Conservative Cabal

Gateway Pundit highlights some lyrics to live by, from Obama’s favorite musical talent, in which Ludicris lives up to his name and encourages Obama to paint the White House black and consider Ludicris for VP.  Oh, and McCain belongs in a wheelchair.

And don’t forget to give him a pardon, should he ever go in the slammer, Prez Obama.

UPDATE: Obama condemns the “song”. “While Ludacris is a talented individual he should be ashamed of these lyrics”.  I can do nothing now but sigh deeply. Talented, huh? Well, it’s no Brahms Symphony No. 1, that’s for sure. (Dead white man, though — but German! Doesn’t that give him some points?)

He ventured forth to bring light to the world | Gerard Baker - Times Online

I can make no further remark on this. It is simply brilliant.  Brilliant. Read it if you haven’t already and laugh.

We heart you Gerard Baker!

And I would like to highlight this trenchant comment made by Matt from France (who I think I heart as well) –

I may be mistaken, but when writing in this style, isn’t it traditional to be far less factual.

Matt, Antibes, France

Unless you count Obama’s ascension to demigod status. That being the case, there are some things I wish we all knew.

-We are winning in Iraq. So, shouldn’t our goal be to win? The Left’s default position since the invasion was that Iraq was another Vietnam (their memory of which is certainly questionable) and hence “unwinnable”. But since we’re, ya know, winning now, should we focus on finishing the job, getting the government of Iraq on a stable footing and leaving a country that can handle itself?

And on that, I am very worried about the plotting of Sadr and his Iranian leash-holders. It seems clear to me that with the defeat of his open armed militia, the Shiite Islamists are planning on turning southern Iraq into another southern Lebanon. The militia will go underground, create an alternative power structure and work to undermine the security and stability of the Shiite areas. They hope thereby to paralyze the nation of Iraq, keep it from entering into the modern world and keep the rest of the world occupied with these proxy problems so they can be left alone to pursue their nuclear weapons and delusions of grandeur.

So, I’m for working against that and winning the war. If it’s no longer unwinnable, how about we win.

-The Globe, such as it is, stopped warming about ten years ago. It is behaving exactly as the skeptics claimed it would and as the IPCC said it could not. Of course, the Warmists have done what they always do. They have adapted their predictions ex post facto to fit the latest observations. This is not new for them. From the beginning Global Warming has been based on computer models instead of actual observations. And these models have always been too hot. Given data from whenever to 1980 and asked to model today’s temperatures, these models always come up way too hot (10 degrees too hot before, now more like 2 degrees too hot). Faced with this, the “scientists” simply re-do their models (without anyone being able to see and verify that whatever they are doing behind the scenes in their progamming) and low-and-behold, suddenly it fits today, and gets warmer tomorrow. When tomorrow comes in cool again, we’ll just redo to program again, and trust me, this time it’ll be right. Never doubt the theory, we’re causing global warming.

The thing is, it’s not just their predictions that are wrong. Human caused global warming requires there to be a tropical warm belt in the atmosphere. There should be a measurable warm area in the air above tropical latitudes if CO2 is causing this warming, and it simply isn’t there. Weather balloons don’t see it, satellites don’t see it. It isn’t there. So like good little scientists, the Global Warming Crowd is claiming that the thermometers, which work everywhere else, are broken in this particular instance. They’ve got lots of reasons, but no facts. Because the theory predicts it, it must be there, facts be damned, reality be damned. I’ve got more to say about this nonsense later, but for now, I’ll just scoff at the “reality based community”.

-And by the way, we aren’t in a recession. And it is looking more and more like we won’t be. So there’s that.

If Bush could hammer those three points into the heads of the press and the American people before November, that would be a great service to our country. Not that he hasn’t already done a lot, but this one little thing would be really appreciated. That and fire everyone in the State Department.

Just in case no one has noticed, the U.S. is about to get past its past — racial past, that is. We are going to CHANGE. The U.S. will once again be a city on a hill. A beacon of hope to a world in need. In need of a new America.  An America they can feel proud of, maybe for the first time ever.

Loves like this come only once — maybe twice — in a lifetime, and journalists around the world aren’t letting the chance for happiness pass them by.

Foreign press: All Obama, all the time - Michael Calderone - Politico.com

And now here’s a somewhat battered John Kass, sometime conservative, writing in the Chicago Tribune about the coverage of this sacred event — the annointing of Obama. Barack is our prophet, priest, and king. Sure, that’s what Christians say about Jesus Christ, but why am I letting my personal beliefs about the Messiah dim my outlook on the person who could embody all of those ideals that Christ actually, umm, embodied.  oops, I’m saying that the press is portraying Obama as a Messiah figure, and everyone knows this already. It’s not news. Move along.

And that’s the problem with the recognition of liberal media bias in this case. I have a sense that most people may think “Sure, the press is cossetting and cozying up to Obama. But so what? Aren’t they right? Aren’t they reflecting what we all feel deep down?”

Am in the midst of reading Tim Harford’s “The Undercover Economist” (Little, Brown, 2006), and was struck by my extreme lack of knowledge in this area. The author, a columnist for the Financial Times and occasional Slate.com contributor, breaks down the beautiful science to make it accessible and fascinating for dunderheads like me. Gem chapters include “Beer, Chips and Globalization.”

The product of a fairly good secondary school and university, I was never required to take an economics course. My post-college education primarily consists of books such as “Freakonomics” and the movie “A Dangerous Mind.”

Barack Obama believes that requiring students to take a second language is the answer to making America more aware of the world and make U.S. tourists more palatable to the Frogs, but wouldn’t making economics a required course in high school be more advantageous?

It would be easy enough to get rid of filler classes such as Yearbook and Basketweaving and teach students how to actually think. A semester devoted to why poor countries are poor may do the little pampered darlings a world of good and cut down on traffic stoppages due to student-filled protests. See, everyone wins.

Don’t watch. Seriously. The only way to bring the idiots at the IOC in Geneva to heel is to hit them in their pocketbooks. If nobody watches the Olympics, TV revenues go into the toilet and networks tell the IOC not to choose a homicidal, totalitarian dictatorship the next time.

It’s not just about Tibet, or the Falun Gong, or the thousands that were killed in Tiananmen square. It’s about thousands of missiles pointed at the free, democratic nation of Taiwan, and censoring the internet, and banning any and all banners at the games. And staging an attack in Paris to discredit the Tibetan movement. It’s about Darfur in Sudan, and Mugabe in Zimbabwe. If you’re an environmentalist, China is the largest polluter in the world by a great margin. If you favor reproductive rights, it might interest you to know that China sterilizes women against their will and aborts pregnancies against the will of the mothers.

There is no measure by which China is not a problem; labor rights, fair trade, human rights, free speech.

Don’t support the butchers of Beijing. Don’t watch.

it’ll all be on youtube a month later anyway, unless Google sells out again. You wouldn’t do any more evil, would you Google?

Don’t watch.

Well, the easy way to get angry is to read the Jersusalem Post. Let’s see, here you can learn that that “lone gunman” bulldozer driver was a “convicted rapist, burglar and drug dealer” who had “‘returned’ to Islam” and yet was driving a bulldozer in Jerusalem.

Or you can read about the “prisoner swap” with Hezbullah where Israel freed six terrorists in exchange for two bodies.

And there’s Obama. Today he’s promising to rid the world of nukes. He means our nukes. See, if we get rid of our nukes, it will show the good people of Iran and North Korea that we’re really nice guys, that we empathize with their plight.

When do we get to say the emperor has no clothes? He blamed the 9/11 attacks on our lack of empathy and the poverty and hopelessness of the millionaire’s sons who flew those planes. He was dead wrong about the surge in Iraq and he was wrong about the need for Arabic interpreters in Pashtun speaking Afghanistan. He’s really just not that informed. Which isn’t surprising since he spent his formative years, politically speaking, in the RACE IS EVERYTHING hot bead of Reverend Wright’s political machine/church.

If Bush talked about arabic in Afghanistan it would be news and comedy fodder for a week, anybody see it mentioned anywhere except the evil right-wing blogosphere?

And now “nuclear disarmament”. It’s like he’s a pretentious, egomaniacal Jimmy Carter.

Fox’s Brit Hume to Stop Anchoring Special Report After Election - TV Decoder - Media & Television - New York Times Blog

Well, this is sad news. I mean, I suppose he is 65 and is allowed to retire. And to be honest, I rarely watch TV news of any kind any more (I should watch more for blogging, probably). But of all the TV news programs, Fox’s Special Report was the best.

And I link to the coverage of this on the NYT because I think the comments people posted in response are especially revealing of the paranoid mindset of today’s pseudo-intellectual liberals.

So, I just finished slogging through Simon Schama’s Citizens.  It’s not nearly as good as Carlyle, but it does make some interesting points.

Historians are also much given to dinstinguishing between the “verbal” violence and the real thing.  The assumption seems to be that such men as Javogues and Marat, who were given to screaming at people, calling for death, gloating at the spectacle of heads on pikes or processions of men with their hands tied behind their backs climbing the steps to the rasoir national were indulging only in brutal rhetoric.  The screamers were not to be compared with such quiet bureaucrats of death as Fouguier-Tinville who did their jobs with stolid, silent efficiency.  But the history of “Ville-Affranchie” of the Vendee-Venge, or of the September massacres suggests in fact a direct connection between all that orchestrated or sponstaneous screaming for blood and its copious shedding. It contributed greatly to the complete dehumanization of those who became victims.  As “brigands” or the “Austrian Whore” or “fanatics” they became nonentities in the Nation of Citizens and not only could but had to be eliminated if it was to survive.  Humiliation and abuse, then, were not just Jacobin fun and games; they were the prologues to killing.

- Citizens, A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Schama. pp.859-860

It never ceases to amaze me that the French Revolution presages every revolution of the 20th century with almost mirror-like quality.  It starts with the highest of rhetoric, The People (always capitalized); the Patrie (or Fatherland or Motherland); Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.  And it ends in organized violence on a massive scale.  In the Vendee, the Revolutionaries didn’t want to waste bullets and gun powder so they filled barges with recalcitrants, towed them to the middle of the Loire and then sank them.  People who could swim though bound were bayoneted.  They lined people up in front of cannon and shot one ball through as many as they could.  People who thought the Nazis invented this kind of thing are sorely mistaken

The rhetoric of violence, as Schama points out, creates the necessary groundwork for the butchers to go forward.  Your opponents, who aren’t really “enemies” at all though they are called that, must be dehumanized before they can be slaughtered.

When one is pursuing the perfect, all things are allowable.  Utopia cannot be stopped by troglodytes, or rednecks, or ChimpyMcHitler Bush.  The dehumanizing language the Left uses to stigmatize and marginalize conservatives and their ideas in this country are part and parcel of the rhetoric of Marat and Robespierre, Mao and Stalin.

Apropos of the escalation, how about burning in effigy?  On the flip side, the Movement must have angelic leaders, idealized symbols of Hope and Change, an Obamassiah perhaps?

FOXNews.com - Tony Snow, Former White House Press Secretary and FOX News Anchor, Dies at 53

We are all very saddened to hear the news that Tony Snow has passed away. He was quite possibly the best press secretary in many years. Certainly, the best press secretary Bush ever had.

And as many noted in the Sunday morning talk shows, and as Bill Kristol noted in the New York Times, he had optimism — optimism about America, and faith-grounded (as Kristol and President Bush have noted) optimism in the face of his illness. He was a good talk show host and an excellent press secretary  (particularly obvious since McClellan’s book has come out) in large part because he acted out his faith. He had his principles and his beliefs, but he could listen, and he gave grace.   A model to emulate.

I find it sad that the coverage of Tim Russert’s sudden passing (which was indeed startling and sad) seems to have generated more digital ink than Tony Snow’s. I had been hibernating from the news for the last week, but somehow I still knew about the cover of the New Yorker, and the White House discussion of a pull-out from Iraq (on which more later), but heard only by the merest chance of Tony Snow’s death.

But no doubt Tony Snow himself would not have minded.  May God bless his family. RIP.