Outcome in 2012? Here's a Clue.

Back in 1992, I happened to be in Mackinaw City, Michigan, right after the annual Labor Day Big Mac Bridge Walk. George Bush Sr., then our president, joined the throng of walkers, searching for votes in the Upper Peninsula which, Bart Stupak aside, had generally been conservative at that point.

Going through the sale merchandise the day after the walk, I notes dozens, perhaps hundreds of T-shirts hanging on the racks, proudly emblazoned with phrases like the following: "1992. I Took the Big Mac Bridge Walk with President Bush." "Oh, oh." I said to myself. "Why didn't these sell?" Negatives had been building for the Bush campaign for months. But this telling piece of anecdotal evidence was the last straw. This was Bush territory. But Bush T-shirts were not selling. It was then I knew that George Bush, the incumbent, would lose.

Fast forward to 2010. It's a little early yet, but here's an interesting story from Tigerhawk:

Earlier this evening, I was walking through a parking lot at the local Whole Foods Market, where I was shocked to see a Toyota Prius displaying the following bumper sticker:

Tiger observes:

If you've lost the Whole Foods-shopping Prius-driving voter, you've lost liberal America, and you're in trouble with your base.

Obama Competent? Peggy Noonan Lays an Egg

Headline of Peggy Noonan's latest op-ed for the Wall Street Journal (via WSJ Online), re: the election of Barack Obama:

"He was supposed to be competent."

Peggy wonders aloud what's going on with the Obama presidency. After all, she and all her friends in NYC voted for him and made history, right? So how could they be so wrong? How could they know that this guy HAD NO CLUE? Wide-eyed with wonder, Peggy now wonders aloud, WHO KNEW?

Well, hey, kid, I DID, for one, and said so here many times. While the MSM clowns commenced dumpster-diving on Sarah Palin 24/7 and denouncing her as "inexperienced," they did their very best to avoid doing the same to Barack Obama WHO REALLY WAS INEXPERIENCED. And, note to NYC Idiotarians: Obama wasn't running for VEEP.

Now, from Wall Street bankers to New York socialites, to columnists who purport to being Republican-oriented, the reaction to the serial disaster that is Barack Obama's presidency is essentially, "Don't blame me. I didn't know."

This is the biggest, most self-serving crock of s... I've ever heard. It's tantamount to Louie's great line in Casablanca when he "discovers" that gambling is going on at Rick's: "I'm shocked. SHOCKED!"

It also reminds me of that famous Pauline Kael quote (which her loyal supporters claim she never said), upon the landslide re-election of Richard Nixon over the left-wing George McGovern. How could Nixon's triumph have happened, Kael allegedly mused. "No one I knew voted him."

And it's not just moi. Check out Little Miss Attila's observations on Noonan's astuteness:

...she, Ann Althouse, and Megan McArdle will have to deal with it for the rest of their lives. Those three women have all been an intellectual blessing to public discourse in this country, but they all succombed to the same cult of personality two years ago, and we still do not know what the final price tag on that cult of personality is going to be.

Miss A's commentators are even more straightforward and pungent. Says one:

The bottom line to Barack Obama’s unfortunate victory is the complete abdication of the media from their duty to investigate and inform the public. They failed in their First Amendment mission and Noonan et al. were part of that failure. The lurid coverage afforded the pregnancy of Bristol Palin proves and underscores this point.

Says another:

Never have so many projected so much onto so little. Not only is Barrack Obama not competent, there was no evidence which would have suggested that he was.

Says a third, the optimist in the group:

There’s a potential silver lining here: The Obamunist experience might have inoculated the nation against left-liberal ideology and Obama’s sort of politicking. If so, it could be fifty years before another social-fascist / redistributionist demagogue rises to trouble America. That would be long enough to get me safely and cozily into the ground, which, at this point, is all I ask.

Here's the deal. Peggy and her pals happily took leave of their reason in order to elect the Chicago leftist cipher known as Barack Obama as president of the United States so they could bask in glory of making history. In so doing, they elected an aloof, cold, phony intellectual, trained as a Marxist organizer whose splinter organization as yet remains unidentified. Politically tone deaf, lacking in essential empathy and humanity, and dedicated to working out far-left theories without any regard to the damage they are causing, his presidency is fast closing in on Jimmy Carter's as the most disastrous in modern times.

The clues were always there. Remember how long it took Obama the Patriot to finally stick an American flag pin in his lapel? Why avoid adopting such a trivial, yet important for so long? That was actually a big tell, but the media pretty much ignored it. How about Obama's comment that he never knew about his minister's racist rantings? After attending services at the rev's church for over 20 years? Give me a break.

The list goes on. The lies, the superciliousness, the arrogance, the deep and abiding relationships with Weatherpersons Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn--Amerikkka's original homegrown terrorists--the dishonesty, the utter lack of a knowledge of American history. They were all there in plain sight. But they were never reported, only occasionally mentioned, and always quickly forgotten as they were never a part of the Received Narrative.

For Obama was The One. If you really think about it, he didn't really win the presidency in 2008. He won the biggest-ever competition for American Idol.

Peggy and her pals "thought he was competent." On what evidence?

We need to stop labeling these morons "intellectuals." Like Obama, they are anything but. They have the veneer of intellectuals. But, as Gertrude Stein once said of an obscure town in Iowa: "There's no 'there,' there."

November's on the way. Time to reboot. Deploying both hemispheres this time.

Wynn Bashes Anti-Business DC

“Washington is unpredictable these days,” declares the CEO of Wynn Resorts. “No one has any idea what’s next…the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it’s delaying the recovery.”

That's the lede in this piece from CNBC online, and it pretty much sums up why it's been next-door-to-impossible for the US to extract itself from the Great Recession. Steve Wynn has been one of the few businessmen with enough guts to speak out about what's going on.

In their 24/7 assault on American business, that triple-threat team of Obamacrats, Pelosicrats, and Reidcrats continue to pummel, assault, and otherwise punish anyone who tries to make money, thus entirely disincentivizing entrepreneurs and established companies to grow their businesses and hire new workers.

The country is clearly in the iron grip of a batch of socialists who want to extract every last dollar from anyone who has a few and redistribute those dollars to their "disadvantaged" supporters, including the trade unions and the American Trial Lawyers. But, ironically, they're torpedoing their own avowed aim. By strangling business and preventing hiring, they are, in fact, DESTROYING the wealth they're trying to distribute.

Wynn pretty much sums up things in the final graf of this piece:

He’s concerned about the prospect of inflation, of FHA repeating the mistakes of Fannie and Freddie, and the cost to business from the new healthcare law. “We’re on our way to Greece, in the hands of a confused, foolish government,” Wynn says. “It’s got to stop. It’s got to stop.”

A confused, foolish government. Led by a batch of left-wing academic theoreticians who have no idea how money works or how it's made. Wynn's got that right, pointing out that, at least for now, it's far easier for him to do business with the Chinese Communist government than with the US. That, my friends, speaks volumes.

It's a losers game. And we're the losers. We'll have just one chance to fix this in November. Hopefully, Rip van Winkle has awakened from his long, media-induced nap.

Opera Goes to the Movies

In my official capacity as the Washington Times' online music and theater critic, I recently caught an interesting, live production of Wagner's Das Rheingold, as staged in Milan's fabled La Scala opera house. Right down the street, too, in Herndon Virginia's Worldgate 9 movie theater complex. (Herndon is a suburb of Washington, DC.) It's all part of an effort to bring opera from legendary European opera houses right to our own backyards.

Attendance was a bit sparse. They could use more PR. And live opera at the movies is not a totally new concept, having been pioneered by the Met several years ago. But, given the total lack of cultural education in public schools these days, events like this can only be viewed as a blessing in a country that is beginning to lose a clear vision of itself and its rich and interesting heritage.

Check out my article here. And click here to find a theater near you that's participating in this series of live broadcasts.

Tardy Draw Mohammed Entry

My drawing skills are pathetic, not to mention derivative (see if you can recognize part of this PhotoShop pastiche). But here's my overdue promised offering for "Draw Mohammed Day:"

All resemblances to persons living and dead are purely coincidental. Draw conclusions as you will.

As those who've followed this brouhaha are aware, the artist who originally came up with this idea in defense of the "South Park" cartoonists immediately copped out when she realized there might be consequences for her not-so-bold bold idea. She disavowed the May 20 event she herself had created, once again proving that a probably lefty "supporter" of free speech wasn't brave enough, in the end, to back up her own ringing endorsement of it.

Likewise, Reason online, which picked up the challenge and sponsored a "contest" for the best Mohammed drawings, also copped out, blathering on about the whole thing yesterday with a windy essay and posting 3 asinine entries, none of which showed the least bit of guts since no one really drew Mohammed.

Look people, if you're going to stand up and take credit for something, at least have the guts to follow through. What are we, a generation of wimps? If you don't knock the neighborhood bully down, he's going to whip your ass every day. Didn't any of you learn that in grade school? Why is anything different now?

BTW, for those of you who hunger for actual images, Hot Air refers us to this site. Enjoy.)

The whole point of this exercise, for me, is that nobody tells me what to do in my own neighborhood. 

The day we start allowing international fascists to order us around is the day we lose the freedom we claim to cherish. These people have no respect for us and never did. So now, I'm returning the favor.

Communist Ron Gochez Violates Smith Act

Time to crack down on sedition in US?

As if the US doesn't have enough problems with terrorism these days. Courtesy of a Facebook page entitled "Stand with Arizona," here's taxpayer supported public school teacher and Hugo Chavez-lover Ron Gochez preaching a literal Communist, racist revolution on the campus of, where else, the Communist-run indoctrination center also known as UCLA. This is sedition, no more or less, specifically prohibited by the Smith Act, which, interestingly enough, hasn't been enforced since 1961. Take a look at this disgusting spectacle. Save for the use of the English language, you might think you were in Caracas. Also note the textbook Marxist-Leninist language Gochez employs in his classic Commie diatribe.



As if we don't have enough trouble with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, now we get clowns like this, nurtured at the breast of the "capitalist, imperialist" system he denounces. Does the Obama Administration have enough guts to prosecute this clown under the Smith Act? Does the local or state public school system in California have the guts to terminate this America hater? Don't hold your breath. As evidenced by the continuing threat to law enforcement officers in Arizona and elsewhere, the "revolutionary" violence in the border states has only just begun.

NASDAQ's List of "Funked Up" Stocks

As all 10 of our regular readers know, I've been on the road for nearly 2 weeks with limited connectivity during much of that time. But I'm on the way home and in Berkeley Springs WV today with DSL, so it's time to get re-connected by offering you a useful bit of info, assuming you're still in the stock market at all. Due to Thursday's as-yet-to-be-diagnosed electronic massacre, the NASDAQ has actually cancelled a number of trades in over 200 stocks that got hammered at least in part due to some mysterious system error. The magic list is listed here, courtesy of the NASDAQ and CNN.

All in all, it's been a hell of a time to be on the road in largely rural areas, isolated from the hustle, bustle, and nonsense we call civilization. Let's see. We have Greeks rioting because their socialistic state has been financing rich public sector benefits for decades with what appears to be thin air. We have President Obama threatening Arizona for, in effect, having the audacity to enforce U.S. immigration laws. We have an Islamofascist wacko trying to blow up shoppers and theatergoers in Times Square very possibly to avenge a recent South Park episode poking fun at the prophet Mohammed. And, of course, we have the continuing saga of the gigantic Gulf of Mexico oil slick--and the concurrent refusal of the MSM to eviscerate the Obama administration for dithering around for a week before even paying any attention to this unfolding and obvious disaster. Gee, imagine what would have happened if the current prez was a guy named Bush. Obamie, you're doing a heck of a job!