Last week – voters toss a carbon-taxing, border-opening, “War on Womyn”-pimping government in Australia, ushering in a conservative government. 

And in Norway – yes, Norway – a center-right coalition toppled the socialists. 

I know – “conservative” is relative around the world.  There was a time when the conventional wisdom was that European “conservatives” were like American Democrats. 

That was before American Democrats became the extremist party, of course.

If, as Keith Ellison and Betty McCollum wish, the Obama Administration drags us to war in Syria, the big victims will likely be the nation’s Alawites (Assad is an ethnic Alawite) and the nation’s beleaguered Christian minority.

Why do Betty “Blood and Guts” McCollum and Keith Ellison hate Christians and Alawites?

 Last night, I caught a bit of Hugh Hewitt.  His line is that we need to start convincing Congress to support some sort of action in Syria.  Not so much to “support the President”, but to support some sort of decisive action against Syria. 

Hugh’s a smart guy, and a great friend of mine and of the NARN broadcast.

But he’s wrong on this one.  So are all the Republicans who are getting rolled into supporting this idea – Boehner, Cantor, McCain. 

Hugh’s point is that we can’t stand by and watch children getting murdered, especially the ghastly murders we saw on YouTube last month.   There’s scarcely a person among us, especially parents, who didn’t see that video and want to load up the B52s and go all Jack Bauer on the perps.

Whoever they were.

The Motives: We’re assured it was Assad – by the same intelligence services that have been covering the President’s butt for the last year in re Benghai, and that have a worse record than the Macalester football team.  Others aren’t so sure it was Assad. 

I’m sure not.  Think about it.  Assad was slowly but surely winning his war against the rebels; by most accounts, the rebels’ tide peaked last year, and has been ebbing.  Armed by his Russian and Iranian benefactors, supported by the same parts of Syrian society that support the Mullahs’ in Iran – the not-so-photogenic rural crowd that doesn’t speak English as a second language and doesn’t make it onto NPR stories about life in Syria – Assad was slowly winning the war, block by bloody block.  It wasn’t pretty – but “bloody and ugly” can serve a dictator just as well as fast and surgical. 

There’s plenty of evidence that chemical weapons have been used many times in the Syrian Civil War, by both sides, in small, “surgical” attacks, away from the public eye. 

So with the war swinging his direction, what was, exactly, Assad’s motivation to launch a large, carpet-bombing raid with Sarin in Ain Tarma, Zamalka and Jobar – densely-populated rebel-controlled suburbs of Damascus?

Where all of the world’s media are,  ensuring the attack would receive (by police-state standards) saturation coverage?

Eggs For the Omelet:  Now, the Assad family has all kinds of blood on  its hands.  There’ve been countless massacres under the Assad family’s control of Syria.  One might surmise that all of them have been done at such a time and place and magnitude as to avoid drawing untoward Western scrutiny, since until the civil war started you probably had little to no idea of Syria’s human rights record.  Right?

And then, suddenly, 1,400 dead people, 400 of them children, killed right where all the cameras area. 

Assad isn’t above doing it – but what would be the point of bringing down the opprobium of the entire world just as the war is starting to swing his way?

But the extreme elements of the “rebels?”   Killing their own people has been a treasured part of the extremist playbook for centuries.  The French, Russian and Chinese revolutions are clogged with tales of extremists killing their own people, or allowing them to be killed, for propaganda purposes.  It serves several purposes; it’s grade A grist for the propaganda mill, and if you do it right,  you get rid of some of the “allies” that you’ll need to dispense with to solidify your own faction’s control (see Marat, the Mensheviks, Ernst Röhm).  All of them – especially the children – are eggs that regrettably must be broken to make the omelet. 

I think the case against the “rebels” makes a lot more sense than the one against Assad. 

Politics:Leaving aside the actual incident?  Obama is playing the GOP for fools.  And they’re obliging.

If it succeeds, of course, Obama – aided by his compliant Praetorian Guard in the media – will engineer a Caesarian triumph.  The NYTimes will proclaim that it’s Obama’s victory.    That’d happen whether he gets Congressional approval or, for that matter, if he’d disregarded Congress and charged in with guns blazing. 

By seeking Congressional approval – and going through the charade of being seen to “want” GOP buy-in – Obama is setting up the GOP up to take the blame when the action turns into a fiasco.  As it pretty likelly will – more below.   

This, as Obamacare spirals into full debacle mode, as the IRS and Benghazi and NSA and Fast and Furious scandals are begging for attention, and as the economic “recovery” starts to look more and more like a high-functioning coma. 

The Fiasco Within:  George Patton summed up the goal of war pretty well.  You kill the enemy as fast and as violently and as constantly as you can, so that the war ends as soon as possible, with victory.   You know your objective, and you kill whatever it takes to achieve it, because it’s in acheiving the objective that the war ends with as many of your people as possible alive.

And I picture Patton – or really any soldier worthy of the uniform – looking at Obama’s puling, PR-focus-grouped “plan”, replete with “sending messages” and “degrading capabilities” and “punishing the regime”, and puking his guts out with revulsion. 

You do not risk American lives to “send messages”.

You do not parlay American blood and treasure to rap a gangster thug across the knuckles and mess with his networks. 

You do either, or both, to win the war, provided that the war was worth fighting in the first place; that American security and interests were genuinely, tangibly threatened, in a war that makes and keeps this country safer. 

So why are we flirting with an action that could open a huge regional war – and blow up what’s left of our economy to boot?  What’s the objective that’s worth so much American blood and treasure?

Even our military has a hard time explaining.  And that’s a huge problem.

On the other hand, some of our greatest, most rational minds on the subject of military action – Victor Davis Hanson among ’em – can spell out the case against intervention in so many ways you’re tempted to say “enough with the overkill”. 

Wag The Boehner: This action is the tail wagging the dog.  I strongly suspect that it’s an epic deception – and whether it is or isn’t, it’s being manipulated by the Administration for political purposes, to give a war-weary public something else to hold against Republicans in 2014, just in time to give Obama control of the House. 

And John Boehner and Eric Cantor are aiding and abetting it. 

Are they doing it for all the right reasons – to avenge the dead children.  Who doesn’t want to keep the children safe?  Everyone!

Sure.  And so they’ll go down in history – having been brutally manipulated into a colossal mistake, for all the right reasons.

Brits have been fighing, and dying, alongside Americans in the Middle East for over 20 years now. 

But if you stand up Obama?  Time to bring in the bouncers:

British military chiefs are being ejected from US meetings about Syria in the first direct consequence of David Cameron’s refusal to join military action.

The role of senior British officers based at US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, has been downgraded because they cannot be trusted with high-level intelligence about a conflict with which they are no longer involved, military sources say.

Say what you will about the idea of the war itself. 

But this is further evidence that Obama isn’t just the worst president of my lifetime, but perhaps the dumbest.

The democratic and legislative process of our allies – sovereign nations all…:

So when Prime Minister David Cameron was unable to muster the votes in Parliament for support for a strike in Syria — even one limited to stopping the future use of chemical weapons — shock could be heard in the voices of senior White House officials who never saw the British rejection coming.

“Bungled by Cameron,” said one.

“Embarrassing,” said another. “For Cameron, and for us.”

Now Mr. Obama is left to cope with miscalculations on both sides of the Atlantic.

…are there for the mocking by our current pack of ruling fratboys.

Say what you will about Dubya. He spent like a lib, after all.

And say whatever you’d like about Iraq. Well-advised? Perhaps not, in retrospect.

But when we went to war with Iraq, we did it with 40 other nations and the UN.

For better or worse – and I think it’s largely “better” – I’ve tried to keep a high level of cultural literacy, not only about the US but around the world.  At most, I’m a jack of many cultural trades, and goodness knows a master of none, but I do try. 

One positive upshot is that I know – again, for better or worse – that different cultures see things differently than we do, sometimes for reasons that may baffle us, but that make perfect sense to them for reasons that, again, baffle us. 

Downside?  You find out that many foreigners are just as stupid as many Americans are.

Earlier this week Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player going to college in Oklahoma was murdered by a couple of teenagers; the teenagers were reputedly bored and looking for something to do, and murdering Lane apparently scratched that itch for them. 

And in a burst of non-sequitur worthy of Heather Martens or Jim Backstrom, Tim Fischer – a former Austrialian deputy Prime Minister and a prime mover in the disarmament of Australians during their spasm of gun control in the nineties – has urged a boycott of the US by Ozzy tourists:  

“Tourists thinking of going to the USA should think twice,” Fischer said.

“This is the bitter harvest and legacy of the policies of the NRA that even blocked background checks for people buying guns at gunshows.

Fischer is toking from the same bong that Jim Backstrom and Heather Martens are bogarting:

• While I’ve seen no information as to where the “youths” got the gun, I’m going to suspect that it was via a source that would not be subject to a background check in any state, or any country, anywhere in the world. 
• For that matter?  The shooters were all, every last one of them, minors.  None of them can legally own or carry a firearm.  The NRA is all about keeping guns away from people who legally must not.  And five’ll get you ten there’s at least one criminal record among the bunch.
• Take a look at the few policies that actually have had a positive effect on violent crime; the NICS database in the form it was enacted, sentence enhancements for using guns in crimes, and of course concealed carry.  All the ones that actually work were supported by the NRA.  Every. Single. One.

Fischer keeps dragging on the bong:

“I am deeply angry about this because of the callous attitude of the three teenagers (but) it’s a sign of the proliferation of guns on the ground in the USA,” Fischer continued.

“There is a gun for almost every American.”

And yet the crime rate plummets.

And yet the crime rate is lowest in the places with the most  guns in the hands of the law-abiding, and highest where that right is the most abridged.

Oh, make no mistake; there are parts of the US I don’t advocate Ozzy tourists coming to.  Places where the culture has been so degraded by the devaluation of family, of social institutions, and cultures that glorify violence and devalue human life – which describes Moonshine Holler, Kentucky and Meth Circle, Suburbia as much as Crack Boulevard in Detroit. 

The NRA didn’t bring us any of those, Mr. Fischer.

Victor Davis Hanson documents how h Obama’s crippling naiveté on human nature is devolving into dark comedy:

The almost eerie hatred for Obama seen in Egypt — among the military, the Islamists, the Egyptian Street, and even the secular pro-Western reformists — in part derives from a sense that Obama tried to cajole them all with cheap commonalities [the Muslim elements in his family history, his cosmopolitan childhood, his ethnically-mixed ancestry] and mytho-histories rather than negotiate often conflicting national interests through tough transparent talks.

A good way to get beaten up in the hallway at a tough school is to assure the local king-of-the-hill thug that both of you really have a lot in common. In some sense, Obama’s entire Middle East policy mirrors the hilarious scene in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, where the white punk attired in pseudo-gang attire believes he can out-jive gangbangers into leaving his girl alone. He can’t. Obama has unfortunately become such a wannabe in the eyes of unapologetic Middle East gangsters.

Read the whole thing.

Australia’s Prime Minster, Julia Gillard, flogs the “Gender War” card…

…with the kind of results the American electorate would do well to heed:

But the ploy has backfired with a poll in Fairfax Media showing male voters are abandoning Gillard and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and there is little sign of more women getting behind her.

The telephone poll of 1,400 voters found that since the last survey a month ago Labor’s standing has continued to slide, led entirely by a seven percent exodus of men.

Under a two-party vote, the conservative opposition would romp home in the September 14 elections with 57 percent (up three points) to 43 percent (down three points) for Labor.

Two possible conclusions:  either 1) there are limits to “war on women” rhetoric, or b) Australian voters are just plain smarter than ours are.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Hillary’s State Department is offering millions of dollars in rewards for information leading to the arrest and capture of terrorists who blew up stuff . . . in Africa.

I don’t give a crap about Africans blowing up Africans. Give ME the seven million dollars.

Joe Doakes

Remember when liberals complained about the US being “the world’s policeman?”

Them either.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

They must have mis-understood the question or the results would not have been so dramatic.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

He’s talking about the poll results in the linked article.

And given the publicity that, er, certain sociological statistics supposedly emanating from the problem that the “bill” would address have gotten in the US (I’m working hard not to give out any spoilers), the result is doubly interesting.

…for all time the quaint, pollyannaish notion that the “elite” media exist as anything but a Praetorian Guard for the Democrat party.

CBS News has been busted gundecking coverage of Benghazi that afflicts the Administration narrative

The biggest Benghazi-related story that took place outside of the House Oversight Committee’s hearing room today is this item in Politico, regarding CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. She’s the reporter who famously drew White House officials’ profane ire over her unapologetic pursuit of the Fast & Furious scandal story; now she’s apparently facing searing criticism from another source: Her own bosses. Why? Because she’s been covering the Benghazi story too aggressively

Read the whole thing.

If Bohner and Cantor don’t get a select committee on Benghazi going yesterday, then what the hell is the point of even having an opposition party?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

John Kerry, Secretary of State, offers to withdraw United States missile defense batteries from the Far East, if China will agree to restrain North Korea from launching nukes at us.

We’re outsourcing the defense of our nation to China.  Well, why not?  They’re already our biggest creditor.  What could possibly go wrong?

Joe Doakes

Como Park.

On the one hand, that was a common tactic in the colonial era; turn one of the tribes in an area of your interest against the other, thereby neutralizing everyone and keeping order.

On the other hand, that only worked when you had some power and influence; the Danes could never get the Sikhs to turn against the Hindi to colonize India; the British could.

And we’re becoming more like Denmark, only deeper in debt.

To:  Kim Jong-Un, Head Community Organizer, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea
From: Mitch Berg, American with no real portfolio
Re:  Anticlimax

Chairman Kim,

Seeing this statement…:

Threatening that it would not give any advance notice before attacking South Korea, the North warned: “Our retaliatory action will start without any notice from now.”

…is just a little incongruous, coming on the heels of a weeks-long PR blitz designed to get maximum attention from western media.

That is all.

(CULTURAL SENSITIVITY NOTE:  I know that neither Rikshaws nor Pagodas are Korean.  But I figured it’d work better than typing “그 기차가 역을 출발“.  Am I right, or am I right?)

(TYPOGRAPHY NOTE:  Is anyone but me amazed that one can actually italicize Hangul characters?)

To: The entire sane population of the United Kingdom
From: Mitch Berg, chagrinned Yank
Re: Apology

Dear UK,

My condolences on the passing of former Prime Minister Thatcher, a great influence on me as a conservative.

Please accept my apologies for my fifty-odd depraved countrymen who have disgraced our nation’s upper legislative chamber:

A Senate resolution to honor Lady Thatcher was supposed to pass last night. However, per well placed sources on the Hill, Democrats have a hold on the resolution.

To refuse to honor a woman of such great historical and political significance, who was deeply loyal to the United States, is petty and shameful. One truly has to wonder, what is it about Lady Thatcher that gives them pause? Her unfaltering commitment to freedom? Or perhaps the way she fought for individual liberty and limited government?

Our lower chamber followed the usual protocol:

The House used traditional bereavement procedures, the same model they used for John F. Kennedy. It’s a simple, solemn means of honoring the individual by passing a resolution and immediately adjourning. Similarly, Great Britain’s House of Commons was recalled, bringing members of Parliament back from vacation to honor Lady Thatcher.

How to explain this in British terms?  Hmm.  Democrats are to conservative women what Roundheads were to Catholics, maybe?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The European Union told Cyprus it had to raise 6 billion Euros in order to get 4 billion more from the EU to bail out its banks. Cyprus waited until banks closed last Friday to announce a “one-time” tax on bank accounts. Accounts with less than 100,000 Euros would pay 6.75%; larger accounts would pay 9.9%, all automatically deducted and sent to Berlin.

The idea is . . . unpopular. Cypriot banks are still closed to avoid massive runs of people trying to grab their money before the government does.

It occurs to me, this isn’t a new concept. Didn’t Larry Pogemiller propose a shift away from income taxes toward net worth taxes about six years ago, in a bid to shift the burden of paying for a Nicer Minnesota away from “working families” over to “wealthy retirees?” I don’t remember the automatic deduction feature in his plan, but the basic idea is the same. In fact, it’s older than that. When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”

To heck with being an outlaw, Willie should have been a government bureaucrat! He was just ahead of his time, is all.

Luckily, that could never happen here. The President might have the Constitutional power to drop Hellfire missiles on unsuspecting Americans, but he can’t just take money out of their bank accounts. He can’t, right? Right?

Joe Doakes

Don’t be silly.

We’re “doing fine”.

North Korean missile pr0n:

Bonus: “We Are The World”?

I listened to Hillary!’s little outburst in front of Congress yesterday – her “What difference does it make?” outburst, and I thought “Madame de Torquemada just set feminism back 50 years”.  She could not have played the “stop picking on me, I’m a girl” card any more blatantly.

James Taranto:

[WI Senator Ron] Johnson pressed her about the administration’s conflicting explanations for the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the ambassador and three other Americans. “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,” said the secretary snappishly to the senator. “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”

So it’s “our job to figure out what happened” but it doesn’t make a difference what happened? Huh? What would we do without rhetorical questions? We suppose we’d answer them, as Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin does:

“The answer to her question is clear. An administration that sought, for political purposes, to give the American people the idea that al-Qaeda had been “decimated” and was effectively out of commission had a clear motive during a presidential campaign to mislead the public about Benghazi. The fact that questions are still unanswered about this crime and that Clinton and President Obama seem more interested in burying this story along with the four Americans that died is an outrage that won’t be forgotten.”

Tobin has more faith in the media-addled American attention span than I do – but we’ll certainly do our best.

Especially if she runs for president in 2016. As we watched this exchange, it occurred to us that Mrs. Clinton was back in a familiar role, and an ironic one for someone who is supposed to be a feminist icon. Once again, she was helping the most powerful man in the world dodge accountability for scandalous behavior.

I’m trying to imagine the outrage in the media had Ronald Reagan (or his SecState, George Schultz) said “what difference does it make?” after the Marines were blown up in Beirut.

Hillary’s bit about the 3AM phone call was one of the best lines in the 2008 Democrat primary.  About Obama, it’s been resoundingly true.  But I’m guessing that if a President Clinton got awoken by a 3AM phone call, “what difference does it make?” is not the answer the country’ll need, either.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The State Department’s internal report is out and as a result, Congress is rushing to fortify the barn door.

What I still want to know is: whose idea was it to tone down American consulate security to present a more welcoming, more open appearance to Mid-East locals to enhance America’s image in the world? Who decided Benghazi should be a temporary facility, and an unguarded one at that?

The “welcoming appearance” theory of diplomacy always held the danger our diplomats could be attacked because we intentionally did not cower behind machine-gun toting Marines. But if it was the correct theory, then Benghazi was an unfortunate incident but not cause to fortify and arm up. The fact we’re abandoning the theory makes it look as if we’re rebuking the proponent of the theory and wasn’t that . . . President Obama himself?

So, the President’s idea was wrong: dangerously, stupidly and perhaps even criminally so? Is that what we’re saying? Cuz that’s certainly what it sounds like we’re saying, just not in so many words. Spell it out for me. Was Barak Obama’s signature diplomatic initiative flat wrong?

Joe Doakes

Como Park.

That’d be a great question for our Secretary of State.

If we can ever find her.

In the wake of the shootings in Connecticut last week, some – myself included – said it might be time to look at the response the Israelis took to repeated terrorist attacks on schools in the seventies; allowing teachers to carry their own, legally-obtained weapons in school.

Lefties, armed with a small sheaf of convenient Google results and an Ezra Klein column that was, er, riddled with errors, responded “But no!  Gun laws in Israel are teh tight!  You are wrong!”

The answer?  Somewhere in between and, as usual, a little to my side of the divide (and, as always, “distrust but verify Ezra Klein”), according to this piece in “The Table” from Liel Leibowitz.

(more…)

“Smart Diplomacy” apparently means “represent your country abroad with egomaniacal empty skirts who gave you lots of money“:

The commander in chief is mulling whether to appoint Wintour, one of his biggest reelection campaign fundraising bundlers, as ambassador to the United Kingdom or France, according to Bloomberg News’s Hans Nichols.

(Facepalm)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade while attending an ecclesiastical conference in Clermont, France. His exact speech is disputed but history shows his words were sufficient to inspire all of Christendom to wage war upon the Muslims then occupying Jerusalem.

September 13, 2001, a different crusader preached the same message in fewer words: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity . . . This is war.”

It’s been a thousand years and we still haven’t solved the problem.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

One of those faiths went through a Renaissance, a Reformation, and a half a millennium of civil evolution. The other largely did not.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Even after the Cease-Fire brokered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took effect (at a cost of nearly $50 billion in bribes to various tribes), Palestinians were still shooting missiles into Israel.

You keep using that word “Cease-fire” Hillary. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

If this is what “extending the hand of friendship to Muslims” accomplishes, we might as well go back to Bush’s Cowboy Diplomacy. At least our embassies were safe.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

It’s a rhetorical cease-fire.  One that both sides – the US and Hamas, the ones the Administration really cares about – can wave about at the UN.

US no longer at war with Mideast film critics: Obama Spokesman Jake Carney “self-evident . . . terrorist attack.”

Wrongfully accused filmmaker last person on earth still awaiting Obama apology.

He’s a busy, busy man.

It was in observance of “Talk Like A Pirate Day”, yesterday.

Perhaps we should respond with “Talk With An Israeli Prime Minister” day…

UPDATE:  As commenter Jeff Rosenberg (Hey, Jeff!) points out, Media Matters has leapt to the President’s defense, noting that the photo above is three years old.

The MM4A piece is silent on what the President was doing.   Playing golf with Jay-Z?  Meeting with (and bowing to) Somali pirates?   Playing video games with his daughters?  At an Eva Longoria fundraiser?  We don’t know.  All we do know is, it wasn’t “meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu at this crucial moment in both nations’ history”.