As IF Times

link War on Women Is 2012 Democrat Rallying Cry – Bloomberg.

People may know that when junkies are deep down the road of addiction, they will do anything to get their next fix.  They will betray friends, family and even themselves just to get the next hit of drugs.  Others can see how disheveled and desperate these poor individuals have become and seek to avoid contact with them.  “Poor So and So, he used to be such a nice person”.  Now they reek of desperation and are pitiful souls.  Nothing can be done with them until they hit bottom.

This behaviour has been the operating tactic of the Democratic Party for ages and now they are desperately trying a new front.  The so called “Big Tent” party has over the years divided society up into identifiable segments and pandered to their supposed disenfranchisement from the rest of society.  It is by isolating blacks, Hispanics, gays, union members, immigrants, religious minorities, students, the elderly, the young, the poor, animal lovers and of course climate nuts,  that they hope to draw upon as their support base.  Now, when it looks as if their specious messages have faltered with their core constituency, they want to target women in general and include them in the list of oppressed people. 

This is truly ironic as the blatant misogyny of the party has been on full display,  particularly over the past few years.   When it was all but a shoe in for Hilary to take over the leadership of the Dems, they instead marginalized her and chose someone with no experience, credibility or apparent skill set.  The ongoing vulgar ad hominem attacks hurled against Sarah Palin and now even Michele Bachmann are embarrassingly contradictory to their supposed support of women.  In essence, they are saying, “we support women, except her, her and her”.

Pretty soon, the message can’t be us against them, because there will be no them.  While the Democratic slogan may be characterized as “divide and conquer”, their actions really are more of a “stoop to conquer” strategy.  It will be amusing to watch them try to pull this off as a campaign platform.  If it fails, the pool of oppressed to which they can pander to gets smaller and smaller.  They can always champion left handed people, bald people, double jointed people, those with Rosacea, as well as those who can’t break 100 on the golf course.  They haven’t hit bottom yet.

link Howard Dean warns Dems Sarah Palin could beat Obama in 2012 – TheHill.com.

The on-going wisdom that is being peddled every day by the sage beltway crowd is amusing in their consensus.  The narrative is that Sarah Palin would be crushed by Obama if she won the Republican nomination.  Hmm.  Politics is the ultimate poker game of course.  Except that in politics, the game is played with other people’s  money and the rules, well there aren’t really any rules.  Posturing, positioning and misinformation are the standard techniques to bluff the opponents.  While the number of beltway pundits is small, their influence can be large since their opinions are transmitted via a sympathetic media to the mostly uncaring public.  The money aspect relates to the ability for any particular vested interest to sell their side of the story.  The more money, the more you can sell your story.  With the generally short attention span of most people, repeating a message often enough will make it true.  As an example, for decades, the media pushed the illusion of Camelot and the Kennedys.  We know this now to be fictional delusion, but most believed it for generations.  But, we digress.

Whether or not you have any stake in the U.S. elections and of course, in Canada, we don’t except by resulting consequences, the portrayal of the players is fascinating.  At the moment, the news surrounding the incumbent president is amazingly quiet.  This is in stark contrast to the pre-election hysteria, which carried through the first 2 years.  We all know how it was sold; hope,change, statesmanship, etc etc.  That was easy to do since he was essentially an unknown entity.  Now, 3 years into the program, to all but the hard wired partisans, it’s obvious the marketing was a lot better than the product.  A person who had never held a responsible position outside of a government funded bureaucracy has been an abject failure as the presumptive leader of the free world.  The much vaunted character and oratory genius has been revealed to emanate from a teleprompter.    If the next U.S. elections were based solely on policies and implementation, there is no logical way that he can possibly win.  In every measurable category, but especially the one of national finance, Obama’s vision has gone rapidly from expectations of hope to realities of despair. 

But that’s not how it’s been  sold.  We’ve seen the marketing and compared it to the product.  It’s been a masterful and coordinated sales job.  It’s as if you believed the hype about how wonderful a solar clothes dryer is until you receive a clothesline for your money.   Whatever solutions Obama has served up to ‘fix America’ are rooted in some form of government intervention or engineering. That is his prism of life.   Of course, the massive errors of this vision are now apparent and horribly so to the naive consuming public.  What has happened to the U.S. is analogous to someone taking some antacid for heartburn and then reading the label which states that “may cause ulcers, vomiting, rectal bleeding or death”.   This was buried  in the fine print. 

So if the partisan left can’t use Obama’s record to battle an agenda that someone such as a Sarah Palin brings to the discussion, then it becomes purely a popularity contest.   We take for granted that Obama would be popular among his core group even if it were revealed he liked to kick dogs and small children as a hobby.  People like Palin or Michelle Bachmann who have actually either run a state,  a business and  raised a barnful of kids (in the case of Bachmann, 23 foster kids) are portrayed as dumb, wild eyed loons and racist rubes.  At least that’s the beltway’s spin on it.  While not a fan of Howard Dean, speaking of loons, at least he has the clarity to see that there is a vast pool of disenfranchised but heretofore quiet majority of Americans who identify with the likes of Palin or Bachmann.  The media’s  haughty dismissal of these two as being non-serious contenders is a slap to this vast quiet majority.  

The press and the pundits can spend money and posture all they want and try to convince the public that their guy holds the better hand.  But with most of the cards dealt, their bluff will soon be called.   The geniuses  may recall the last time they practically anointed the presumptive winner of an election, albeit only within their ranks.  Hilary Clinton.

link Jason Gay: A Snap Judgment on Cutler – WSJ.com.

In the last playoff game that the Chicago Bears played this season against the eventual SuperBowl winner Green Bay Packers, the starting quarterback, Jay Cutler was taken out of the game.  He was benched not for poor play, which would be understandable, but because of an injury he suffered to his leg.  Not having a leg to throw against is fairly serious for a quarterback because their mobility is required in every play.

For some reason, fans and players alike were quick to jump on Cutler and accused him of not being tough enough and not wanting the big game enough to play through the pain.  Football is arguably the most macho and gruelling of all professional sports since the odds are great that a body will be hit hard on every play.  Even players from other teams who were not at the game felt entitled to criticise Cutler. Cutler quickly became a despised villain.

As it turns out, after the game was over, doctors confirmed that Cutler had suffered a torn MCL in his knee. This is a serious injury which threatens one’s ability to walk, much less play contact football.  It’s been almost a month since that event, the SuperBowl has been played and the incident may have been forgotten. 

Except for the legend.  Twenty years from now, if Jay Cutler achieves nothing else in his career, people will always remember him as the quarterback who bailed on his teammates during the big game notwithstanding that he sustained a legitimate injury.  The media stories, the chatter and the record is set for life.  Even now, people are using his name as an adjective, as in ‘don’t go Cutler on me’, in reference to bailing out of a situation with a flimsy excuse. 

This kind of unfairness is seen time and time again in many other fields of pursuit, notably politics.  As most informed  people know by now, the predominantly left leaning media can frame an image or position on someone they don’t like and similar to the Cutler illustration, it becomes the truth and is hard to dispel.  In 2003, George Bush was giving a speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln about the state of the war in Iraq.  Unbeknownst to him, someone had placed a huge banner behind him which read ‘Mission Accomplished”.  To this day, people will claim that Bush gave a speech claiming preliminary victory in Iraq.  No such thing happened.

Of course the most well known fib about Bush is the weary canard about him lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  If they say it enough, it becomes the truth to those too ignorant, lazy or ideologically partisan to check the facts.

During the famous 2008 federal election, Sarah Palin was tagged with the line in which she claimed to be an expert on Russia because, ‘you can see them from my house’.  In fact those words were uttered in a satirical skit on Saturday Night Live by Tina Fey.  What she actually said was in response to a question by the brilliant Katie Couric about the importance of Alaska’s geographic position to America’s defence.  She responded by saying ‘of course it’s important, you can see Russia from Alaska’, which of course is true.   However, years from now, the line of  ‘you can see Russia from my house’ will be attributed to her as if it actually happened.

In his recently released memoir entitled Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld makes the point of how media can wilfully distort facts to suit their agenda and in doing so, may cause actual harm.  It was widely circulated at the time that prisoners in Guantanamo were treated horrifically and were subject to all kinds of torture, physical and mental.  Newsweek reported an incident in which a copy of the Koran was flushed down a toilet.  Anyone who tries to flush a book down a toilet will know that it’s impossible, so that was one hint already as to the veracity of the story.  In any case, this story was a complete fabrication, it never happened.  But it served to mobilize the crazy left to demonize the practices at the prison camp enough to push for closure of an important military tool.    The moral here is to not believe something  just because it’s in print.  There’s an old saying which can be paraphrased here.  There are lies, damn lies and then there’s the news.