hear: America had essentially contained the evil of racism to the point at which it was no longer a serious barrier to black advancement.
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