Obama Mania

I was watching TV Sunday evening and saw the very quick reaction of crowds of mostly young people to the news of Osama bin Laden's death on the various news networks. I also saw and heard the Obama attempt to get out in front of this apparently unexpected crowd. I suspect the delay in the Presidential obituary was because of the surprising and unexpected enthusiasm of the commoners in New York and Washington DC. My guess is that at least some of the demonstrators were celebrating our military success well before the President took responsibility and claimed the whole operation as distinctly his and only his—I wonder if he would have taken responsibility if the assassination had failed?

Those who would always make political hay when the sun of any civil or military disturbance shines were surprised on Tuesday when the President didn't apparently get much of a bump in his Presidential popularity polls after this extra-ordinary feat engineered entirely by Obama. Is it possible that only the Kool-Aid drinkers would think he had done something unusual and good for his political fortunes, while the rest of us were still thinking that it was about time the Seals were allowed to do their job, and about time someone in power gave some thought to our Main Street economy, to our rapidly rising debt, and how to protect our savings from a predatory government.

Will we have forgotten this feat by November 2012?

Just thinking about things.

Obama and the Easter Bunny

This may not be a real posed picture. I found it on this website. Along with 7 reasons that Our Leader and the E.B. are frighteningly similar, the first being that it is difficult to trace the origins of both.

Signs of the Apocalypse?

What are the signs of the Apocalypse? Here is the WikiAnswer. That seems fairly reasonable. What did the fall of the Roman Empire feel like to the Romans? What did it feel like to be Germans and Japanese in the latter stages of WWII? Supposedly the victors write the histories but surely the losers can write memoirs. Who writes the revisionist versions?

The above signs were said to be posted somewhere in Kansas. They came to me in my email this morning. Is this a version of the Country rising up to deal with the Rulers? Are these interesting times?

The Unbearable Usefulness of George Orwell

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink." - from George Orwell's 1984


From The BlogProf. Thanks. Maybe we shouldn't have sent those Russian spies packing so quickly—which reminds me—how come it is almost impossible to send home other undesirables or at least takes a very long time? The Russian spies might have been useful in instructing us commoners in the way of reading Pravda in order to get at the truth.

The Onion Scores Again

Obama To Enter Diplomatic Talks With Raging Wildfire

Huey Long Redux

Because the Billings Gazette is very selective in which George Will column they publish I thought it might be useful to remind everyone about a recent one in which Will calls President Obama an "ivy-league Huey Long." This appeared in Newsweek. I guess the editors of that left-leaning magazine were not worried that their readers would understand the reference.

If you haven't studied recent American History or even if you did in the last 20 or 30 years our friends at PowerLine have pointed out some of the reasons that Mr Will is actually frontally attacking Mr Obama. There are some interesting similarities between Mr Obama (or at least some of his cronies, including the ones who write his speeches) and Mr. Long. Check this out and this too. It seems that sharing the wealth has a long history.

And of course there are books and movies too about the famous Huey Long. That is the first edition dust jacket to the right. As usual Wikipedia is good on these.