Victor Davis Hanson asks:

The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya should be one of the richest countries in the world. The ratio between its size (twice that of Texas) and population (about that of Indiana) should have resulted in untold per capita wealth, in the fashion of Norway. Add in its vast petroleum reserves (the sheer size of which is still not quite known), long beautiful coastline, proximity to Europe, and stunning Roman antiquities (among the best in the world), and compare that to its current desolation and poverty, and the full extent of the nightmarish five decades of Qaddafi becomes clear. And then we must factor in the global misery Qaddafi has wrought with his support of terrorism and assassination abroad.

In other words, with Libyans in full revolt, it is hard to understand why someone has not provided them aid to slay this monster, particularly because, while we do not know what follows, we can assume (a) it will be hard to be worse than Qaddafi, and (b) to the degree that we show some empathy and support in ridding the world of this thug, we might have an iota more influence with the succeeding government than we otherwise might have by our present hands-off policy…

Hanson then notes that we’re not just being spineless with Libya’s tyrant, but we’re also truckling to the mullahs of Iran and Syria’s bestial regime. Seems that there isn’t a tyrant out there we won’t coddle, nor an ally we won’t insult. But really, the answer to “why” is right in Hanson’s first sentence: “The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”. Yes, that is what Qaddafi calls his country – no one knows what “Jamahiriya” really means, so rather than try to translate it in to English, it is left at that. Meanwhile, his official title is “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution”. To someone like Obama and the people who staff his Administration, there is just no way for them to get around the words – Libya is socialist. Its people’s! Heck its even Jamahiriya!! There must be something good going on there – come on, the guy in charge is a brotherly guide! His people must love him if they call him that!

And, seriously, that is the level of thinking on the left. What, you don’t believe me? Then how come our left in the 60’s was agog over the National Liberation Front in Vietnam? They weren’t liberating anything – and even if you want to say the Saigon regime was bad, how can anyone say its successor was better? How come the left welcomed each new version of the “People’s Democratic Republic” of whatever as the latest and best dispensation for mankind? They were all, without exception, ruled by brutes and swiftly became inhuman sewers…but the left kept the flame lit because of the words the regimes would use to describe themselves. That is all that matters to the left – use the right words and you can get away with bloody murder.

The left hated Spain’s Franco so much that they’ve spent a lot of time going through Spain to eliminate all references to him in public…even making it illegal to have a memorial plaque for any Nationalist veterans of the Spanish Civil war. The left hated Chile’s Pinochet so much that they seriously tried to indict him when he was an aged, dying man. So, what was the difference between Franco and Castro? Between Pinochet and Ho Chi Minh? Well, aside from the fact that Franco and Pinochet were less bloodthirsty and oppressive, not much…and the left would still have loved Franco and Pinochet had the two men been clever enough to call their regimes “people’s republics” and themselves “General Secretary” or “Revolutionary Guide”.

Obama and Co simply don’t know what to do when a Revolutionary Guide starts massacring people in public (the left never has a problem with massacres in private when done by people who use the correct terminology). They know that people really shouldn’t be gunned down in the streets (at least, not on television, especially when its early enough in the news cycle that people will expect a Presidential comment), but they are at a loss for what to actually do about it – fight a revolutionary, socialist regime? The only way out for them is if another group comes along saying they are even more revolutionary and socialist than the guys they’re trying to oust. If the Libyan rebels will name themselves “The Ultra-Socialist People’s Double Revolutionary Vanguard”, they might get some help from Obama.

As for what to do about it – deal with it, fellow Americans. Obama is President until at least January 20th, 2013…and this sort of ignorance will govern our affairs until that time.

Interesting story over at Pajamas media – the conclusion:

It should be noted that Freeman doesn’t claim that outside forces were responsible for the major factors of the economic crisis, namely the subprime mortgage fiasco, but that these outside forces might have intentionally helped things along. The report identifies three key stages in this possible economic attack:

* The first phase was a speculative run-up in oil prices that generated as much as $2 trillion of excess wealth for oil-producing nations, filling the coffers of Sovereign Wealth Funds, especially those that follow Shariah Compliant Finance.

* The second phase appears to have begun in 2008 with a series of bear raids targeting U.S. financial services firms that appeared to be systemically significant.

* The risk of a Phase Three has quickly emerged, suggesting a potential direct economic attack on the U.S. Treasury and U.S. dollar.

The run up in oil prices prior to the crash was patently absurd. I remember being flabbergasted that a world awash in oil would have such a rapid rise in price. It didn’t make sense at the time, and still makes no sense today (though our current run up does make sense – with all tyrannies under pressure, oil production is at risk of sustained disruption). But its one thing for it to be absurd, quite another for it to be deliberate – and I don’t really think it was deliberate, though we can count on it that people ill-disposed towards the United States took advantage and probably helped manipulate the bubble higher than it it otherwise would have gone. As for the bear raids – that, in hindsight, appears less like an attack than like a few people out there figuring out how bankrupt our financial system was and taking advantage of the situation.

The lesson here is to work hard to develope our own resources – to make ourselves less vulnerable to the actions of outsiders by making, mining and growing more of our own things (especially energy) and, of course, getting out of debt so that foreigners cannot buy influence in our nation. Quaint as it may sound, the solution to all things is to have faith and work hard (who would have thunk it?). We became a bit faithless over the years and eschewed hard work as if it were the plague…that has to change. And when it does, we’ll get back on track and be what America is supposed to be – the Land of Opportunity, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.

UPDATE: Oil prices continue their spike today, with the prediction now for the nationwide average for gas to be at $3.50-3.75 by spring. I paid $3.49 yesterday…it was only on the 21st of February that I was pitching a whine about $3.31…if gas goes to $4 a gallon this year, then you can count on renewed recession within 12 months.

Over at NRO’s The Corner:

…when I hear people express extreme optimism about the Internet, I say, we’ve had it in mature form for about ten years. Macroeconomically speaking, those are about the worst 10 years we’ve had since about the 1930s. I don’t blame the Internet for that — that would be ridiculous. But nonetheless, it’s yet to really kick in as a major positive moving force at the economic level. It has just a small amount. The best is yet to come.

Look at electricity in human history — it took a few decades for electricity to really revolutionize the American economy. And the Internet will be the same. At some point in the future we will arrive at a new era of low-hanging fruit. We’re just not there yet, and the optimists tend to forget just how long those lags are…

We’re seeing society grow more rapidly along the happiness or utility dimension than we had expected, and seeing it grow more slowly across the jobs-and-revenue dimension than we had expected. And that’s a disconnect. It doesn’t have to be a fatal problem. The problem is when you don’t plan for that and don’t understand that that is happening.

A major issue is that we have a lot of debt commitments — some privately, but mostly in the public sector — that were premised on robust growth in revenue and jobs. But we’re taking a lot of our social dividend out in the form of happiness or utility — which, by the way, is harder to tax.

But that does mean that our fiscal crisis is going to come more quickly and be a lot worse than many people expect, even fiscal conservatives. They still think it’s only a matter of time before we revert to 1968 levels of growth for the typical families. And I don’t see us as being there.

We’re going to have slow growth and persistent, fairly high unemployment…

That quote is from a gentleman named Tyler Cowen – clearly a very intelligent and thoughtful man. He’s also very right about crisis coming very fast and very hard. I know that I got it wrong in my prediction – I figured the Big Crash for March of last year. I am absolutely astounded that Ben Bernanke and the rest of the banksters have managed to hold it off this long – and now I can’t say when the crash is going to hit; I can only say that it will hit, it will be quite destructive, and it can’t possibly hold off longer than three or four years, at the maximum outside. We’ve got a mountain of debt and fake money running around the world at a time of demographic decline – this circle cannot be squared with the set of rules we have right now.

But Cowen does miss something very important, and it is what he is calling a disconnect between happiness and jobs dimensions. The reason we’re seeing this is because we’re at the tail end of a socio-economic catastrophe which we instituted (as a civilization) round about two centuries ago. While it all started a few centuries earlier than that as the middle ages closed down and greedy/base princes and financiers started to loot the Church and the people of their property, it really only got rolling to destruction in the post-Napoleonic world.

To nutshell it – we ripped up the economic basis of the family upon which our civilization rested, crammed ever more people in to cities and started to develope an unsustainable ethic where personal happiness and pleasure trumped all other considerations. The finality of this is the unemployed 20-something wandering around the mall with his I-pad and whom Obama is now going to allow to stay on mommy’s health insurance. No work, no family responsibility, high tech gadgets and government subsidized/enforced benefits – and death at the end of it all.

We can reconnect the two halves – the jobs and happiness dimensions, but not under the current socio-economic regime. We cannot use more fake money, more debt and more skullduggery to put right what was wrecked by fake money, debt and skullduggery. Real money, no debt and honesty will fix what ails us. Of course, we might choose to continue on the road to suicide because, lets face it, its much more fun for someone to contemplate computer programming for a living rather than being a farmer, lumberjack or miner. In other words, we’re so hooked on being happy that we might just keep laughing until we die.

Personally, I don’t think it will come out like that. Looking around the nation I see a leaven – which may be a solid majority, but is at any event the largest segment of the population – of people who have, incredibly, held to the things which used to make our civilization work, and will make it work, again. Faith, family, hard work – those are the keys to a rational, just and humane society, and I believe there are enough people who hold to these things to repair all the damage which has been done. The liberal nightmare will end and our civilization will arise from the ashes.

So, remember; hard times are coming. No sense trying to pretend otherwise – no sense, that is, in being absurdly optimistic. But, also, no sense in being pessimistic. Think of it like this – a little while before he died, I advised my dad of my opinion that today’s Marines were better than the Marines of my dad’s day…he thought about it for a bit, and admitted that I was right. And its not like the WWII Marines were slouches, you know? Any nation which can produce the men and women of our armed forces has within it sufficient strength to revive. We can fix all this; it just won’t be an easy task.

But, then again, Americans have never been daunted by hard tasks…

From Salon – the intro to the article being the way Saif al-Islam Qaddafi’s son managed to gain a lot of western friends:

…Money, even foreign money (and particularly that Saudi money), has always been able to buy access to Western statesmen. But in the last decade or so, the proportions have subtly shifted. The democratic West has become relatively poorer, while a clutch of undemocratic “emerging” markets have become richer. To put it more bluntly, Western politicians, ex-politicians, and even aristocrats have become much, much poorer than the very, very rich businessmen emerging from the oil-and-gas states of Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Twenty years ago, no retired British or German statesman would have looked outside his country for employment. Nowadays, Blair advises the governments of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, among others; Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, collects a paycheck from Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth…

And its not just European elites selling their country for a fat paycheck – think of all the Americans who lobby for, represent or otherwise kowtow to foreign tyrants to make a buck. I’ll keep saying it and saying it and hoping that some day everyone will agree with me because I am absolutely right – the people of free nations should have nothing to do with tyrants, except when we find it necessary to kill them; and then the introductions should be made by one our special forces soldiers. You cannot do good by doing wrong – you cannot remain civilized if you consort with barbarians. A “realistic” foreign policy is nothing more than propaganda cover for a surrender of principle.

It is well past time for us to re-order our foreign and trade policies and make them entirely subservient to the twin needs of defending ourselves from tyrants, and protecting free people around the world from same. Free trade – but only with other free nations; diplomatic relations only with free nations; travel too and from only free nations. Are we Americans, or just fools who are willing to sell our hangman the rope?

We need none of these tyrants – anything we might need from the territories they hold we can take by conquest and hold until the surrounding territory becomes free. But we don’t even need much of that – control of a few strategic points, perhaps some resources which simply cannot be obtained in a free nation, but not much more. Other than that, let the tyrants stew in their own juices, with the standing declaration that if they ever so much as cross us, we’ll destroy them…and may just do it, anyway, if we take a mind to it.

I’m just sick to death of seeing my side’s honor sullied with the mud of these brutal thugs…nothing to do with them; unrelenting hostility and war; that is the only way to deal with tyrants.

Nothing like a hefty dose of political suicide – from Charlie Sykes at 620 WTMJ:

Last week, we heard that State Rep. Gordon Hintz (D-Oshkosh) had been busted in a prostitution sting.

State Rep. Gordon Hintz was issued a municipal citation in Appleton earlier this month for violating a city sexual misconduct ordinance.

Appleton police said the citation was issued Feb. 10 in conjunction with an ongoing investigation of Heavenly Touch Massage Parlor, 342 W. Wisconsin Ave., in Appleton. Police searched the business and a nearby residence in the 1300 block of North Division Street Jan. 28, after investigators had staked out the properties for several days after receiving a tip.

Last Friday…. after the Assembly voted to engross the Budget Repair Bill, Hintz turned to a female colleague, Rep. Michelle Litjens and said: “You are F***king dead!”

New tone, indeed. Will he be held accountable?…

Hintz, of course, wants us all to remember that his dalliance with women of easy virtue should not distract us from the real issues of the day – you know, making sure that corrupt unions remain juiced in with bought politicians (such as Hintz).

The Ruling Class at work, my friends…

Our last veteran of World War One has passed away:

Frank Buckles, America’s last surviving World War I veteran, has died at age 110. Born on a Missouri farm, he lied about his age to enlist in the Army at 16 and went on to drive ambulances in France. A civilian during World War II, he was captured by the Japanese while working in Manila and imprisoned for more than three years. Later in life, he entered the national spotlight as a living legend and advocate for the dedication of a national World War I memorial.

The burdens of that war were fairly light upon the United States. We lost about 116,000 dead in that war – certainly a large number, but it pales in comparison to the 900,000 British deaths, the 1,400,000 French dead or the 2,000,000 German dead. And all those dead totals were from populations much smaller than ours (about 4% of all French died in World War One, about 0.1% of all Americans). In large measure, a civilization committed suicide during that terrible four years.

It still astounds the mind to think about the way they went to war – they really did go off singing to the fight. They thought it would be short and glorious. They believed in a concept called “progress” which, basing itself upon a misunderstanding of Darwin’s theories, asserted that things always improve…and thus that if there was to be a war, it was a noble action which would certainly lead to a better future. Thus the “war to end all wars”. Thus, also, the rather insane determination of all combatants to fight with every available means, fair and foul, until absolute victory was won – even though, as Churchill pointed out, victory was to be bought so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat. Here is what they did:

Germany having let Hell loose kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage against humanity and international law was repaid by reprisals often on a greater scale and longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of armies. The wounded died between the lines; the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations in to submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered, often slowly, in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only the the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves; and these were of doubtful utility. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis

Of course, Churchill was a bit wrong there – but not on purpose. What he thought of as being a Christian civilization was, in large measure, already being displaced by post-Christian civilization. And thus there was no room in that war for a truce, or for considerations about non-combatants. The madness of that war proved a mere curtain-raiser for the absolute wicked insanity of Lenin, Stalin and Hitler. Whenever I read about the war, I feel like weeping – just in transcribing that passage I choked up. As we mark the passing of the last of our veterans of that war, we should also pause to think about all of those who died – so many of whom now lie in nameless graves, the very nations they fought to defend no longer existing.

And when men die in war, even if they fight for the other side, charity should move us to try and make a better world in their honor. The people of that war are almost all dead, now. Perhaps a few more veterans still linger on, though it is to be doubted – those who were very young children at the time also live with us, but in a very few years everyone who lived during that time will be gone. And we should remember them all, and what they did and pledge ourselves to making a better world. A world in which, even if there is to be war, there will at least never be a war again where we tear at each other and seek mutual extermination. A world of justice and mercy, even if not a world of peace.

Best exemplified by Tim Pawlenty:

He understands – it is a Ruling Class we fight, and all parts of it are inter-connected; you can’t just fight part of it. The whole thing has to go – the ideals of our Declaration must be realized, the Constitution must be enforced.

From Rasmussen:

…A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 33% of Likely U.S. Voters would rather have Congress avoid a government shutdown by authorizing spending at the same levels as last year. Fifty-eight percent (58%) says it’s better to have a partial shutdown until Democrats and Republicans can agree on what spending to cut…

Naturally, there is a partisan split – with 58% of Democrats horrified at the thought of any sort of government shut down, while Republicans and Independents are delighted with the prospect, 80% and 59%, respectively. As I’ve been saying, the people are on the side of budget cuts – deep and real cuts which are necessary to rescue us from fiscal disaster. The Democrats are on the wrong side – and thus there is no reason to compromise with them in the slightest.

Fight, fight and fight some more – keep pressing them back. We can win this, if we just show a bit of courage.

UPDATE: Another poll shows that more people would blame Democrats for a shut-down than GOPers. Once again – we’ve got them boxed in. We are forcing them to defend the indefensible…and all the time 2012 comes closer.