So The Kneepad Media Has A Pass On #Syria. Will It Grow Real Curiosity?

by Smitty

Fareed Zakaria is miffed:

. . .it’s hard not to conclude that the administration’s handling of Syria over the last year has been a case study in how not to do foreign policy.

But will the media grow some stones and note that Obama’s foreign policy is roughly as jacked up as his domestic rodeo clownery?
Joe Curl notes at the Washington Times:

Whatever happens, this much is clear: We’re no longer talking about the IRS targeting tea party groups, the Justice Department tapping reporters’ phone lines, the NSA’s surveillance programs, Benghazi. The president has smartly changed the subject to the most important decision a commander in chief makes: war.

Syria looks like a twofer:

  1. #OccupyResoluteDesk can control the news cycle, and
  2. the media can pause its standard hoovering and feign doing its traditional job on a narrow topic,

all the while accidentally-on-purpose diverting from

or half a dozen other scandals like Pigford and the EPA.

If this President was anything other than a continuous river of falsehood, I might begin to feel embarrassed by my cynical attitude and unwillingness to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. But this is the time to double down, not ease up.

via Instapundit and Newsbusters

President Punchline: Are Obama’s Top Advisors Late-Night TV Joke Writers?

“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

Could he possibly look more ineffective if he tried? A year ago, after the Syrian civil war had already been going on for about 14 months, Obama declared that the Assad regime would cross a “red line” if it used chemical weapons against the opposition. By the end of April this year, there was already pretty clear evidence that chemical weapons had been used; in June, U.S. officials said chemical weapons had been used, and by early August, the Syrian opposition supplied video that appeared to confirm a chemical weapons attack.

And . . . nothing.

Nothing but a lot of noise and indecisive hand-wringing.

Let me be clear: I’m against U.S. intervention in Syria. As bad as Assad is, there are indications that the opposition is not much better.

If the U.S. had intervened early, maybe there could have been a chance of bringing to power a more-or-less secular, more-or-less pro-American coalition in Syria.

Now? The place is reportedly crawling with 10,000 foreign jihadis, key groups within the opposition have clear ties to al-Qaeda, and there’s little reason to expect that Assad’s ouster will do anything but turn Syria into a dangerously violent radical Islamic terror state. It’s a bad situation, and American intervention would probably only make it worse.

Still, the worst possible thing you can do in either  foreign policy or poker is to be exposed as a bluffer, and right now Obama’s looking like that idiot who raised pre-flop with a pair of 7’s.

Never threaten war if you’re not ready to fight, and once the British Parliament voted against attacking Syria, Obama was stuck with his pair of 7’s. OK, so he reverted to campaign mode: Says he’s going to wait for congressional authorization — which he knows damned well he won’t get — after which he will then blame Republicans as “obstructionists,” even though Democrats don’t want this war, either.

He’s a great bullshit artist, but he has never been anything more.

John Kerry will do all five Sunday shows. Kerry is not even an adequate bullshit artist. This should be amusing.

 

Any #ManBearPig Sightings In Peru?

by Smitty

The Government of Peru has declared a state of emergency in parts of the southern Andean region of Puno after temperatures have plummeted to the coldest they have been in a decade. President Ollanta Humala announced emergency states in seven separate Puno provinces: Carabay, Sandia, Lampa, San Antonio de Putina, Melgar, Puno and El Collao.
Not only have hundreds of families been affected, but more than 250,000 alpacas have died due to the freezing temperatures.

Is Obama Pivoting From Jobs To Syria To ObamaCare Like A Rodeo Clown Ballerina?

by Smitty

The only way to make this any worse would be to give it full animation and “Dancing Queen”, by ABBA, for a soundtrack.

I guess if Syria isn’t proving enough of a distraction, or the IRS scandal, or the Benghazi scandal, then #OccupyResoluteDesk is just going to have to hit the road and whack the people with his rhetorical bludgeon to keep them from noticing the debt ceiling negotiations (emphasis mine):

The White House is mapping out a strategy to deploy the president, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Jill Biden in what will be their most coordinated effort yet to sell Obamacare, senior administration officials said.
A burst of activity will coincide with the October opening of the insurance marketplaces, but the West Wing views this next phase as something more akin to a political campaign’s push for early votes. Over the six-month enrollment period, the White House will use the Obamas and Bidens strategically, tracking the turnout for the exchanges in key states and sending them into weak markets to boost numbers.

This promises to be rich. I can’t wait to see the Potemkin villages, with their Potemkin marketplaces, on this Potemkin tour.
Then there is a question over whether there is enough hush money for the unions:

A few weeks ago, I discussed the fact that labor unions have been increasing vocal about their objections to certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare will “shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class,” wrote three labor leaders in July. Now, according to a report from InsideHealthPolicy, the Obama administration is considering offering insurance subsidies—intended for the uninsured—to labor union members who already have employer-sponsored coverage.
…
Now, according to Rachana Dixit of InsideHealthPolicy, the administration is “working on regulations to address the issue” that people covered under Taft-Hartley plans aren’t eligible for subsidies. But it’s not an “issue” in the sense of being a glitch or a mistake; union leaders are seeking special treatment, and additional taxpayer subsidies, that other participants in employer-sponsored coverage don’t get.

Assad aside: let no one think the U.S. would be so crass as to undertake unilateral action:

The United States can always look to Bulungi for support.

via Rare
and Rare
and Breitbart

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Ready to Make Feeble Unilateral Gesture Against Syria

The British Parliament voted against war, but now that the oceans stopped rising and the planet has begun to heal and Obama has “restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth” — what, you didn’t notice? — President Gutsy Call has decided that go-it-alone foreign policy and military intervention without congressional authorization are the humane and democratic thing to do:

The goal of the cruise missile strikes the United States is planning to carry out in Syria is to restore the smudged “red line” that President Obama drew a year ago against the use of poison gas. . . .
But the military strategy that the Obama administration is considering is not linked to its larger diplomatic strategy of persuading President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to yield power and support negotiations that would end the bloody civil war. . . .
Mr. Obama appeared to acknowledge as much on Wednesday when he characterized the potential military operation as “a shot across the bow” that would be intended to caution Mr. Assad from further chemical weapons attacks. “That doesn’t solve all the problems inside of Syria,” Mr. Obama told the PBS program “NewsHour,” “and, you know, it doesn’t obviously end the death of innocent civilians inside of Syria.”

A mere gesture — a politically motivated gesture rejected by our allies, a gesture that won’t actually achieve any tangible policy goal, except to remind our nation’s enemies that when Obama talks tough, they can disregard anything he says and suffer no consequence more severe than a token symbolic response and an angry speech or two.

 

Will Syria Be #OccupyResoluteDesk’s Resignation Letter?

by Smitty

Stacy hates this sort of noise, but I’ll throw it out there, because I think it’s plausible.

  1. BHO is a narcissist.
  2. BHO has an awful lot of issues/scandals set to go lively after Labor Day:
    • Benghazi
    • IRS
    • Debt ceiling increase
    • Immigration
    • Continuing resolution in general–
    • ObamaCare in particular
  3. BHO is to the Presidency what Wally is to the Dilbert comic strip, hold the laughs.
  4. Leaders such as Coburn and Boehner have already laid down markers saying “Don’t do it” concerning Syria.
  5. This is of such concern that no less than David “the Greasy One” Axelrod himself got on the air to denounce Coburn.

Prediction: citing high-minded concerns about “the children”, #OccupyResoluteDesk gives the orders to bomb Syria.
This triggers a Constitutional crisis so severe that the anti-War movement, dormant since Bush’s last wave goodbye, is roused. It unites with the Tea Partiers and everyone else sick to death of our Rodeo Clown foreign policy, and the House votes to impeach.
Before Harry “the Cadaver” Reid can be roused from his quasi-comatose stupor, #OccupyResoluteDesk grabs the camer for one last, personal-pronoun-drenched, racial dog-whistle soundtracked, interminable, strawman-army-decimating soliloquy that says, in summary, that neither the American people nor this Constitutionally-obsessed Congress are worthy of the power of his glow.
And that’s how he maintains his streak of never dealing with the responsibilities of his office in any intelligible way.

Hmm. @JamesTaranto Mildly Disagrees With @AnnAlthouse? Let Me Try That.

OK, so a Puerto Rican guy kidnapped and raped girls in Cleveland and everybody reported about that case, and not once do I remember anyone arguing that Ariel Castro’s crimes, or the reporting about his crimes, had any specifically racial context. Everybody was just horrified by it, and nobody said either (a) that Puerto Rican guys are particularly prone to chaining up kidnapped girls in their rape dungeons, or (b) that reporting about Ariel Castro was motivated by deliberate racist fearmongering to demonize Puerto Ricans.

Why, then, is there some kind of score-keeping about crime involving blacks and whites? Why can’t we all just get along — and worry about those crazy Puerto Rican rapist kidnappers?

Also, dildo-wielding lesbian cheerleaders, but I digress . . .

Brian Beutler’s shoddy assertion that he knows the Secret Motives of those who have reported about black-on-white crime — and these are, of course, evil racist right-wing motives — mistakes the reaction for the action. That is to say, if there is some kind of backlash going on here, to what is it a backlash, and is it justified? And if Beutler would care to explain why the original action (i.e., relentless wall-to-wall media coverage of the Trayvon Martin case) was justified, he’ll find himself hard-pressed to refute those who argue that a reaction is equally justified, if not more so, by quite similar arguments. This is not an argument about race. It’s an argument about media bias.

The correct conservative argument is that liberal media hyped up and deliberately distorted the Trayvon Martin case because it was an election year and an apparently juicy story about racism and gun control was a nice way to exploit black grievances against whitey. Let’s be honest: If you’re a black person who thinks The Man is keepin’ you down, you’re not going to vote for Mitt Romney, and so Trayvon Martin became a Democrat Party voter-turnout poster child.

There, I said it: This was just Democrats playing ugly partisan politics.

Democrats have never recognized any standard of decorum, civility, decency or honesty in political rhetoric, and the fact that they would exploit a shooting in Florida this way surprises no one who has paid attention to American politics.  (Fact: In 1916, Woodrow Wilson’s re-election slogan was, “He Kept Us Out of War”; less than a year after he was re-elected, America went to war.)

Democrats are just goddamned liars. The fact that one of their more politically useful falsehoods nowadays is telling black people that their problems are caused by white racism should not require us to treat that lie any more seriously than we do any other Democrat lie.

When Democrats say we need “a conversation on race,” what they really mean is they want to have a monologue, a tedious lecture about all the evils perpetrated against black people by those evil racist Republicans. Your part of the “conversation” is, shut up.

All of this was motivated by James Taranto’s defense of colorblindness, including a strategic disagreement with Ann Althouse:

Counter-Trayvonism, according to Althouse, refers to efforts “to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case” by “looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white . . . to undo the distortions.”
She thinks this is a terrible mistake . . .

Althouse’s argument includes the assertion that reporting about black crime “gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.”

Whoa! Hold on there, Professor: Are you saying you know such people? Have you reported these dangerous haters to the Department of Homeland Security? Oh, wait, never mind . . .

Here’s Professor Althouse’s headline: “The conservatives’ high ground on race is colorblindness, and they’d be fools to abandon it.”

And who can argue with that?

Yet the fact remains that Democrats mopped the floor with the GOP last year by exploiting all manner of transparently false appeals (“War on Women,” anybody?) aimed at special-interest groups that compose the Democrat constituency. Because the liberal media enthusiastically promote the Democrat Party’s agitprop campaigns, however, it is very difficult to persuade the targets of such appeals that these partisan lies are not simply “the news.”

For crying out loud, no Republican could get elected in the South for an entire century because Democrats had folks convinced that voting Republican would be a disgrace to the Heroic Cause of the Glorious Dead. (BTW, “Confederate” is the new talking point.)

Go ask any Democrat voter — black, white, male, female, whatever — why they voted to re-elect Obama. And good luck getting any rational explanation of how voting Democrat has actually made life better for themselves or their community.

(Has anybody heard from Peggy Joseph lately?)

It is an undeniable fact of American political life that any precinct that votes overwhelmingly Democrat is typically composed of either (a) affluent white elites, or (b) the most wretchedly poor minority populations in the nation. Somebody’s getting screwed over in that deal, and I’m pretty sure it ain’t the rich white folks.

Whatever your problem is, “vote Democrat” is never the solution.

If you suffer from such low self-esteem that it makes you feel better to have a bunch of rich white liberals throw a year-round pity party for you, you’re going to get just about as much actual help as you deserve, which is to say, none at all.

So I’ll leave Professor Althouse to worry about whether those white supremacists are getting “air” from the daily news. Instead I’m going to focus on the goddamned Democrats and their hired liars in the media who have never said an honest word in their lives.