Bringing in the White Guys

Well it seems that the President has decided to bring in the white guys to clean up the mess made by his first diverse cabinet.

By doing so, however, he is once again showing how incredibly stupid race is as a selector of talent.

The white guys he is bringing in are pretty, pretty, pretty bad to horrendous. Kerry is a joke. Hagel is, to put it kindly, an idiot--and that's putting it very kindly. Lew is a hypocritical money-grabber of the first order.

Makes you despair about white guys . . .

"Fire is the Devil's Only Friend"

Just a few thoughts about this Dorner fiasco.

First, lest there be a misunderstanding, I think the guy was a murderous creep. He had no justification for killing anybody. Nothing that might have been done to him justifies any of the mayhem he caused and caused to be caused by the incredibly inept, cowardly, and trigger-happy Southern California police forces.

Now, let's imagine that Dorner, rather than being as he was a black supporter of Obama and the prevailing liberal ethos--including gun control--had been a white supremacist/survivalist, who before going off on his murderous rampage had posted a screed praising Sarah Palin. What sort of press coverage would we have seen? I don't think I need to describe it--you know what it would have been. The calls for the Tea Party to "stop the hate," for conservatives to distance themselves from this sort of behavior and thinking; we would have seen John McCain falling all over himself trying to get as much camera time as possible as he blasted the "extremists within our ranks." The media frenzy would have been a sight to behold! Funny, in contrast, how Obama supporters are not being called to order and made to disavow Dorner and his ilk; how the media is not blasting his views on gun control and support for the liberal orthodoxy. No need to go on. You can all come up with all sorts of this on your own without my bloviating disrupting your thought process.

The cops. Readers of this blog know my views on the state of the police in America today. I find the overwhelming number of of police forces to be inept, overpaid, overstaffed, over-equipped, poorly trained, and of a brutish disposition that sees the public as the enemy. The only thing I can say in favor of American cops is that European ones are even worse.

The worst features of the police were on display throughout this Dorner mess. If he was clearly a troubled man, why was he accepted in the LAPD in the first place? Were there no clues pointing to the fragile nature of his psyche? Or was he a perfectly normal person driven mad by the LAPD, by the Code of Blue which declared him the unit "bitch" for having ratted out a superior for brutality?

Once he snapped, the operation to nab Dorner was a disaster. As I have noted before, innocent civilians were shot in bizarre cases of mistaken identity. The crack police forces that defend us thought that two petite Asian ladies delivering newspapers in the morning "looked like" a nearly three hundred-pound, bald, muscle-bound black man--so, of course, they shot these ladies. Likewise they shot a white couple driving a vehicle completely different from Dorner's. I understand that they had a bus load of marachis in their gunsights when word came that Dorner was dead. Lawsuits, please! Fast and furious to coin a phrase popular among liberal defenders of the law and proponents of "gun control." For once, I hope the lawsuits blossom like weeds after a spring shower.

So our heroes in blue find that Dorner is holed up in a cabin in the touristy Big Bear Lake area. They found out through meticulous scientific and dogged police work . . . well, actually, they found out because two maids told them Dorner was there. So they bring in enough manpower and firepower to fight a small war. They have him surrounded; he can't escape; hunger and thirst will eventually drive him out or provoke his suicide. . . so, of course, they decide to burn him to death--did they know he was alone? Now that's due process. If conservatives waterboard some terrorist creep, that's torture. If liberals burn a suspect to death -- Waco, anybody? -- well, that's just stuff that happens . . .

What a weird world we have created for our kids . . .

Too Much to Hope for Change?

Won't be watching the State of the Union address. Do you really need President Obama to tell you?

I, however, was hoping that he would be inspired by the example of Pope Benedict.

I guess it is too much to hope for that sort of change . . . sigh . . . .

"Guns for Me but Not for Thee"

I am still in So. Cal; still partly laid up with this stupid knee issue. That means that I have lots of time on my hands, and have been reading the news.

Not good.

Lots about this crazed ex-LAPD cop Dorner who has been on a killing spree and has disappeared. The wonderfully trained and always dedicated public servants in Southern California's police forces have responded to the presence of a deranged colleague by taking a page from their colleagues in the NYPD: they have been shooting innocent people and showing, once again, that increasingly cops in America are out of control. They are poorly trained, brutish, cowardly, and overpaid bureaucratic bullies to whom we have ceded extraordinary power and given exaggerated deference. I am not saying that all cops are this way, but most, yes, most are or will become that way after a couple of years of service in the Gang of Blue.

It is time to reduce the size, power, and armament of police forces in America. They think increasingly like armies of occupation, and see the public as the enemy or at best something nasty to be tolerated, and then just barely. The police in the US have become militarized with excessive para-military SWAT training and have been gifted a level of war fighting equipment that would make many a Third World army jealous. Even small town police forces have an impressive array of armored vehicles, aircraft, powerful weapons, and, above all, an attitude that they are the Lords of War. Deal with a cop on even the most mundane and banal issues, and you will see the attitude I am describing.

I remember the outrage when many years ago Alan Dershowitz noted that in his experience cops frequently lie under oath. I see that there is a renewed interest in this topic. Having spent years in a close-knit bureaucracy, I know exactly the mentality that leads to this lying and the impulse to protect the herd from outsiders. Unlike, however, the pinstriped herd in which I lived for 35 years, this blue herd is heavily armed.

It is no surprise that this loser Chris Dorner was an ardent Obama supporter and a believer in gun control. He is also a lesson in why we need an armed citizenry.

I  hereby make a gun control proposal. It should appeal to liberals who have long lectured us all on "freedom of choice" when it comes to killing unborn babies: Anybody who doesn't like guns, and doesn't want any guns, should not buy any guns. The rest of us need to be ready for the Chris Dorners of the world.

All So Obvious: Part II, in an Ongoing Series

The topic is Benghazi.

So, ladies and gentlemen, what have we "learned" in the past few days about the performance of our Comander-in-Chief and his "brilliant" Secretary of State during the slow-motion Benghazi massacre?

Hmmmm . . . so much . . . so much . . . . Panetta's testimony Hill testmony earlier this week and that of General Dempsey make it clear that neither Obama nor Clinton were either deeply concerned about or involved in the Benghazi crisis. You can read all about it on the net--I am having trouble setting up links (sorry). Despite their subsequent teary statements about how deeply they felt the tragic deaths of Stevens et al in Benghazi, neither of our fearless leaders could really be bothered too much to have worked to avoid the massacre or to have worked to stop the assault once it began.

Let's see hands: How many of you are surprised to hear this?

All So Obvious

Been laid up a few days with a recurring problem, one that reminds me of the old line "revenge is a dish best served cold." Bad knee, lots of pain, lots of ibuprofen, x-rays, tomorrow an MRI, inability to sleep, can't drive my Corvette because I can't bend down far enough to get into it . . . sigh . . . those Guatemalan narcos are getting their revenge some thirty years after the fact. I first messed up the knee getting out of a helicopter in a drug op in Guatemala; I stepped on the skid as I was jumping out, and went for a roll in the dust. Second time was in Bolivia on a hunting trip when I stepped on llama poo, slid, broke my leg and twisted the knee. Third time was three days ago, going for a walk in a peaceful, boring So. California suburb when I took a misstep off  the kerb--shooting pain, almost unable to walk.

Curse you drug war! You claim yet another victim!

Anyhow, sitting about in a ibuprofen/codeine induced haze led me to think, of course, about politics. One should only think about politics these days when the pain is numbed by the products of modern pharmacology or old whisky. Even when under the influence, I cannot bear to hear the news and the pontifications of the pundits. So many opinions, so many solutions for what ails us, when, in fact, any housewife who has ever tried to balance a checkbook knows exactly what is wrong and how to fix it. Stop spending so much! Most certainly, stop spending so much on stupid things!

At the federal level it is obvious what needs doing. Slash and burn. Departments of education, interior, energy, health, labor, commerce, and transportation should be eliminated asap, as should the EPA and USAID. Yes, completely eliminated. The Department of Justice needs to be radically reduced in size and power; eliminate the ATF and DEA, for starters. The FBI has completely overstepped its original mandate and needs to be reined in. The State Department can be cut by one-third almost immediately, and closer to one-half in a couple of years. DOD needs to focus on its mission and shed programs, offices, and employees that have nothing to do with defense. Lawyers. My God, does DoD have lawyers. Slash and burn. Get rid of all the environmental nonsense in DoD. Drop the vast, corrupt, and bloated domestic PX network. In a time of WalMarts and Targets, why have a PX? Negotiate a discount for military personnel. The same with VA hospitals, most of which are substandard; get veterans a voucher system they can use at private hospitals. The CIA? A complete overhaul and reduction in the massive stateside bureaucracy which interferes with and stifles CIA's proper role overseas. NASA? Privatize as much as possible of the space program, keeping in government hands only the most secret and sensitive operations. Don't get me started on Homeland; it needs a radical downsizing or even a splitting apart.

Stop making everything illegal. Get rid of the drug and gun laws, and you will empty a lot of prison cells.

Stop viewing life as a series of problems that needs "solution" by the government.

Not so hard.

WLA

The Liberals and Their Shiny Things

Go ahead ask a landed fish. OK, OK, cut me a little slack: I mean assume it were possible to ask a fish a question and get an answer. So, ask a fish about shiny things. As many a fish has discovered, shiny things are not always your friend. They might be hiding hooks.

Shiny things have presaged trouble throughout history--and not just for fish. European explorers and conquerors found they could fool indigenous people into giving up, for example, vast tracts of land with gifts of a few cheap shiny things, e.g., beads and mirrors. I remember in this regard an incident during a cocktail party at a diplomatic residence in Central America. A Latin American Ambassador, who would not have passed a DUI checkpoint sobriety test, loudly and throughout the evening harangued and berated the Spanish Ambassador demanding to know, "When are you going to return the gold you stole from the Americas?" The Spaniard, exasperated, finally lost his professional diplomatic cool and replied, "¡Cuando ustedes nos devuelvan los espejitos! " ("When you return the little mirrors!") A pretty neat and witty put down, and a potent reminder of the danger of taking shiny things in exchange for your birthright: once it's gone, it's most likely gone forever.

American lefties love shiny things. They are so much better for their purposes than dull, boring facts and reality. I wrote before about their obsession with shiny things when it came to Libya. Throughout the execution of Obamista foreign policy we see the obsession with the shiny "new" thing. Unfortunately for America, many times the "new" thing is only new to the ahistorical people who run our foreign policy apparatus. We see the enthrallment with the "Arab Spring," for example. Nothing new  there. The Arab world goes through "Springs" every few decades. Such "Springs" in the past produced beautiful flowers such as Qaddafi, Nasser, the UAR, and the Bathist regimes of Syria and Iraq. Out with the evil corrupt monarchs who favor the West! In with the even more evil and even more corrupt military dictators who favor the USSR and terror! Progress! The shiny new lures of the 1950s and 1960s, of course, proved to have some very large and hideous hooks hidden in them. The Obamistas, of course, are, at best, bored by history, and, at worst, driven by a desire to undermine the position of the United States, Israel, and the West writ large in the region. The latest shiny Arab Spring has brought about a resurgence of Al Qaeda and has lined us up for endless war in the region, with it spreading to Sub-Saharan Africa. The hooks are there, and they are sharp.

We see the Obamistas pursuing the same sort of nonsense in Latin America. We, in effect, have become totally irrelevant to developments in that region, and the region is slipping evermore under the sway of what should be the highly tarnished lures of Castro, Chavez, Morales, Correa, Ortega, and Evita Peron, er, uh, Cristina Kirchner. But for the Obamistas this is all exciting and refreshing to see the Latin Americans strike out on their own paths to the future . . . there will be consequences and, to quote the movie of the name, "There will be blood." Anybody with even a bare understanding of history knows that the current political movements in Latin America are not new at all, but then, we have the Obamistas in charge. Everything is new!

This obsession with the shiny thing, of course, is not limited to foreign policy. We see it in the continued obsession with "climate change," although every day seems to knock a new hole in the "theory." We see with the false "medical care" crisis in the United States which brought us Obamacare. We see it by the bucketful in the phony debate over "gun violence." Yet another shiny thing with which to distract the people from the disastrous "drug war," the collapsing economy, the ballooning deficit, and the hollowing out of the military. The gun grab effort shares with all the other lefty crusades, whether overseas or at home, the drive to expand the power and reach of the government, and to corrupt the nature and status of the United States.

Look at this shiny thing! Pay no attention to the laws and cops whittling away your freedoms at home, and the bureaucrats selling us out abroad.