Chaos In Egypt

The U.S media has been up front in its comparison of the Egypt situation with what happened in Iran back in the late seventies. But there’s a twist: Both the media and the government are using the occasion for U.S. bashing: All U.S. policy up to this point has been wrong, they say, and even immoral. There is practically no discussion about Israel or the fact that Egypt controls the Suez canal.

The view consistently promoted by the media is that Obama will either fix everything or that he is doing the best he can given the situation on the ground. In fact, Obama is doing neither. Rumors are circulating that the Obama administration itself actually encouraged the foment in Egypt. While only just rumor, it is to some extent believable as it has become clear that Obama is neither a friend to Israel nor of (big) oil. If the price of oil rises out of reach for Americans (due what’s happening now throughout the Middle East), so much the better. It fits right in with the Left’s agenda and will force America to get serious about developing a carbon-neutral energy strategies (to which the president devoted much of his State of the Union Address. Significantly, perhaps, no mention was made of Israel and the still unresolved conflict with its neighbors). Israel, as you must know by now, has already been given up as a lost cause.

While all eyes are turned to the chaos in Egypt (and throughout the Middle East), the real revolution is taking place in America. Obama came in with the promise of being a transformational president. As far as he is concerned, his vision for America is right on track. My best guess is that he will be re-elected in 2012.

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Going For the Jugular

It’s been going on for years: the demonization of Big Oil by the Left – like Ahmadinejad promising Israel’s demise. Remember, ‘global warming’? The torching of SUV dealerships? Strictures against drilling. Instability in the Middle East. The list goes on and on. We now have a leftist president. Why would he now suddenly abandon one of the Left’s key tenets: the war on oil and all it represents: prosperity; capitalism; America itself?

Building the World Trade Center complex so high as to tower over the economic capital of the free world was largely symbolic. The attacks on it were symbolic as well, designed to rip the pride out of America’s heart. We have never recovered. It’s turned us into sniveling victims; forced us into taking a defensive stance. The red-green alliance has been hammering us ever since. Ten years later, symbolism is passé. Now they’ve graduated to going for the jugular: OIL.

Imagine a new neighbor has moved in next-door. One morning you go to work and you decide to use your wife’s car instead of your own. Later, your wife takes your car to go shopping. It blows up when she cranks the ignition.

You are grieving. In an apparent gesture of good will, your neighbor’s wife brings over a casserole. Your hands are no longer steady. You drop the dish, spilling its contents on the kitchen floor. The dog comes over and eats it. He goes into convulsions and dies – poisoned.

One night, your house catches fire and burns to the ground. You manage to save yourself by jumping out a window just in the nick of time.

At what point do you begin to suspect your neighbor of something?

Nobody's Talking

I’m not seeing a plan. All I’m seeing is BP blamed a lot – and Big Oil. How convenient! It’s the same as it was back just before Obama was elected, when we had our big brush with economic Armageddon. At that time the big banks were said to be at fault. And this still is the case. What I’m saying is, we never seem to get at the root of a problem. We never go back quite far enough to examine its cause.

Yet, something caused Bush to panic and start insisting on TARP. And something caused Deepwater Horizon to blow up. It was a huge structure (32,588 tons; 112 meters long; 78 meters wide; 97 meters high). We say it was an ‘accident’. But look at it this way: When the World Trade Towers collapsed, nobody could claim it was due to a mere 'accident' in the kitchen of its ‘Windows On the World’ restaurant. It took something much bigger to bring those buildings down.

The following is only a partial list of recent semi-successful news blackouts we have come to know of.

1. Operation Orchard
2. Specific documentation detailing the spark (and origin) that got TARP rolling.
3. Bhutto assassination
4. South Korean ship sinking

And now we can add the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon to our list. Somebody knows the answers to all of this. (I suspect that JB knows.) But nobody’s talking. Why? It's quite obvious. If we knew only half of what’s going on, we’d be out on the streets with our pitchforks. Perhaps Obama’s only crime is his sloppiness in keeping things covered up. Also, the blame game seems to still be going well. …and we’re still only up to the second letter of the alphabet after all.

Declare the Wearing of Glasses a Crime

You can always count on Bill Maher to say something stupid. His appeal (if it is that) is not in what he says; it is in how he says it. Also, never forget that one of the reasons ‘W’ ran into so much trouble politically was because many of his supporters thought he was not conservative enough. In other words, that he caved in too much to Democrats.

The Left's complaint about POTUS is just that. They feel he has not been radical enough. He has allowed talk radio to dominate the narrative; he has bailed out the rich and famous on Wall Street; he has not closed Gitmo; he has continued Bush’s wars; etc. The hard core Left in this country is basically a destructive and vengeful force. They’d likely see happen what Pol Pot did in Cambodia: clear out the cities and drive people out into the countryside; erase any vestige of human history; declare the wearing of glasses a crime (for it means that one might be inclined to read books). They shun education, technology, art and free individual expression in general. To the extent that Obama has failed in this, they proclaim him a failure and he, who is essentially of a similar mindset, recognizes his shortcomings.

Mention that the Democrat party also does not speak with one voice, though it may seem so. What is clear is that the extreme left wing is calling the shots, while the moderates are being shunted out. It’s the same with Republicans. This makes for fascinating drama. Left and Right politics are irreconcilable – because they are essentially one and the same. With the middle forcibly hollowed out, the shell is bound to collapse.

For now it makes for good political talking points to blame Big Oil. It’s quite superfluous to dig for the truth behind the explosion. We might actually have to face the fact that there are people out there who despite our good (communist) intentions are determined to bring us to our knees – which is actually quite alright with the Pol Pots among us who envision Utopia as an endless system of gulags.

Plan B

As we struggle with the technical aspects of capping the oil spewing from the collapsed rig in the Gulf of Mexico, we can be quite certain there are those working equally hard to exploit this disaster in order to advance their own political agendas. "You don't ever want a crisis to go to waste…”

After the collapse of the science that propped up the ‘global warming’hoax, this crisis in the Gulf represents Plan B for those who would at any cost seek to throttle down America’s economic engines and thrust her back into the stone age. How convenient for them, this high profile (clearly man-made) ecological mishap – almost God-sent; a black swan. Eyjafjallajokull, we never knew ya!

Where will the White House make its stand? We think we already know, especially if and when it were discovered that it was no less a personage than George W. Bush who donned scuba gear and personally set the explosives. As for now, it’s still BP’s fault (bad enough) and, by extension, Big Oil’s (even worse) – and, of course, America’s in general (horror of all horrors), for its insatiable energy appetites. Almost effortlessly, we’ve automatically tilted back in favor of our flat earth, no-growth argument.
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We dutifully sit and debate the fine points of every issue. The points pulverize into the dust of a zillion minutiae as we continue to analyze endlessly. And before we can throw up our hands in frustration, a new crisis appears out of no where, complete with streamers bearing insult and hostility (which we do our best to counter).

The members of Congress sign their good names to bills they haven’t yet read. When they are asked to explain any given point, we find they are as confused as we are. All they know is that they’re fighting for their lives – as we are.

Mr. Smith’s stint in Washington is no longer fun or productive. Something alien seems to have taken hold of the city. Something’s been added, or something taken away. Something is missing. The newspapers seem to be in on it, but they won’t discuss it: the elephant in the room. There’s plenty of detail to fill their pages – screaming drama from all sides.

It’s classic Cloward-Piven: overwhelm the system; orchestrate crisis; gridlock. No way to get a handle on it. And even if we could, we would be appalled at what we’d find.

It’s time to stop playing. Every move we make (in good faith) sucks us deeper into the sinkhole. That’s how it was designed. The house always wins.

What’s missing is trust. Face it! We don’t trust our government. Anything it might intend has now become tainted with suspicion. It could fix health care; Wall Street; immigration; energy; education – whatever your pet peeve might be – and we wouldn’t trust it as far as we could throw the heads on Mt. Rushmore. We’ve gotten to the point where things can’t be fixed anymore. Everything needs to be replaced. We need to start from scratch.

Politically, we feel cornered - shut out. At the same time we sense danger in the pit of our stomachs. We’re even prepared to forego summer and sprint straight to November, only to discover, perhaps, that our faith in elections will be the last domino to fall.

What then? Move to Australia? Cuba? This dilemma is by no means new. It has been faced by countless peoples before us. Their dream destination was always America. And they came in droves, bringing all they could carry on their backs and in their hearts. America allowed them to make a fresh start. Eventually they would become Americans and prosper beyond their wildest dreams. But that was then…

It’s different now. America has become just like every other hell hole in the world. No need to bother packing.