As IF Times

link Review board raps State Department for poor security in Benghazi – Washington Times.

Boy have times changed.  Used to be (and not that long ago) that the guy occupying the White House had enormous influence in many and varied areas of western society.  It was in fact an American President, Harry Truman who famously coined the phrase, “the buck stops here”.  In any organization, the ultimate responsibility for success or failure resides with the guy at the top.  That’s why they pay him so much versus the line worker.  He has control and he has responsibility.  In a few nations, they take this very seriously.  In Japan for instance, if the Prime Minister fails in his promises, he resigns.  Luckily for him, this is a lesser penalty for failure than his samurai ancestors would have demanded.  Sadly, this custom is not observed in most modern political arenas.  Standard operating procedure now requires that scapegoats and excuses are found for any failures and to prevent the buck from ever reaching the top.

As an example, the most recent ex President, George W. Bush, is still given credit/responsibility/blame for a looseleaf binder full of things, even though he’s been out of office now for over 4 years.

In no particular order, the most publicized ones were:

The Economy

Climate change

911 attacks on the world trade center

Katrina Hurricane

high gas prices

border security and illegal immigration

woes of the car industry

the war in Iraq

troop casualties

poverty in the world

aids

gun violence

woeful state of education

racism

It’s amazing the guy had time to do all of these things during the few waking hours of every day.  He must have really been a remarkable guy. It’s a pity they only allow 2 terms in office.  Compare this to the present incumbent who seems to be a non factor in almost everything that he’s supposed to be in charge of.

Not high gas prices

Not the economy

Not the conflicts in the middle east

Not the Fast and Furious gun scandal

Not ballooning bureaucracy

Not global warming, because he calms the oceans

Not racism

Not border security and illegal immigration

Not troop casualties

On this last item, an on-going review of the tragedy that befell the four Americans at the embassy in Benghazi recently concluded that it was the State Department that was to blame for the deaths at that compound.  In response to these findings, about 4 staffers were recently fired from their jobs.  It’s not clear what these 4 individuals did specifically that merited them being axed, but apparently this absolves their boss, Hilary Clinton and her boss, the Prez, of culpability in the tragedy.  Again, the President was apparently of no influence in this event and he never even saw the buck, much less stop it.

What is now obvious is that the White House has incompetent staff.  They are like the New York Jets.  Like the Jets, the present administration has fumbled on virtually every major play.  It’s always easy to lay the blame at the feet of player A or player B, but when the ongoing disasters keep piling up, eventually the blame has to find its way to coaching and management.

Like the New York Jets, the Democrats have no bench.  They have Hilary, Joe and now possibly John Kerry, all well past their intellectual and effective sell-by dates.  Their records on handling policy are about as stellar as Mark Sanchez handling a snap from center, which is to say fumbly.  These are people who may have been relevant 20 years ago, but they are hardly the voices of new ideas and in most cases, even rational thinking.  In the last election, they even dusted off Bill Clinton to rev up the base as if he was a circus act.  The Jets tried the same thing with Tim Tebow. The Democrats’ version of this of course was Susan Rice.  It’s amusing how the narrative has been that the conservatives are the old guy party.  On the contrary, they have a pretty solid, young and vibrant bench.  They’ve been building their team from the ground up with younger people such as Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley and Paul Ryan.

So with the ongoing disasters that are befalling the Jets over the past few seasons, even loyal Jets fans are booing their home-team.  They may think that what they need are new players, but what they really need is new competent management.  Like their political counterparts in D.C., eventually even the die-hards will need the proverbial buck to reach the top.

 

link Randy Newman writes new satirical, political song – Yahoo! News.

It’s difficult to refute an argument about a topic if the rebuttals have no reference to basic logic.  Liberals love to demonstrate how enlightened they are by taking the sides of issues that have little logical foundation.  If one reads the argument of the artiste Randy Newman, one will get that he is trying to prove how enlightened and non racist he is.  Yet the thrust of his argument is that the President should be embraced BECAUSE he is black, not for any particular aspect of ability.   What if that same logic were  applied to his music business?  Why don’t we all buy music that’s performed by black artists regardless of their quality?  Hey wait a minute….

In our modern American Idol culture, popularity is the same thing as being legitimate.  If there weren’t sane people in the world, (a shrinking contingent to be sure ), George Clooney or Brad Pitt would be elected to lead the country.  It makes very little difference to most that neither one of those talented individuals have any genuine grounding in economics or geopolitics.  Oh sure, they may look good on TV and probably even smell nice.  However , it should not shock most people that the opinions of folks like those are considerably less illuminating than your average first year economics student. In an increasingly dumbed down society in which David Letterman is considered a source of real information, people farm out their critical thinking and merely adopt what they hear in the pop media and from pop artists as fact.  As if people who live in fantasy can give advice on reality.  An artiste like Newman may think it’s logical to support someone solely because of their ‘minority’ status, but it’s the very racism he’s trying to parody.

If we are going to appoint people solely because of their membership in a favored constituency, why don’t we elect more female leaders? They do represent more than half of the population and it would only be appropriate in an enlightened, modern society.  I recommend Kim Kardashian.  She appears to be popular.  Some may perhaps argue that a Hilary Clinton would be eligible; they had that chance.  But as we recall, the DNC thought that it was more important to install someone with no real life experience but who happened to be a person of color, than it was to embrace someone with a lifetime of political experience.  Any racism or sexism there is incidental.  Now if Hilary looked less like Hilary and more like Kim, who knows?

Like most people, when I get my car fixed, I want the guy who knows what he’s doing, not the grad student who has University credits for studying engine theory or because he belonged to a favored minority.    I’d bet  that even the socially sensitive Randy Newman doesn’t specifically ask for the black mechanic, nor would he write satirical songs about it.  We keep hearing that racism is the great issue of our society.  For people like Newman at least, it must be,  they find it everywhere.  Sort of like lawyers and lawsuits.  Americans have the largest numbers of lawyers per capita in the world.   Coincidently, they are the most litigious nation as well….lawbreakers are everywhere.  As the old saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

 

 

link Protesters dispersed in Cairo; fury over anti-Islam film hits Australia – CNN.com.

In a long forgotten movie from 1983 entitled “Yellowbeard”, there is a scene in which a blind man is offered a roast chicken but is actually a loaf of bread.  The blind man takes a bite and says, “mmm, great chicken”.   The ongoing narrative about the uprisings in the Muslim world is an amusing parallel to this.  What we hear from news outlets of all stripes is that the rioting, shooting, setting ablaze of buildings and killings of ambassadors is rooted in anger over an obscure YouTube flick in which their religion is slighted.

Purveyors of news think that the public are just like the blind man in the movie, willing to accept the narrative as allegorical chicken when it is in fact, bread.  Think about that.  In many of those muslim nations, having a change of clothes would qualify you as middle class, yet we are to believe that because of some YouTube video, young men are willing to get their hands on RPG’s, riot and murder people.   For this kind of over reaction, you would think their hockey team lost a playoff game.

You would have to believe that on the anniversary of 9-11, in simultaneous attacks across a dozen countries,  young muslim men collectively decided to protest a crappy video.  (Imagine if they had seen any of Will Ferrell’s movies )  Somehow, en masse, they decided that freedom of expression in another country would not be tolerated.  This dubiousness is perpetuated by no less than the Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton who denounced the video as inflammatory and disgusting.  As well, UN ambassador Susan Rice also chimes in with her condemnation of the video.  So we have the entire world condemning some low budget video as being the root cause of the violence towards Americans.  Except for Al Qaeda.  They actually issued a statement saying that the violence was in response to the killing of their number 2 guy.   http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/12/world/africa/libya-attack-jihadists/index.html  Of course, Al Qaeda doesn’t have as much credibility as the New York Times or the Huffington Post.

Because of this narrative, subtly but surely, a free western world has to be on eggshells worrying about what words  may or may not invoke anger among  otherwise peaceful and tolerant muslims.  This of course is an extension of an entire generation of people in the west being fed the bs of ‘root causes’, as in “the root cause of the axe murderer’s rampage was being denied candy at the age of 5″.

Let’s hope that the muslim world doesn’t catch on to the new Wendy’s triple bacon burger.  The very idea that people can consume something like that has to be offensive at some level.