The Krauthammer Ten

There's been talk of replacing Alexander Hamilton on the ten. May I make a modest suggestion?

Hammer And Tong

Hammer & Tong

Krauthammer Got it Wrong

I don't say this lightly. I have the utmost admiration and respect for Charles Krauthammer. He is a gifted thinker and has a way with words that is virtually unparalleled. The man can turn a phrase like no other. I don't always agree with Charles, but on those few occasions that he drifts from orthodoxy, which is to say, whatever I believe to be true, his reasoning for it is always well thought out. I direct your attention to today's Quote du jour, taken from his best selling "Things That Matter":

"It's hard to blame this state of affairs on a fickle public. Blame also belongs to the idiot politicians who decided 30 years ago to abandon the moon and send us on a pointless and endless journey into low-Earth orbit. President Bush has sensibly called an end to this nonsense and committed us to going back to the moon and, ultimately, to Mars. If his successors don't screw it up, within 10 years NASA will have us back to where we belong---on other worlds."---Charles Krauthammer, Aug. 3, 2007

That was written seven years ago this month. Raise your hand if you seriously think we will return to the Moon or go to Mars in the next three years, with our space program focused more on Muslim self esteem than going where no man has gone before. Can you see his error? Can you see what was unfathomable and unthinkable in 2007?

 If his successors don't screw it up

He used the plural: "successors". In retrospect, how could he have known that it would not take more than one successor to "screw up" and decimate the space program? Because he is a man of integrity, he allowed this glaring error to be republished in his book. It only took one successor to George W. Bush to screw up the space program (along with the economy, race relations and foreign affairs) and deny us access to the heavens. Unless you consider the outrageous amounts we pay one of our biggest geopolitical enemies to ferry us to the space station, at their whim, which hamstrings us to an extent in standing against their earthly aggression. 

In retrospect, I can see how Charles could have made the error. Few people, even those who were certain that Obama would be disastrous for our country, could fully envision the magnitude of that disaster. Who knew?

Cross posted at Proof Positive

Ain’t It Rich? The Insufferable Airhorn And His Insufferable Hubris

“Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.” ― Thomas Sowell

Many people read with great disdain the long and tedious puff piece by David Remnick in The New Yorker wherein the ridiculous assertion was made that racial tensions may have softened his popularity.

“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president. Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.”

And now, in bonus excerpts, from the same interview Mr. Remnick foisted upon The New Yorker’s elitist readers we learn that The World’s Most Dangerous Community Organizer believes he’s been frozen out by none other than Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

“Another way of putting it, I guess, is that the issue has been the inability of my message to penetrate the Republican base so that they feel persuaded that I’m not the caricature that you see on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, but I’m somebody who is interested in solving problems and is pretty practical, and that, actually, a lot of the things that we’ve put in place worked better than people might think.”

It couldn’t be because he sucks at president’n.  Nah.  Perish the thought.  It’s because we’re all fucking raaaaacists.

“When the central domestic fact of your presidency was a fraud, people won't listen to you anymore,” opined Peggy Noonan.  She continues—“He has been for five years a non-stop windup talk machine.  Most of it has been facile, bland; the same rounded words and rounded sentiments, the same soft accusations and excuses.  I see him enjoying the sound of his own voice…”

The venerable former psychiatrist, Charles Krauthammer, clinically diagnoses TWMDCO’s delusions of grandeur in this way:

“Look, it’s rather unseemly if you are the commander-in-chief, the leader of the free world and the most powerful man on earth who can reduce pieces of the planet to a cinder on his command, to get so whiny. You know when you pull the camera back and you look at the media landscape—on one side you got those elements in the media that are sympathetic or even worship at his feet.  You’ve got ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, of course MSNBC. You’ve got Hollywood that’s sympathetic, the television/entertainment side. I mean, you got the major newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post.  It’s what Lenin would call the commanding heights of the culture—are all on one side. And what do you have on the other side? Fox News and talk radio. And you’ve got a president of the United States complaining that that explains the failures of his administration.” 

“It goes way beyond that.  This is the best example you can find of Obama's political and ideological self-righteousness. He truly believes that the way he sees the world, he says in this little snippet of the interview, that it's pragmatic, it's rational, all he wants to do is help the folks. And of course, anybody who is on the other side, anybody who sees say the biggest stimulus in American history or the takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy—with a scheme that is completely irrational and collapsing around him—anybody who says this is not working can only be either acting against the national interest or being suspicious of him without any reason.” 

“He simply can't accept the fact or at least in public he doesn't accept the fact that one can actually have a view that contradicts his, that is in good faith, that is patriotic, and that also seeks the good of the country.  So if you think as he does, self-righteously, that there is no way to oppose him and be honestly patriotic and sympathetic to the American people, then of course you have to attribute all of these evil motives to the other side who are preventing the people from receiving the message. I think it is a myopia, rather it is unbecoming, and in fact it often becomes repulsive. It is a refusal to give respect to the other side.”

Woof.  They don’t call him “The Hammer” for nothing.

Big “Farma” Or Who’s Milking Whom?

The failure of the 112^th Congress to pass a new version of the farm bill which expired on September 30 of this year is going to cause the price of milk to go through the roof.  We could be seeing the price on grocery shelves double to $6 or $7 a gallon.

I guess this news is only good if you’re lactose intolerant.

Washington Post Columnist Charles Krauthammer has suggested that going over the "dairy cliff" might have an upside:

"I do think if we went over the milk cliff it would actually be a good idea. [If] people actually saw the milk price double, it would be less abstract than watching a debt clock. They would finally understand that we have the insane laws that acquire barnacles over the decades. And the farm laws are the worst. They are all kind of pressure, special interest favors, pay offs which make no economic sense. I'd like to wipe them out and start all over again, and it would be good if the law expired. People would actually be awakened to how insane our system is and how much we really need tax reform. It wouldn't be an abstraction, it would be real."

Federal law puts a giant safety net under the dairy industry by promising that if the price of milk collapses, the government will swoop in and push it back up by buying mass quantities of dairy products. The goal is to make sure that the farmers are paid somewhere close to what it should cost them to produce the milk, a figure that's determined by a complex formula. 

Usually, dairies can earn plenty selling their product on the open market, and the government doesn't need to intervene. But the 1949 law getting ready to kick back in, bases its formula for the cost of milk production on how the industry worked in the early 20th century, when it was far less efficient than today. As a result, it will automatically force the government to start paying a giant premium for milk products, which will then cause prices to jump for everyone else as well. 

Don’t think for a moment you can avert the so-called “dairy cliff” by stocking up on powdered milk or almond milk or soy milk.  It’s all milk-based.

What’s next?  Oreos?

That giant sucking sound you hear isn’t just the milking machine hooked up to the udders of cows; it’s going to be hooked up to our wallets relieving us of its contents.  Thanks you miserable POS congresscritters.

Happy New Year, citizen.

UPDATE 12-31-12:  Deal could prevent spike in milk prices.

The Mediocrity Of The President Or The Destiny Of Our Nation?

On August 27, 2012 Bret Stephens wrote a stinging appraisal of this president’s failed foreign policies.  His piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal sixteen days before the barbaric murders of four Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.

Stephens writes:

“I tend to think that the buzz about American decline mistakes the mediocrity of the president for the destiny of the nation. But we have an election on, the outcome of which will decide whether one man’s mediocrity becomes a whole nation’s destiny. Mr. Obama is now the world’s leading has-been, trying to revive a career on the strength of a talent that was greatly exaggerated to begin with. But a country that’s willing to reward mediocrity with a second chance risks becoming a has-been itself.”

In his piece, Stephens comments that “the president would rather be loved than feared.  He is neither.”

I chose to Photoshop the picture associated with this post by substituting the American flag that had been set ablaze while a group of radical Muslims look on with the flag that his Obamaness is now hawking on his website.

His failed effort to improve America’s standing in the Muslim world with the now-forgotten Cairo speech and his comment while on the 2008 campaign trail where he boasted “when I’m inaugurated Muslim hostility will ease” rings hollow.  Ambassador Stevens could not be reached for comment.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton said, “And what's unmistakable, despite the bluster which is coming from the Obama administration, they [the Muslim world] are not afraid of the United States. They do not fear this president. They do not fear the United States. They do not fear consequences for their actions.”

America’s friends are bereft, confused, paralyzed, says Charles Krauthammer.  He warns:

“Islamists rise across North Africa from Mali to Egypt. Iran repeatedly defies U.S. demands on nuclear enrichment, then, as a measure of its contempt for what America thinks, openly admits that its Revolutionary Guards are deployed in Syria. Russia, after arming Assad, warns America to stay out, while the secretary of state delivers vapid lectures about Assad ‘meeting’ his international ‘obligations.’ The Gulf states beg America to act on Iran; Obama strains mightily to restrain…Israel.”

“Sovereign U.S. territory is breached and U.S. interests are burned. And what is the official response? One administration denunciation after another — of a movie trailer! A request to Google to ‘review’ the trailer’s presence on YouTube. And a sheriff’s deputies’ midnight ‘voluntary interview’ with the suspected filmmaker. This in the land of the First Amendment.”

“What else can Obama do? At their convention, Democrats endlessly congratulated themselves on their one foreign policy success: killing Osama bin Laden. A week later, the Salafist flag flies over four American embassies, even as the mob chants, ‘Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas.’”

“A foreign policy in epic collapse. And, by the way, Vladimir Putin just expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development from Russia. Another thank you from another recipient of another grand Obama ‘reset.’”

I’ll close with this. Froggy at Blackfive attended the funeral of Tyrone Woods, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi while trying to protect Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

He writes:

Ty's widow, Dorothy, delivered an inspiring eulogy with more grace, poise, and fervor than I have ever witnessed from the spouse of a fallen warrior.  I wish I had the entire thing on tape, as it should be read by the nation on the anniversary of 9/11 next year.  Here are two quotes that I will never forget.

"It is easy to write a book about being a Navy SEAL, but it is very hard to write an obituary for one." 

"To all the Operators here today I give you this charge: Rid the world of those savages.  I'll say it again, RID THE WORLD OF THOSE SAVAGES!"