Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Britons Never Never Shall Be...


The next word in that ancient song was 'slaves' but they're thinking of changing it to fit the New Age. Looking at the upcoming election the old song just doesnt fit in any way. They dont rule the waves and they dont seem very adept at avoiding tyranny and slavery to the state either. We can stand a few thousand miles away and think of all the times in England where us dumb colonials were subjected to that backhanded sneering irony that made Britain the ruler of the world. Oh you foolish Americans, you Bush voters, we understand that you're just not very clever and we will allow for your Western Hemisphere Retardation by treating you like the helpless mental defective we know you are but are too 'polite' to say right to your face. This leaves you standing, enraged, missing the opportunity to think of something equally snidey to say back and unwilling to confirm their opinion that you are an uncultured boor by screaming 'screw you' back at them.

But isnt it nice to be able to look with new eyes at the nation whose language, legal system and culture were the roots of our own and realize...they're as dumb as we are! Maybe even a little bit dumber. Look how things have turned around. Margaret Thatcher, one of the great figures of the last century, a woman who literally saved the UK from economic catastrophe, preceded Ronald Reagan, who essentially did the same thing for the US. But what, in the end, did these giants accomplish? They balanced the welfare state's books, they didnt stop its growth or undermine the assumptions that underlaid its expansion. The idea that everyone could take more out of the system than they put in didnt recede even a tiny bit under either of these two or the beetling nonentities who followed.

Who was more of a wet noodle John Major or Bush 41? Both of them blew the noodle-ometer off the scale as they truckled to every special interest with a campaign contribution in its hand and a greedy gleam in its eye and smiled happy at the growing megastate metastasizing all around them. Meanwhile a new generation was being hatched out from the universities, steeped in the heady broth of utopianism and totally ignorant of logic, economics and their own cultural traditions and stuffed to the gills with politically correct slogans in place of thoughts. This rot proceeded to the point where both countries could be attacked by an enemy who described us in the most vile terms as a bunch of cowardly, atheistic degenerates and howl for our extinction or forcible conversion to the most detestable religion on the planet and our leaders found themselves unable to even mention the name of this hostile ideology or, in the case of the UK, to make illegal any criticism of that ideology in case these rage-filled misogynists are somehow made even madder. In the US a half-wit Senator named Patty Murray took the opportunity, several days after the 9/11 attack murdered several thousand of her fellow countrymen, to inform us that Osama Bin Laden was beloved in Afghanistan because he built so many roads and day care centers. These mysterious day care centers had vanished by the time the coalition forces chased the Taliban from power and were replaced with stories of widows starving to death because they were unable to work or even leave their houses unescorted by a male relative. Watching these so-called 'feminists' truckle to a pack of angry misogynists who consider women to be a form of livestock is part of the grim comedy of political correctness.

The hideous John Major was followed by a toothy reptilian sociopathic liar, Tony Blair, just as the feeble Bush 41 was followed by the nauseating BJ Clinton. Clinton was preparing to dive headfirst into the rocky chasm of socialism but was stopped cold by a crippling defeat in the 1994 mid-term elections, an outburst of sanity on the part of the electorate that has yet to be repeated. Both Clinton and Blair had a conniving reptile intelligence that placed their own political survival above any high-falutin ideals they might have thought they believed in and both continued the low tax rates as they quietly fed the forces who would emerge in a few years to seize power in the name of the megastate.

The leftist Clinton was followed by the liberal and ineffective Bush 43, a man with no agenda other than running the machinery of government, while the leftist Blair was replaced by the incredibly incompetent, even more leftwing leftist Gordon Brown. He looks like Terry Jones of the comedy group Monty Python and his public statements made people wonder if he had hired Monty Python's writing team as his speechwriters. Under Brown the old Blair policy of respecting the sanctity of the Thatcher Tax Rates was abandoned and public spending and promises to do more public spending escalated. The result has been capital flight and rapidly rising deficits.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the American electorate, tired of the buffoonish and lackluster Bush, succumbed to an American Idol political advertising campaign by installing a vapid, glassy-eyed ideologue whose brain had done a Vulcan mind-meld with every bad political and economic idea developed in the foetid swamp of the last fifty years of academic think tanks. He was elected because he was more telegenic than any of his opponents. His voters were the New Generation, clutching their soon-to-be worthless college degrees and yearning for the New Age laid out so lovingly by their professors, deluded independents who were disgusted at the corruption that the megastate-friendly media skillfully portrayed as a solely Republican phenomena, and fulsome blood-sucking parasites of all stripes who licked their lips in the hopes of even bigger payouts. The 'political debate' was vapid and ignored any of the real problems that would have to be dealt with in the near future. The American Idol President promptly handed the keys to the treasury over to a legislature run by a botoxed Marxist multi-millionaire crackpot Granny and a sniveling gay Mormon pathological Uriah Heep-style liar who was notorious for his crooked land deals and put his presidential feet up on his desk dreaming of being the greatest president since Lincoln.

In a few days the UK electorate will go to the polls to decide between three appalling but distinguishable candidates. they have had American style TV debates where moronic reporters ask irrelevant questions and a new dynamic has emerged from that. Brown, representing Labour, has been skunked by the candidate of the usually laughable Liberal Democrat Party's new young candidate Nick Clegg. Clegg is another Obama. He is much more far to the left than even Brown but is skillfully obfuscating and pretending to be ideology-free. The Brits who arent going to vote for the Conservative Party seem to be deserting Labour and running towards this New Hope And Change candidate. Brown is scrambling to hold on to his voters.

But today Brown got in a debate with someone even more formidable than Cameron (the 'Conservative' who in this country would be as conservative as Arlen Spector or Chuck Schumer) or even Clegg; Gillian Duffy of Rochdale, Lancashire. She confronted the miked-up Brown, asking him the questions that the dimwit press had been avoiding. Taxes, deficits, debt, the implosion of the horrible National Health Service and immigration.

Brown retorted to her remark that millions of Eastern Europeans were flocking to Britain and getting on the public assistance rolls by noting that millions of Britons had moved away from the country. So productive tax-paying upscale Britons are replaced by subsidy-sucking, poverty-stricken foreigners and that's OK with Gordon! As Ms. Duffy took this mutt to the cleaners in their ad hoc debate he became more and more irate that someone had the effrontery to raise actual issues and on walking away, still miked, he snarled to an aide, "That was a disaster - they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? It's just ridiculous...she was just a bigoted woman."

And that, my friends, is who we are to these jerks--a bunch of angry bigots trying to weasel our way out of paying 'our fair share'. Duffy, a lifelong Labour voter was shocked to be described as such and promises not to vote this time but I dont believe her. English people always do what they've always done and a lifelong Labour voter will go to the polls and vote for Labour no matter what that means politically. Americans might jump back and forth between parties but Brits are not that way. Even the charismatic Clegg has a dim chance of an upset that would give him anything like a majority. He hopes to have a key block of votes in Parliament that will make him a king-maker.

Meanwhile the debt grows. The Russians and Iranians run amok. The public employees demand ever higher payouts as services collapse and crime runs rampant. British traditions are vilified by the Marxists who run the education system and more and more Brits check out of the system, retiring or fleeing the country, leaving a dwindling tax base to the crowds of freeloaders and parasites who feed so lustily at the public trough. We're seeing the result of this trend in the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain), who are very visibly going broke now, but France and Britain and indeed all the rest of Europe are not far behind. And California and New York and Illinois and Pennsylvania and...

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Gamey Change


I'm depressed. My daughter mailed me her copy of 'Game Change' so that her political junkie father could read it. 'Game Change' is an account of the inside machinations of the various players in the 2008 election. It was written by Mark Halperin, the former director of ABC News who was so helpful to BJ Clinton during the impeachment, and another liberal journalist. Whatever you think of their point of view you have to admire how these guys dug up the dirt. Of course, as Rush Limbaugh noted, it might have been a bit more useful if these guys had dug up some of this dirt before the election but that was impossible; anything that jeopardized victory for the cause was unthinkable. Another reason to not dig too deep into the Clintons before they had been brought down to earth was the prospect that they would be back in office with a giant sheet-list, ready to direct the IRS to revenge every tiny insult from the out years.

Thats the most satisfying and at the same time most disturbing thing in the book; the downfall of the Clints and especially BJ. That a person with a total contempt for the truth was elected and then re-elected as President of the United States has been an issue for all of us Right-wing fringe nutballs since 1992. How could our fellow Americans be so ignorant and dense as to find some redeeming features in this narcissistic reprobate and his squawking power-mad crow of a spouse? The picture of them that emerges from this book will add to the shock of even the most dedicated Clinton-haters. The Smartest Woman In The Universe and Our First Black President are surrounded by an entire Democratic Party hierarchy who hated their guts and did everything in its power to block Hilly's candidacy, including begging Obama to run against her and then backing him to the hilt. As the Clints realized the level of betrayal by slimy nematodes like Harry Reid, John Kerry, George Soros, Chuck Schumer and a raft of more anonymous but important party insiders their rage and bitterness drove them (especially BJ) totally insane, especially after Fat Teddy plunged his dagger between Hilly's shoulder blades.

That the media, who had spiked rape stories and covered up bribes from a hostile foreign government or two for the Clints in the past, would all of a sudden start treating them so badly you would almost think they were Republicans, was a dagger in the hearts of America's Power Couple. Of course they werent being given the full-on Bush-Rove treatment; little faux pas like Hilly's two million dollar campaign contribution from the Chicoms bundled through Chinese street vendors and small businessmen in NYC or the whole Norman Hsu-Chicom bribe were passed over by 'Game Change'. The problems with BJ's donor list werent addressed or some of the more questionable aspects of the Clinton Global Cashgrab Initiative but I guess a book can only have so many pages, after all. But what was getting out during the primaries was enough to spark rage and fury in the hearts of Billy and Hilly as they watched Clinton 3 slide down the tubes. Bill ended up doing a tour of Dairy Queens just off the two-lane blacktop in forgotten rural backwaters to keep him from doing any more damage with his out-of-control big mouth.

The sage and calm Obama strides purposefully through the narrative like Kim Jong Il, sometimes chagrined by the scuffle and pressing to reign in a misguided follower or two but always on the right side of history, as Marxist hagiographers would say. The fad-like Obamamania is unmentioned or mischaracterized, as in the case of Barry's disastrous visit to Israel and his embarrassing flop of a speech in Berlin, the former ignored and the later mentioned in one sentence which describes it as a triumph. The swooners and fainters and indeed the whole clownish emotiveness of Obamamania are unmentioned. No policy opinions of any sort are ascribed to any of the people in this book.

Which brings us to the most disturbing part of this book for those of us who think of ourselves as Republicans. This book explains, in a way, how John McLame became the candidate of a party he had absolute contempt for. At one point it quotes McLame as exclaiming, "Who would want to be the leader of a party made up of people like that?" (I'm paraphrasing from memory). Well, Johnny Boy, we felt the same way about you. McLame was genuinely shocked that the media, which had supported the weakest possible opposition to the Democrats (him), pushed his drive to the nomination, and then turned on him after he had it clinched, just as 'rightwing gasbags' (the author's language) like Rush Limbaugh had predicted would happen a year previously. Rush's contribution to Hilly's victories in Ohio and Texas by imploring his listeners to switch parties and vote for her in the primaries to cause trouble for the Dems was of course unmentioned.

The picture of McLame goes beyond ideology. The image that emerges is one of an unstable egomaniac without strong convictions about anything except his right to the Oval Office. He screams, he curses, he fulminates, he flies off on wild fantasy trips that he is sure will win him the White House. He bullies Bush and Obama into a meeting in the White House during the financial crisis and arrives completely unprepared, leaving Boehner to take the heat from Obama, Pelosi, Frank,and Reid as a bemused Bush sat back and watched the carnival.

The behavior of the RINOs, whom the liberal authors coddle as the real non-yahoo Republicans, is sickening. The pygmy stature of the other Republicans in the race for the nomination is stark. After reading this book my always negative picture of Mutt Romney was hardened into real dislike. Giuliani comes off as a pathetic poser, unwilling to engage. The conniving Lindsey Graham and the odious, ferret-like Charlie Crist act as one would expect. In the end McLame got the nomination because the liberal policies of George W Bush had marginalized the core of the Republican Party and because Bush sat still in the White House for eight years while his sworn enemies were screaming lies about him and us and howled for the end of the Republicans in general and him in particular. He sat there while Chuck Schumer and Colin Powell framed one of Cheney's innocent operatives in a kangaroo court where the defense was enjoined from mentioning anything about policy or politics and where the prosecution , faced with a total lack of evidence and knowing the name of the true 'culprit' in this non-crime spoke of nothing but policy and politics. W is disgraced forever for not standing up in front of the cameras the next day after the 'trial' and awarding a full pardon to Scooter Libby and then denouncing the liars Powell and Schumer and the disgraceful prosecutor Fitzgerald for their perfidy. But I digress.

In the end, after reading this book I am ashamed to say that I voted for McLame. He didnt deserve and wasnt fit to be president. As bad as Obama is at least his disastrous liberal policies have to be labeled just that. McLame's liberalism would have been blamed on us conservatives just like Bush's was. RINOs and Blue Dog Democrats are worse than honest liberals, who at least stand up for their beliefs. Nothing admirable or human emerges from this harsh picture of McLame. I felt more sympathy for Hillary Clinton's loss than I did for McLame.

Now for the toughest part of the book, the part about Sarah Palin. She was taken from her family and her recently born son with no preparation and dropped into the shark pit without a swimming lesson. She had a bit of a nervous breakdown after she made the acceptance speech that annointed her as the only person on the political scene that any conservative could support and the entire media tidal wave hit her full force. The McLamiacs treated her with contempt and disdain, as though she was a mere prop that had to be managed 100% of the time. She was isolated and under pressure. But with that said there were still things that could only shock someone who hopes that she will emerge as a party leader. At one point Katie Couric asks her whether she disagreed with other Supreme Court decisions besides Roe v Wade. Now come on. In my day any thirteen year old would have said Dred Scott or Plessy vs Ferguson. Anyone who reads a newspaper daily could surely have blurted out Kelo vs New London. She froze. The governor of a state, a person who makes her living in politics and government, couldnt answer a question like that! I'm in the cartoon industry and Palin's inability to answer Couric's question when she was running for a political office would be like me asking my collegues, "Who's Bugs Bunny?" Maybe it was stagefright, the bugs bunny in the headlights, but it doesnt come off well, to say the least.

In the end a shocking thing about this book is how little there is from any of these dopes about any kind of policy. Maybe thats what its all about, The Game, and that annoying policy nonsense is just a sideshow to highlight these paragons. Every one of these people who would lead us comes across, without exception, as a self-centered, narrow, conniving egomaniac, unfit for any high office. They all, with the notable exception of Palin, have never done anything in their lives except strive for power and that struggle has left them with shallow, empty souls and narrow, crabbed outlooks. After you read this book your hope for any kind of reform coming from the political class will have to wilt and die. We are in a period similar to France right before the Revolution. As Louis XIV or George W Bush 43 must have said, "Apres moi, le deluge!"

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Whaleburgerz!


Santa Monica used to be a slum. In the 60's all those beach towns were definitely low-rent and run down. Not any more. Santa Monica has become Yuppie Central, like a vast colony of prairie dogs, except instead of those cute little yellow-ochre rodents Santa Monica is a giant warren of granola-eating New Age loonies addicted to destructive behaviors that cause societal erosion...like voting for Henry Waxman. A run-down shack in this little enclave tucked in between LA and the beach sells for over a mil and severe rent control has made apartments only available to those who can afford to pay the landlord huge 'key fees' to move in. A walk down the Third Street Mall will find you confronted by petition circulators who are trying to put measures on the ballot that would turn the State of California into an even more bleak economic desert than the left-wing loonies in the legislature have so far been able to accomplish.

What is dearer to the hearts of these paisley-clad Puritans in their pursuit of a Clean Green Planet than forcing all of us to eat a diet completely devoid of any kind of flavor or juice? Its amazing that they havent outdone that whacky little screwball who claims to be mayor of New York City by banning salt, transfat, meat produced from unhappy animals, or any food containing any kind of preservatives. In fact these pinched-mouthed fanatics hardly ever agree on what constitutes non-sinful eating but they tend to agree on one food as being completely politically correct...sushi.

Yes, you heard me, sushi. A piece of raw fish laid across a seaweed-wrapped, circular disk of usually white rice (brown in the case of the truly hard-core). Of course Sashimi, Nigiri, Maki rolls, all are OK for good-thinking Santa Monicans as long as their wallets hold up to the stiff costs of these little niblets of raw fish and sculptured veggies. The vibes in the numerous sushi establishments that are far more numerous than gas stations in that Progressive burg are SO highly evolved you can almost sense Gaia looking down with a smile lighting up her Earth Mother visage.

But of course no one is perfect. Many of the sushi chefs hail from formerly unknown Japanese cities with names like Zacatecas and Guadelajara. All of the serving staff speak a patois of Japanese known to its speakers as Espanol. The upscale owners of these bistros have been known to chastise mistakes in service with rhino-hide swagger sticks purchased from the British Empire going-out-of-business sale. These minor sins can be overlooked by an accepting population who recognizes that movement in a Green Direction is progress.

Then it happened. It was on 4th Street, right in the belly of the Green Beast, that some sharp eye noticed a popular upscale sushi bar was selling whale sushi. Little strips of whale laid lovingly across the little muffins of seaweed-wrapped rice. Oh they had some euphemistic name for it but it was whale. A mob formed and the owner of the joint barely escaped painful bloody murder at the hands of an angry crowd of people who only eat organic eggs from cage-free chickens. Its lucky that there was a medical marijuana dispensary and a sexual appliance store on either side of the sushi bar or the outraged hippies would have torched the scene of the crime.

Now there are neighborhoods in my beloved Los Angeles where people happily wear jumpsuits lined with fur from snow leopards and carry dolphin-skin handbags encrusted with rhinestones. My neighborhood as a matter of fact. We have a word for people like that...Iranians. You can see them speeding down the left-hand turn lane in the center of Ventura Boulevard in their badly-tuned Hummers laying down a carpet of black diesel smoke and screaming in Farsi on their cell phones. They probably eat whale shwarma all the time. My fellow Republicans, as they have developed a healthy resentment to being fleeced by high taxes and watching Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton suck up to the evil regime in Iran.

But over the hill they dont have any truck with cetacean murder. They deny themselves that last order of Unagi so they can kick in to reelect Hog-Nosed Hank and Babs Boxer without realizing that their favorite food is about to be denied to them by the same regime they elected so lovingly sixteen months ago. How could this be? Sushi is to the Obama Administration what pizza was to the Clinton Administration, its outrageous to think that the sushi-eaters who monopolize the upper reaches of our government would do anything to outlaw their favorite food.

Outlaw? No, but have these thoughtful Greenies considered what imposing a Value Added Tax might do to the price of their fishy treats? In the UK they imposed a VAT in the bleak, dark, socialistic seventies. What happened? Prices exploded overnight. A VAT is imposed at every level so the costs of rice and fish are taxed and then the cost of sushi is taxed when you buy it at the sushi bar. The cost of parking your car is taxed. Chopsticks, ginger and wasabi? Ditto. In the UK the business owners decided that everyone was expecting a price hike so they added a great big one to the VAT, figuring it could just be blamed on the government. Those eight-dollar spicy tuna rolls might double in price. The gas to drive your car to Santa Monica will double and triple as the idiotic foriegn policy climbdown turns the Middle East over to the nuked-up Iranians.

Inflation. It will crash into the beachside cafe culture of upscale places like Santa Monica like a tsunami. As the sushi-addicts are cold-turkeyed from their favorite food you'll see them wading into the sewage-polluted surf with meat-cleavers attacking the dolphins and sea lions with a hungry gleam in their eyes. Crowds of sushi-deprived Green Activists will greedily devour the fresh carcasses on the beach wrapping bloody scraps of cetacean flesh in the slimy seaweed that washes up with every wave. The Obama Depression has so far been fairly selective. The upscale have managed to avoid its most onerous effects but the day they impose a VAT that will be a thing of the past. This mega-inflationary tax is a wealth destroyer and a poverty creator.

Are the whales safe then? After all, its hard to swim far enough out to clip one of them with your meat-cleaver and you wont be able to afford gas or tie-up fees for a boat. Hmmm. Maybe they're safe, maybe not. The power vacuum created by the economic suicide of America will cause the rise of a new Superpower in the Pacific. China. Not a society known for their stewardship of the environment. Whale eaters. Drag net users. Dolphin killers. No environmental conscience at all.

The Obama policies could easily lead to the extinction of every form of marine life outside of those Chinese chemical and fish-feces polluted fish farms that are so notorious for contamination that Green markets like Trader Joes were forced to relabel their tilapia fillets as Chilean. It was easy to make a sticker that covered the 'na' at the end of the phrase Made In China with an 'le', creating a much more safe and salable product.

Not that you'll be able to afford tilapia fillets at $750 a box. Even the rice will be unavailable as the Green Nutballs cut off the water to every rice paddy in California in the name of the Delta Smelt, the only fish that has a chance of survival in the next few years. Every Obama policy is dedicated to make you live poorer than the poor in the poorest countries. You'll be cashing your unemployment check so you can use the worthless currency to light a fire to keep warm.
Hope And Change.