"What if Obama is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together his actions? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior." -- Newt Gingrich, quoted by the National Review, arguing that President Obama "is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works."
Sunday, September 12, 2010
What If Newt Gingrich Is a Disgraced Discredited Crank Saying Ridiculous Rancorous Things in a Pathetic Last-Ditch Bid for President of Crazytown?
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> Newt Gingrich. . . argu[es] that President Obama "is
> fundamentally out of touch with how the world works."
So what else is new? A charming book I encountered recently
at Barnes & Noble:
_Conduct Unbecoming: How Barack Obama is Destroying The Military
and Endangering Our Security_
by Robert 'Buzz' Patterson, Lt. Col. USAF (Ret.)
http://www.amazon.com/Conduct-Unbecoming-Destroying-Military-Endangering/dp/1596986212
A jacket blurb:
“Humorist P. J. O’Rourke has said that putting Democrats in charge
of foreign policy is like giving the car keys and a bottle of whiskey
to a teenager. Buzz Patterson explains here why this is no joke.”
—Steven F. Hayward, author of _The Age of Reagan_ and _The Real Jimmy Carter_
Chapter 5 "The Wrong Gay Line"
Epigraph: "There are ways in which a ruler can bring misfortune upon
his army: . . .by attempting to govern an army in the same way as he
administers a kingdom, being ignorant of the conditions which obtain
in an army." -- Sun Tzu, _The Art of War_
". . .President Obama is seeking to govern the military as he governs
his 'kingdom', along the New Left lines. . . Obama is essentially at
war with the traditional cultures of our military which has been,
in the past, deeply grounded not only in effective war-fighting doctrine,
but in traditional virtues -- such as courage, duty, honor, and
patriotism -- and Judeo-Christian principles. . .
[His] culture war against our own armed forces is being conducted on
several fronts: including pursuing the pet social engineering
projects beloved of the Left at the expense of readiness and
capability of our forces. . .
[He] has been virtually systematically undermining the morale
of the United States military. . . by giving the impression that
he has no strategy for Iraq and Afghanistan except scuttling
and running. . . and taking this most inappropriate time to
attempt to shove through the integration of openly gay men
and women in the armed forces, which is sure to be a disruptive
force at a time of highest possible stress. . .
If [Don't Ask Don't Tell] is overturned, we will likely lose
10 to 25 percent of our current, already overstretched force --
a loss that would be truly devastating. . . and that's before
factoring in the impact on unit cohesion of an almost
inevitable flurry of lawsuits accusing commanders or other
serving personnel of bias. . .
The military is under command of the president, but the
military is not meant to be his personal plaything, where
he can pursue a leftwing social agenda. . ."
Well of course Republicans endlessly say ugly stupid things, it's not that anybody is surprised at this. Nevertheless, the GOP is one of two organized parties with any chance of governing in the USA and so we cannot slacken the exposure of the ugliness and stupidity of the things they say, however tediously repetitive, because there are real consequences.
I do think part of what is extraordinary in this case is that Gingrich is put forward as an intellectual eminence of the GOP and in this case his comments reflect his assessment of statements by D'Souza, another so-called GOP "intellectual" -- and the plain fact is that these claims are flabbergastingly insane and inflammatory.
While on most accounts the GOP is poised to regain a majority in the House and unleash some real havoc, the fact remains that the GOP is in utter disarray -- its leaders are, to a person, not even holding elective office, they are appealing to a rabble whose aspirations have actually been out of the mainstream of American thought for over half a century and which the demographic browning and ideological secularization of the American people render now even more marginal.
Given the depressed economy, the costly mass-mediation of their noise machine, the ferocity of dead-ender white racists and christianists, the GOP is catapulting themselves into a last gasp last grasp of power that is more or less a public act of suicide, the farthest thing from the dawn of a new era. They can still do enormous damage, but they're done.
> “Humorist P. J. O’Rourke has said that putting Democrats in charge
> of foreign policy is like giving the car keys and a bottle of whiskey
> to a teenager.
You know, I can still remember when I was first exposed to this
Democrats-as-loose-cannons view of politics. The first presidential
election I was able to vote in was the 1972 Nixon vs. McGovern
one. I voted Democratic, as I have every time I've voted since
then.
I'd just turned 20 that year, and there was I guy I knew then,
oh, a year and a a couple of months younger than me, a college
student studying chemistry. He was pretty full of himself --
considered himself something of a genius -- was already preparing
his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He was from the midwest,
where his father was a chemist who worked for a big corporation
and his mom was a nurse. He was also an avid reader of science fiction
(I remember he introduced me to David Gerrold's _When H.A.R.L.I.E.
Was One_, first edition), and that's why a mutual friend
decided to introduce us. He would be the prototypical young
male SF-con attendee (and probably a transhumanist) today.
In the event, he did **not** go on to win a Nobel in chemistry;
he became a computer programmer, like me.
However, I remember seeing something this guy had written
shortly after that '72 election, not specifically directed
at me (I can't remember **how** it came about that I saw it --
I think it must have been in a private letter or a
journal. Was I **snooping**?), something to the effect of
"Nixon has won the election. Thank **God**." As in, thank
God the country's safe from those crazy Democrats. This
was at a time when the U.S. was still enmeshed in Vietnam,
and shortly before Nixon resigned in disgrace over
Watergate. This florid sigh of relief caused me a significant
degree of cognitive dissonance -- up to that time, I'd
thought Republicans were mostly the know-nothings I considered
my parents to be, and I hadn't met many science-and-math-steeped
families or SF fans back then (though, come to think, I
did go to elementary-through-high school with a girl whose father
was a chemical engineer -- he had a whole room stuffed with SF
paperbacks and his daughter was an insufferable self-styled genius
who was an Ayn Rand fan and went on to become a bigwig in Mensa.
I suspect they were Republicans too. At any rate, they
were Episcopalians.).
So this guy was a 19-year-old self-styled genius who knew
far more about politics than I did at the time -- he was
familiar with all the anti-war protest movements and had
friends in the Students for a Democratic Society. He even boasted
that he had access to enough materials in his organic chemistry
lab and the knowledge to synthesize the means to get the
whole campus high. And yet -- praise be, Nixon's in
charge, the country is safe. Go figure.
Humorist P. J. O’Rourke has said that putting Democrats in charge of foreign policy is like giving the car keys and a bottle of whiskey to a teenager.
And then dry drunk W. literally lies us into a ruinous criminal war while the self-nominated Sooper Geniuses of the Project for a New American Century lurch and sway their way through the world declaring the UN should be bombed, Iran should be bombed, Korea should be bombed, Venezuela should be bombed, you know, for kids! Is "humorist" PJ O'Rourke (whose books haven't been funny for a generation) sure it's the Democrats who sound like they're bombed?
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