| « | October 2011 | » | ||||
 |
||||||
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||
…I'm not at all sorry about the demise of Muammar Qaddafi—who definitely got what was coming. I just wonder why the United States should have bothered to support his overthrow in favor of a radical Islamist regime? "From bad to worse" seems to be the core principle of US foreign policy in the Age of Barry.
Democracy, Obama style, comes to liberated Libya: “Libya's interim leader outlined more radical plans to introduce Islamic law than expected as he declared the official liberation of the country.”
These “radical plans” include the legalization of polygamy. But feminists need not get too upset: Libyan men are restricted to no more than four wives. And (in a nod to Occupy Wall Street?) Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, Libya’s interim president, has announced that banks will no longer be permitted to loan money at interest. "Interest creates disease and hatred among people," he explained.
Sounds like the new, improved Libya is off to a flying start!
Somehow I missed this story when it came out in 2010. But yesterday, while searching for more information about Wife & Mother of the Year Stacey Hessler (see below), I stumbled across Courtney Cook’s “How to Leave a Soldier.” With no apparent sense of shame, she permitted Salon to publish this truly horrific document, the opening paragraphs of which give you the flavor of the whole:
You’d be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can’t argue with you. He doesn’t have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, “This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it,” it’s that much easier. The letter won’t even come as a shock.
And if you have children with that soldier? You can handle all that with a letter, too. He’ll write it—because he cares about the kids, because he wants to work with you to do what’s best for them even though you’re leaving him—and you’ll give it to them. Here again, you will avoid a nasty confrontation. Who will they cry to? You? You’re just the teary-eyed bearer of the letter. Him? The one who’s sweating it out in the desert?
There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn’t care who gets the couch.
The cruelty necessary to commit such an act of betrayal is probably not so rare in today’s self-esteem-focused culture. And for sure, Ms. Cook has no doubt that it’s all about her:
Then came 9/11. My husband [a reservist at the time], like so many others, saw the attacks as a call to action. He went back on active duty and volunteered for a tour in Egypt. Our children were old enough to miss their father now. I put a calendar up in the kitchen so we could check off the days, took them both for cupcakes to cheer them up as we walked home from kindergarten. A part of me was proud of how brave we were all being. The other part was weary with being brave. I took a job at an independent bookstore and started spending time with the young, funny, book-reading guys I met there. When John came back things were awkward. I couldn’t stop myself from being angry, couldn’t help feeling abandoned.
Oh, my goodness—poor Courtney! I suppose she would have been mightily offended if her soldier husband had exhibited anger and feelings of abandonment when she dumped him via letter while he was on deployment. Fortunately for their children, however, he exhibited the kind of class that’s foreign to his ex-wife’s world view.
Incidentally, Cook didn’t stay single for long:
I am married to a lithe, blue-eyed Marxist whose dissertation was on U.S. imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a man who participated in war protests in Santa Cruz, Calif., during the winter I lived at Fort Knox. He has two children of his own — bright, intense redheads, close in age to mine. I live with him in a tiny apartment in Manhattan, and when we can, we commute together to work. On weekends if we are not at a museum or movie together, we are at home right up next to each other.
A “lithe blue-eyed Marxist!” Let us hope that differing interpretations of dialectical materialism do not culminate in a marital crisis.
But I'm happy to report that in the end cosmic justice took a hand, frustrating Courtney Cook’s attempt to leave her past behind:
Last July my son, the baby that was born to television coverage of Operation Desert Storm, said goodbye to his high school friends, shaved his head and enrolled in the United States Naval Academy. I am deeply proud of him, but it was my ex-husband who stood with my son on Induction Day. I could not bear to be there, could not watch the child of my body step away from the safe, civilian world I’d tried to so desperately to create for myself and him.
Actually Courtney, it’s people like your ex-husband, your son, my daughter and—come to think of it—me who maintain that “safe, civilian world” of yours. So you’re welcome.
So yesterday morning I was watching the news and along came this story about a Florida woman who abandoned her family and traveled to New York for the Occupy Wall Street protest. Stacey Hessler has been camping out in Zuccotti Park for two weeks now, during which time she’s managed to speak by phone with her husband and four children just three times. Not to worry, though! Friends in Florida are taking care of the kids. And Ms. Hessler is staying warm at night with the help of one Rami Shamir, a 30-year-old radical who works as a waiter at a French bistro when he’s not busy scheming the overthrow of the system.
So far, so boringly typical of the OWS mob. But then Hessler added this cherry to the hot fudge sundae of her goofed-up life: She compared her abandonment of her family to service in the armed forces. “Military people leave their families all the time, so why should I feel bad?” Hessler said. “I’m fighting for a better world.”
My daughter, a serving soldier on leave after a year in Afghanistan, happened to be sitting with me when Hessler tried this one on with the TV audience. We agreed that except for the IEDs, the suicide bombers, the snipers, the rabid dogs, the flies, the dust and the lack of cold beer, service in Afghanistan is very much like camping out under a tarpaulin in Zuccotti Park…
…you’re liable to get your fingers burned. Barack Obama and the Democrats should have recalled that tidbit of folk wisdom before they started fawning all over the Occupy Wall Street mob. For this is the result:
After the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent a recent email urging supporters to sign a petition backing the wave of Occupy Wall Street protests, phones at the party committee started ringing.
Banking executives personally called the offices of DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and DCCC Finance Chairman Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) last week demanding answers, three financial services lobbyists told POLITICO.
“They were livid,” said one Democratic lobbyist with banking clients.
The execs asked the lawmakers: “What are you doing? Do you even understand some of the things that they’ve called for?” said another lobbyist with financial services clients who is a former Democratic Senate aide.
Democrats’ friends on Wall Street have a message for them: you can’t have it both ways.
“You can’t have it both ways.” Something tells me that’s going to be a tough sell to Mr. Wonderful…excuse me, President Obama…for whom having it both ways is both a political principle and a lifestyle choice.
If this story is true—as it appears to be—the world has seen the last of one of its most repulsive tyrants. Muammar Qaddafi’s dictatorial sojourn began in 1969 when as a young army officer he engineered the coup that toppled the Libyan monarchy, emerging as Libya’s undisputed strongman. Colonel Qaddafi (as with false modesty he was pleased to style himself) not only oppressed his own people but lent support to terrorist groups around the world, from the PLO to the IRA. Among his many crimes was the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people including many Americans.
Despite his blood-handed record, in the final period of his rule Qaddafi proved adept at managing relations with Europe and the United States. In 2003, his government admitted responsibility (though not guilt—go figure) for the Lockerbie bombing and agreed to pay compensation to the families of the victims. Qaddafi further curried favor with the US by agreeing to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction programs and cooperate with the CIA in the pursuit of 9/11 terrorists. In short order, he became the beneficiary of Western largesse. The US lifted economic sanctions on Libya and reestablished diplomatic relations with the Qaddafi regime. He was feted in Brussels by the European Union. Disgracefully, then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Prime Minister Tony Blair kowtowed to the Libyan tyrant during visits to Tripoli.
This degenerate thug with his lunatic outfits, his incoherent rants and his eccentric brutality will not be missed. But it’s a shame—and a telling commentary—that the so-called world community tolerated Colonel Muammar Qaddafi for so long.
PFC Gregg arrived in Chicago late Monday night. We met her at Midway Airport and brought her home to Granger. After a couple of weeks in Florida/Arizona/Las Vegas, you'd think she'd be ready for some downtime. But no: Lexi and her mother abandoned me yesterday afternoon for an overnight casino trip. But I'm not complaining. It's great to have my girls together again, albeit for a matter of days. And who knows? Maybe this time they'll win big!
You don’t need the political second sight of a Machiavelli or a Karl Rove to perceive that Barack Obama has decided to play the populist card in his increasingly challenging quest for reelection. “Millionaires and billionaires,” “Wall Street,” “Pass this bill right now”—the script is coming together before our eyes.
And it’s a mistake to think that a product of elite privilege can’t pose as a populist. FDR—no horny-handed son of toil he—turned that trick quite effectively with his condemnations of Wall Street’s “economic royalists.” But Roosevelt, though in reality a cold man, was adept at projecting an aura of bland geniality—leading Oliver Wendell Holmes, no less, to remark that FDR possessed “a first-class temperament.”
Three years into his presidency, no one could make a remark like that about Barack Obama. It makes for funny yet sad reading to revisit Christopher Buckley’s 2008 column in the Daily Beast, wherein he threw John McCain under the bus and endorsed the Messiah:
“[H]aving a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.… Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.
Wince! Seldom has the proposition that a high IQ does not necessarily imply good political judgment been so resoundingly validated.
So can Barry fake his way through a populist campaign without looking as phony as, well, John Edwards? Nah. With his palpable sense of entitlement, his thin skin and his perfect trouser creases, Barack H. Obama possesses all the populist appeal of a corporate jet.
Here it is:
That’s Che Guevara, in case you didn’t know, and according to one eyewitness, his face is all over the place at the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Writing for the New York Post, Charles Gasparino tells what he saw during a visit to the protest site:
It’s not an overstatement to describe Zuccotti Park as New York’s Marxist epicenter. Flags with the iconic face of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara are everywhere; the only American flag I saw was hanging upside down. The “occupiers” openly refer to each other as “comrade,” and just about every piece of literature on offer (free or for sale) advocated socialism in the Marxist tradition as a cure-all for the inequalities of the American economic system.
Glancing across the room, I see on my bookshelves half a dozen volumes that document Marxism’s horrific real-world consequences: the arrests and purges, the torture, the executions, the Gulag—the bloody reign of terror in which Che Guevara gloried. And to judge from Che’s continuing popularity among our own aspiring Bolsheviks, there’d be no lack of volunteers for the wet work necessary to purge American society of “harmful elements” like corporate CEOs, bankers, hedge fund managers and business owners. Their hero, Che, came to enjoy enemies of the people before Cuba’s revolutionary firing squads. No doubt they’d develop a taste for it as well.
I just watched Herman’s Cain’s Sunday appearance on Meet the Press. In this interview, conducted by David Gregory, Cain delivered a solid performance. I was once more impressed by his unflappability. Cain fields tough questions with good humor and defends his ground without rancor. If he thought that any of Gregory’s questions were snarky or unfair, he didn’t let on.
The entire interview can be viewed here, and I strongly advise you to check it out.
Make no mistake about it: Herman Cain is a serious candidate with a real shot at the GOP nomination. He many not have the money, organization or campaign experience that Mitt Romney commands, but Cain connects with voters. Unlike Barack Obama, Herman Cain possesses a first-class temperament. That could take him a long way.
