Saturday, October 5, 2013
Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game.This little story has been around for a long time. This site attributes it to a commenter on Amazon – same story, different protagonists.
...an appellate court case involving a biological mother, her same-sex partner and a man who had an affair with the mother while she was temporarily separated from her female lover. In the 2011 case, the California Court of Appeal held that courts could not recognize more than two parents even if doing so would protect the child from harm.Twenty-first century relationships are complicated. I fully expect California to be the first state to legalize polygamous marriages, in which case this law will have broader applicability. Then there's the folks in Berkeley who believe they should be able to marry animals. In such a marriage, the list of parents for any children might get a little odd: mommy, daddy, mommy #2, goat #1, horse #1, goat #2, etc.
This crazy bastard had so many ways to kill you, it was like a death buffet: should I die in the nuclear blasts of the bombs themselves, or just let the shockwave of the overpassing missile kill me? Maybe I'll just wait for the radiation sickness as this thing circles endlessly overhead, like a colossal demonic robot vulture. It's so hard to choose!
Meanwhile, President Obama has become the Hamlet of the West Wing: One minute he's for bombing Syria, the next he's not; one minute Larry Summers will succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the next he won't; one minute the president is jetting off to Asia, the next he's not. To be in charge, or not to be in charge: that is indeed the question.And he's utterly convinced the U.S. is in deep debt crisis:
Yet, entertaining as all this political drama may seem, the theater itself is indeed burning. For the fiscal position of the federal government is in fact much worse today than is commonly realized. As anyone can see who reads the most recent long-term budget outlook—published last month by the Congressional Budget Office, and almost entirely ignored by the media—the question is not if the United States will default but when and on which of its rapidly spiraling liabilities.As Maggie Thatcher liked to say: the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money...
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I begin with incompetence as a problem. I think his behavior reflects a lack of experience and a lack of a strategic concept, or some principles or values that he tests things against. We are contributing to a vacuum in the world that’s going to be filled by people who don’t have our values and don’t have our interests and our beliefs, and that means it’s going to be a more dangerous world for us and for others.The interviewer further reports Rumsfeld's state of mind:
What seems to bother Rumsfeld most is his sense that America is a country in steep decline – which is a word that he used more than once. While he thinks that Obama’s Syria policy is a fig leaf for a disaster, he actually seemed less focused on specific policy choices than on his sense that the socio-economic foundation of American power is disintegrating. Without sustained American economic strength, neither American threats nor American offers of friendship are likely to carry much weight with the rest of the world.That's consistent with my own sense, but somehow it's more worrying when Rumsfeld says it...
