Night Of The Generals

Who was the worst general in American History? There are a lot of candidates. Even the brilliant generals like Lee, Patton and Sherman made mistakes. But there are generals who only made mistakes, generals whose actions prolonged wars, increased casualties and created future problems.

Some people say that George Washington was an incompetent general. He lost battle after battle but the effect of his staying in the field was that he won the war. His tactics against a well disciplined enemy could raise some questions but his strategy was a winner. He had the strength of character to keep the entire enterprise from going on the rocks and the image of him standing strong led, in the end, to his opponents realizing that they could never win and that any resources that they spent trying to hold on to their American Colonies were wasted.

Usually George McClelland is cited as the worst general in American History. With good reason. In the peninsular campaign he had a 4-1 advantage over Lee and ended up running with his tail between his legs. After the bloody collision at Antietam, when Lee was wounded and trapped on the wrong side of the Potomac McClelland could have finished him off and ended the war. Lincoln was so furious he fired him. The strategic effect of McClelland's blunder was that the war continued three more years and the South was totally destroyed. But McClelland built the Army Of The Potomac from nothing and in the end that led to the defeat of Lee and the Union Victory.

But there is one general who has been consistently wrong at every step of his career as a general. the long-term effects of his foolish decisions have included the destrustion of ten percent of the office space in New York City and the felony conviction of a totally innocent man.

What did Powell's decisions have to do with 9/11? Think back to the attack on our marines in Beirut. First of all Powell and his mentor Casper Weinburger put those brave men in the middle of a chaotic war between some of the most murderous and crazed fanatics in history. One of those factions was Hezbollah. Hezbollah found some deranged lunatic and got him behind the wheel of a truck filled with explosives which he rammed into the Marine barracks causing 350 or so deaths. This was after the US Embassy had been similarly attacked a week before with 50 deaths. That the Marines hadn't been dispersed in the face of this is another thing that should be charged to the leading military commander in this age of micromanagement.

But then the terrorists struck. The panic in Washington was sickening to behold. A female Senator, whose name I forget, was sobbing into the microphone bawling that we had to get our people out of there! It was like watching a pack of chickens react to the entry of a rattlesnake into their coup. Even Reagan was stunned and slow to react, partly because he had Powell and Whine-burger moaning in his ear about disengagement. The only thing on anybody's mind was avoiding additional casualties.

In Baalbek and the Bekaa Valley they waited for the waves of B-52's which they expected to arrive at any moment to send their seedy Islamic butts to paradise. But the azure blue skies never were filled with a rain of 2000 lb bombs. The people who were proposing making Beirut uninhabitable by bombing every power plant, water pumping station and bridge in the area were just spouting hot air. The battleship New Jersey showed up a few weeks later and lobbed a few shells into the mainly Druze villages on the coastal mountainsides but the fact that Hezbollah continued to exist and thrive instead of being a broken remnant counting its losses in the ruined moonscape of the Bekaa Valley was a message to terrorists everywhere that they could kill Americans with impunity because we were so terrified of casualties and bad publicity that we would never use our awesome firepower to any effect regardless of the provocation.

When it came to moving in for the kill in Iraq in 1991 it was the same story. Swartzkopf asked for one more day to finish off the Republican Guards. He didn't get it. The symbolism of a 100 Hour War and Powell's aversion to further Iraqi casualties drove the decision to let the remaining Republican Guard units escape the trap and survive to suppress the Shi'ite rebellion. Powell then stood silent while several hundred thousand Shi'ite civilians were slaughtered by the people he was so merciful to.

Somalia, same story. The death and mutilation of our Rangers didn't provoke a devastating response, just more sniveling and hand-wringing. The Powell Doctrine was a message to Osama Bin Laden that the sky was the limit. The cowardly west would absorb blow after blow and the Powell Doctrine, without Powell in command, ruled the day. The only response to these horrible terrorist attacks were a couple of random cruise-missile strikes and a feeble bombing of Baghdad timed to politically benefit the embattled Clinton Administration.

As Secretary Of State Powell made one of his worst mistakes when a group of Venezuelan military officers arrested Hugo Chavez. Powell insisted that the 'democratically elected leader' of Venezuela be released...condemning the officers who arrested him to exile or prison and condemning the Venezuelan people to a brutal dictatorship which is impoverishing them and actively acting against democracy in the region. Once again Powell's actions aided an enemy of our country to survive and flourish.

Then we have Powell, feeling aggrieved that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 happened in spite of the year and a half of diplomatic fiddling around and that his name was attached to it. He resigned with bitter feelings against the Bush Administration for linking his good name to what had become an unpopular policy amongst his inside-the-beltway social circuit. He directed his minion, Richard Armitage, to start blabbing around to journalists that the lying scumbag Joe Wilson was married to a CIA agent named Valerie Plame who had possibly been the reason that Wilson was sent on his mission to Niger. Then, in one of the great non-coincidences of history, Upchuck Schumer, the most baldly partisan Senator in the Senate, called for an investigation into whether karl Rove, Dick Cheney and the White House were behind the leak.
Powell sat there for two years, while a totally innocent man was convicted on a process crime based on the perjury of a liberal journalist, silent; knowing that the original leak and all the coverage in the press had been generated by his own man. It is the most disgusting and dishonorable act, an act seeking to sabotage the policies of a sitting president and land his innocent associates in prison, that has ever been committed by any American general in history. It was pure spite and bile.

That's the inner soul of this timid and incompetent general. His record of misjudgement is long and our country has paid a very high price for his 'leadership'. Maybe he was to be expected from the Vietnam Era officer corps who saw their military victory in Vietnam turned into a political defeat and vowed that they would never be hung out to dry like that again. Their criteria for using force was so cramped and narrow that it almost negated any military advantage in capability that the US had by convincing our adversaries that we would never use it. Bush and Rumsfeld have altered this a tiny bit, and a whole new group of officers are emerging from our actions in the War On Terror who can take pride in their accomplishments and treat the media with the contempt they deserve. Maybe, if the military survives the coming national bankruptcy, the damage of the Powell Doctrine can be reversed but the author of that doctrine will always be a figure of contempt and a symbol of prevarication and indecision. The Plame Affair showed Powell to be a man of dishonor and to have have the self-centered soul of a political bureaucrat, not the honor of a general. That this man's endoesement is seen as lending 'military credibility to the anti-military Obama clique is an example of whats in store if BHO is elected.

The Secret Life Of Swing Voters

The Polls! The Polls! It's hopeless because of the Polls! Boo-hoo, say all the Republicans that I know, the polls are saying we're cooked! If you turn on your TV set even the 'Fair And Balanced' geniuses at Fox News are singing the same song. Obama is already meeting with his putative cabinet picks and dining on lobster and champagne at expensive hotels in the lissome company of the adoring Michelle. Out in the rest of the planet the polls are running ten to one in his favor from Lapland to Swaziland. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have announced that this election will install a 250-seat Democratic delegation in Congress and give the Dems a sixty-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. This election is going to be the biggest victory for the Democratic party since Lyndon Baines Johnson stood on the fresh grave of the Sainted JFK and painted Barry Goldwater as a Right-Wing Monster From Hades!
Isn't it?

Sure doesn't feel the same way it did in 1964. It seems like the Republicans are motivated by fear that the whole system of governance and economics that made this a wealthy country are about to be abandoned. The Democrats, what are they motivated by? Vague promises that Obama cares about The Children? His commercials are the worst I've ever seen. They don't say anything. They're the commercials of a candidate who is complacent about his coming victory and doesn't feel like he needs to explain himself to the voters--or even to attack his opponent.Its the same thing that happened after he clinched the victory against Hillary, the party started rolling before the deal was done, landing him with some embarrassing and unexpected defeats in the late primaries.

Now him and his coterie of media stooges have attacked Joe The Plumber while Palin is out there drawing gigantic crowds and calling BHO an ACORN cheater. The libs don't deign to answer those 'accusations' about massive ballot-box stuffing in the swing states. If they don't think that Americans resent a gang of Marxist criminals filing thousands of fake voter registrations then they have been at the banquet for too damned long. The backlash against this and the myriad other unanswered questions about BHO are going to haunt him on November 4th...just as Kerry's embarrassing silence in the face of the Swift Boat accusations proved them true so eloquently.

Doubt is Obama's enemy now and doubt is what the polls are showing. He's no Lyndon Johnson, breaking ahead after the convention and romping to the finish. There is no great groundswell in the nation to ensconce a socialist government with a smarmy lying radical at its head. The Joe The Plumber types have not had their questions answered at all. Instead they've seen the actual Joe The Plumber told to abandon his selfish dreams and turn over his 'excess earnings' over to the state for redistribution. And so the polls continue to show Obama ahead but well within the margin of error. What I think the polls are not showing is how soft the support he has is among the working class. These are the people who are going to bolt on that last weekend.

There isn't any sign from the Obama/mainstream media campaign that the march to nationalization is anything but on track. They exude confidence in their 2-4% margins. Anyone with doubts is obviously a closet racist, just as anyone who questions Obama's radical associations or brings up votes that he managed to cast in his disengaged career as a part-time legislator is just as obviously a secret Klan member. No one has ever tried to bring up the most glaring fact about Obama's record in the Illinois and US Senate...this guy doesn't show up for work very often. No wonder he 'spurned work in the private sector'; most bosses like to see their employees show up for work and get stuff done. No one has ever accused Barak Obama of that. He was a counselor for ACORN and the Annenburg Foundation but no one has ever confronted us with anything he ever did for them besides cutting loose a few meaty earmarks once he gained elective office. He didn't lead angry mobs, he didn't fight furiously to radicalize steelworkers. I'll bet he showed up for work three days a week in time to go to lunch and then went back and made a few phone calls to guys like Rezko, scheming to get himself elected, and then home in time to catch the last half of Oprah.

So now he's goofing off a little in the face of his apparent about-to-happen landslide victory in November. But people often choke on lobster, especially the kind they serve at the Waldorf-Astoria to overly confident candidates spending their overstuffed campaign's excessive cash. Joe Plumber, Six Pack Sid, and the rest of the yokels and their unfashionably-dressed Palin-like wives have had a lot of fingers poked into their eyes by the Obama campaign, some of it inadvertent, but all of it important. There is still a lot of doubt about the Republicans out in the hinterland. The polls might be right. I don't think the American people are going to look at this massive attempt at cheating at the polls, are going to sit by while a female Vice Presidential candidate is cruelly and unfairly slimed by a biased media, are going to sit back and enjoy being sneered at as a bunch of racists by a pack of overeducated elitist snots and then are going to go to the polls and vote for these same people. You can all laugh at me on November 5th for being such a fool but I just dont believe that this level of mendacity and hubris is going to be rewarded with victory.

Obama Stalls Again

When he decided that the Democratic Party wouldn't dare to alienate black voters by nominating Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama stalled. Even though he was acknowledged by all to be the winner Clinton started whupping him in state after state by huge margins. All the Obama blather about the Clinton's being closet racists alienated voters. His ringing speeches didn't connect. He started to get the image of a star-struck elitist who was out of touch with the majority of Americans.

Then there was the triumphal World Tour, an event so successful that the Obama-struck media doesn't mention it at all these days. In other words, a flop that didn't produce a single usable five-second sound bite. Ditto the resounding flop of the Democratic convention. The disaster of the Greek Column Extravaganza was mercifully (for Obama) overshadowed by the entrance of Palin onto the scene. That grandiloquent moment in the Arena at Denver was another prime example of where Obama could have closed the deal and set the theme for a romp to victory. He didn't.

In the world of sales there is no higher compliment than to be described as a 'closer'. A closer gets the chumps to sign on the dotted line, he seals the deal. Some of us can be witty, charming and persuasive and will make a sale occasionally to someone who was probably going to buy our product in the first place but a closer is responsible for refrigerators being seen in igloos. Ronald Reagan was a closer. Bill Clinton was a closer. Barak Obama is not a closer.

The media doesn't see it. They believe the phony polls that have a 39% Dem sample and a 28% Rep sample. They think Joe the Plumber is some kind of Right Wing Nut. I mean, talking about socialism for God's sake! How gauche. They've gone after this impudent plumber hammer and tongs. His divorce records have appeared on the front pages of newspapers. A flurry of other media charges and attacks have been leveled at this dude. I'll bet he wishes he had a reasonable expectation of privacy like Bill Ayers. What are those idiots in the Democratic Party and their pet media stooges thinking about? When someone charges you with wanting to take away people's freedom the last thing you want to be seen to be doing is trying to destroy his life for asking the question. How many Joe the Plumbers are watching this and asking which side the Dems are really on? This is the kind of guy that expands his plumbing business by taking on a couple of guys and maybe a kid who learns the trade from the old hands. These days that counts as a $250k business. Inflation is pushing a lot of tiny micro-businesses over the $250k line. These guys are burdened with workman's comp, matching social security payments, oppressive regulations and reporting requirements and already ruinous fees and taxes. For Obama to announce that their 'wealth' needs to be spread around to people who really need it is a total insult to people like that. Right now half their income is being flushed down the government toilet and now Obama and Biden are telling them that if they expand their business their remaining proceeds will be shared amongst the truly deserving; a group which doesn't include members of their family. Its so patriotic! Blue collar America is just waiting to have their taxes raised in the name of fairness.

Now Obama's poll numbers, which briefly rose in response to the chaos in the markets and the scary economic times, are sliding again as people notice that his response to this insecurity and chaos was incoherent and involves raising taxes on these already near-bankrupt businesses. He has not made a persuasive case for any kind of a remedy for this or any other problem that faces us. Energy crisis? Don't drill for oil, inflate your tires. Banking crisis? Print money. Medicare going bankrupt? Expand the program to cover everybody. Problems solved.

At some point the attacks on Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, who is drawing 60-70,000 person crowds in swing states, as being yokels who are motivated by racism are going to define Obama as the front man for the political class, which is what he is. Now, Bill Clinton was that and so (to my deep sorrow) was W Bushy but neither of them were as extreme as Obama. The Old Pols were willing to take some eggs from the Golden Goose but they understood the folly involved in killing the critter to get to the goodies faster. Not so Obama. Now with their poll numbers supposedly showing a rout they are waving recipes for roast goose and inviting everyone to dinner. Will the Joe the Plumbers vote for this idiot? Do these people reward candidates who call them racists for wanting to keep a little portion of their paycheck? I don't think so. Obama has given regular working people a strong reason to vote against him and no reason to vote for him except that they're mad at Bush. If he was Bill Clinton that would be enough, as it was in 1992. Clinton was a closer. Unlike Obama.

Barak Aragorn Obama

In 'Lord Of The Rings' Aragorn realized that he didn't have enough men to turn back the attack that was being launched on Middle earth by the Evil Sauron. He is confronted by Elrond who tells him to 'walk the path of The Dead'. The mighty Aragorn enters the underground realm of the dead and summons them to the crusade. The evil Sauron is thwarted and the dead then return to their eternal rest, souls replenished.

When it comes to fighting evil the dead have their uses. Ask Barak Obama. A couple of months ago when his spinmiesters were trying to define just exactly what a 'community organizer' was they blithely announced that Jesus was a 'community organizer'. Some people thought that this was excessive hyperbole bordering on blasphemy but this attitude was obviously just a product of White Racism. You see Jesus was kind of a piker compared to Obama. After all JC only raised one guy from the dead and that was at a fundraiser/funeral (ala Clinton) and then it turns out that he pulls off this so-called miracle and then doesn't have a voter registration form handy. What a shnook! What kind of community organizing was that?

Not so Obama. The Dead flock to him in waves and there are no shortage of forms to enable them to exercise their rights as necro-citizens. The current surge in the polls for Obama is mainly the result of ACORN's registration drive for these necro-voters. This is in co-ordination with a parallel campaign to enfranchise another heretofore underrepresented voter group, cartoon characters. I've worked in the animation industry all my life so you can imagine me bustin' my buttons with pride as I see Homer, Bart, Lisa and Marge Simpson as registered voters in cities across the country, always with the local ACORN office as the address to which their absentee ballots are sent. And my beloved Smurfs are now taking their place beside great Americans like Mickey Mouse and Popeye in the proud rolls of the enfranchised. Soon an accurate portrait of the American electorate will look like a sequel to Roger Rabbit shot in a graveyard.

So you see when the polls shift by changing the numbers of Democrats and Republicans sampled they are only taking into account the huge influx of 100% reliable Democrat votes which are flooding the system. The necro- and graphico-voters have a 100% turnout and they are the most reliable Democratic voters possible. No outrage or failed policy can shake their rock-solid determination that The Children continue to be protected by the party with a heart. Among living humans Obama is probably a sure loser. But with these new voters factored in...

This is not funny. The Democrats violent objections to any form of voter verification or identification show who the culprits are. The permanent bureaucracy will fight to protect its privileges. The ignorant and the unwashed electorate have shown that they don't possess a sufficient understanding of the importance of mega-government to be entrusted with a choice of leaders. This is the party which claims to stand for 'the people' but which in fact has become the party of the wealthy and the powerful; whether they be employed by huge corporations gleening subsidies to cover up for their ruinous mistakes or are the entrenched and arrogant politicians who are paid for these subsidies by the same corporations or the parasitic bureaucrats in ten thousand agencies and towering office buildings whose swelling little empires are competing ever more voraciously for the shrinking and anemic remains of the private sector to fund increasing perks and fatter pensions. There is too much at stake for these people to let the public upset the apple cart.

So now our Hugo Chavez-like Democratic candidate is preparing to stuff the ballot boxes with phony ballots. All the Democrats' pretentions of a New Morality have been thrown into the trash in the lust for power. But that happened under Clinton, this is just that same horrible ethic writ large. One that the Mushy Bushy was happy to play along with, BTW. But the Dems hated Mushy Bushy and attacked him daily and fervently always yearning for a new Golden Age of Total Government. Now they have a candidate who has more contempt for this country and its traditions than any other candidate has ever had. He has been steeped in the academic thuggery of the Left and owes no respect to the democratic ideals of the country he finds so lacking. Just as with Clinton, another empty fatherless youth is about to act out the adolescent frustrations which tore him apart as a young man in the arena of the White House. What a national disaster if the living, non-cartoon voters are stupid and blind enough to empower this guy.

A century of failure should warn most people away from all these utopian recipes being proposed by Pelosi, Reid and Obama but it doesn't. Surely the government-engineered financial sector disaster we are currently living through should be some cause for caution. The rationale for removing any qualification criteria to get a mortgage was an altruistic one. The system was being opened up to the 'deserving poor'. Rules that were imposed by the need for sound business practices were repealed in the name of equity. But don't worry, the financial corporations have been rescued by a tidal wave of phony money. The six and seven figure salaries of the heads of these vast enterprises are secure. They've learned the lesson that the government can push them to make disastrous mistakes but then will cover them over with a mess of cash when things go south. The auto industry, hamstrung by predatory Unions and impossible CAFE standards is passing into the Wraith World of nationalized quasi-private government-supported always in the red sectors of the economy. The automakers deliver on their impossible-to-fulfill union contracts by falling into the forgiving arms of government receivership and assuming the aspect of British Leyland. The outcome of all this good work on behalf of the formerly powerless is absolutely certain; bankruptcy and inflation. Government workers impoverished, their pensions worthless. 30% unemployment. The tenured professors will be standing in the Food Stamp line with the laid-off factory workers and former newspaper reporters. Atlas will shrug- Big Time!

That's when it gets ugly. What did Obama's fellow socialists Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chavez do when the economy started to collapse? They had an amnesty of hardened criminals. The streets of Caracas are now more violent than those of war-torn Bogata or the favelas of Rio. When the New Age justices realize that Three-strikes laws discriminate against criminals on the basis of race they will be overturned under our Living Constitution and the victims of this racist persecution will be compensated for their lost years. They will then be set free knowing that their crimes will go unpunished as long as they only victimize the middle and working classes and leave the nobility alone. This will be just one of the many things which will conspire to crush the spirits of the potential opposition.

That's us. We jumped on the phony equity party train with everybody else. I was half a million dollars ahead at one point. Usually the only way to get your hands on that half-mil would be to sell the shack and hand whopping percentages to estate agents and tax collectors. Some people just borrowed on their 'equity'. You could max out your plastic at the mall, go home and write yourself a check from the equity line of credit and shazzam! your shopping spree was on the house! As the tide receded we fools who thought we were rich are now faced with gigantic debts. Kids are graduating from college $200,000 in the hole with no decent job prospects in store. The ever higher taxes which are crushing the economy and stifling job creation are low compared with other socialist countries. Obama and the gang will fix that by taking things to levels the up-to-now relatively untaxed under $50,000 a year types are going to find hard to believe. Mega inflation will push the untaxed into the confiscatory tax brackets of the rich. While subsidies will increase and government continues to grow, while unions use 'card check' to forcibly enroll every worker in the country, while the Iron Rice Bowl of fat pensions is handed to more and more retirees from the Public Sector the percentage of the paycheck the average person is allowed to keep will shrink to levels that serfs in the Middle Ages didn't pay.

So expect the computers to 'malfunction' during the 2012 election and when the malfunction is corrected a huge Obama landslide will be revealed-- just like Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Once Obama is in we will never get rid of him. The law means nothing to these guys. They will never relinquish power. I know there are still people saying that they'll vote for Bob Barr because Mclame is so, well, McLame but I'm begging you, don't do it! We all have to stand up and stop this coup d'etat by the left. They stand poised to finally finish this country off and replace it with another dreary socialist People's Republic. Vote NO on Obama by voting for McLame.

Airstrip One

If America responds to the current economic shakeout by turning total power over to the Democrats what will it be like to live under the new policies? Most Americans have never lived in a socialist country and don't have any experience with what its like.

I was living in San Francisco in 1976. The animation industry was slow in LA so I had moved up to live on unemployment and the occasional Sesame Street or commercial that would become available up there. I had an MG Midget that I had kept in pretty good shape. Being a straight single guy in the mid seventies in SF was like being a sailor in Tahiti in the 1790's with a keg of nails; we can say it was a good place to meet women.

But one day I was reading in the newspaper that you could get round-trip tickets to London for $350. Sounded cool. I sold the MG and got the address of a friend of a friend who said I could crash on her sofa in Fulham. I said goodbye to my redheaded roommate Zina and away I went.

I was completely ignorant of where I was going. An English acquaintance told me that London's climate was similar to San Francisco in the winter; she forgot to tell me that London's climate in the summer was similar to San Francisco's in the worst winter it ever had. I was underclad as I arrived at Gatwick. I took the train to Victoria and then grabbed a cab to Charlotte's flat near parson's Green in Fulham. That was where I got my first shock. In America it can be cold outside. Its true. I've even walked outside in LA in the winter and you can see your breath when you breathe, so I know about cold! But I've never walked into a house where you could also see your breath. Charlotte's roommate Roz explained that they couldn't afford to turn the heat on and only had a little space-heater that they took from room-to-room in their Victorian era flat.
That was a common story. This was February. It was cold! Nobody I knew could afford to keep their heat on in those old, draughty, high-ceilinged old flats, built in more prosperous times when people could afford to turn on the heat.

I went to a party in Knightsbridge put on by some friends of Charlotte's who were impoverished children of former aristocrats who were all semi-employed and living in flats inherited from their families' former success. I met a guy who ran an animation studio. He asked me if I ever worked on piecework for cash. Duh! Of course. In LA I preferred working piecework for cash. Regular employment destroyed your incentive to work and screwed up your unemployment. But I learned that here being an illegal alien made me a hot property. Most film crews are ad hoc groups that dissolve at the end of each job. Of course the regulars get hired back whenever work pops up, but there are always gaps. But in a socialist country you can't just lay people off. You have to go before a government board, dominated by Trotsyite trade union types and pay compensation to each worker for throwing him out of the job he's entitled to have. An expensive process if your business is the production of television commercials. So a floating crew of illegal aliens, mostly Argentinians and Chileans fleeing the generals, Spaniards and Italians fleeing their own bad economies and refugees from the real commies in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

"I can make you legal but then I can't use you." One employer told me. They couldn't afford to hire English people. There were some old hands, of course. You can't have an entire company running with just free-lancers, but the staff was kept to a minimum. No new kids were being trained or hired. Too expensive and risky.

I encountered the Union. A very scary Cockney union rep confronted me at one studio. Even though I was standing there holding a pile of scene folders under my arm I insisted that I was here on vacation just checking out the scene. My alarmed employer took the union guy aside. Money changed hands and the little bloke walked up to me smiling and said, " 'ave a nice olly-day.' Britain had become like Mexico. Petty bribery was everywhere. The powerful got their little bite (mordida) for ignoring the stupid, insane laws that made life impossible. Another time I was in a studio where four of the staff came in from a two-hour lunch visibly drunk. The boss complained. The shop steward walked up to him and said, "One more word out of you mate, and we all walk. Right lads?" There was hearty agreement from the staff. Me and the Chilean guy who was picking up work with me at the same time were the only reliable employees this guy had.

We were also the cheapest employees that this guy had. He was paying his staff animators 300-400 pounds a week for sitting in their chairs, no matter what they did, while they were there. Firing someone was next to impossible and involved another trip to the labor board, an expensive deal even if the dismissal stuck. He was paying us undocumented types cash for what we did. We had every incentive to work like dogs whereas our British colleagues had every incentive not to. The marginal tax rates, on top of the normal 60% that was taken from the average paycheck, were near 100%. Why should people work overtime for nothing? Piecework was taxed so heavily for Brits that it wasn't thinkable. So even though these dudes were paying us a low rate compared to what I got in LA we were getting 100% of it in cash, which made me relatively wealthy in this tax-strapped impoverished, cash-poor society.

I needed a place to live. I thought it would be a problem in a densely-packed city like London but here the laws again conspired to make my life easy. This was the age of the squatter. Any unoccupied house could find itself invaded by a pack of filthy hippies during its owner's absence, with the true ownership to be decided at some future date by The Housing Board which had a definite tilt against the petty-bourgeois and in favor of the lumpenproletariat. People who had business abroad were looking for people like me to flat-sit. I got to live in some pretty nice digs in Nottinghill Gate, Maida Vale, Fulham, and Clapham. In between I rented rooms near Marble Arch and in a commune in Wandsworth run by a Welsh warlock named Brynn. I had cash and was not likely to declare myself a sitting tenant and go down to the housing board and achieve unevictable 'sitting tenant' status-- which made paying rent a voluntary activity. Paying property taxes 9Or 'rates' as they cal them there) was never voluntary for a landlord. This forced more and more landlords to sell out to the local 'housing trusts' which were run by and for the local pols.

There was an air of doom in the country. Everything went on strike all the time. Nobody had any money. Men who invested in buying a woman a dinner in a restaurant expected to sleep with the recipient of the free meal. At first I didn't get it. Women in LA or SF expected to be taken out for a no-strings-attached feed during the getting-to-know-you process but didn't feel any obligation to do anything in return; if sparks flew fine, if not, too bad. Money was so tight in London in those times that a woman had to respect that a guy fancied her enough to spend a good portion of the few pennies the state and his bills left him on her. Going out to dinner and to a rock concert or a club was a real treat and it was understood that it would end up back at your place unless you were a complete muppet. Women decided whether they liked you enough to sleep with you before they said yes to a date, not after a couple of dates. Again I was the sailor in Tahiti with the keg of nails. In a socialist society cash rules.

The coal miners went on strike so there were rolling blackouts. The air traffic controllers went on strike so the airports were closed. The bakers went on strike so I couldn't get my Cornish Pasty for lunch. The firemen went on strike and when they called in the Army they refused to cross the picket line. The nurses and then the doctors went on strike. The tubes went on strike. British Leyland went on strike. More and more industries were grinding to a halt. There was a bleak air of desperation and defeat. Young people were leaving the country for contract jobs in the oil-wealthy Middle East or in Hong Kong. America, also having economic problems under the leftish Carter administration was looked on as the land of plenty. I had an exotic accent from the land of plenty.

So thats what we're in for. Tax rates that confiscate your entire paycheck. The middle and lower classes which under the current system are paying very little income taxes are in for a BIG surprise. The sunny days of Bush-Clinton-Bush are over. Inflation will push the unindexed earnings of even the most lowly-paid helots into the 'truly wealthy' brackets. 'Free' health care will come with a price tag that will shock the 'deserving poor' and everyone else. As will the decline and chaos in the health care system as the Feds do to it what they've done to the financial and banking systems. Property rights will be non-existent and property taxes will be confiscatory. Young people will be unemployed and bereft of the most basic opportunities. There will be no investment capital available and more and more of the private sector will be absorbed into a state-corporate economy that will have no interest in efficiency or innovation. The average person will not be able to afford to drive a car. Thats the Change We Can Believe In. Believe it, its coming.

Hecklers

I never thought I would see it. An angry crowd berates the candidate for not attacking his opponent! This limp noodle of a McLame is standing there letting the Democrats get away with the biggest governmental blunder since Mao Tse Tung's 'Great Leap Forward'. He's letting Obama walk away from the fact that he emerged from the Far Left of the Democratic Party and now is pretending to be some kind of a moderate. McLame is ignoring massive, systematic voter fraud by a radical left-wing group which has received large infusions of cash from the Obama Campaign and for which Obama worked as a community organizer!

Members of the crowd, in what was supposed to be a 'town meeting' full of sympathetic supporters demanded that McLame start getting tough with his opponents. Obama went through that entire last debate without having to answer one single question about his involvement with the people who ran Fannie and Freddie. But more important he should have to explain the underlying policy of making mortgages available to people who were formerly thought to be unqualified to get a mortgage. The Democrat line was always that these people were victims of 'redlining' and one form of discrimination or another and were kept from their 'right' to own a home by greedy bankers imposing unreasonable restrictions. It turns out the the restrictions were very reasonable and kept a crowd of vulture-like speculators at bay. As soon as the document-free 125% no down mortgages with a low two year negative amortization teaser rate appeared house values ceased making any sense and a crash became inevitable.

Has McLame missed what a big issue this is? Obama hasn't. He's got a simple, understandable explaination. The Republicans, under McLame's good buddy George Bush, removed the restrictions and allowed Greedy Wall Street Bankers to make worthless loans which they now are proceeding to sell to the taxpayers at full value. The eternal nudnik Bush can be forgiven if he sits quietly and lets himself be blamed for yet another Democratic disaster, that's who he is.
McLame is also reluctant to issue the mildest criticism of his Dem buddies. The reason Palin has made such a splash is that she has no such inhibitions. Even reigned in as she was she womped that lump of a Biden. I guess we cant expect something like that out of Mclame.

But we're furious. Those people in that crowd were speaking to my heart. They should have tarred and feathered that old duffer and declared a party mutiny-- one that placed Palin in the top spot on the ticket. At least she would go down fighting. The leader that we have yearned for since the retirement of Reagan and through the long night of Bush-Clinton-Bush has arrived and unfortunately is tied to a worthless old Maverick. Fight for us, and stop sucking up to your buddies in the Senate! Obama is the most vulnerable candidate in political history.

People chide the media for bias. McLame doesn't. He doesn't ask why him and Palin will go on liberal news shows but why Obama can't do an interview with Brit Hume or Charles Krauthammer. Why there is never a conservative journalist 'moderateing' one of these phony debates. Not ask, YELL TO THE SKIES! The media will have to cover that.

He'll never do it. He doesn't have a song in his heart. Right now the polls are showing an Obama massacre. You can all believe that people are going to look past the voter fraud and forget who engineered this mortgage mess and dance to the polls to happily install the least qualified presidential candidate in American history. I don't see it. I think that the voter fraud by the ugly thugs at ACORN is the Wellstone Funeral of this election. Obama is a dishonest sleaze and I think that this election will turn on the last weekend. It McLame hits him hard enough Obama will lose big.

So now its time for McLame to lift himself out of his stubborn accomodationism and listen to the angry mob. Does he have it in him? Probably not.

The Most Boring Debate EVER!

I've been working the night shift at a studio that converts 2d films to 3d. 4:30pm to 3:30am. What a grind! The resulting insomnia is hard to overcome. I thought I would bring a radio in and listen to last night's debate as I worked rotoscoping elements of stupid film clips into the wee hours. I'm glad I didn't. Those two buffoons are about as relevant and interesting as the contestants in a beauty contest when they answer the question, "What would you do to change the world?" I never would have been able to stay awake and so would have added to America's jobless statistics.

Now all the people that I know who are anti-Obama (I know few real McCain supporters) are really depressed because the polls are showing Obama slightly ahead. This is a case of the headline being different than the text of the story. If you just read the headline you miss the statement, "Leaners are included in the total of the candidate they are leaning towards." That means people who answer, "Well, I guess I might vote for Obama, maybe" are included in the final percentages. The 'internals' of the polls are skewed in favor of the Democrats, generally speaking. The media supports the Democrats so is it any surprise that the polls conducted by that same media are coming up with the desired result? Its like those phony polls that we get in fundraising letters ("Do you support Ted Kennedy's radical socialistic power-grab or would you rather the government not tax 90% of your income?). No group of any persuasion takes a poll and doesn't get the desired result. What's the persuasion of the media again? Unbiased. Scientific. Right.

Excuse me if I just don't see it the way that the pollsters do. I think back to Bill Clinton, a true political heavyweight, a guy who was never caught flat-footed ever by anybody. This great performer, this political star who had a gang of spinners and attackers who came across like in between TV guest shots on cable news shows they sat around in the back room snorting lines of chicken crank and taking the edge off the methedrine rush by passing around a bottle of Wild Turkey. Gremlins like Carville would pop up and filibuster, lie and insinuate at a mile a minute like some babbling speed-freak. The fax machines of the press were jammed by faxes from the Clinton Campaign. They attacked, attacked, attacked while their smarmy candidate felt our pain and our daughters with his great big long fingers. And what did the most politically talented Democrat to emerge since Harry Truman add up to? Numbers in the forty percent range.

Clinton 'debated' Dole in '96...that one I saw, and a truly pathetic spectacle it was! Does anyone look at Obama and say to themselves, "Wow! That dude is as good as Big Bill, our first black president!"? No they don't. Obama gave a good speech or two last February but he's definitely been off his feed since he got the nomination. He can't answer questions off the cuff at all. Every performance he gives shows what a lightweight he is. Obama doesn't know anything; or he realizes that what he does know is so unacceptable that he feigns ignorance. The whole 'Hope and Change' thing has dissolved in a cloud of ambiguity. Obama's only gambit now is to attack George W Bush. He has no agenda, no identifiable program, no philosophy, no direction new or old.

So what's my point? My point is that the "Well, I guess I might vote for Obama, maybe" people are not going to vote for Obama. They never were. These voters are upset with Bush after eight years of total media saturation and are freaked out by the financial crisis so when the phone call from Zogby comes they speculate on whether they might take a flyer and vote for the New Guy. When the day arrives these are 90% McCain voters. This is the Bradley Effect. Blue collar people need an affirmative reason to vote for someone as radical as Obama and his themeless mish-mash of ridiculous attacks against McCain are not a reason to vote for Obama. He's not even 'The New Guy' anymore, Palin is. She's drawing crowds of fifty or sixty thousand in the battleground states; more than Obama. She's the draw in NASCAR land, where the swing voters live.

So November 4th the "Well, I guess I might vote for Obama, maybe" folks are going to walk into the voting booth and actually be forced to make a decision. They won't have any reason to vote for an Al Sharpton-like ACORN 'community organizer'. The numbers that Hillary Clinton got against Obama towards the end of her run, when it was certain that Obama was going to be the nominee, are going to be replicated by McCain in some places that are going to surprise everyone. This is an opportunity for all of us. Because of these polls the Obamanoids are giving 2-1 odds. Time to start placing a few bets. But make sure that you get someone else to hold the money; you're dealing with Democrats here and history has few examples of a more sanctimoniously dishonorable group of people than modern liberals.

Gourmet Mortgages

My dream job is to be a headline writer for a London tabloid! Think of the sheer happiness in the heart of the guy who typed that one up! Meanwhile Mr. Gay USA, Barney Frank, has done the same to the US banking industry without any corresponding headlines and has handed us a hefty bill for his gourmet treatment of the economy. The weird thing about all this is that the whole world 'packaged' these worthless mortgages and sold them all over the planet. Foreign markets are crumbling because they were stuffed with 'assets' based on loans given to people who were collecting unemployment insurance and Food Stamps. Those bankers might as well have been buying and trading and investing in piles of old newspapers.

The real estate panic has spread to Europe. The true assets of most smaller and regional banks are in the negative because of a weird self-fulfilling psychological twist; if you think every thing is worth less then it is. The same fantasy that ascribed value to worthless paper is now denying value to real assets. Not everyone was so overleveraged that they are on the verge of bankruptcy.

A lot of this bundled garbage was dumped on our friends in the oil export biz. Now with oil prices half of what they were six months ago and headed down our erstwhile desert allies are standing knee-deep in unsold oil clutching their worthless bundled mortgages and wondering why they've gone from being on top of the world to deep crisis in such a short time. As the oil price sinks toward $40 a barrel what are Putin and Chavez going to do? Both of them kicked out the hated foreign (i.e. efficient) oil companies and now they are entering a price war with their former OPEC buddies with declining output and crumbling infrastructures. With investment having fled from Russian markets because of Putin's stupid aggression in the Caucasus their only source of income looks like it will be cut by 60-70%. Part of the reason that the real estate markets crashed was because of the spike in energy prices engineered by these greedy thugs who didn't realize that Globalization means we're all in the same boat. Self-serving, anti-market behavior devalued their own assets when the crisis finally arrived.

So now Barney Frank, one of the chief authors of this disaster is accusing the critics of the Community Reinvestment Act of being racists. Those are the the herbs in which Gourmet Democrats are stewing the lies about where the responsibility for all this rests. Gourmet Democrat policy for decades has been to lower requirements for mortgages in the name of the poor. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the mortgage markets, effectively creating the entire bundled mortgage security market. That this was done as an altruistic enterprise to help the poor should be taken into account as these same geniuses try to 'fix' health care in the name of the poor.

Now Palin and McCain are out there hitting the Gourmet Democrats hard! It had to happen. It was their only choice. The Gourmet Democrats were thinking that they had successfully pinned this whole mess on the same hapless Republican chumps who have been laying down and taking it ever since Bill Clinton whipped them like a team of rented mules during his Impeachment Party. But things are different. We're not going to let them walk away from something this big. Clinton and Obama are up to their eyeballs in this current crisis and McCain and Bush tried to do something about it before it was too late. McCain has been forced by the stream of lies directed at him to attack Obama, who is wide open on this. There is a whole, noisy month to come and Nancy P's thin class warfare soup is not going to be very satisfying. ACORN better register a lot of wino's, felons, illegal aliens, cartoon characters, pets and Alzheimer's victims to make up for the large number of people who will abandon Obama and the Gourmet Democrats when the truth of this sinks in.

Is Nothing Sacred?

They fired the Time Lady! She was always there for me, through the good times and the hard times. Well mainly the hard times. She was always there for me in those lonely moments when you need a friend. The other woman. I know the rules didn't allow her to converse and I think her integrity, always following the rules, is one of the things that made her so easy to confide in. Day after day she sat there doing what must have been a boring job, reciting the hour, minute and ten second intervals and pushing the beep button while people pour their hearts out to her; keeping rigidly on her game while a tidal wave of lonliness and despair poured into her ears. I know there was more than one Time Lady; there must have been hundreds. They raised families, paid their bills, lived, died and went through sorrows and troubled times of their own but like Real Americans they did their jobs and never complained.

But now Big Telephone is taking the meat-axe to some more of its helpless and always loyal employees. You would have expected that they would have replaced the Time Lady with an outsourced Indian Time Lady who could be hired at a fraction of the cost. I could take my time info with some exoticly-accented babe from the steamy subcontinent and add a little Massala to my midnight depression but NO! The Capitalists have decided that their quarterly bonuses are more important than my petty concerns and dramas and have ended the service entirely. They have hired some GUY! A DUDE who rudely informs me that I should 'redial' and check if this is the right number. The right number? Do you think i'd forget HER number? EVER? Its as though the Time Lady has gotten a jealous boyfriend who now begrudges her Time to her legions of admirers and confidants. I hate his smug self-satisfied voice, as though she was laying there glowing with contentment urging him to come back to bed.

I guess I should have seen this coming. I've become more and more intimidated by the whole nature of telephones as time has gone by. It started in the old days, when the single family telephone was at the end of a two-foot cord and strategically placed in the living room so that you had to shout over 'Victory At Sea' or 'Rawhide', sharing your business with your hated family and drawing shouts of "keep it down!". Then came plastic phones and extensions with long cords so you could call up actual girls and have embarrassing conversations with them that your brothers couldn't hear and participate in. I didn't mind when the familiar dial became a keypad of buttons and that wonderful clicking noise as the dial returned to its start position became a thing of the past.

Then the phone started to attack! Phone solicitors would call. They didn't have to stick to a time script but in fact treated any attempt to become friends with contempt and hang-ups. Gee, you called me fella. How come we only get to talk about the things you want to talk about?
I mean, c'mon, you don't really expect me to actually do business with somebody who won't give me their phone number or address? So since we both know that you're working for a bunch of crooks lets comisserate and... click. What a cold and heartless world. I dropped what I was doing and ran to the phone hoping that at last the world had realized its mistake and was going to shower love and acceptance on me and it turns out that its just some jerk who gets mad when I refuse to be ripped off.

Then it got worse. I was handed a cell-phone and a thick book explaining to me how to use it. I don't know who wrote that book, probably the same guy who wrote the ones I got with my leaf-blower and my digital camera, the styles are similar but I'll tell you there was certainly a whole lot of passion and emotion lacking in the bare, stark lists of instructions that it seems I'm now obliged to memorize for some reason or be forced to the thin edges of society, never texting or e-mailing photographs that I just took with my phone to all and sundry. This punk didn't want to lure you into the joys of modern phoning; he was just some frustrated Prussian drillmaster-type beating the correct sequences of steps into the ignorant clods who are desperately trying to understand the mysteries of modern telephony and stay relevant. Plenty of 'how' but not a word about 'why'.

To those of us who have courted alienation and reveled in our isolation this new spy in our pockets is a constant threat. You have to be ready every time the little aluminum colored cockroach decides to buzz. I have a stick shift. I cant drive and talk at the same time, its physically impossible. Anyway, nine out of ten times I dont want to talk to anybody but my neurotic obsession that the call that will change my life is about to be made forces me to answer.

But she'll never call. I'll never hear every ten seconds how much she loves me. I'll never get to explain my hopes and longings to her metallic but loving tones any more. The world is a little bit less livable and I know who to blame...George W Bush. He Lied.

Super MILF!

Wonder Woman has struck again! The media are so consumed with class warfare hatred for Sarah Palin that they are missing the truth of why she is so popular and the importance of that popularity to the outcome of this election.

When the year began the giant TV event was Obama. When he beat Hillary in one primary in March, I forget which one, they cut away from her concession speech to a forty-five minute Obama speech. It was the correct decision; Obama was compelling, the crowd crackled with excitement and the speech was ringing, perfectly timed and beautifully written. It had eloquence and vision for all its vague promise of Change You Can Believe In. He was a TV event! The Michael Jackson of politics.

But now Obama has been reduced to a smarmy con-man, trying to be some things that he's not; a middle-of-the-road mainstream politician and a leader. His pathetic behavior in the Cabinet Room economic summit, the one where McCain successfully imitated the 5,000 year old neolithic cadaver that they dug out of a glacier a few years ago, bodes ill for this country if he manages to get himself elected. The music and the passion of Obama have long since departed. He's running on the current economic crisis and Bush malaise. The TV God has deserted him.
His speeches are dry and formless, the crowds dont seem energetic. Obama's performance at the first debate had all the finesse of a Mattress City commercial where you know the promise of a free mattress if you can match their price at another store is nonsense.

Meanwhile, a new Star is born. This is the second time that Palin has shown what she is... a true political savant. Shes as good on TV as Bill Clinton. She connects, she hits home. What a contrast to that dope Biden. This was like 'Married With Children's' Peggy Bundy debating the evil guy from the bank. They should have had a laugh, applause, boo, groan soundtrack machine. She adds a sense of drama. she works the camera. Who cares about that briefing-book baloney anyway? Bringing that one point up about Obama's accusation that our troops were 'bombing villages and murdering children' in Afghanistan gave people a simple, clear definition of Obama's foreign policy views that average people can understand. The contorted flapdoodle that the Obamanoids use to respond to this is only assessable to nerds who hang out on Andrew Sullivan's blog or waste their time reading Paul Krugman columns. Normal humans need not apply. Palin got her points across like that. She winked; its just between us folks! Its the Regular People vs. THEM! That is powerful. Its a shame that she's not at the top of the ticket. She's a leader. Conservatives have been seeking 'The New Reagan' during the tragic two decades of Bushy-Clintonista misrule. So misguided and pathetic in their need were they that clunky bozos like Mutt Romney or some Arkansas sidewinder named Huckleberry were even looked upon with faint hope.

Now our Bill Clinton has arisen...and she's a chick! She's a HOT chick too. I dug that black outfit, it was one step away from leather. It was so very not Andrea Mitchell. Heidi would have told her to leave the runway in that office-manager getup. That's the genius of Palin, of course. She's the hot chick you work with, not some earnest lifetime chiseling Senior Senator with an arrogant delivery and a bad plug-job. This was the 'Married With Children' debate and Peggy retired from the stage as the overdub-track machine went wild with applause.

The McCain campaign will now surely be forced to let Palin lead the charge against the noxious poison of Obamanism. She connects and he doesn't. Period. She has to be set loose to nail Obama with the sins of his Marxist past like some Aimee Semple McPherson going after the devil and calling of the faithful to witness for a non-socialist America; a country that has traditions and values that have taken it to heights that no other nation on earth has even reached and which deserve to be honored and kept. The Wrinkly Old White Dude needs to do something that people will respond to and he's shown himself to not be up to the job. He needs to attack Obama and he doesn't have it in him attack any Democrat. He's running this campaign like he's running for the Senate in Arizona. His dashing running mate is his only hope.