Navy Yard Shooting

Mark Noonan11 Comments

We don’t really know anything about it other than someone started shooting.  We’ll let the MSM tie themselves up in knots getting it wrong for a while and then see what the full details are.  But here’s my first take on it:

One or maybe two or three shooters shut down an entire US Navy base.  That is disgraceful regardless of whatever facts relate to this case.  Our enemies are now taking note:  if you want to go to war with the United States, you start with a few three-man commando teams attacking major US military bases – it will paralyze our military for hours, at least.

We need to change this – our bases have to be fully armed with people who know how to shoot to kill in an instant.  No US base should be shut down because of an attack – and no one should flee their post, nor should a “shelter in place” (translation: cower in fear) order be issued.  The strength of any military force is expressed by its instant readiness for war.  There are no rear areas for the military and there is no peace time.  Violent enemies are always out there, always seeking to kill…the military must always be ready.

UPDATE:  Seems that the killer is going to fall in to the “nut” category.  Here’s the bit of news which caught my eye this morning over at The Telegraph:

Exclusive: The Washington Navy Yard gunman Aaron Alexis played violent video games including Call of Duty for up to 16 hours at a time and friends believe it could have pushed him towards becoming a mass murderer.

Going through the whole article and seeing other things in the news about him, he appears to have been a dog’s breakfast of oddities.  There has emerged so far no hard center for the man – adrift on the tides, grasping some lifelines, but ultimately over the edge in to madness.  Naturally, most people will not blame what he saw and did prior to the attack.  Blame will be assigned in two ways:

1.  Anti-gun nuts will, as always, blame the gun.

2.  Rational people will almost all just blame the killer.

Me?  I blame the entire situation.  As I’ve said again and again and again these things used to never happen.  Now they do.  The dividing line is that school shooting in San Diego back in 1979.

It is everything that went in to the killer which caused him to kill – our broken morality, our glorification of violence, our attacks on masculine virtues (men not taught to be properly manly often wind up as brutes); all of this and more caused this to happen…and, yes, someone who plays violent video games for long periods of time is feeding in to his brain things which can come out in very bad ways.  As always in these situations, I’ll just point out that until we decide to change entirely, we’ll just get more and more of this.

Deep Liberal Thinking: Its the Fault of Those Damned Teabaggers!

Mark Noonan22 Comments

To be sure, they don’t use words like that – being all super intellectual and mainstream, you see, they don’t go in for vulgarity.  But, that is the sense of Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein when they write this:

A brighter future for politics and policy requires a different Republican Party, one no longer beholden to its hard right and willing to operate within the mainstream of American politics.

Unlike the Democrats who, of course, completely ignore their hard left and are willing to compromise on such things as abortion, right?  I mean, if some people just wanted to have some reasonable, humane restrictions on abortion in the later half of pregnancy, these moderate,  in-the-mainstream Democrats would have no problem with that.  Answer:  Wendy Davis.  The Great Pink Hope of the Democrat party in Texas who stood tall and brave against an attempt to prevent children 8 months in to pregnancy from being ripped limb from limb by abortionists.  Thank goodness for moderate Democrats who operate within the mainstream of American politics.

What, exactly, is the “mainstream of American politics”?  It is that big corporations and big government will get bigger while an insulated Ruling Class of corporate and government bureaucrats live high and mighty off the sweat of average Americans.  Mann and Ornstein are dead on about one thing:

Any degree of success in this arena requires enlisting a small group of Senate Republicans who have tired of the lockstep opposition to Obama and  relish an opportunity to legislate.

Opposition to Obama is “lockstep”, you see?  If you bother to read the article, you’ll understand that the authors think that Obama is the one who reached out to the GOP and tried to govern by compromise.  But then that dratted TEA Party came along and started to muck everything up (unstated sub-text – dog whistle, as it were – “they are racists who just hate”).  Meanwhile, opposition to conservatism is nuanced and willing to compromise…like the way Obama immediately abandoned the birth control mandate when Catholics reasonably pointed out they couldn’t do that without violating their moral beliefs.  But it is true that there is a group of Senate Republicans who do relish the opportunity to legislate and if such legislation works out to just giving more power and wealth to the Ruling Class at the expense of the people, so be it.  After all, its not the people who pass out invitations to the cool parties, nor can the people ensure a well-paid sinecure once the “small group of Senate Republicans” retires.

As I noted in “You Say You Want a Revolution“, below, its an entire class which is united against us.  People like Mann and Ornstein have got their marching orders…provide a patina of intellectual legitimacy for the McCains and Grahams of the GOP to stab the rest of us in the back…go ahead, they say, satisfy your desire to legislate.  Step away from those crazies Rand Paul and Ted Cruz (to Mann and Ornstein, the literal pictures of intolerance…and I mean that; the picture posted at the top of their article is Paul and Cruz).  You’ll get a nice write up in the Washington Post.  You’ll be lauded as a statesman.  President Hillary Clinton will award you a Presidential Medal of Freedom.  We’ll ensure that your memoirs sell in the millions!

Getting rid of these people will be difficult and then easy.  First difficult in finding enough GOPers who will fight – but once we do, we will win and win it all.  And then we just cut off the taxpayer funds for the left and be free of them forever.

You Say You Want a Revolution…

Mark Noonan8 Comments

Well, here’s why:

She drew the big names — but didn’t dole out the big bucks.

The celebrity-backed charity launched by departing Daily Beast editrix Tina Brown failed to meet the company’s goals in its first year out of the gate — handing out just $10,000 in grant money in 2011 despite raising nearly $1.2 million, IRS records show.

The nonprofit Women in the World Foundation kicked off to much fanfare in 2011 with a star-studded Manhattan party that cost $168,048 and was hosted by Meryl Streep…

…Total expenses, including the launch party, came to $536,868 for the period.

Of course, they are now claiming they are giving out bags of money – in 2012 about $1.1 million out of $2.6 million raised.  Given that I’m a knuckle-dragging, Bible-clinging, teabagging bastard, my math might not be so good…but that, I believe, works out to less than 50%.

Now you might ask, what has something like this got to do with anything?  Well, because this kind of self-dealing by the Ruling Class is what happens all the time.  They are always giving themselves bags of money and congratulating themselves on being so wonderful – and ensuring that they have fabulous parties along the way.  Do you think that Hillary is going to get a “Liberty Medal” because she’s done anything significant?  Nope.  She’s going to get it because she’s Hillary; and they can have a swank party to celebrate it – all at taxpayer expense either in the form of direct taxpayer money, or because the money being spent on it is tax deductible.

Just get in to that Ruling Class and do as you’re told and all door are open.  You’ll have wealth.   You’ll get awards.  You’ll be ensured a well-paid sinecure either in corporate or government America (which are becoming increasingly interchangeable).  Doesn’t matter if you’re a complete idiot or unrepentantly morally corrupt (though you can run afoul of things some times – as the former Mayor of San Diego found out…but even that took decades of misbehavior before someone decided to call him on it…he was one of them; he did as he was told…he had to be protected lest the unwashed masses find out).  Got no talent?  Can’t tell sh** from shinola?  Doesn’t matter.  Just get the right credentials, mouth the right liberal phrases and do as you’re told – you’ll be taken care of.

Leeches like Brown are living off the wealth produced by others – and they are legion in our nation.  Our whole country is infested with these folks – and they are destroying us because being mindless pinheads in service of a anti-human, leftist ideology they advance causes which destroy the very sources of wealth they latch on to.  You see them everywhere – they are in political office, they are running our largest corporations, they man the bureaucracy (especially at its highest levels), they are 90% of the MSM, they run most of the non-religious non-profits.  If you ever say “they are ruining things” then here’s your “they”.  Think of Tina brown blowing through half a million dollars as part of a “charity”.  That is the Ruling Class.

I bring this up because we must get unconfused about this – we are fighting a whole class of people, which includes at least half of the GOP leadership.  These people are either too stupid to know what they’re doing (I’d guess about 70% of them fall in to the “too stupid” category), while the rest know full well what they are doing and think its a good thing…after all, we Bible-clinging morons simply don’t know what’s best for ourselves.  We need a Ruling Class to ride herd on us, you see?  The stupid just want to keep living well, the rest believe that if they can finally, absolutely destroy the United States (fundamentally transform it, as it were) then they will have done a service to the world.  They will have got rid of a Christo-fascist, racist, sexist, homophobic entity which is destroying the world.

For us to survive as a people, all of the Ruling Class ultimately has to go – we can’t think in terms of just winning one election or hoping that a Republican gets in, even if that particular Republican is a a true-blue conservative.  We need a revolution – someone who will go to DC like Andrew Jackson in the 1830’s to clean out the whole mess…get rid of these people.  They are not only unfit for government and corporations, they are unfit for decent company.  Fire them. Send them packing.  Take away their taxpayer funds and tax deductible “charities” which are merely vehicles for their swank lifestyle.  Walk through the bureaucracy and fire everyone who has in even the least instance misused taxpayer money, or abused their authority.  Hammer the big corporations – break them in to little, bitty pieces so that a free market can emerge once there’s no longer corporate money-bags suppressing competition via government regulation.  Unless we think in terms like that, we’ll just be fighting with particular tentacles of the nasty beast rather than driving a stake through it’s vile heart.

Rant over.  But I’m serious – we’ve got to kill the whole, nasty dragon…not just bits and pieces of it.

Continue reading →

Obama: The Self-Parody President

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Fresh from having Putin rub salt in his diplomatic wounds, Obama will now pivot for the nth time back to the economy:

The White House is signaling it wants to shift back to the economy after two weeks in which the Syrian crisis has dominated President Obama’s schedule and workload.

Obama will be “focusing” on issues related to the economy in the coming weeks, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday at his daily briefing.

He said the president wants to push forward with economic policies that the White House believes will grow the middle class…

I do wonder – are they just joking around with us in the White House?  Was the whole purpose of Obama merely to give liberal hacks greater scope for graft – and while they’re in there, its just a matter of keeping up the appearance of governance while they loot the Treasury?  Pivot back to the economy?  Don’t we have a few, little things like ObamaCare, the debt limit and the 2014 budget to deal with at the moment?  Obama is going to pick up where he left off two weeks ago and start giving forgetting speeches about growing the middle class?  As if anyone thinks he gives a darn about the middle class?

If you wrote this as a comedy skit it would be spiked because it is too unbelievable – no President facing Obama’s problems would ever be this silly.  This stupid.  This absurd.  The United States and the world are heading down the tubes and Obama is going to start campaigning, again…has no one noticed that the election is over and he can’t be re-elected again?  Or is it just a way for his staff to keep him busy and out of trouble while they continue to steal?

January 20th, 2017 cannot come fast enough.

Oh, good grief:

White House Press Sec. Jay Carney told Fox News Channel’s Senior White House Reporter Ed Henry on Thursday that Americans appreciate President Barack Obama’s shifting approach to the Syrian crisis. He said that the American people “appreciate a president” who “doesn’t celebrate decisiveness for decisiveness’ sake.”

I’m sure of it now – they are just playing with us; seeing how long they can keep up the joke.  Oh, to be sure, they’re mostly playing with the MSM…the people who get leg tingles when they think of Obama.  Back in the Oval Office, it goes like this:

Carney:  So, Mr. President, we’ve kinda topped off on the level of absurdity.  I don’t know if we can push it any further – eventually, even those pinheads will have to figure it out.

President:  Look, I’ve got a bet with Biden on this one.  And, remember, he’s the guy who got the MSM to give him a pass on claiming that we and the French kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon…

Carney:  (laughs).

President: …so you’re going to march out there and say the most ridiculous thing possible and make them swallow it!

Carney:  But, what?

President:  I got it – tell them I’m to be lauded for deliberately being indecisive!  Tell them that its a positive virtue that I dickered around on Syria.  That but for my brilliant indecision, all would have gone to heck in a hand basket.  Better than Horatius at the bridge, I dithered until our enemies retreated in confusion!

Carney:  No way, you’re not getting me out there to say that.  I have a shred of self-respect left, sir.

President:  Oh, really Mr. “Obama welcomes the debate over the NSA”?

9/11 Open Thread

Mark Noonan21 Comments

We pray, of course, that at least one adult has been monitoring the situation in Washington and we won’t have a replay of last year’s Benghazi debacle…though even if it is pure idiots in charge, perhaps we’ll be graced with peace on the theory that we were so humiliated last night with Obama’s boneheaded Syria policy that we deserve a cosmic break.

It is hard to believe that 12 years have passed since That Day – also sad to reflect that 12 years on, we’ve pretty much lost the segment of the war which started back then.  I’ve long thought – indeed, within weeks of 9/11, thought – that we were entering a Thirty Year’s War…that the battle our enemies brought to our shores in 2001 would not be ended swiftly or easily.  Never did I imagine in the face of such a horrific attack that a good number of my fellow Americans would prove willing to lose the war if that would result in changing an (R) for a (D) in office.  But, so it goes – a prophecy once said that the poison unleashed in Russia in 1917 would spread far and wide…and so it has, infecting us here in the United States to the point where we have “the worse the better” leftists just as Russia did…hoping for and provoking catastrophe because, as was once said, you should never let a crisis go to waste (and “waste” in their minds is “not gaining political advantage out of it”).

Still, with all that, the effects of the attack will continue on – and part of the continuation is the increasingly clarity emerging from the fog of delusion we lived in since the end of the First World War.  All those who think understand that our civilization was attacked on 9/11 – and, furthermore, that it isn’t just people flying planes in to buildings which are the problem.  Indeed, a good part of the enemy is found in our bathroom mirror each morning…each of us when we are greedy or base or cowardly contribute our mite to the ruin we see all around us.  But things are changing – a bit of the Founder’s spirit does live within us.  Old Hickory also now strides the land and is winning some surprising victories when issues are clarified and the people simply cannot ignore the truth.  Heck, even some of our leftists citizens are starting to understand that just because someone mouths leftist platitudes, he or she still might be a creep – a mere tool of Ruling Class corruption (we on the right figured it out longer ago – which is why we’ve crushed so many RINOs in the past four years).  Some times I even ponder whether we shall Occupy the Federal Reserve and set things straight?  Perhaps, perhaps – and all part of the battle to be won both at home and abroad.

Today, pause a moment to remember the dead – stay away from all bitterness and anger and remember even those who drove the planes in to the buildings were driven by lies.  Lies are at the root of all our problems – to a Christian, of course, the lies of the Enemy…but believer or not, it is lies which are the problem.  Lies drove planes in to buildings, and have done many other horrors.  So, remember the dead – and pledge upon their graves that the truth is what you’ll seek…what you’ll fight for and if necessary die for.  Because the truth shall, indeed, set us free…and, in the by and by, win the war for us, too.

UPDATE:  The “2 Million Bikers” showed up in force in DC…offering an excellent, peaceful response to the deliberate insult of the “Million Muslim March”.

UPDATE II:  In re: Putin’s insulting little op-ed in the NY Times – up yours, Vlad.  Sure, you danced rings around Bambi but there will come a US President who’ll put your contemptible Russian ass in a sling.  Count on it.

Secession is the Answer, Update

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Seems to be spreading like wildfire:

…West Virginia was the last state to break off from another. Now, 150 years later, a 49-year-old information technology consultant wants to apply the knife to Maryland’s five western counties. “The people are the sovereign,” says Scott Strzelczyk, leader of the fledgling Western Maryland Initiative, and the western sovereigns are fed up with Annapolis’s liberal majority, elected by the state’s other sovereigns.

“If you think you have a long list of grievances and it’s been going on for decades, and you can’t get it resolved, ultimately this is what you have to do,” says Strzelczyk, who lives in New Windsor, a historic town of 1,400 people in Carroll County. “Otherwise you are trapped.”…

Maryland is governed by the DC/Baltimore area of the State – holding the largest population and entirely dependent upon Big Government (federal and State), the people of those areas prefer their politicians to be Big Government boosters.  And no problem with that.  More power to them.  But this means that the people of western Maryland – much smaller in population and thus playing little role in either the legislative or executive branches of State government – are left out in the cold…and many of them don’t want a government which is keen mostly upon creating more government.

In government, smaller is better – the smaller the territory under any particular government the more attuned it will be to the needs of the local people.  The Founders knew this – and thus set up a federal Republic in order to secure local rule in most areas of government, leaving to the federal government only those limited powers necessary to secure the broad rights of all the people.  Over time, both the federal and State governments have engrossed power to themselves – and do not think that this was just some trick pulled by hucksters…for a very long time, starting in the misbegotten “progressive” era of the early 20th century, the people, themselves, sought government to “do something” about problems.  The trouble is that government “doing something” means government growing in power…and often not doing at all what people wanted.  Now the reaction has set in – and in a very American fashion, it is emerging on the national level as a revived “Jacksonian” desire to reign in the federal government, and a desire to break up the States in to smaller political units which can better be managed by the people, rather than being resigned to the Ruling Class and it’s permanent bureaucracy.

This is the revolution, folks – the Second American Revolution.  The people are leading it, and it will reform this great nation of ours.

Thinking About Syria

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Does anyone in any position of responsibility realize that for the Alawites lead by Assad, this is a matter of life and death?  That if they don’t win the civil war, they are in for a round of murder and pillage at the hands of their enemies?  While they are Muslims, they are considered to be a sort of heretical Islam by the dominant Sunni Muslims and for centuries before Syria fell under French rule post-WWI, they were oppressed by their fellow Muslims.  To be sure, they have used cruelty and chicanery to gain and maintain mastery as a minority Ruling Class in Syria, but now the fat is in the fire – the Alawites are not expecting mercy and brotherhood from the other side if they lose, so they’ll fight on until destroyed or they have secured their own homes and families.  Lobbing a few missiles at them will not make them stop doing whatever they think proves necessary to, at minimum, maintain their control over predominantly Alawite ares of Syria.  Only an army more powerful than they can do the trick…and if you’re wondering why this minority of 12% of Syria’s population has maintained control for decades and has an even chance of winning the Civil War look no further than the fact that the Alawites retained for themselves the best weapons…and constituted a majority of the total Syrian armed forces pre-Civil War.

I bring this up because no one seems to be thinking along these lines – that people with their backs to the wall are not likely to be easily swayed.  We’re treating them as if they are concerned about the whole of Syria and its welfare.  In some theoretical sense, this might be true – but in the concrete, the Alawite soldiers are fighting for lives of their wives and children.  These people will not go down easily.  Of course, they are not the only minority group in Syria.  In fact, Syria is a grab-bag of minority groups.  Sure, its overwhelmingly Muslim – but there are nearly as many Christians as there are Alawites (and the Christians probably do favor the Alawites because, point blank, the more secular-minded Alawites have tended to live and let live with the Christians…meanwhile, the rebels are increasingly infected with Islamism, and so Christians are increasingly brutalized); Islam in Syria is broken up in to quite a lot of different sects.

Syria isn’t really a nation as we think of it – its just another one of those colonial left-overs.  Ruled for centuries by the Turks, taken over by the French post-WWI, the people there never thought of themselves as “Syrians” in the sense that we think of ourselves as “Americans”…people with a common history, a shared set of basic values and a willingness to sink sectarian differences for the good of the larger community.  Essentially, the Alawites have provided what the Ottomans provided until 1918 and the French until 1946 – a group of people who keep down everyone else, until just lately, when for a variety of reasons a rebellion broke out (not in any case the first), at a time when non-Syrian forces were willing to back the rebels (and not us, good people – quite a lot of Gulf State Muslim money has poured in to the rebels).  And don’t think the rebels are keen on establishing a republic in which all Syrians live in brotherhood.  There might be a few such trotted out to meet with a junketing Senator McCain, but most of them are primarily interested in securing their own particular interests…and, if things work out, grabbing the sort of power the Alawites have held on to since the 1970’s.  I almost hate to point this out, but the only thing which can be found in common among most Syrians is probably a loathing of Israel…but even that has been set aside so that they can kill each other in a mad scramble for power.

Crucial to any expectations of results is to understand the reality of things.  Syria is not just “Syria”.  Its a lot of different things and the people battling there with extreme cruelty have clear ideas of what they want.  If we don’t have a clear idea of what we want and how it relates to the reality on the ground in Syria, then whatever we do will fail.  This does not at all preclude a diplomatic solution to the problem, by the way – in fact, it opens up wide vistas of diplomatic action, if we will understand the facts and figure out what it is we want.

Furthermore, we do have the power to impose a solution – our weight thrown on to any particular side will allow that side to emerge victorious.  If, that is, we make it clear that if we decide to come in on a side that we’ll come all the way in with whatever level of force would prove necessary.  Half measure won’t do; lobbing a few missiles is absurd.  If we want to have any particular result in Syria, then we have to will the means as well as envision the ends.  We could, perhaps, use our overwhelming power to convince all sides that it is time to sit down and talk – to set up some sort of federal or cantonal system of government which will allow each major element its own absolute sphere, surrendering only enough power to the central government as is necessary to make Syria a functional, national unit.  Carrots for everyone – and a threat of the Big Stick for anyone who decides that they’d rather keep fighting instead of negotiating a settlement…and, yes, this does mean that in certain circumstances we throw our weight behind Assad’s Alawites (if not behind Assad, who probably could be eased out by Alawites convinced that we’ll ensure their lives and property against revenge).

But if we are not willing to envision an end and unwilling to provide the means to achieve the end, then it is best we stay out.  At this stage of the game, staying out is probably the best course of action – mostly because Obama has botched it so badly to this point. It is not because people are getting isolationist that intervention in Syria is unpopular, but because Obama has proven himself a fool and no one wants to dive in to a murky situation without some idea of what we hope to accomplish, what it might cost and how long it will take.  But good things can be done with American power – wisdom is not to be found in launching endless wars, nor in the twin follies of pacifism and isolationism.  Clear headed, rational thinking informed by the actual facts can get us out of this mess – and help the people of Syria, in to the bargain.  My prayer is that some how, some way even Obama will start to see things clearly and a reasonable, humane policy will emerge.

UPDATE:  I’ve pondered it some more and here’s a follow-on comment I left elsewhere:

…(we have) all the ingredients which cool headed diplomacy can make much hay with.  If we understood diplomacy (ie, if we didn’t have Obama and team in charge) we would long-ago have said that our interest is peace in Syria and to that end we will exert pressure on all sides to engage in talks to reform the government of Syria to secure absolutely minority rights.  Once that announcement is made, support can be rounded up in the world for the effort and support built at home for a forward policy – while backstairs negotiations let all and sundry know that we are determined upon a peace settlement to be imposed on the warring sides with the carrot being US and international help to rebuild and the stick being US force being thrown against whichever sides proves most resistant to compromise (in other words, we’re telling them that we’ll even fight on Assad’s side, if he proves most willing to compromise).  Once the preliminary work is done, we call a conference of all the interested parties to reach an agreement to embargo all arms and impose sanctions on the warring factions…Russia, China and Iran would strongly object to this (and thus no such thing could be done through the UN…which is why we’d ignore the UN and go for genuine diplomacy), and we’d lay down the marker:  we’re going to do this and we’re willing to fight…and if Russia, China and Iran want to fight us in order to maintain their particular clients in Syria, then let’s have at it.  They would back down in front of that as no one in the world wants to go to actual war with the United States of America.  Once a cease-fire agreement is hammered out it is presented to the Syrian factions and they are given 36 hours to comply or face sustained military action by the United States until they do agree.  More than likely, all but the Islamist fanatics would agree, and they could be swiftly exterminated.  We can then mid-wife in Syria a Cantonal form of government allowing each group to keep its own while cooperating to sustain the larger entity of Syria.

At any rate, that’s what I would do.

Uh Oh! Contrary to Climate Models Arctic Ice Grows 60% in a Year

tiredoflibbs3 Comments

Again, the prevailing climate models are proven faulty, inaccurate and fraudulent by NASA and NOAA.

http://personalliberty.com/2011/07/29/nasa-data-proves-global-warming-computer-models-wrong-29347/
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/noaa-proves-that-climate-models-are-wrong/

To the chagrin of climate change alarmists (formerly know as global warming alarmists and global cooling alarmists) NASA data shows that far less heat is trapped by earth’s increased CO2 laden atmosphere. (Even AlGore’s own chart showed that temperature increases PRECEEDED CO2 concentration increases by 800 years).

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/NASA-Global-Warming-Alarmists/2011/07/28/id/405200

Now after seeing dozens of pictures and videos (by very discriminating camera persons) of Polar Bears stranded on smaller and smaller ice flows (again pictures were misleading), it seams, that during one of the highest concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and contrary to the climate models, arctic ice has increased by 60% in one year!  The pictures speak for themselves.

The current models, which are supposedly based on “settled” and “peer reviewed” science, that the alarmists take as gospel have yet to predict any of the contrary physical evidence that we have seen.  This goes to show anyone with an open mind, who avoids the zealotry of the left that treats Global Climate Change as their religion, can see that the science is far from settled and that consensus does not a solid conclusion make.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html

Uh oh, what is an global warming…errrr… climate change alarmist to do?

Democrats Who Are for Action in Syria Don’t Want the pResident Humiliated

tiredoflibbs20 Comments

Dem Congresswoman: Only Reason I’d Vote for Syria Attack Is Loyalty to Obama

It goes to show that Democrats can’t think for themselves and their actions are a result of partisanship.

HOLMES NORTON: So I think he’ll be in real trouble if he then does it anyway. No president has done that.

PRESS: It’s not an easy decision for any of you, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton.

HOLMES NORTON: Oh, and I’d like to say, Bill, that if he gets saved at all, I think it’ll be because, it’ll be because of loyalty of Democrats. They just don’t want to see him shamed and humiliated on the national stage.

PRESS: Yeah, right.

HOLMES NORTON: At the, at the moment, that’s the only reason I would vote for it if I could vote on it.

Wow, she has said it all.  It is a shame that a pResident who claimed to “restore our world image” is an utter failure at that as well.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan

You want to know just how we got ourselves in to this mess?  Where, here’s the level of stupidity in the Obama Administration:

…Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, hoped that a team of UN investigators — many of whom, presumably, have a longstanding relationship with Iranian leaders — could write a report that would convince Iran to abandon its ally at the behest of the United States.

“We worked with the UN to create a group of inspectors and then worked for more than six months to get them access to the country on the logic that perhaps the presence of an investigative team in the country might deter future attacks,” Power said at the Center for American Progress as she made the case for intervening in Syria.

“Or, if not, at a minimum, we thought perhaps a shared evidentiary base could convince Russia or Iran — itself a victim of Saddam Hussein’s monstrous chemical weapons attacks in 1987-1988 — to cast loose a regime that was gassing it’s people,” she said…

So, here goes the “thinking” – if we can just get the Iranians to see that Assad is a bad guy, they’ll get on board with us against him!  Genius, I tell ya!  Just where to heck to we get such idiots?  Well, Tom Elia on his Facebook page details it:

Yale undergrad; journalist; Harvard Law School; Pulitzer Prize winner (non-fiction book); professor, Kennedy School; diplomat.

We get it from the Ruling Class – the privileged elite who are supposedly just oh, so well educated and oh, so much smarter than us knuckle-dragging teabaggers.  That’s where we get it from.  Ms. Powers, a little clue for ya from the dummies:  people who hang people for being gay and stone women to death because they were raped are unlikely to have an attack of conscience over gassing people.  Its just not that likely, ya see?  In fact, people who do that sort of thing might even be in favor of gassing people…I know, shocking; but there it is.  Some people are just like that.

Update:

Now anti-war Hollywood chimes in with the most unintelligent reason for not opposing action in Syria:

Ed Asner: “They don’t want to feel Anti-Black”

Wow.  Now I have heard it all.  I am 100% positive if the President was a African-American Republican, Hollywood would have no problem “feeling Anti-Black” in that case.  Again according to the left, if you criticize the pResident you are a racist…. a bigot…. a hater.

UPDATE III, by Mark Noonan:

In between bouts of blaming Bush, I guess someone over at Team Obama realized that Team Bush could at least drum up and sustain support for war – even when things got really rough.  And, so, Team Obama sent some former Bush people to lobby House GOPers:

Top Bush administration officials have mobilized to sway a skeptical Republican party to authorize military intervention in Syria. As National Review Online reported, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley and former undersecretary of defense for policy Eric Edelman this week led a briefing on Capitol Hill for Republican legislative directors and chiefs of staff…

…Their argument: If you hope to have a negotiated settlement with Iran, they only way you are going to get there is if the Iranians actually believe the use of force lies behind America’s efforts to negotiate. Hamstringing the president’s effort to use force against Syria now will “absolutely cripple and destroy” the chance to reach a diplomatic settlement with Iran…

The idea is that if we fail to sustain Obama on Syria, then when he does go to talk to the Iranians about their nuclear program, the Iranians will know in advance that there is no credible threat of US action if Iran refuses to forgo nuclear weapons.  Its a nice theory, but it is based upon a premise that to this moment Iran believes that we’ll do something about their nuclear program.  If they do, then they are too stupid to figure out how to build an atomic bomb…or even a firecracker, for that matter.

Obama’s credibility will not be destroyed by failure to sustain him on Syria – Obama’s credibility has been destroyed for ages.  If the Assad government did use chemical weapons it is because they were convinced that no great punishment would be meted out if they did.  And, they’re right – even if we sustain Obama, he’s just going to lob a few missiles in to Syria.  Twenty or thirty more large explosions added to the scores of large explosions happening there every day.  Not exactly the sort of thing to convince a bloodthirsty dictator fighting for his life that he’s in trouble.  No war in Syria – not now; not while Obama is President.

The Answer to the Syrian Question is “Lebanon”

Mark Noonan16 Comments

First off, Russia has released a report claiming that Syrian rebels used poison gas on March 19th. Whether or not the report is true, it does cast doubt on the Administration’s “Assad rat bastard against Freedom Fighters” narrative.  The Russian report, if proved correct, just adds one more bit of evidence that the rebels in Syria are just as nasty and inhuman as the Assad forces.  And this, in turn, makes it less and less wise for us to intervene in Syria.  But, there is a course of action the United States can take during this crisis which will help us, help our allies, weaken our enemies and leave us in a better position no matter who wins the Syrian Civil War – and that is to concentrate our efforts on Lebanon.

What is important is not necessarily what is in the newspapers.  In fact, what is making the headlines is as often as not the last thing we should be paying attention to.  This is because most reporters and editors are ignorant of things like history, strategy, military issues and such.  They are in the news business not to keep the citizenry informed, but to make bags of money and get rich and famous.  This Onion parody of why the MSM reported on Miley Cyrus actually explains the motivation of the  news business correctly.  Read it for the truth – and for the laughs, as its quite funny (language warning).  While reports showing the horrors of war and dead bodies will get people to tune it (especially if their are explosions!), what you’re seeing there isn’t what is at issue…it is the result of an issue.  The issue going on in the Muslim world right now is who gets to be in charge…all the battling and civil war and revolution and repression is all about who gets to be top dog.  Our leaders might think this, that or the other thing but the people there causing the trouble simply want power and are willing to go to horrific, anti-human lengths to obtain it.

Given this, we can be certain that whomever ruthlessly climbs to the top over a mountain of corpses probably won’t be a paragon of virtue.  In other words, whomever wins will be an enemy – actual or in prospect – of all we hold dear.  We can’t intervene on either side because both sides are simply after the same thing – ruthless, absolute power in order to perpetuate themselves (though, truth be told, the least dangerous outcome for us is an Assad victory…he doesn’t appear to have dreams of a global caliphate, as do many of the rebels).  So, our task then is to ensure that at the end of the bloody war, we and our allies are in the best possible position.  To me, this makes me turn to Lebanon.

Lebanon was wracked by civil war for years and then, essentially, came under Syrian and proxy-Iranian rule (the Iranian proxies are Hezbollah).  While this has made for peace in the sense of nobody immediately shooting each other, it has made for a lot of oppression as neither the Syrians nor Hezbollah are interested in the rights and desires of the people of Lebanon.  With Syria now locked in a death match and Iran expending energy keeping her ally Assad in power, the time is ripe for us to try and leverage Syria and Hezbollah (Iran) out of Lebanon.  The people there probably don’t like Syrian/Hezbollah rule, even if they don’t particularly like us, either.  There’s not much Syria can do if we decided to apply a little political pressure backed by covert military pressure to help the Lebanese push out the Syrians and then turn on Hezbollah. If we can get Syria/Hezbollah out of Lebanon then at the end of the Syrian Civil War we’ll have a weaker Syria, a weaker Iran, a free Lebanon and a more secure Israel – and if our efforts fail, we’ll be no worse off than we are now and we won’t have gotten ourselves involved in a Syrian Civil War which can do no good for us.

I don’t at all expect Obama to do anything like this.  He’s even more ignorant than a news reporter.  But I thought it worthwhile to demonstrate that there is an alternate policy for us to support – and thus put to rest the concept that some how or another because Obama screwed up and Assad is a bastard that we have to get directly involved.  The world doesn’t work like a machine – its run by human beings and thus can be quite confusing and the real issue can be off to the side while everyone is looking at the shiny object.  A true sense of our power and what our interests are clears things up a lot – pity that hardly anyone in a position of authority has any idea of either thing.