Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
One still finds lefties obsessed with W’s role in the economic downturn and government deficit. I would refer them to this graph. The bars go way under the baseline, far more deeply than any dipping below under W, with no end in sight, from the time of the TCM regime coming to power.
And at Pajamas Media, Claudia Rosett says that TCM is still, at this late hour, behaving as if there is no crisis.
The National Post says Iran’s real leaders are the Revolutionary Guards.
Looks like I’m not the only one who sees Bibi as the new leader of the free world. It’s the subject of a Washington Times editorial.
Honduran president Micheletti’s suspension of civil liberties certainly complicates matters, but it does not change the fact that the army and the Supreme Court were upholding the consitution when they whisked Zelaya out of the country. Now he’s back in the country, holed up in the Brazilian embassy, and fomenting unrest. Micheletti and the patriots of Honduras don’t have a lot of good options.
My newest ongoing freelance writing gig is providing the two (sometimes three) main feature articles for each issue of a monthly business magazine. I wasn’t sure how I’d like business journalism. It’s actually turning out to be quite interesting.
This morning, I interviewed the CEO of a small company he founded in the 1970s. He became interested in public-policy issues related to his industry, which has led to several years of trade-association activity, culminating with a year’s term as association president. He confirms a pattern I’ve seen in the viewpoints of other trade-association figures I’ve encountered, that being the view of their role as principally one of putting out fires. “We probably get more bad things stopped that good things implemented,” he told me. In other words, keeping the tentacles of government out of their companies’ business consumes most of these associations’ attention.
For one thing, government bureaucrats – we’re talking about the paper-shufflers at the regulatory agencies here, not the actual anti-freedom lawmakers themselves, although this applies to them in spades – tend to take a one-size-fits-all approach to situations that arise within a particular industry. This gentleman spent considerable time pursuing the application of reasonable safety standards to one type of valve used by one type of vehicle, trying to get the regulators to see that particulars of overall compliance with their code didn’t pertain to this valve.
“I went to Washington two days a month for three years,’ he says. “Paid my own way. We sat around a table and negotiated ways to make our industry safer. Behind everybody at that table was a team of attorneys.” He spoke of an “invisible wall between regulatory people and regular people.” He says that after two years he finally got some of these bureaucrats to get out in the field and see that actual equipment companies in his industry used.
As for the lawmakers themselves, he says that the atmosphere of the D.C. world makes them different to talk to when he’s out there than when he gets their ear back home in the district. He also says that there is a mercenary class of lobbyists who sell their skills of persuasion and doing lunch to the highest bidder, sometimes leaving even legislators with integrity wondering just who is being square with them.
This guy has been a leader in innovation in his line of work. His company is considered a pace-setter. How sad that there is a class of people so far removed from basic human impulses like inventiveness and vision that it offers entire careers in the spread of mind-numbing inertia.
“The mother, father and crazy uncle of all unfunded mandates.”
TCM terrifies the hell out of me.
There is, of course, the domestic agenda, a veritable lunatic’s to-do list of economic wreckage, freedom-destruction and obliteration of even the rudiments of common sense.
It’s always been in the realm of foreign policy, though, in which I thought he’d bring us to the edge of the abyss. Alas, nine months into his rampage of America-hatred, we are there.
Accepting the book from Chavez. Sitting through Ortega’s diatribe. The happy-Persian-new-year letter to the mullahs. The Cairo speech. Last week’s UN speech. Dithering through North Korean tests of missiles and a nuclear bomb. Pledging to close Gitmo. Hiring AG Holder, of investigate-the-interrogators fame. The reset button with Russia.
And the momentum gathers:
Being on the wrong side of the sham-election outcome in Iran – the very best chance we’d ever have of fomenting regime change in the world’s most dangerous country.
Being on the wrong side of the Honduran action to restore its government to constitutionality.
Giving Poland and the Czech Republic the middle finger by reneging on a missile-defense system that was arduous to negotiate in the first place, and thereby immeasurably strengthening Russia’s hand.
Using the venue of the UN Security Council – a den of vipers if there ever was one – to press for his infantile vision of a world without nuclear weapons, even, as Nicholas Sarkozy pointed out, as the two most dangerous regimes on earth are pressing in the exact opposite direction.
Mealy-mouthing some nonsense about “strategy reassessment” in Afghanistan, even as his top general there tells him bluntly that the situation is deteriorating and will do so at an even faster rate without significantly more troops.
Even all that, however, is secondary to his Aquarian obliviousness to the crisis level to which the Iranian situation has boiled.
He’s still talking about chances for Iran to show responsibility and goodwill. Offering them “serious, meaningful dialogue.” The MSM used terms like “stern warning” and “ultimatum” over the weekend to characterize consequences that TCM said Iran would experience if it didn’t play nice.
He didn’t specify anything. That’s because he has no consequences in mind. In his malignant narcissism and messianic conviction, he really believes his charm is so irresistably effective, negative consequences won’t have to be even fleetingly considered.
And see the post below concerning Russia and China for why sanctions won’t work. You’d have to be dealing with countries who gave a flying diddly about Western interests to get a unified front for imposing real sanctions.
Sanctions won’t work. Carrots won’t work. It’s too late for regime change. The thugocracy-dressed-in-tie-dye with its grip on America’s throat won’t consider doing what only the United States would be able to do.
It’s up to Israel to give it its best shot. Benjamin Netanyahu is now the leader of the free world.
Iran test-fired some missiles yesterday.
UPDATE: The third round of those tests included 1200-mile-range Shahab-3 and Sajjil missiles.
. . . consider a slyly totalitarian nugget of legislation known as Wyden-Bennett.
Further proof that the sane response to any connection of the terms “compromise” and “health care” is a big thumbs-down.
Russia and China are still not inclined to get on board with such a course.
Indian career diplomat M K Bhadrakumar offers some significant insights into such matters as the policy-elite and public-opinion pressures that TCM amd Medvedev are each under in their respective countries. For example, while Russia is goading TCM to pursue kumbaya-level nuke-and-missile reductions, the Pentagon thinks it’s most unwise. Certain parties in the Kremlin want to make sure Medvedev doesn’t get specific in naming Iran as a nation that needs to knock off the nuke activity. He points out that Medvedev recently defended Russia’s missile sales to Iran. Alas, things wentRussia’s way when a UN Security Council resolution was drafted this week, keeping a call for an end to nuclear proliferation very general.
Then there’s Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu’s statement that “we always believe that sanctions and pressure are not the way out.”
Robert Coalson, a veteran Russia-watcher (he used to be deputy editorial-page editor for the Moscow Times), says nothing in the events of the past few days changes his view that Russia’s desire to see US power and leadership in the world diminished remains a higher prority than doing anything about Iran’s nuclear program.
UPDATE: Here’s why I’ve admired French president Sarkozy. He has the clarity to say that rainbows-and-unicorns UN resolutions about worlds without nukes are meaningless when two particular countries are going hell-bent-for-leather in the other direction.
Still wonder about his mention of an end-of-year window in his joint appearance with TCM and Brown, though. Maybe he felt that it was in the best interest of a unified front for the occasion.
That’s how Freedom-Hater-care would work.
John at Powerline does a good job of summing up in his own words, and bolstering his case with a couple of pertinent links, the weakness of today’s supposedly resolute Western (TCM-led) response to the disclosure about the additional Iranian uranium enrichment site.
Still, I want to add a few words. I was just listening to TCM’s live end-of-Pittsburgh-G20-summit presser, and this is a guy whose insane Aquarian vision still has not been altered by the facts that are in his face. He’s still talking about how he hopes Iran will choose the path of international cooperation. It’s beyond mad.
His peers are no better. Sarkozy, for whom I’ve had a fair amount of admiration since his becoming French president, is talking in terms of the end of the year as some kind of point for imposing unprecedentedly tough sanctions. This looks to me like dealing another hand in a bridge game when everyone at the card table knows the house is on fire.
And what of these sanctions? With Iranian allies like Venezuela providing the mullahcracy with the gasoline it needs, how do we make them violation-proof? Also, let us consider how principled any “yes-we’re-now-on-board-with-sanctions” talk coming out of Russia is. Or, more to the point, isn’t.
One more point to consider: TCM was crowing and gloating when the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate came out saying Iran was not pursuing nukes. How well can he be expected to muster up a resolute stance now?
Oh, one more point: there’s Zbigniew Brzezinski’s assertion that we ought to reserve the right to shoot down Israeli warplanes that fly over Iraqi airspace if Israel decides to look after its own prospects for continued existence.
Faster than TCM and the other clueless supposed stewards of Western and, indeed, global security can reach for the snooze button.
This development might change the tenor of next week’s meeting of UN Security Council representatives and Iran’s chief nuke-program negotiator: Iran has an until-now-secret uranium facility, one that no one had been taking into account in calculations about how this situation was going to play out.
Paul Mirengoff at Powerline looks at a noteworthy aspect of TCM’s disastrous UN speech yesterday: begging for legitimacy in the eyes of the thugs who control the UN by listing the anti-American accomplishments he’s racked up in his first nine-months.
The comment threads here at BN often wind up coming down to debates over the role of self-interest in human affairs. This video makes a worthwhile contribution to that discussion.
HT: The Anchoress.
UPDATE: My link, even though I put in the specific URL for that video, takes you to the general page for free PJTV shows. I’ll leave it up, just to encourage folks to watch all the great stuff available there, but for some reason The Anchoress’s link works directly, so here that is.
