Post by M KfivethousandPost by M Kfivethousandon FLynn
How was the trial “unfair”?... because he was found GUILTY? And admitted it?
Sounds pretty unfair, to me.
mk5000
Dr. Cox: I think your very funny when your up on your high horse, you know when you stay right in your wheelhouse. Everyone is funny for something. Barbie is an emotional trainwreck, your husband sells with a cocky attitude...
Turk: Well you know I do what I do when I do what I do--scrubs
about humanitarian convoys 2014-2018 that Putin supplied with really spoiled food and some cereal, but mostly contained weapons', and which were really meant to spirit in and out troops, and other nefarious things
which reminded me of the bizarre allegations made this week by trump witnesses that lunch trucks pulled up only a third full and with the rest of the cargo being fake ballots...
the russian speech on tis topic was followed by q and a.
Lavrov the russian foreign minister was asked how to achieve peace in Syria.
Answer: USA should leave
Mattis will be perplexes a long time
mk5000
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The anthem seems to blast from a building housing the neo-fascist CasaPound organisation in Rome. The UGL trade union is historically linked to CasaPound, and the head of UGL has visited Russia several times.
Another video was filmed from inside a flat, with the Russian anthem heard in the background. --By BBC News Russian
Moscow
just a few months later, we would see the most incompetent administration, most lying president, who does not even read his speeches before he goes on stage, visibly surprised by some of the information therein, audibly mispronouncing all sorts of easy things, and only a couple years later, the populace realizes not only does it need health care bad, but most people cannot get it through work anymore, for a variety of reasons that include the fact they are unemployed due to pandemic
but of course Hanson still thinks Obama was worse and that there was some unspecified evil wrought in the results of this years presidential election
save me from these faux conservatives
Clinton's shakedown fortune pales next to Trump's
O and relying on Charlie Rose as a valuable source of discourse,in 2020? Sure
17 May 2016
The Pajama Boy White House
by Victor Davis Hanson
Meet the 30-somethings who are running our federal government.
“Cleverness is not wisdom.” — Euripides, Bacchae
What exactly has birthed the Pajama Boy aristocracy — our over-class of pretentious, inexperienced, and smug 30-something masters of the universe?
Prolonged adolescence? Affluence? The disappearance of physical chores and muscular labor? The collapse of traditional liberal education and the triumph of the therapeutic mindset? Disdain for or ignorance of life outside the Boston–New York–Washington corridor? Political correctness as a sort of careerist indemnity that allows one to live a sheltered and apartheid existence? The shift in collective values and status from production, agriculture, and manufacturing to government, law, finance, and media? The reinvention of the university as a social-awareness retreat rather than a place to learn?
During the showdown over Obamacare, the pro-Obama PAC Organizing for Action put out an ad now known as “Pajama Boy.” It showcased a young fellow in thick retro-rimmed glasses, wearing black-and-red plaid children’s-style pajamas, and sipping from a mug, with a sort of all-knowing expression on his face. The text urged: “Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”
Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the few that matter do, explains why a nation $20 trillion in debt envisions the battle over transgender restrooms as if it were Pearl Harbor.
In a case of life imitating art, Ethan Krupp, the Organizing for Action employee who posed for the ad, offered a self-portrait of himself that confirmed the photo image. He is a self-described “liberal f***.” “A liberal f*** is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views, and sarcasm to win any argument while making the opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he explains. “I won every argument but one.” I suspect that when Krupp boasts about “making opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he is referring to people of his own kind rather than trying such verbal intimidation on the local mechanic or electrician.
The ad was no right-wing caricature of an urban twerp. Through photo, text, and commentary, Krupp confirmed the self-portrait of an in-your-face adolescent who somehow ended up with his 15 minutes of notoriety.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber crowed. “If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. . . . Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really critical for the thing to pass.”
Note Gruber’s disdain for the public. Like Pajama Boy, he exhibits a visceral contempt for the supposedly less educated whom he helped to deceive. Were supposedly stupid voters who lost their health coverage to this government-run con to feel, in the words of Pajama Boy, “terrible about themselves” once they heard Gruber’s boast?
Jon Lovett: I really like, I was very — the joke speeches is the most fun part of this. But the things I’m the most proud of were the most serious speeches, I think. Health care, economic speeches.
Jon Favreau: Lovett wrote the line about “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.”
Lovett: How dare you!
Millions losing their health insurance ends up with Pajama Boy banter — “How dare you!” — with Charlie Rose.
In 2013, a few years after Lovett wrote, “If you like your insurance, you can keep it,” he gave a Pajama Boy graduation address at Pitzer College, in which the 30-year-old sage unknowingly seemed to be warning graduates about people like himself: “One of the greatest threats we face, simply put, is bullshit. We are drowning in it. We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research, in social media’s imitation of human connection, in legalese and corporate double-speak; it infects every facet of public life, corrupting our discourse, wrecking our trust in major institutions, lowering our standards for the truth, and making it harder to achieve anything. . . . Know that being honest, both about what you do know and what you don’t, can and will pay off. Up until recently I would have said that the only proper response to our culture of B.S. is cynicism, that it would just get worse and worse. But I don’t believe that any more.”
We see the Pajama Boy adding of insult to injury in now-multimillionaire former Wall Street intern Chelsea Clinton — whose husband’s Greek hedge fund just collapsed, and who is the heir to the $100 million Clinton shakedown fortune — sighing that “I tried to care about money but I couldn’t.” Perhaps those who invested in her husband’s disastrous fund still can care about the money they lost. Or note amnesty and open-borders advocate Mark Zuckerberg, who sends his security forces to expropriate parking spaces around his San Francisco digs and buys up neighboring homes around his Palo Alto estate to create his own private border zone.
From left: Ben Rhodes, Jon Favreau, President Obama, and Cody Keenan in 2013. (White House/Flickr)
“In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he says. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project, and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked. . . . We drove them crazy.”
Ben Rhodes gloats over misleading the American people about the conditions that led to the Iranian nuclear negotiations, and how the Obama administration sold the “We drove them crazy” deal as a non-treaty that could be rerouted around Senate approval. But after Rhodes follows other 30-something Obama speechwriters to Hollywood, who cleans up the mess of an Iran blackmailing the Middle East with nuclear-tipped missiles?
Who hires and promotes Pajama Boys? Why, of course, Barack Obama, the Pajama Boy in Chief.
Pajama Boy arrogance? “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
Pajama Boy condescension? “It’s not surprising then they get bitter — they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Or the prep-school graduate talking down to the elite-forces combat veteran: “Bibi, you have to understand something. . . . I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”
Pajama Boy cynicism? From the Jeffrey Goldberg interview: “Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure” for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the U.S. to “purchase France’s involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us.” The president gloats to the obsequious press that the French president is reduced to a clueless glory hog, bought off by the cynical U.S?
Or maybe this is a better example of cynical dissimulation: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.”
Or maybe the locus classicus of Pajama Boy cynicism was the president supposedly ruling out amnesties and open borders: “Again, I just want to repeat, I’m president, I’m not king. If Congress has laws on the books that say that people who are here who are not documented have to be deported, then I can exercise some flexibility in terms of where we deploy our resources, to focus on people who are really causing problems as opposed to families who are just trying to work and support themselves. But there’s a limit to the discretion that I can show because I am obliged to execute the law. That’s what the Executive Branch means. I can’t just make the laws up by myself. So the most important thing that we can do is focus on changing the underlying laws.”
Note the Pajama Boy phrase “I can’t just make the laws up by myself,” which is of course precisely what Obama planned to do and did.
Pajama Boy pop-psychoanalyzing? Of Putin: “My sense is that’s part of his shtick back home politically as wanting to look like the tough guy.” He has “got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom.”
Pajama Boy arrested-development references? “I’m LeBron, baby.” Or of ISIS: “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” Or of Michael Jordan: “There is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am. Of course, if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case.”
Pajama Boy ignorance? If you forget that the politically correct version of the Falklands’ name is “Malvinas,” then just plug in “Maldives,” another non-Western-sounding, exotic-M island group somewhere or another — and assume that journalists “know nothing.” Don’t worry who speaks what language in Austria, or where the death camps were or who liberated them, or whether “corpsmen” is pronounced as if the Marines in question were zombies. There is no need to worry about such things — when hip, cool, sarcastic, and cynical all trump intelligence, experience, and humility every time.
When Euripides in his Bacchae unleashed the reaction to the young Panama Boy prig Pentheus, it was not something measured and rational, but rather the wild maenads. So too is the growing pushback today to the Pajama Boy aristocracy.
[ NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.]
VDH on Soetoro's world view and resulting "policy", all his complaints, just as stated above, Trump was worse. Obama may not have known as much about foreign issues as VDH, but Trump did not care to learn. At least Obama tried to learn some of it. I mean you just cannont be as much of a genius as VDH, as much as you try (rolls eyes)
and why is this man so fixated on the maldives
As far as insulting UK our greatest partner, Trump did far much worse than any things Obama did in that regard
vdh is SUCH a hypocrite
I do not even want to look up his rationalizations of trump policy to putin and ukraine after reading this hogwash
Obama's Undiplomacy
BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Most of the criticism of the Obama administration’s foreign policy concerns the failure of “reset diplomacy,” the inability to deal with Iran or North Korea, or the sense that we are ignoring allies and appeasing enemies.
All true. But under the radar, there are several developments that are far more disturbing than we seem to realize.
Take the RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone that went down in Iran in December 2011. The U.S. chose neither to attempt to retrieve it nor to bomb the wreckage. Why? Who knows? But it seems that, as in the case of the administration’s silence when Iranians hit the streets in protest during the spring of 2009, Obama was worried about provoking an Iranian response. Although Iran brags that it will reverse-engineer the drone, it is not likely to actually do so. However, it will very probably sell off key components to the Chinese and the Russians, who will duplicate it or at least find far more effective ways to neutralize its use.
Most recently, during a Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, Barack Obama weighed in on the Falklands in a fashion that was both offensive and ignorant: “And in terms of the Maldives or the Falklands, whatever your preferred term, our position on this is that we are going to remain neutral. We have good relations with both Argentina and Great Britain, and we are looking forward to them being able to continue to dialogue on this issue. But this is not something that we typically intervene in.”
Almost everything in that statement was false or dangerous. Aside from the 57-state-type error of Maldives for Malvinas, the U.S. does not look forward to “dialogue” on the issue, but rather avoids it like the plague. And in the past, we were not neutral but eventually intervened with massive clandestine support for Great Britain, a NATO ally.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had previously used the term Malvinas, which is a sort of Argentine equivalent of “the Zionist entity” — a bankrupt construct loaded with cultural and political significance. Obama should know that the more he uses that term (or trills some sort of M-word for an archipelago somewhere on the map), the more likely it is that there will be an Argentine effort to replicate the 1982 attack, especially as the Peronist Kirchner regime seeks foreign scapegoats (cf. the recent nationalization of the Spanish oil firm Repsol’s stake in an Argentine company), and the British loudly reduce their military forces. Fears of massive American logistical and intelligence support for Great Britain alone keep the Argentinians guessing, and by extension not trying something as stupid as replaying the 1982 invasion.
The problem is not just that Obama has no knowledge of geography, but that he has none either about history or diplomacy. The Falklands, a windswept, lightly populated group of islands with a history of sparse European settlement, never fit the so-called colonialist model of oppression of indigenous peoples. The isolated and barren islands were always disputed by European powers, and are as much British as Guam is American. More importantly, Britain has fought side by side with the U.S. — after a past century of solidarity — in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Obama insidiously is eroding that relationship by a gratuitous and uninformed effort at politically correct multiculturalism.
Then there is the talk of unilaterally downsizing our strategic arsenal, perhaps even to 1950s levels of 300 to 500 deployable nuclear weapons. In utopia that sounds noble, but with North Korea now nuclear, and Iran about to be, the number of rogue states that do not play by the rules of the nuclear club is growing, not shrinking. If we were to downsize our arsenal so radically, America would be on par with lesser powers like China, India, and Pakistan, which do not have global deterrent responsibilities. Obama seems indifferent to the fact that sophisticated Free World countries that could make nuclear weapons as they do Hondas or BMWs — Japan, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and most of Western Europe — depend on the vast size of the U.S. nuclear umbrella for their own strategic security.
In theory, 1,500 to 2,000 instantly deployable nuclear weapons might seem overkill; in fact, their numbers assure our allies that we have ample power to allot a strategic deterrent to each of their needs, even at times of simultaneous regional crises. Draw down to a level of 300 to 500 nuclear weapons, and the comparative profile of a Pakistan or an Iran will rise, our allies will eventually ponder going nuclear, and the global influence of the U.S. will wane. Such disarmament pipedreams are no longer the stuff of college essays, but a life-and-death matter affecting billions of people around the globe.
The administration has also quite publicly announced a shift in U.S. strategic attention to the Pacific, apparently on the premise of a rising China and a quiescent Europe and Mediterranean. Aside from the fact that Europe’s southern coast lies at the intersection of three continents, and is critical for operations in North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, now is not the time for our first “Pacific” president to announce a drawdown in our European forces.
Historical pressures, well apart from Putinism in Russia, are coming to the fore on the continent — pressures that were long suppressed by the aberrations of World War II, the Cold War, the division of Germany, and the rise of the EU. The so-called “German problem” — the tendency of Germany quite naturally at some point to translate its innate dynamic economic prowess into political, cultural, and above all military superiority — did not vanish simply because a postmodern EU announced that it had transcended human nature and its membership would no longer be susceptible to ancient Thucydidean nationalist passions like honor, fear, or self-interest.
If you have doubts on that, just review current German and southern-European newspapers, where commentary sounds more likely to belong in 1938 than in 2012. The catastrophe of the EU has not been avoided by ad hoc bandaging — it is still on the near horizon. Now is the time to reassure Germany that a strong American-led NATO eliminates any need for German rearmament, and that historical oddities (why is France nuclear, while a far stronger Germany is not?) are not odd at all. In short, as the EU unravels, and anti-Germany hysteria waxes among its debtors, while ancient German resentments build, it would be insane to abdicate the postwar transatlantic leadership we have provided for nearly 70 years.
There is a pattern here in all these recent missteps, one of hesitancy, moral confusion, and naïveté. To the extent that Obama knows history, it is a boilerplate one of European and American culpability. To the extent that he is interested in human nature, he holds a therapeutic belief that rhetoric and good intentions, not preparedness, resolve, and deterrence, impress rivals. To the extent that he understands geopolitics, it is of the juvenile multicultural sort, in which hostile nuclear powers, traditional enemies, and troublesome neutrals are either not much worse than or morally equivalent to long-standing allies and friends.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.
if you cannot come up with any other reasons to distinguish Obama and Trump, their handling of disease shows which is the better manager
yesterday we surpassed more than a quarter million dead officially from covid, AND LIKELY MANY MORE THAN THAT HAVE DIED UNRECORDED
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.