There were a number of reasons why George W. Bush’s administration didn’t become proactive in Louisiana, as quickly as the lefty media crowed that he should have, during the Katrina debacle, one being that state’s Governor Blanco’s refusing (her legal right as a governor) to accept Bush’s help when it was offered and for some hours to come, others related to the fact that the breached levees, the floods and so forth were a first-time occurrance, in modern history (in Obamanese “unprecedented”), for these events in that region.

However, there were less reasons, especially after Katrina had given the emergency planners a crash course in addressing the same kind of problems they recently had with flooding in Tennessee, for the Obama Administration’s response therein.

Now, we’ve got the big oil kerfuffle down in the Gulf of Mexico and the damage it’s doing all along that coast, from Texas to Florida, and the response to it, from the Obama crowd, leaves much more to be desired. Much, much more.

So where are the anti-Obama diatribes from the liberal “progressive” media? .

And what’s the Obama Administration doing?

Priorities, folks: priorities. Apparently Lisa Jackson figures that if Interior Dept CoS Tom Strickland could go white-water rafting while the oil spread, she can go raise money for the Democrats:

As the Obama administration struggles to contain the massive oil spill threatening the Louisiana coast, one of its top environmental officials will be the featured attraction at a fundraiser for Senate Democrats next week in Manhattan, at which donors are promised they can speak to her about their “issues of concern.”

I have an ‘issue of concern:’ the Governor of Louisiana is shouting at the federal government to sign off on emergency sand berms to keep the oil away from wetlands; and the administration is dithering. So, several questions, here:

• When was the EPA planning to help with that?
• Was the EPA planning to help with that at all?
• If it’s not… why? I mean, I can guess, but the nicest answer implies rank partisanship on Jackson’s part, and rapidly degenerates from there. And I mean really rapidly degenerates.

Lisa Jackson can answer these at her leisure: after all, it’s not like there’s an acute ecological crisis going on right now…

So, from the “dithering” link above:

As federal agencies continue to study the state’s proposal to build a chain of sand barriers along the Louisiana coast, Gov. Bobby Jindal and other state and local leaders are heightening the rhetorical battle against the federal government’s delays in giving a clear “yes” or “no” to the expansive, $350 million proposal.

As proposed, the plan would build up a mostly continuous chain of six-foot sand berms stretching more than 80 miles east and west of the Mississippi River in an attempt to keep oil out of coastal wetlands. The Army Corps of Engineers and Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the oil spill, offered few new details on the likelihood of approval Monday.

Allen cited several logistical challenges with the state’s proposal during a White House news conference Monday afternoon, though he said the Coast Guard and corps are still considering it.

“Building a set of barrier islands and berms that large would take a very, very long time — even by the state’s own estimates six to nine months in some cases — and a significant amount of resources associated with that might be applied elsewhere,” Allen said.

As proposed, the sand dredging would be an unprecedented engineering effort, requiring as many as 18 dredges to be mobilized from across the country to begin building up islands. There are substantial questions about whether the berms could be built in time to stop the oil. And several scientists and environmental experts have cautioned that the hasty approach could jeopardize future barrier island restoration efforts by depleting the state’s limited offshore sand resources.

So here, we have the right-thinking incumbent governor of New Orleans, Bobby Lindal, begging the government (under Obama, not only is the governor aggressively seeking help from the government, but all he’s getting in return is a lot of hemming and hawing from an administration that, simply put, does not belong in the White House, because they do not possess the leadership abilities that would qualify them to be there, let alone any unsolicited offers of assistance.

On Monday, Jindal and Sen. David Vitter pushed the plan again in a news conference with congressional leaders, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

“Every day that it’s not approved is another day the choice is made for us” to allow oil to seep into coastal marshes, Jindal said.

And Louisiana Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell sent a forceful letter over the weekend to Lt. Gen. Robert Van Antwerp, the commanding general of the corps, asking for “prompt approval” of the emergency permits to begin dredging. Caldwell in the letter says the federal government does not have the right to block a state from doing emergency response activities to prevent environmental damage and urged Van Antwerp to issue the permit and avoid “an unnecessary constitutional confrontation between the state and federal governments.”

If the corps does not OK the plan, Caldwell wrote, “I will have no choice but to advise the Governor to go forward with our plans to construct the barrier islands without a fill permit from the Corps in order to set up a legal test of your constitutional and statutory authority.”

Officials with the corps did not return e-mail messages seeking a response to Caldwell’s letter on Monday.

At least Bush attempted, very quickly and though put off by the Democrat then “governing” Louisiana, to get the federal government mobilized. Not so Obama in this instance. The only “help” his administration is interested in providing is in the areas of oppressive federal regulation in and manipulation of the private sector.

Well, all you wildlife, wetlands and environmental “buffs” who supported Obama’s election to the presidency, how do you like him now? He’s fiddling while your version of Rome is burning. Diddling around while your precious nature is being well oiled, greased, saturated with petroleum and your animals and birds are slowly dying.

Your hero, your messiah, your agent of Hope and Change is really working hard for you, isn’t he?

Now pay the price, you gullible asses.

Nope.

Congress is apparently being overlooked as well where our supposedly transparent Administration is concerned.

A top lawmaker on the House intelligence committee said Sunday the Obama administration is withholding information about the botched Times Square bombing from Congress, continuing a pattern in which Capitol Hill isn’t getting the information it needs to conduct oversight.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the panel’s ranking Republican, said he agrees with the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate intelligence committee, who last week sent a letter to the White House accusing the administration of putting national security in jeopardy by failing to keep lawmakers apprised of the probe into suspect Faisal Shahzad.

“Having to fight over access to counterterrorism information is not productive and ultimately makes us less secure,” wrote Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein and Vice Chairman Christopher S. Bond in a letter to President Obama on Thursday, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

If I’m not mistaken, that’s against the law, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t Congress supposed to be apprised of such things, what with the U.S. not being a dictatorship?

Mr. Hoekstra said the lack of information prevents Congress from evaluating whether the government is adequately prepared to thwart future attacks.

“One of these days there will be an attack, it will be successful, and then people will want to know what was done and why weren’t things done to stop it, and it will all be on the heads of this administration because they ran it and they didn’t involve Congress in the process,” he said. “On the most recent terrorist attacks they’ve given us no opportunity, no invitation to work with them, to enhance or modify our intelligence tools … and that we did everything we could to try to get them to work and be more open about it.”

In the letter, the senators say U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly refused to provide relevant information on the Times Square case that would allow the committee to conduct oversight without hampering the ongoing investigation. Senate intelligence staffers were told that the Department of Justice had instructed the agencies not to convey information on the Times Square plot without its approval, they said.

However:

The White House wouldn’t comment on the charges…

What’s new?

…but a spokesman for the Justice Department said the department reached out to Congress “shortly after” the May 1 incident, providing information by phone and e-mail beginning on May 3.

Spokesman Dean Boyd said officials from the FBI, Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center provided a classified briefing to members of the House intelligence panel on May 6 and briefed their Senate counterparts on May 11. He also said the Justice Department did not tell intelligence officials not to cooperate with lawmakers.

“The Justice Department did not order anyone in the intelligence community to withhold information from the Senate intelligence committee in connection with the attempted bombing,” Mr. Boyd said. “In fact, when the Justice Department was notified by certain intelligence agencies that they were planning to make calls to the House and Senate intelligence committees, the Justice Department encouraged those agencies to do so.”

A spokeswoman for Rep. Silvestre Reyes, head of the House intelligence panel, said the Texas Democrat — the only one of his counterparts not to sign — was generally “pleased at the detailed level and the timeliness of the briefing, given we were briefed less than 72 hours after Shahzad’s arrest.”

Reyes, a combat vet, was a career mover and shaker on the U.S. Border Patrol, but he is also one of today’s Democrats, who haven’t exactly distinguished themselves of late in the “protect and defend the Constitution” arena.

“So,” we ask, “what’s the story?”

But, Mr. Hoekstra countered:

Ah! A “but”!

“It’s a joke when the administration says ‘well, Justice, they’re fully cooperating and they’re telling everybody else to cooperate’ but then they put handcuffs on them about what they can tell and actually share with us.”

Dissatisfaction with the administration on oversight matters goes beyond the intelligence panels. Last month, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, the top members of the Senate panel on homeland security, issued the administration its first congressional subpoenas over the Fort Hood shootings in Texas. Mr. Hoekstra argued that that case has documents — such as Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan’s e-mails — that the administration could share with lawmakers without jeopardizing the investigation.

“They’ve got enough information to convict Hasan and probably send him to jail for the rest of his life; he killed 13 Americans in front of what, 100 people,” Mr. Hoekstra said.

Barack Hussein Obama is not very “talkative” for the nucleus of a “transparent administration”, now, is he?

The only transparent things about his presidency are the “czars” he appointed ‘way back in every sector so that he’s got people on the scene who can go around Congress and deal directly with him and his moving the results of the U.S. Census into the white house so he and his cabal of convict material can manipulate demographic information to suit their political agendas.

“Don’t turn around, uh oh uh oh, der kommissar’s in town, uh oh uh oh…”

…The World Of Barack Obama.

In a “candid and constructive” human rights dialogue with officials from the People’s Republic of China last week, Obama administration officials brought up Arizona’s new immigration-enforcement law, telling the Chinese Communists it was an example of a “troubling trend” in the United States and an indication of “discrimination or potential discrimination” in American society.

Ironically, the State Department’s most recent report on human rights in China indicates that the government there restricts the internal travel of its own citizens.

“We brought it up early and often,” Posner told reporters on Friday. “It was mentioned in the first session, and as a troubling trend in our society and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination, and that these are issues very much being debated in our own society,” Posner said. The Chinese did not raise any concerns about Chinese people visiting Arizona, Posner added.

During the press briefing, Posner explained that “part of a mature relationship is that you have an open discussion where you not only raise the other guy’s problems, but you raise your own, and you have a discussion about it. We did plenty of that. We had experts from the U.S. side, for example, yesterday, talking about treatment of Muslim Americans in an immigration context. We had a discussion of racial discrimination. We had a back-and-forth about how each of our societies are dealing with those sorts of questions.”

Well, I suppose there’s something a little less malodorous than a president travelling the globe and apologizing for America at each stopover than a president and his retinue engaging in a little fat chewing, over eggrolls and tea, on comparitive human rights topics with the Communist Chinese.

In a “candid and constructive” human rights dialogue with officials from the People’s Republic of China last week, Obama administration officials brought up Arizona’s new immigration-enforcement law, telling the Chinese Communists it was an example of a “troubling trend” in the United States and an indication of “discrimination or potential discrimination” in American society.

Ironically, the State Department’s most recent report on human rights in China indicates that the government there restricts the internal travel of its own citizens.

“We brought it up early and often,” Posner told reporters on Friday. “It was mentioned in the first session, and as a troubling trend in our society and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination, and that these are issues very much being debated in our own society,” Posner said. The Chinese did not raise any concerns about Chinese people visiting Arizona, Posner added.

During the press briefing, Posner explained that “part of a mature relationship is that you have an open discussion where you not only raise the other guy’s problems, but you raise your own, and you have a discussion about it. We did plenty of that. We had experts from the U.S. side, for example, yesterday, talking about treatment of Muslim Americans in an immigration context. We had a discussion of racial discrimination. We had a back-and-forth about how each of our societies are dealing with those sorts of questions.”

Have a “candid and constructive” human rights dialogue, maybe swap a few recipes for fair and balanced media, or for reasoning with those who take umbrage with government policy.

Of course.

The People’s Republic of China is “an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party constitutionally is the paramount source of power,” according to the State Department’s 2009 Human Rights report on China.

The report also states, “Individuals and groups, especially those deemed politically sensitive by the government, continued to face tight restrictions on their freedom to assemble, practice religion, and travel.”

Come on, Mr. President, when are you going to go down to Venezuela and do some serious presidential bonding with Hugo Chavez?

Oh, wait, my bad…You already have.

…rather well, good for politicians (except RINOs, as we learned recently from developments in Utah) on the right side of the aisle, not so good for those on the left.

A better title might have been Europhiles Beware.

From The Wall Street Journal and a link from Best of the Web Today:

One of the constant criticisms of Barack Obama’s first year is that he’s making us “more like Europe.” But that’s hard to define and lacks broad political appeal.

Until now.

Any U.S. politician purporting to run the presidency of the United States should be asked why the economic policies he or she is proposing won’t take us where Europe arrived this week.

In an astounding moment, to avoid the failure of little, indulgent, profligate Greece, the European Union this week pledged nearly $1 trillion to inject green blood into Europe’s economic vampires.

For Americans, this has been a two-week cram course in what not to be if you hope to have a vibrant future. What was once an unfocused criticism of Mr. Obama and the Democrats, that they are nudging America toward a European-style social-market economy, came to awful life in the panicked, stricken faces of Europe’s leadership: Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown, Papandreou. They look like that because Europe has just seen the bond-market devil.

Hmmmm, looks sorta’ like this “let’s be just like Europe” trip the lefties among us have been on for the last several years is coming back to bite them where the moon don’t shine, what with them trying to push us into the same barrel of socialism, in full view of the voting public, that’s dragging Old Europe’s collective economy down a deep, deep drain.

Good, let it bite ‘em hard and deep this November.

Barack Obama would never say it is his intention to make the U.S. go stagnant by suppressing wealth creation in return for a Faustian deal on social equity. But his health system required an astonishing array of new taxes on growth industries. He is raising taxes on incomes, dividends, capital gains and interest. His energy reform requires massive taxes. His government revels in “keeping a boot on the neck” of a struggling private firm. Wall Street’s business is being criminalized.

Economic stagnation arrives like a slow poison. Look at the floundering United Kingdom, whose failed prime minister, Gordon Brown, said on leaving, “I tried to make the country fairer.” Maybe there’s a more important goal.

A We’re-Not-Europe Party would promise the American people to avoid and oppose any policy that makes us more like them and less like us.

I’m all for it! Between a little of this and a little of that, the Democratic Party and B. Hussein Obama are already well into sowing the proverbial seeds of their own political destruction, but it couldn’t hurt to add that extra little push…

The entire OpEd is here.

…I have to give credit where credit is due, even if it hurts (ouch!).

To tell you the truth, I’m somewhat impressed.

While our socialist president and his administration are beyond weak where homeland security is concerned (I wouldn’t hire Janet Napolitano as a security guard in a pet shop), Barack Hussein apparently realizes how important it is that we win in Afghanistan.

As I posted once before, a loss in Afghanistan would mean that the Taliban and their al-Qaeda butt buddies would be in a position to join their Islamofacist allies in Pakistan and help those evil Mohammedans overthrow the government in Islamabad (yes, Islam is bad, but that’s beside the point).

That, in turn, would give the forces of Islamofacism possession of a nuclear armed country from which to employ said nuclear arms in their war against We, The Infidels and as we know, those madmen and madmanettes wouldn’t hesitate, just as Ahmadmanjihad in Iran won’t hesitate once he’s got his nukes on-line and on the business ends of appropriate delivery systems, to commence a nuclear holocaust.

But once again, I digress.

From today’s L.A. Times:

The CIA received secret permission to attack a wider range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan’s border region, according to current and former counter-terrorism officials.

The expanded authority, approved two years ago by the Bush administration and continued by President Obama, permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as “pattern of life” analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras on the unmanned aircraft and from other sources about individuals and locations.

Yes, B. Hussein Obama, demonstrating something of the will to beat the Taliban, has continued the use of drones to wax terrorists who are badly in need of waxing, in an effort to wage a winning war, despite the fact that this kind of thing would seem to be totally counter to the sort of Queensbury Rules approach most “progressives” would prefer to apply to a war against a profoundly malevolent enemy who is chaffing at the bit to butcher every infidel, man, woman and child, they can lay hands on.

The information then is used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities are not known, the officials said. Previously, the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list.

The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes in which few militants are off-limits, as long as they are deemed to pose a threat to the U.S., the officials said.

Instead of just a few dozen attacks per year, CIA-operated unmanned aircraft now carry out multiple missile strikes each week against safe houses, training camps and other hiding places used by militants in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.

As a matter of policy, CIA officials refuse to comment on the covert drone program. Those who are willing to discuss it on condition of anonymity refuse to describe in detail the standards of evidence they use for drone strikes, saying only that strict procedures are in place to ensure that militants are being targeted. But officials say their surveillance yields so much detail that they can watch for the routine arrival of particular vehicles or the characteristics of individual people.

“The enemy has lost not just operational leaders and facilitators — people whose names we know — but formations of fighters and other terrorists,” said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We might not always have their names, but … these are people whose actions over time have made it obvious that they are a threat.”

Great! Kill ‘em all, or as close as you can come…

At any rate, I just thought that a president with whose every other aspiration for America and every other policy I take unmitigated umbrage should get at least two “attaboys” and one “way to go” for not discontinuing this particular Bush-initiated strategy.

President Bush secretly decided in his last year in office to expand the program. Obama has continued and even streamlined the process, so that CIA Director Leon E. Panetta can sign off on many attacks without notifying the White House beforehand, an official said.

Missile attacks have risen steeply since Obama took office. There were an estimated 53 drone strikes in 2009, up from just over 30 in Bush’s last year, according to a website run by the New America Foundation that tracks press reports of attacks in Pakistan. Through early this month, there had been 34 more strikes this year, an average of one every 3 1/2 days, according to the site’s figures.

{Above emphasis mine}

Go get ‘em, B. Hussein. Kill ‘em all, and let Allah sort ‘em out!

…have a really rough time trying to balance a fundamentalist Muslim agenda with a marxist point of view — two mostly uncompatible (except in the realm of authoritarianism) dogmas, yet he balances them with the aplomb that only a man raised in the first and mentored in the second could pull off.

That, and the ease with which he disses our ages old friends and allies while cuddling up to our enemies and potential enemies, bespeak an individual whose serving (if that’s the operative word) as president has probably caused any of the true patriots who have fought for this country to turn in their graves.

Yeah, yeah, I know I’m sort of flogging a dead horse, seeing as I’ve posted on the latter before, and between the education system, the far left mainstream media and the politicians over there on the port side, the dumbing down administered to the younger generations has already given value to the traitors among us — they got one elected president and keep the speaker of the house in dog biscuits.

But where treating our friends like garbage and our enemies like gold is concerned, Barack al-Osama is a master.

Barack Obama has come up with an interesting strategy for dealing with the evildoers of the world. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Surrender your friends, if necessary.

He wants to make Israel, our oldest and only reliable friend in the Middle East, the guinea pig to see whether the strategy works. What appeared to be a minor flap between old friends only a fortnight ago now looks like an exploitable opportunity for the man who learned about who’s evil in the world from a crazy Jew-baiting preacher in Chicago.

The public scolding of Israel and the warning that it must make nice with those determined to “wipe it off the map” are now revealed to be tactics in the plan to make the Middle East over in a way to please the Islamic radicals. The observant among us have seen this coming. America’s true friends - Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Norway and Poland in addition to Israel - have been getting the back of Mr. Obama’s hand from the day he took his oath. The commitment to constitutional government and the ancient traditions of intellectual freedom that make up the cultural heritage of the West have been snubbed when not ignored, the natural allies of America lectured to when not insulted.

We’re told that it’s not nice, and maybe even racist, to notice that Michelle Obama, the elegant first lady who does so many things well, has cultivated her husband’s talent for strategic snobbery. She once conceded that she only became proud of America when her husband got to the brink of the presidency, and in a remarkable video of a 2008 appearance that surfaced only this spring, she told of their visiting “his home country in Kenya.” Unless she was conceding that she, too, is a “birther,” she meant that Kenya is his ancestral and cultural home. This could explain a lot, and it certainly offers insights now into his determination to discard the Israelis in the affections of Americans and replace them with nations alien to the affections of most Americans. Why retain an emotional attachment to the sources of American law and literature when you could bow to the Saudi king and court the leaders of Iran, Syria and Venezuela?

I’d be willing to bet that even under the above circumstances, denizens of the left are ignoring the snubbing of our friends by the President and still blaming Bush for “America’s unpopularity in the world today.”

When B. Hussein Obama was first elected to the Presidency, I and my co-writers here at Hard Astarboard really did determine to give the man a chance without any pre-inaugural condemnation such as that received by George W. Bush from the fraction of a second he was elected until… actually, they’re still blaming Dubya for everything from an act of nature to the decades old shooting of J.R. (remember that?). More extreme tinfoil hatters even, to this day, sccuse him of complicity in the destruction of the Twin Towers.

But back on track — we tried, seriously tried, to cut the far left product of the Chicago Machine some slack. Neither Wolf, Chuck nor myself wanted to display disunity of American citizens in the face of the rest of the world, like that which the Democrats have displayed through three wars, their opportunistic, not-very-patriotic patrons on the Hill currying their favor by turning these wars into political circuses, resulting in prolonged conflict, boosts to enemy morale and the deaths of U.S. service personnel as a bi-product of it all.

The problem was, Mr. Obama declared, in his every word from the time he was elected, that the Constitution was irrelevant as it conflicted with his own agendas for America, which have been much, much nearer to the propogation of marxism than to the concepts upon which this great country was founded.

The programs this president has pushed from the start have been so anti-American as most of our countrymen understand that to mean that the three of us saw no option but to abandon our “wait-and see” attitude in a so-called New York minute.

The “community organizer” provides a veritable smorgasbord of targets for anyone with even a drop of patriotic blood, so…

Unlike Bubba Clinton, whom we learned had a multitude of uses for interns, the Obama Administration has few to none.

The Obama administration’s top law enforcement officer at the Labor Department, M. Patricia Smith, is targeting companies that give young people unpaid internships. She claims that internships are rife with abusive practices and that serious violations of labor law are widespread. Arguing that interns should get paid at least minimum wage, Ms. Smith and the White House risk destroying a valuable steppingstone that gives many young Americans training they need to get jobs they want in the future.

Unpaid internships are valuable for many reasons. Most simply, they help people test whether they are a good fit for a particular industry. If interns like the type of work at particular companies, internships can help them get the training and contacts they need to make their career aspirations a reality. The short time that interns spend at jobs - often just two to three months - makes it difficult for firms to both train these young people and get much work out of them. From manufacturing to nonprofits to media companies such as The Washington Times, hands-on opportunities open through internships are almost endless.

Change, indeed.

Basic economics teaches that if the price is raised, demand falls. If companies have to pay wages, they will take on fewer interns. If these youngsters were actually benefiting companies more than it costs to train them, companies would pay them. Profit-seeking companies compete against each other for employees. If untrained students were such valuable workers, firms would gladly offer money to beat out the competitor next door to get them.

Some statements by the administration suggest that their actions are not simply motivated by the welfare of the kids who get internships. The O Force worries that unpaid internships might disadvantage less-affluent students, who might not be able to afford to spend their summers at unpaid jobs. But the administration’s solution risks eliminating many internships at for-profit companies so that no one gets them.

The Obama administration, which is full of rhetoric about improving education, actually views education extremely narrowly. In the real world, people gain a lot of practical knowledge on the job. Eliminating training opportunities will only mean worse careers and lower future earnings for those President Obama’s team is claiming to protect.

Ah, sweet Utopia. These lefties are clueless about the marketplace, no matter how many times reality smacks them in the face.

“It hasn’t worked the last ninety nine times, so it should work the hundredth.”

Then again, when Obama sees the results of this one, he can always issue one of those Constitutionally unauthorized royal edicts executive orders, one to the effect that every private concern has to use X amount of interns, like it or not, and compensate them with wages and benefits, including comprehensive health insurance.

While we’re on the subject of Obama, Wesley Pruden writes:

What this country needs, in addition to the elusive nickel cigar, is a president with less presence and more absence. Not just from Barack Obama, but from whoever follows him as well. Celebrities, even presidents, can be too much among us. They, like us, suffer for it.

The jet airplane, the ubiquitous television camera and now the Internet have conspired to illustrate as nothing ever has that familiarity breeds contempt, that it’s absence that makes the heart grow fonder. Women once knew that by female instinct, until they aspired to be men, minus the body odor and whiskers. (Some of them are working on that.) The studio moguls in Hollywood understood that, too, when Hollywood was still Hollywood, populated by movie stars. Now Hollywood, like Washington, is populated only by actors, who compete to see who can look and smell most in need of a bath. Jane Russell, one of the last of the authentic movie stars, once told me how she couldn’t slip out of her house for a quick trip to the supermarket for a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread without her make-up, manicure, heels and hair perfectly in place. It was in her contract. (Meryl Streep, our only surviving movie queen, projects the old star power precisely because she remembers the formula.)

You might think that a president, being the most powerful man in the world, able to start wars on a whim, wouldn’t be so eager to get noticed. Indeed, presidents once carefully rationed their availability, even for photo-ops. FDR, Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower would never be available for a photo-op with Miss Drumsticks of the Ozarks, even for a cause so grand as commemorating poultry plentitude. Barack Obama has not yet descended to the chicken house, but that may be in the works. He never misses an opportunity to take his noisy community activism on the road.

Heh, heh…

Read on…

From Wesley Pruden today,

Celebrating Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the most important holy day for Christians of all denominations, can be deadly in the Middle East. Reciting a Scripture or humming a hymn could cost your head in Saudi Arabia, and you could risk other highly valued body parts in the similarly benighted ninth-century neighborhoods abounding in the lands of caliphs, imams and ayatollahs.

Beheading is something of the national sport of Saudi Arabia, where the government has scheduled for Friday the gruesome ritual for a man, the father of five, accused of sorcery for “making predictions” in his native Lebanon. (Punditry can be risky there, too.)

Better to take your celebration to Israel, where the government will assist your visit. It’s the difference between Middle East and the cultural West, between the 8th and 21st centuries, between civilized and not-so-civilized. The Israeli guarantee of religious freedom, taken for granted in the nations of the West, is part of what invites hostility and belligerence from Israel’s neighbors.

Ah, yes. The sweet, sweet freedoms found in the Muslim world versus the liberty smothering, murderous, despotic aparthied of Israel. Right, Barack, Joe & Hillary?

Pilgrims proceed under protection today along the Via Dolorosa, believed to be the path that Christ took with His cross to the crucifixion at Calvary, and on to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Many Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, believe Christ was buried on the site three days before the Resurrection. Christians and everyone else are welcome to join the procession. Unless a suicide bomber or other evil-doer slips through security, no one will be harmed. The Israeli government guarantees it.

The Israeli Declaration of Independence, adopted in 1948, declares Israel to be a Jewish state, but further declares that the nation “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.” It’s a promise bereft of Jeffersonian eloquence, but it’s plain and to the point.

My emphasis there. Try and find anything like that on the “Arab street.”

Moshe Dayan, the defense minister who led the Israelis to victory in the Six-Day War, was clear about religious tolerance and protection in a radio broadcast the morning Jerusalem was captured. “This morning,” he said, “the Israel Defense Force liberated Jerusalem. We have united Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again. To our Arab neighbors we extend, also at this hour - and with added emphasis ‘at this hour’ - our hand in peace. And to our Christian and Muslim fellow citizens, we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights.”

And in a column today from Carolyn Glick that is, as always, right to the point:

There is an element of irony in the current crisis of relations between the Obama administration and Israel. On the one hand, although US President Barack Obama and his advisors deny there is anything wrong with US-Israel relations today, it is easy to understand why no one believes them.

On the other hand on most issues, there is substantive continuity between Obama’s Middle East policies and those his immediate predecessor George W. Bush adopted during his second term in office.

Yet, whereas Israelis viewed Bush as Israel’s greatest friend in the White House, they view Obama as the most anti-Israel US president ever. This contradiction requires us to consider two issues. First, why are relations with the US now steeped in crisis? And second, taking a page out of Obama’s White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s playbook, how can Israel make sure not to let this crisis go to waste?

The reason relations are so bad of course is because Obama has opted to attack Israel and its supporters. In the space of the past ten days alone, Israel has been subject to three malicious blows courtesy of Obama and his advisors. First, during his visit to the White House last Tuesday, Obama treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu like a two-bit potentate. Rather than respectfully disagree with the elected leader of a key US ally, Obama walked out in the middle of their meeting to dine with his family and left the unfed Netanyahu to meditate on his grave offense of not agreeing to give up Israel’s capital city as a precondition for indirect, US-orchestrated negotiations with an unelected, unpopular Palestinian leadership that supports terrorism and denies Israel’s right to exist. Next, there was the somewhat anodyne — if substantively incorrect — written testimony by US Army General David Petreaus to the Senate about the impact of the Arab world’s refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist on US-Arab relations. In the event, the administration deliberately distorted Petreaus’s testimony to lend the impression that the most respected serving US military commander blames Israel for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. After Petreaus rejected that impression, his boss Defense Secretary Robert Gates repeated the false and insulting allegation against Israel in his own name.

Finally there is was the report this week in Politico in which nameless administration sources accused National Security Council member Denis Ross of “dual loyalties.” Ross of course has won fame for his career of pressuring successive Israeli governments into giving unreciprocated concessions to Palestinian terrorists. Still, in the view of his indignant opponents in the Obama White House, due to his insufficient hostility to the Israeli government, Ross is a traitor. If Ross wants to be treated like a real American, he needs to join Obama in his open bid to overthrow the elected government of Israel.

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The differences between Islam’s definition of “civilized” and the western interpretation of same are 180 degrees apart, and when you examine these differences from the point of view of even one iota of decency, the Muslims come out looking pretty evil while the rest of us emerge looking good.

Despite the glaring obviousness of this concept, Barack Hussein and his White House junta choose to attack Israel while all but worshipping the terrorist spawning fascism of Islam. No matter how they attempt to justify it, Obama, Biden and Clinton are profoundly transparent where the reality of their positions are concerned: They are wrongly supporting our enemies against our only true ally in the Middle East because they perceive Arab dictatorships and terrorism as being more in line with their own mindsets.

After all, the submission without quarter expected of a good Muslim is the same attitude they secretly wish they could provoke towards themselves among the American people, good facists that they are.

…with the World Government crowd.

Interestingly, it seems to begin with the two leaders showing their disdain for one another…

France may be America’s oldest ally, but the presidents of the two countries are not exactly the best of buddies.

When President Obama visited Paris in June, he declined a dinner invitation from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, even though he had no evening plans and was staying just a few doors down from the Elysee Palace.

The brushoff followed a more substantive snubbing, when the French president turned down a U.S. request to put more troops into Afghanistan. Mr. Obama responded by sending a letter to former French President Jacques Chirac expressing his desire to “work together … to build a safer world.”

The petite but fiery Sarko was reportedly livid.

So when he arrived in the U.S. on Monday, Mr. Sarkozy went not to Washington but to New York, where he delivered a speech at Columbia University.

There, he mocked Mr. Obama’s recent health care reform victory, saying “if you want me to be really honest, when we see the U.S. debate on the health care reform from Europe, it’s difficult to believe. … Excuse me, but we’ve solved this problem more than 50 years ago.”

With the supreme dismissiveness only a Frenchman can pull off, he added: “Welcome to the club of states who don’t turn their back on the sick and the poor. … If you come to France and something happens to you, you won’t be asked for your credit card before you’re rushed to the hospital.”

When Mr. Sarkozy finally came to Washington, he stopped first at the Capitol, where he met with 2004 failed presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry. There, he pledged to help enact global taxes on countries that resist steps to fight climate change.

Emphasis mine.

Did I mention the World Government crowd?

…and then making nice for the media as all diplocrites do.

With lunch finished, it was finally time to go to the White House to meet with the U.S. president. After a private meeting in the Oval Office, the two repaired to the East Room for a joint news conference, where it was all happiness and light.

Mr. Obama welcomed “my dear friend” and proceeded to call the French president by his first name eight times. “The fact that Nicolas went to Ben’s Chili Bowl for lunch, I think, shows his discriminating palate,” he said to laughter from Mr. Sarkozy. Mr. Obama, reading from notes, praised his counterpart for his “legendary energy” before ticking off a series of issues on which the two agree.

{Truncating here}

Unlike the Obamas in Paris, the Sarkozys accepted an invitation to dine in the White House, joining the first couple in the residence for a private dinner. And the two leaders, perhaps the hatchet finally buried, left the stage together, with Mr. Obama’s arm draped around the shoulder of his smiling French counterpart.

Yes, I did mention the World Government crowd.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday praised President Obama’s health care overhaul, called his push for stricter financial regulations “great news” and, standing alongside Mr. Obama at the White House, said he hopes their administrations can team up “to go even further in regulating world capitalism.”

Mr. Sarkozy, a fierce advocate for tougher rules on global financial markets, said France will use its position next year as leader of a group of the world’s top finance ministers to push for a new economic regulatory regime.

“During the French presidency of the G-20, [Treasury Secretary] Tim Geithner, [French Finance Minister] Christine Lagarde are going to be working hand-in-glove in order to go even further in regulating world capitalism, and in particular, raising the issue of a new world international monetary order,” Mr. Sarkozy told French and American reporters gathered at the White House in a brief joint appearance.

For his part, Mr. Obama said world leaders must take actions to ensure that “reckless speculation or reckless risk-taking by a few big players in the financial markets will never again threaten the global economy or burden taxpayers.”

“I will continue to work with President Sarkozy and other world leaders to coordinate our efforts, because we want to make sure that whatever steps were taking, they are occurring on both sides of the Atlantic,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Sarkozy also took a moment to tell his host “how glad” France is for the U.S. that Mr. Obama’s health-care legislation passed.

Of course he did, because now the United States will be joining France and other socialist shitholes in the slide to gross economic failure.

Meanwhile, the two weasels, along with others of their ilk to be found under the large portside stone known as the European Union, will work to force other countries’ leaders to “tow the line” in the true spirit of national sovereignty-hating globalists.

An example was set back in the late 1990s, spearheaded by Bubba Clinton and his EU and UN butt buddies: What happened to Slobodin Milosevic can happen to you.

When Sarkozy was first elected, it seemed like we had a real ally in the French president. It’s a comedown to realize that all we got was another feckless French socialist.

I’ll tell you, friends, having grown up in America in the 1950s and 1960s, I’m beginning to suspect that somewhere along the line I was somehow transported to another dimension…

…post today, given the following.

Bret Stephens had a must-share opinion column in Wall Street Journal Online titled Lady Gaga Versus Middle East Peace.

Pop quiz—What does more to galvanize radical anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world: (a) Israeli settlements on the West Bank; or (b) a Lady Gaga music video?

If your answer is (b) it means you probably have a grasp of the historical roots of modern jihadism. If, however, you answered (a), then congratulations: You are perfectly in synch with the new Beltway conventional wisdom, now jointly defined by Pat Buchanan and his strange bedfellows within the Obama administration.

Heh, heh. Mr. Stephens hit the nail right on the head with that one.

You have to wonder, however, if the Obama Administration really believes (a), though, or are merely using that POV as a political tool as they use everything else. As we know, veracity, morality, patriotism, ethics, loyalty to the American people or even logic are all of secondary importance to the current president and his cadre when it comes to pushing one of their very un-American agendas (then again, what other kinds of agendas do they embrace?).

The definition of a “fact” with those critters is anything they have to say to get what they want, and they most definitely entertain some profound malevolence for Israel, so with that in mind…

What is that wisdom? In a March 26 column in Human Events, Mr. Buchanan put the case with his usual subtlety:

“Each new report of settlement expansion,” he wrote, “each new seizure of Palestinian property, each new West Bank clash between Palestinians and Israeli troops inflames the Arab street, humiliates our Arab allies, exposes America as a weakling that cannot stand up to Israel, and imperils our troops and their mission in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Mr. Buchanan was playing off a story in the Israeli press that Vice President Joe Biden had warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “what you’re doing here [in the West Bank] undermines the security of our troops.” Also in the mix was a story that Centcom commander David Petraeus had cited Arab-Israeli tensions as the key impediment to wider progress in the region. Both reports were later denied—in Mr. Biden’s case, via Rahm Emanuel; in Gen. Petraeus’s case, personally and forcefully—but the important point is how eagerly they were believed. If you’re of the view that Israel is the root cause of everything that ails the Middle East—think of it as global warming in Hebrew form—then nothing so powerfully makes the case against the Jewish state as a flag-draped American coffin.

Being me, I had to emphasize that part, LOL.

Anyone in the United States who isn’t brain dead, brain-washed by the evil, sleazy, treasonous, communist mainstream media, deaf, dumb and blind or just plain stupid knew long before Barack Hussein Obama was elected that he was going to go after Israel right out of the gate; after all, they are the sworn enemy of his people.

It must be tough, having to carry the torch for both Islamic jihadis and socialists at the same time.

Now consider Lady Gaga—or, if you prefer, Madonna, Farrah Fawcett, Marilyn Monroe, Josephine Baker or any other American woman who has, at one time or another, personified what the Egyptian Islamist writer Sayyid Qutb once called “the American Temptress.”

Qutb, for those unfamiliar with the name, is widely considered the intellectual godfather of al Qaeda; his 30-volume exegesis “In the Shade of the Quran” is canonical in jihadist circles. But Qutb, who spent time as a student in Colorado in the late 1940s, also decisively shaped jihadist views about the U.S.

In his 1951 essay “The America I Have Seen,” Qutb gave his account of the U.S. “in the scale of human values.” “I fear,” he wrote, “that a balance may not exist between America’s material greatness and the quality of her people.” Qutb was particularly exercised by what he saw as the “primitiveness” of American values, not least in matters of sex.

“The American girl,” he noted, “knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.” Nor did he approve of Jazz—”this music the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires”—or of American films, or clothes, or haircuts, or food. It was all, in his eyes, equally wretched.

Whoa!!!!

Read the rest here.