Archive for June 24th, 2010
SPECULATION: Why did General Stanley McChrystal do what he did?
We’ll never get a definitive answer on this, we’re sure, but we’re wondering why General Stanley McChrystal did what he did, and more importantly said what he said, in that Rolling Stone interview.
Knowing his words would be printed, and that SOMEONE at the White House would read them, why did McChrystal put the facts out there that the Obama Administration is comprised almost entirely of fools and clowns who do not know what they are doing (note that the sole grown-up in this administration, as identified by McChrystal, is Hillary Clinton).
Our gut reaction to all of this is that McChrystal believes the current “president” is so grossly incompetent and living in fairyland that he just took an opportunity to draw attention to this fact, and seized upon that Rolling Stone interview to do it. It was a perfect setup, really, because Rolling Stone is such an odd choice for this to happen in — considering the fact that it was one of the driving forces of Obama’s 2008 cult of personality. Remember the RS cover with Obama bathed in ethereal light, with storm clouds behind him receding due to the awesomeness of his mere presence? The hero worship of Obama in this magazine, like the rest of the American Media, was revolting.
McChrystal could have delivered his remarks to the actual news Media, and not to whatever it is that Rolling Stone has become. Is it an entertainment magazine, a men’s magazine, a Mick Jagger-obsessed shrine, what? Surely, McChrystal could have talked to any number of international reporters, from some papers that are still credible and carry weight, if he wanted. Why Rolling Stone?
Maybe McChrystal knew the oddity of all this appearing in Rolling Stone would get his remarks more attention than they would have received if he’d done this in the London Times. Maybe he knew Rolling Stone wouldn’t censor him, to protect Obama, the way other news outlets would have, since RS would consider it such a big scoop they would rush to publish his words immediately.
If a general knows the Commander-in-Chief is a dangerous, ego-driven fool, surrounded by yes-men clowns, and the actions and inactions of these reckless buffoons are endangering American boots on the ground, then what options does such a general have if he wants to affect change and put an end to whatever’s going on in the White House?
It seems like falling on his sword the way he did was the only way to accomplish this.
What are we doing right now?
We’re talking about the situation in Afghanistan and how incompetent Obama is as Commander-in-Chief.
Afghanistan is not something any of us have personally talked about in a while, with so much going on, in particular the Obamaspill Disaster in the Gulf.
Did McChrystal want Afghanistan back in the headlines? Did he want people to talk about this at the dinner table again?
Most importantly, did he want people to wonder why a General would throw away his career by making remarks to Rolling Stone about how incompetent the current “president” is and what a foolish clown the current vice president is as well?
What do you think?
Why did McChrystal do what he did, and what did he hope to achieve by doing it?
Victor David Hanson claims Nemesis has come to punish Obama — we think it's just Hera doing her thing some more
Here’s a fun read by Victor David Hanson, where he invokes Greek myth in the form of the lesser goddess Nemesis to explain the collapse of the cult of Obama. In short, he waxes on the Olympian plane to recount Dr. Utopia’s determined hubris as a candidate, where he constantly used grandiose hyperbole to delude his cultists into believing, as president, he would “lower the oceans”, “heal the planet”, “fix broken souls”, and do everything else this “new god” of Media manufacture promised not just Americans, but the whole world, he would do.
As Hanson notes, in the Greek myths, whenever a mere mortal became so pumped full of ego that he likened himself to the gods and made such insane pronouncements about himself, Olympus dispatched Nemesis to bring wretches like this down — in fun, creative, and let-that-be-a-lesson-to-you all sorts of ways.
All of us here attended Catholic schools, where Greek myths were always studied in English and history classes, every year — and where we always had creative little projects assigned to us, which often involved dressing up as various characters and performing little skits. One time, in high school, one of our schools even had us write new myths using existing or original characters, as if these stories were still being told today to explain the world around us.
So, it’s fairly easy for us to see Hera hard at work, since 2008, punishing all those who sided against Hillary Clinton in the Democrat primaries. Obama, for everything he did to the Clintons, and everything his cultists did to her supporters, bears the most responsibility of all. His wife Michelle’s punishment is the simple and sublime fact that she has to wake up each morning as herself — no amount of “high fashion”, lavish praise from the Media, or elaborate extravagance on the taxpayer dime will ever make up for having to stare into a mirror and stare at what’s looking back at her each and every day for the rest of her life. Her husband, however, is only just starting to receive the attention of Hera…and if you read Hanson’s piece, you can clearly see a queen on a peacock throne, not the vengeful Nemesis, at work here.
Really, Obama’s fall is more like what happened to Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone, and other would-be tyrants and destroyers of this country. He might have been positioned where he is now by people who want to see this country destroyed, and his arrogance and various mental disorders may have culminated into a very real danger to the continued prosperity of this nation, but in the end he will be undone by some trick of fate and happenstance that reveals his true colors to the nation. Everything that’s happening now is the leadup to this moment, so maybe you can see it as Hera priming that pump, or you can wax more patriotic and believe the ghosts of the Founding Fathers are assembling ethereally behind the scenes to construct a political Rube Goldberg device that will soon form a Byzantine, twisting, and turning assemblage of oddities that will combine to bring him down.
We think, mathematically, there’s a more rational explanation — and it’s simply that a person cannot do as many crazy things, and can’t exist with his level of chronic incompetence in the most high profile job in the world, without all of his mistakes accumulating to the point where some small event in the future is going to be the proverbial straw that breaks the socialist’s back.
And when this man finally goes down, he’s going to take not just a lot of bad Democrats down with him, but he’s going to drag a large portion of the national Media down too.
Americans must remember how much the Media pushed for Obama, and how Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and the rest of MSNBC in particular became a de facto, unpaid arm of his campaign.
A lot of people out there have comeuppance coming, to answer for all that’s happened to this country for the last two years.
You can believe it’s Nemesis behind this, or Hera, or just simple math and probability…or you can believe angels on high really do love this country and will defeat all who abjure it. Whatever you believe, history teaches that men like Obama get the takedowns and falls from grace they have coming.
For him, because of his global cult of personality, that takedown is going to be spectacular. And, as Hanson notes, that’s something he should have thought long and hard about as he encouraged his cult’s rise to begin with.
QUESTION: How do we get regular Americans to start asking questions about, and start doing something about, the wasteful spending of school districts?
One of the biggest mysteries out there for us is why, exactly, taxpayers have let the teachers’ unions get away with such wasteful spending in school districts — largely on the ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky salaries of district officials, superintendents, and others who’ve grown mighty fat off the public gravy train.
America’s close to being broke, if not there already.
We can no longer afford to funnel so much money into failing school districts — not when the majority of these funds go into the pockets of administrators and union crooks, instead of making any marked difference at all in the education of children.
A few days ago, AceofSpades ran a terrific graphic that showed spending on education in the last 50 years or so, documenting an enormous upsurge in funding, but absolutely no measurable increase in the quality of education the children were receiving. Apparently, it costs four times as much today in education spending for each K-12 student, but these kids are not four times as smart as they were 50 years ago. In our opinion, at least in school districts like Chicago’s, these kids could actually be four times dumber than they were when our grandparents’ left school.
Have you ever been in to a public school in a large city like Chicago? It’s ridiculous.
Some of us here do little freelance assignments in public schools once or twice a year, conducting surveys or doing promotional work for various companies. We are forever astounded at just how poor these students are. Their English is terrible, their manners are practically nonexistent. The schools have framed photos of Malcolm X, Yassir Arafat, and Che Guevera on the walls. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are nowhere to be found. The teachers robotically speak in a verbiage that’s almost impossible for us to replicate without laughing. It goes something like, “Now, Deante, my expectation of you, gentleman, is excellence, and you have not exceeded my expectation of excellence by behaving in this manner. What do you think your expectation of excellence means in terms of the matter of turning in your homework on time?”. Why not just ask this kid where his homework is? Why talk like Vicki the Robot from Small Wonder while doing it?
And seriously, YASSIR ARAFAT, on the walls in a framed photo? In Chicago? We’ve seen this, and not just in one school. It’s insane.
We believe there’s a silver lining to the economic crunch we are in, especially in states like Illinois.
It’s a chance to spur regular Americans to question where all the money is going. In the rush for Democrats to raise taxes, there’s no grassroots movement to audit the books and investigate where the tax dollars are already going. With billions lavished on the education system, which does not seem to produce qualified, hard-working, learned graduates commiserate with the amount of treasure dispatched into these black holes, we think it’s time tax payers stood up and demanded some of that change we were all promised in 2008.
And that change looks an awful lot like cutting the money stream that’s been pouring into the teachers’ unions, and ending the days where school administrators take home millions of dollars a year when the kids in these school districts certainly aren’t receiving educations to warrant this sort of lavish compensation for these bureaucrats.
We increasingly see just how much damage unions in general do to this country…and we believe the teachers’ unions are vulnerable to a severe public backlash if only they could be exposed for the waste generators they are.
How do we do this, and where do we start?
Thoughts?
PS — What do you also think of Sharon Angle’s idea in Nevada to do away with the US Department of Education? It didn’t exist until 1980, and doesn’t seem to be good for very much in our opinion. How much money a year does this bureaucracy cost US taxpayers and what does it actually do that’s productive?
Can anyone answer these queries?
Thursday Open Thread: June 24th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Thursday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
