Sadly, No!

WaPo starts the inevitable thrashing of Charles Black

• Despite the fact that he has tirelessly lobbied on behalf of blood-soaked autocrats, Charles Black is easily the best thing that McCain’s campaign has going for it.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Gavin adds: See-Dubya, the Malkineer who wrote the inevitable shrugging eh-who-gives-a-crap defense of Charles Black, plays an interesting game of Twister:

It will be interesting, of course, to hear these Democrats explain why exactly Black’s ties with evil dictators are so bad, when their presumptive candidate is proposing to go work with them face to face and legitimize relations with a whole assortment of repressive thugs. Sit down for a tea party with Bashar Assad? Why, that’s exactly the sort of legitimacy and international prestige that dictators hire lobbyists like Charles Black to arrange for them.

Fine then, we’ll explain. When it really comes down to it, in this penny arcade of hopes and dreams that we call life, would you want a lobbyist for clients including Jonas Savimbi of Angola, Ferdinand Marcos, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida of Nigeria, Mobutu Sese-freaking-Seko, and Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia (among others) to marry your dad and be your new gay dad? No, just kidding. The actual answer is that Black worked for them, while Obama is planning to work for us — i.e., against Bashar-hypothetical-Assad, i.e. ‘almost the exact opposite,’ as almost-exactly-opposite things are usually called by sane, as opposed to ding-whoop yar-yar crazy, people.

If See-Dubya ever faces arraignment, for instance for dazedly wandering a Wal-Mart while two-fistedly sniffing Sharpie markers, he would then do well to master the difference between ‘a defense attorney’ and ‘the prosecutor.’ The one is a nice man who charges you money to help you out of a jam. The other will offer you deals and may even bring you a cup of tea or coffee, but is not really your friend. Take heed, feckless wanderer!

Note that in this analogy, See-Dubya is in the hypothetical role of a bloody dictator who murders his own people. This is by way of irony, a thing which occurs when you open Black’s fly and he urinates into your Chardonnay, or however that whole thing went.

Jeesh. It’ll also be interesting to see how flexible and obfuscatory the term ‘ties’ can become as this hellacious campaign year wears on. It can link people who have little to do with each other (e.g., a public figure and some mortifying jackass who dropped money on his or her campaign), drawing us all a bit closer together, as it were; but it can also… Well, apparently Karl Rove isn’t listed as an official McCain advisor (and has only ‘been linked to’ the McCain campaign) because he has what some would call ‘ties with’ the Bush administration.

Yes indeed, it’s another weekly syndicated newspaper column from Michelle Malkin, as seen in newspapers.

Barack Obama, Gaffe Machine

All it takes is one gaffe to taint a Republican for life.

If only it were so.

The political establishment never let Dan Quayle live down his fateful misspelling of “potatoe.” The New York Times distorted and misreported the first President Bush’s questions about new scanner technology at a grocers’ convention to brand him permanently as out of touch.

And as the spinning flashback spiral abates, we find ourselves blinking at the ceiling sixteen years later, with no memory of how we got here.

But what about Barack Obama? The guy’s a perpetual gaffe machine. Let us count the ways, large and small, that his tongue has betrayed him throughout the campaign:

I like to think that we’ve come to understand ol’ Michelle during the slow-motion ski jump catastrophe that has been her career in mainstream punditry.

A good first principle of Malkinology is that she does the same tricks over and over, and when they aren’t working, she only gets angry and does them more foot-stompingly and carelessly. The main trick is basic projection: When she decides to write a column about a fatal fault in someone, it will almost 100% of the time be a completely hatched up and calculated ploy to immunize herself or a political ally from the exact same charge.

So she’s writing about Obama as a ‘perpetual gaffe machine.’ I wonder if we know anyone else who fits that description.

Welp, let’s see what she’s dug up.

• Last May, he claimed that tornadoes in Kansas killed a whopping 10,000 people: “In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” The actual death toll: 12.

Okay, yes. Egad, what a gaffe.

• Earlier this month in Oregon, he redrew the map of the United States: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.”

Holy Toledo. A gaffe is what that is. It’s as though Obama is confusing states, which are political divisions within the American federal system, i.e., the United States of America, with putative varieties of Heinz products.

In a regional emergency — tornadoes in Kansas, let’s say — would a President Obama order Federal assistance sent to Bread-and-Butter Pickle Slices? Would wildfires in California yield a relief package to Original Malt Vinegar?

How can we know, America? How can we know?

• Last week, in front of a roaring Sioux Falls, S.D., audience, Obama exulted: “Thank you, Sioux City. … I said it wrong. I’ve been in Iowa for too long. I’m sorry.”

Beam me up, Scotty — sensors detect ‘gaffe.’

• Explaining last week why he was trailing Hillary Clinton in Kentucky, Obama again botched basic geography: “Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.” On what map is Arkansas closer to Kentucky than Illinois?

OMDFG! I can has gaffe?

• Obama has as much trouble with numbers as he has with maps. Last March, on the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Ala., he claimed his parents united as a direct result of the civil rights movement: “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Ala., because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.”

Obama was born in 1961. The Selma march took place in 1965. His spokesman, Bill Burton, later explained that Obama was “speaking metaphorically about the civil-rights movement as a whole.”

The hits, a.k.a gaffes just keep coming!

Let’s skip some out of self-respect (they’re all at about the same level of malapropism or triviality).

• And in perhaps the most seriously troubling set of gaffes of them all, Obama told a Portland crowd over the weekend that Iran doesn’t “pose a serious threat to us” — cluelessly arguing that “tiny countries” with small defense budgets can’t do us harm — and then promptly flip-flopped the next day, claiming, “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”

Except here we’re interested enough to check the facts, and it turns out that Michelle is selectively misquoting her own website, and then engineering a ‘flip-flop’ by cherry-picking a sentence out of context from Obama’s response.

From Malkin’s Hot Air: “‘They don’t pose a serious threat to us in the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us,’ Obama told a cheering audience, explaining why he doesn’t think we need to worry about “tiny” countries like Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran.”

But even that quote is truncated. Here’s a fuller one, courtesy of the National Review: “Iran, Cuba, Venezuela—these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we’re going to wipe you off the planet.”

Now here’s the referenced passage in which Obama supposedly ‘flip-flopped,’ via the Chicago Tribune’s blog: “The Soviet Union had the ability to destroy the world several times over, had satellites spanning the globe, had huge masses of conventional military power, all directed at destroying us,” he said. “So, I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave. But what I’ve said is that we should not just talk to our friends. We should be willing to engage our enemies as well. That’s what diplomacy is all about.”

Joker made a boner, eh, Michelle?

Above: Another weekly staff meeting at Malkin, LLC

Barack Obama — promoted by the Left and the media as an all-knowing, articulate, transcendent Messiah — is a walking, talking gaffe machine. How many more passes does he get? How many more can we afford?

On the other hand, you’ll notice that they’ve stopped trying to wring any more mileage out of Jeremiah Wright.

Wheeeeeee:

It may be the mother of all doom and gloom gas price predictions:  $12 for a gallon of gas is “inevitable.”

Robert Hirsch, Management Information Services Senior Energy Advisor, gave a dire warning about the potential future of gas prices on CNBC’s May 20 “Squawk Box”. He told host Becky Quick there was no single thing that would solve the problem, due to the enormity of the problem.

“[T]he prices that we’re paying at the pump today are, I think, going to be ‘the good old days,’ because others who watch this very closely forecast that we’re going to be hitting $12 and $15 per gallon,” Hirsch said. “And then, after that, when oil – world oil production goes into decline, we’re going to talk about rationing. In other words, not only are we going to be paying high prices and have considerable economic problems, but in addition to that, we’re not going to be able to get the fuel when we want it.”

Fun stuff. I, for one, am looking forward to living off a majority-ramen diet, with the occasional package of Soylent Green thrown in for protein.

But seriously: we need to solve this problem because it’s not getting better. I’m fortunate in that my current job allows me to work from home once or twice a week, although I’m still spending around $50 a week on gas. I’m trying to organize a group of my fellow employees to pitch in for a shuttle service that will take us from the commuter rail to the office every day; how are the rest of you coping?

Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser has a question:

New Books on Men and Boys

A reader (thanks!) let me know about a new book by columnist Kathleen Parker that is coming out soon entitled Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care. […]

Sounds interesting–but I must add that I find it somewhat disturbing that ultimately the premise of the book (I am inferring this from the title and the above summary) is about the effect of men’s cultural demise on….women. Yes, I know that focusing on women is the only way to sell books but if I had my way (or I was not so darn lazy), I would write a book that focused on the effect of the male bashing culture on – surprise!….men. How do actual men feel about it, what do they think, how does it affect them personally and their sons?

Speaking as a guy, I just don’t give a rat’s ass. Life is too short to worry about the fact that Homer Simpson is now the gold standard for male characters on television. In other words, Dr. Mrs., I’m not such an overly-sensitive wimp that I start crying whenever somebody says something mean about my gender. I repeat: life is too short.

I hope this answers your question.

Adding: I think there are relevant gender bias issues that relate to men. But most of what Mrs. Perf is describing is men who cry because people refer to them as deadbeat dads when they don’t pay child support.

Above: Director of the MRC’s Culture and Media Institute

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I suppose the point of no return was when I realized that I was following more than a dozen right-wing news sources every day, and yet I was still baffled each time at how these idiots get away with the things they do.

Free Concert by Popular Band Preceded Obama’s Big Rally
By Robert Knight | May 20, 2008 – 17:16 ET
NewsBusters.org

From CNN to the New York Times, the media hyped Barack Obama’s Portland, Oregon rally on Sunday, some comparing him to a rock star.

Unmentioned in national reporting was the fact that Obama was preceded by a rare, 45-minute free concert by actual rock stars The Decemberists. The Portland-based band has drawn rave reviews from Rolling Stone magazine, which gave their 2005 album Picaresque four and a half stars (out of five), and another four and a half stars for 2007’s The Crane Wife.

How many of the people showed up to hear Obama, and how many to hear the band?

Alas, a staffed and funded Research Center is not enough to estimate such a number. For that kind of quantitative firepower, one needs the resources of a B-list comedy blog.

Above: Decemberists concert in Portland two weekends before the Obama rally [Note: See updates]
 

Above: Venue of prior concert
 

Above: Capacity of concert venue

This number may be artificially low, however, as it might not include the band members.

There’s nothing wrong with a candidate using celebrity power to draw a crowd, but the media have a responsibility to report their presence. By ignoring the free concert, the Times and other outlets made it appear that 75,000 people were drawn only by Sen. Obama’s considerable charisma.

Apparently, there was also ice cream for sale. By ignoring the ice cream, the liberal media made it appear that 75,000 people were drawn only by the Decemberists and that neatly-dressed rapper who took the stage after their concert.

Above: Award-winning newspaper columnist

Update: Via Instapundit, here comes our pal Don Surber of the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, with some real reporting on the latest Obama scandal:

Question: Didn’t 75,000 people show up to hear him in Oregon?

Answer: Not really. A free rock concert preceded his appearance, News Busters reported. Oops.

 
 
 
[Concert schedule and venue images cf., cf., and cf.]

Update and Important Correction: The show listed above is for the Colin Meloy solo tour. A comparable upcoming Decemberists show will be on May 24th at the Les Schwab Amphitheatre in Bend, Oregon. The venue has a capacity of 8,000. On the other hand, they’re second on a three-act bill headlined by Death Cab for Cutie.

This does, however, provide further evidence, if any were needed, that Thers is a man ahead of the curve:

Quick, someone e-mail Michael Goldfarb a detailed explanation of how Obama only connects with African-American voters because he won the endorsement of Death Cab for Cutie. Bet you a nickel he’d go for it.

We should hope so! Because the last Decemberists shows in Portland were on January 21st and 23rd, 2008, at the Crystal Ballroom (capacity 1500, 850 seated). Utilizing mathematics, we find that 3,000 people represents 4% of the attendance at the Obama rally.

[Hanx! Prudence Goodwife]

I’m even more depressed now:

U.S. Allowed Chinese to Interrogate and Abuse Gitmo Prisoners

The Pentagon allowed Chinese officials to visit and interrogate Gitmo prisoners. It even softened them up for the interrogation.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China’s ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar. U.S. personnel “are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese,” she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said.

I know this is just a left-wing pipe dream, but I want the entire Bush administration prosecuted for war crimes.

Sigh:

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

Egad. This is so frigging stupid that it’s something I would have expected from the last Republican congress. Dudes: we cannot force other countries to sell us their oil. It doesn’t matter how much we cry and stamp our feet: if they see they can make a fortune by gouging us, they’re damn well going to do it.

And because we’re Americans, we simply refuse to look at intelligent long-term solutions – i.e., more fuel-efficient cars, better public transportation, utilizing alternative energy sources wherever we can find them – but instead shout at the evil Sand People that we’re going to SUE, SUE, SUE, SUE YOU IF YOU DON’T GIVE US YOUR OIL!!!!!

Pathetic. We need Al Gore to run for preznit, methinks.

Above: Elizabeth Scalia aka The Anchoress

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The hypochondriacal shut-in who daily rises from her deathbed, puts on a pretend wimple, and blogs as “The Anchoress” is, of course, opposed to condoms, and particularly condoms for people in a country where God has sent a typhoon to wash all the condoms off the store shelves in order to assure that hunger and disease can be augmented by AIDS and unwanted pregnancy.

Priorities in order, the UN sends 200,000 condoms to Myanmar, which the government has accepted. Perhaps those poor people can inflate them, tie them together and float out of there on them.

Perhaps this poor woman can take her rosary, tie her hands together with it, and never touch a keyboard again.

The Real Bush Record

Above: Liveblogging the Bush Revolution

• Despite appearances, nearly everything that George W. Bush has done has been a resounding success. This we learn from a thoughtful unsigned editorial in the right-wing Investors Business Daily.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Bonus Shorter: The actual tagline from IBD‘s latest heartbreaking work of staggering genius:

Bashers Beware
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, May 19, 2008 4:20 PM PT

It takes little courage — or brains — to join the mob vilifying President Bush. But the Democrats (and Republicans, too) depicting him as villain will one day regret it.

The ensuing column is enough to make parody hide behind the water heater cutting her arms with a sharpened Glassjaw CD:

There has not been a single terrorist attack on the homeland, and we have instead foiled multiple terrorist plots to kill innocent Americans. America has succeeded in foiling these plots because Bush gave the National Security Agency the authority to monitor any and all communications of suspected terrorists, by telephone, e-mail or other means.

The president also gave authorization for the CIA to employ tough interrogation methods on terrorists in custody, to the extent of transporting those detainees to secret locations abroad.

As we have prevented the terrorists from taking their jihad to the U.S., we have taken the global war on terror to the terrorists’ home soil. We have given Muslims in the Middle East the opportunity for freedom in Iraq, proving that we are willing to spill our blood and expend our own resources to defend our interests as we promote their liberty.

Truly, the most believable thing in the column might be the time stamp. Carry on, Hinderaker!

Clif adds: Since Gavin beat me to this post, I might as well share the photo that I’d been planning to use for my take on Hinderaker’s dispatch from the alternate universe where George Bush is a great man, where Ramiele Mulabay is voted the new American Idol, and where Don Surber wins a Pulitzer Prize.

They just never quit. It’s just one ding-dang thing after another, every doo-dah day.

The blogosphere schools Barack Obama in asymmetric warfare
By Michelle Malkin
May 20, 2008 10:13 AM

Does Barack Obama understand the concept of asymmetric warfare? Barack Obama complains that no one wants to talk about the “issues.” Well, his abject ignorance of warfare in the 21st century is an issue that can’t be emphasized enough.

This is worth thinking about because, you know, expertise in 21st Century warfare has been such a strong suit for ol’ Michelle.

And the right side of the blogosphere has been all over it.

Have you noticed a cod-populist ‘we’ quality creeping into Michelle’s prose lately? So many things seem to be about the power of crowds and distributed crankery, about an invisible majority of right-wing wackadoos among whom Michelle Malkin is important and influential. Yep, someone seems to be feeling quite secure lately, cough-cough, achoo.

From Purple Avenger at Ace of Spades:

Phrases which invoke a similar sense of competency: ‘Don’t worry; it isn’t loaded.’ ‘Nothing can go wrong now.’ ‘Hey y’all; watch this!’

 

By stating that Iran isn’t a threat because they spend much less on defense than the US, Obama displays a complete ignorance of how asymmetric warfare operates. The AQ “defense budget” for pulling off 9/11, was by comparison to the US, essentially zero.

An analysis of the Iranian order of battle and where they’ve been spending their defense dollars over the past 10 years would show that they are a serious threat in certain specific areas. They’ve been investing heavily in coastal batteries, anti-ship missile systems, silent diesel electric subs, and such. They could turn the narrow strait of Hormuz into an unnavigable scrap yard faster than the US Navy could stop them or the US Air force could neutralize those batteries and missiles.

Are the Iranians going to bomb NYC or invade Chicago? No. Can they be a major PITA to the rest of the world if they decided to suicidally squeeze oil shipments through the straight? Absolutely.

 

So, to sum up:

1) Obama is a complete ignoramus, because

2) Doy, what about asymmetric warfare? The lesson of 9/11 clearly shows that

3) Iran so is too a threat, because

4) They are building up their coastal defenses for no apparent reason, and

5) What if their coastal defenses are actually not coastal defenses at all, but are in fact secret preparations for an unprovoked and suicidal plot to block the Strait of Hormuz — one that would cause a major pain in the ass? What if then, huh?

6) […]

7) No really, what if? Not so smart now, are you, smart guy?

8) Ha, perfect: ‘Order of battle’ is the official military analysis term. Let me add it in here somewhere. “An analysis of the Iranian war machine order of battle and where they’re spending their defense…” Um, what do they use in Iran? I’ll just put ‘dollars’…

To be fair to the Purple Avenger — whyever he calls himself that — our own analysis of the Iranian order of battle has yielded results even more threateningly asymmetric than previously supposed — also suggesting that the appeasement of speech is futile against this nation of Hitlers and their passive-aggressive threats of major world ass pain.

But if our only choice is to talk loudly about bombing them until they thump surrender their ow threateningly small defensive thump capability unasked — because asking ow would be appeasing the…um, thingy… Then it is thump clear that the ow. Because it… And then if you think of the… When…

No, I lost it. It seemed like it was making sense there for a moment, but then I realized I was cheating by hammering a blunt nail into my forehead.

Yup, it’s always something with these frickin’-frack people, every frap-jab day.

D. Aristophanes adds:

What’s really worrying here is that the gazillions of tons of land, sea and air armaments we have surrounding Iran still leaves a gap on its Turkmenistan flank through which the Mullah’s hordes could easily penetrate, battle their way across Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus, invade Poland from the east, give the Germans what-for, pause in Amsterdam for a re-invigorating toke of their demon Hashashin weed and be shopping on Carnaby Street before you can say Barack Hussein Obama.

A more dangerous threat to mom n’ apple pie there nevermore ever were-wuz, sez me.