2009 | Scoundrels, Knaves & Fools

Crafty, All Right

A few days into the new year, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson announced he was withdrawing from his nomination to be Commerce Secretary in the Obama Administration. A federal investigation into Richardson’s fund-raising was given as the reason. That prompted the conservative National Review to remind us of a rarely-heard item from Richardson’s biography—that he was drafted as a pitcher by the Kansas City Athletics in the days of his youth. Turns out that was not true, but it took the press (the Albuquerque Journal) until 2005 to “vet the story.” If the gub’nor were left-handed, we could resurrect one of baseball journalism’s great clichés, and call him a “crafty portsider.” As it is, he’s just another crafty guy who got caught.
Eric Holder, President Obama’s nominee to be attorney general, testified before Congress that he knew “some of the details” about Marc Rich, but didn’t know that he was an international fugitive. This from the Clinton White House loyalist who engineered the pardon by Sick Willie of 16 Puerto Rican terrorists, and Marc Rich, too, and served Clinton faithfully.
Caroline Kennedy quietly withdrew her request to be appointed Senator from the state of New York and the stand-in governor soon after named somebody else to fill the hole left by Hildebeest’s appointment as Secretary of State. Thus ended the ridiculous Kennedy candidacy, which embarrassed even some of my left-leaning friends. Score one for the Obama wing of the Democrat Party, and a loss for the Kennedy-Clintonista crowd. (January 31, 2009)
Comedian Dennis Miller nailed it when he said on his radio show, as the news broke that Tom Daschle and some other lesser-known woman were withdrawing from their nominations to front-row spots at the trough because of “tax issues,” that he wished Obama would just cut the crap about being “different” and bringing “change.” At least four of Obama’s nominees have now been caught with blou or trou around ankles—the new Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, being the only one of them without the decency to bow out. This isn’t change. This is more of the same. Obama is just like all the rest of them, now that he can’t spin on the campaign trail and has to actually govern. He is, as Miller noted, a Chicago politician surrounded by corrupt or semi-corrupt people in a corrupt political culture. (February 4, 2009)

Dick Cheney Has It Exactly Right

AOL News ran one of its snapshot polls in mid-February, asking all of us what we thought of the departed Vice President Dick Cheney. When I checked, almost 162,000 had voted, and 69% of them felt “mostly negative.” Mostly positive got 19% and “neutral” got 12%. This illustrates how effectively the Left has trashed a good man. Cheney is by far my most favorite member of the Dubya Administration, mostly because he treated his enemies on the left the way they richly deserved to be treated—with utter and boiling contempt. Cheney drove them nuts because he was impervious to their criticism. He didn’t need the job, the power, or the glory, and he detested liberals. A man can’t get much better. I’ll miss him deeply. (February 17, 2009)
One terrible snapshot is burned into memory after watching Obama’s hour-long address to the nation last night: the head-on camera view of Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seated behind the President. Biden behaved like a sniggering junior high school-aged boy. He was repeatedly seen sly-winking at friends in the audience, once or twice even pointing a finger at someone as he winked. Opposite him, Pelosi was simply horrid top to bottom, from her hair helmet plopped atop her pale, botoxed face with its manic, forced, charm school smile seemingly sewn on, to a knit sweater and skirt of a putrid grey-green color. She leapt to her feet repeatedly with a weird grin-grimace, clapping her hands more rapidly than the vast audience, like the school dork who has no sense of timing or rhythm, looking for all the world like a hysterical six-year-old child jumping up and down. Obama’s performance was superb, with only an occasional partisan wisecrack, and one incomplete sentence—where Barack called for legislation in the names of Republican Orrin Hatch and The Senator From Chappaquiddick (SFC). Obama said that Teddy had “never stopped asking what he could do for his country,” leaving off the crucial observation for anyone honestly describing the SFC’s life—that Teddy should have been asking what he could have done for Mary Jo Kopechne, instead of leaving her to drown. The evening was the usual lovefest, and even Republicans joined in some of it. A Newsweek magazine cover presaged the speech with its headline, “We Are All Socialists Now.” (February 25, 2009)
Poor Bobby Jindal. Touted by some as the rising young hope of the Republican Party, the young Louisiana gub’nor gave the GOP reply to the president’s State of the Union speech. It was an utter disaster. Jindahl looked like a fool. He needs to wait 30 or so years before giving another speech. (February 25, 2009)
“That’s the joy of being a cynic. You expect nothing; you get less; and you remain serene.” –Charles Krauthammer, on Fox News, when asked for his reaction to President Obama’s signing of a huge spending bill loaded with over 8,000 earmarks, which Obama had promised would not be allowed once he became President. (March 11, 2009)

. . . And A Friend of Angelo, Too!

“We’re not going to mince words. Chris Dodd is a lying weasel.”—The New Haven Register, in an editorial enumerating numerous Dodd falsehoods the Democrat Connecticut Senator has told about his sweetheart mortgage deal from Countrywide, and his involvement in the AIG bonus scandal. (March, 2009)
“I suspect that the wave of populist adulation for Obama is a symptom of our semi-pagan times. Secular liberalism is the faith of the godless, and at the moment Obama resembles nothing so much as an idol who is carried about in triumph for a season or two before, with little warning, that god, too, fails.” –Tom Bethell, senior editor of The American Spectator (April, 2009 issue)

Honest Arlen

Arlen Specter’s switch from the Republican to the Democrat Party is, if not the first honest thing he’s done in his adult life, then one of them. He would have lost in his last Senate race against Patrick Toomey had not Dubya betrayed the conservative cause and supported Specter. He must have seen polling data which compelled the switch. Toomey is challenging him again in the coming 2010 election. Becoming a Democrat should assure Specter a remaining lifetime at the trough. Republicans are better off without him. (April 28, 2009)

Joe’s Five Don’t Count

Joe Biden, the current vice president, received five student deferments during the Vietnam War, same as Bush’s Anti-christ veep, Dick Cheney. But you never hear lefties mention Biden’s.

Spring Madhouse: Or, If A Woman Blows Us Up Will It Be Called A ‘Woman-Induced Disaster’?

One weird thing after another as The One, The Redeemer, Obama, ascended to the throne. After campaigning on a vow to end earmarks, Obama signed his first spending bill containing at least 8,500 of them. Then he went to Europe to apologize for America’s arrogance, hubris, disrespect for Europe’s greatness, and most everything else bad that’s ever happened, anywhere. At least four of the new president’s nominees for cabinet and other posts had to withdraw when it became known that a grand jury investigation (Bill Richardson) and certain unpaid back taxes and unreported income (Timothy Geithner, Tom Daschle and one other minion) lurked in their backgrounds. Geithner was given a free pass and confirmed by Congress because he was too important not to have the job and because his tax “issues” were the fault of Turbotax—and because he was a Democrat, of course. Hildebeest, the new Secretary of State, took an Asian trip she described as a “listening tour” (said the New York Times). There she was asked by a “giggly” Korean girl about “how she knew when she had fallen in love with her husband,” (that would be the legendary Sick Willie), but the Times opted not to present her answer. In Tokyo, the Times reported, she was asked by a “nervous” young woman how she might become as strong as she (Hildebeest) was. “Well,” the Times said she replied, “I played a lot of baseball and I played with a lot of boys.” In Indonesia, Hildy met with more “giggling” students and was a guest on an Indonesian variety show where she talked about teenage pop culture. Obama’s new attorney general, Clintonista pardonmeister Eric Holder, accused Americans of being “a nation of cowards” for not discussing race more often. Janet Napolitano, the former leftwing governor of Arizona and newly-named Homeland Security chieftain, announced in testimony before Congress in February that the nation would not be using the word “terrorism” anymore, but instead would call terrorism “man-induced disaster.” She also said “September 11” and “vulnerability” were being stricken from her vocabulary, and from her department’s.
The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ plan to toughen its identification requirements for issuing and renewing state driver’s licenses brought forth—man, this caught us be surprise!—the usual howls of rage from the Left. The BMV wants applicants to present a birth certificate or a passport, two pieces of proof that they live in Indiana, and their Social Security card to prove who they are and where they live. Allegations of racism, discrimination, outrageous human rights violations, and the like are pouring forth. The League of Women Voters claims the new rules are unfair and will make it more difficult for the poor and the elderly and the disadvantaged (code for: Democrat constituents) to cast their ballots. Watch for the ACLU, ACORN, and other Democrat front organizations to join in the legal battle to block these new rules. The U.S. Supreme Court has already upheld Indiana’s voter ID law (The Democrat Party sued over that, and lost), but that doesn’t stop lefties from suing and suing and suing again, and amending their suits and refiling them when they lose in the first attempts. Eventually they will find the judge and court they need, and prevail. (July 22, 2009)

Best News Of The Summer, So Far . . .

The legendary and potentially unethical William Jefferson, a Democrat and former Louisiana congressman, was found guilty by a federal court jury on 11 of 16 bribery counts as July closed—the most publicized of which involved an FBI sting at his apartment in Wonderland, D.C., which yielded about $100,000 in cash—alleged to be intended as a bribe to the vice president of Nigeria—found wrapped in aluminum foil in his freezer. His leftie apologists hollered racism, called it all lies, lies, lies. His attorney told jurors Jefferson might have been “potentially unethical” but was certainly no criminal, adding that Jefferson was a “victim” of over-zealous prosecutors. Only the delusional bought in. All that remains is to pack this dirtbag off to prison. (July 29, 2009)

No, This Is No. 1!!

The vile and execrable Senator from Chappaquiddick, Edward M. Kennedy, died today at age 77. If there were any justice in the world, he would have spent the last few decades of his life in prison, and he would be buried in his 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 upside down on the bottom of the tidal channel on Chappaquiddick Island in the exact spot where he abandoned his youthful (she was 28) intern, Mary Jo Kopechne, to drown on the night of July 18,1969. But there is no justice in this travesty, and so we will endure the spectacle of the world’s swells, smarts and chics trooping in to be seen at the funeral and keening and moaning graveside. No matter what they say, the world is a better place with Teddy out of it. (August 28, 2009)
“Bellowing on the Senate floor about the meanness, duplicity, cruelty, power-hunger, hypocrisy, and general indecency of Republicans, he was simultaneously understood by the public to be a negligent husband, a serial adulterer, a liar, and a drunk. Maybe the moral exhibitionism in his political life was compensation for the rapacity of his private life. It certainly saved him with the many Democrats who continued to lionize him.”—Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, in an essay on the late Democrat Senator from Chappaquiddick, Edward Kennedy, in the magazine’s September 28, 2009, issue. (October, 2009)
“Extremist Mobs” (Democratic National Committee); “pawns of the insurance industry” (Dick Durbin); “Un-American” (Nancy Pelosi); “Un-American” (Steny Hoyer); “Brownshirts” (Rep. Brian Baird, state of Washington); “manufactured” and “Astroturf” (White House press secretary Robert Gibbs); “Evilmongers” (Harry Reid); “fear-mongering” (Barack Obama); “Political Terrorists” (Rep. Baron Hill, Indiana)—List of epithets offered by Democrats to characterize Obamacare critics who made such an awful noise during town hall meetings across the country during the August Congressional recess. (From The Weekly Standard, September 15, 2009 edition).
Cheryl Jones of Tobaccoville, North Carolina, has written the editor of USA Today with a truly dangerous insight. Responding to an article about President Obama’s claim we can fund his Obamacare national health industry takeover by uprooting and eliminating billions of dollars of fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid programs, Cheryl noted that, by golly, there’s something mighty odd here: Medicare and Medicare are both gub’mint-run programs, and the President and his lefty friends want to get rid of fraud and waste in both in order to start another federal program run by the same danged old gub’mint which allowed all that fraud and waste in the first place. “You cannot be serious,” Cheryl wrote. But, alas, they are. Still, Cheryl seems one of the few Americans who’ve noticed this. A day or two later another troublemaker wrote to the Indianapolis Star to note that lefties are ever so fond of excoriating industry and business for “unconscionable profits” (a locally-based healthcare company was cited in a recent story as making a 4 percent profit) but have been utterly silent on a news report that the Indiana Lottery, a gub’mint-run business, returns 61 percent of its revenue to lottery players and keeps 26 percent as profit. (September 30, 2009)

Something Else Lefties Can’t Blame on Dubya

The gub’nor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, was a featured speaker last weekend in Chicago at a big business poohbah conference. Word had just broken that the Olympics selection committee had turned down Chicago’s bid for the 2016 games, and done it insultingly. When Daniels stepped to the podium, he said, “What’s this world coming to, when Chicago can’t even fix an election?” Perfect. (October 4, 2009)
George Will had the most insightful comment of any I saw after the Obamas flew over to Copenhagen to make separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee trying to convince it to award the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. Will wrote, “Of the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronoun “I” or “me” 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences was sufficient to convey the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago’s case compelling . . . Perhaps the premise of this otherwise inexplicable trip to Denmark was that there is no difficulty, foreign or domestic, that cannot be melted by the sunshine of the Obama persona.” Soon after their appearance, the committee eliminated Chicago on the first vote, and ultimately settled on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as the host. (October 7, 2009)

There Must Be Something Wonderful In The Water Down in South Carolina!

“You lie!” –Joe Wilson, a Republican Congressman from South Carolina, during the President’s speech supporting the left’s pending health care legislation. Wilson shouted this right after Obama denied that pending legislation would give free medical care to illegal immigrants. (September 9, 2009)
The Financial Times reported in September that in the wake of the savings and loan crisis in the early 1990s, over 1,850 banking executives were prosecuted, and 1,072 were jailed, but that only a handful of miscreants have been prosecuted to date for their roles in the late 2008 meltdown of the financial system. A mere oversight, surely.

Oslo Euroweenies Just Love Insulting Us

Somewhere in all this grotesqueness, they gave Barack Obama a Nobel Peace prize—not for achievements, but for thinking and talking about peace (this was confirmed by the committee in Oslo). The reaction of many was disbelief, but it quickly became apparent the Nobel Committee was not joking. Obama thus joins Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Kofi Annan and Yassir Arafat on the list of the most preposterous recipients—of almost anything--in history. The award is meaningless if this is all the better they can do. Adding to the disgrace, Obama had been in office only 12 days before the February 1 deadline for nominations. (October 9, 2009)
Back to top

Don’t Forget The Trash America First Speeches in The UN and Russia . . .

“I’m not sure what the international community loved best: his waffling on Afghanistan, pulling defense missiles out of Eastern Europe, turning his back on freedom fighters in Honduras, coddling Castro, siding with Palestinians against Israel, or almost getting tough on Iran.”—Gresham Barrett, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, commenting in an Associated Press story about the Nobel Peace Prize given to Barack Obama. (October 9, 2009)

At Last, An American President Who Meets Europe’s Standards . . .

“The award of the Nobel Appeasement Prize to President Barack Obama is well deserved. His record is replete with accommodation: his refusal to send defensive missiles to Poland, leaving that nation vulnerable to Russian hegemony; negotiating directly with an illegitimate Iranian regime; badgering Israel while Hamas and Hezbollah reload for their ongoing holocaust campaign; and, most recently, welcoming the Taliban into the political and cultural destruction of Afghanistan. This is what Europe has been looking for in a U.S. president. And thus he wins the Swedish prize for disengagement and retreat.”—Gary L. Shaw, Indianapolis, in a letter to the editor of the Indianapolis Star. (October 20, 2009)

Preposterosity, Raised To The Googol Power

Pundits and wisecrackers—ever’ danged last one of them practicing The Politics of Personal Destruction---had a field day with the Obama prize. The Internet quickly plugged up with absurdist—but thoroughly believable—jokes about other awards the president had just won. Some were retroactive, like the Olympic Gold Medal he got for watching the Olympics on television, the Emmy he got for a guest appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the NCAA basketball championship trophy and ring he got for playing Midnight Basketball last winter. Cartoonists weighed in waspishly, too. Columnist Cal Thomas pointed out one of the simplest insights—though lefties don’t seem to get it--into human experience: “The Nobel Committee apparently believes that by diplomatically saying, ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance,’ evil people will study war no more and be so impressed by our intentions they will lay down their arms . . . the peace prize concept is flawed because the problem of war does not lie with those who would make peace, but with those who would make war. If the Nobel Committee were realistic, it would stop handing out peace prizes and start issuing awards to those who have confronted evil and produced peace . . . ” Thomas cited Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II who confronted and eventually brought down Soviet Communism, and Bill Clinton for his efforts in stabilizing Bosnia, as people who actually did something about peace, instead of just thinking and talking about it. (October 14, 2009)
Newtie weighed in with the observation that he wasn’t surprised that Obama won a Nobel Prize for no accomplishments—after all, American voters gave him the presidency based on the same resume. (October 25, 2009)

A-Jad’s Roots!

“ . . . the London Daily Telegraph (has) found documents indicating that the Iranian president (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) and notorious Holocaust denier has Jewish roots. Ahmadinejad’s family changed its name from Sabourjian, a Jewish name meaning ‘cloth weaver,’ when it converted to Islam after his birth.” –News Report from The Week magazine, on page 6 of its October 16, 2009, issue. The Daily Telegraph article was printed October 2, 2009.
“ . . . sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other.”—Irving Kristol, writing about American liberalism in 1993, quoted in the Spring, 2009 issue of Claremont Review of Books.

Oooooh . . . Too Much Transparency!

The prestigious London-based magazine, The Economist, reports in its October 10, 2009, issue that a Gallup poll shows that, on average, American citizens believe that 50 cents of every dollar spent by the government is wasted. Even Democrats, whose faith in big government is unbounded, say that 41 cents is wasted. Republicans put the number at 54 cents, and Independents say it’s 55 cents. (October 14, 2009
It can only be a matter of time before some big league baseball player sues to establish his sacred right to wear his cap backwards. He will win, too. (October 16, 2009)
Republican candidates won governor races in New Jersey and Virginia on November 3, and lefties continued their mantra that these results really meant nothing, and were certainly no referendum on The One, The Redeemer, or his magnificent presidency. Righties should resist the temptation to think their victories mean anything, or that they’ve even won. For one thing, there’s still plenty of time for Dems to file lawsuits, and to hunt for those lost satchels of absentee ballots (Jimbo Carville, who is still in darkest Florida counting ballots from the 2000 presidential election, would be perfect to lead this search!). There was an unconfirmed rumor, too, that approximately 5,500 busloads of illegals, being hauled to Democrat precincts by ACORN, were somehow shunted off the freeways shortly after entering New Jersey, and became hopelessly lost. If they can be rounded up again, the ACLU is said to be ready to sue on their behalf for being denied their right to vote whenever—and, of course wherever-- they can be found by a Democrat election official. Let’s wait. It’s too early to be celebrating. (November 4, 2009)
Lefties kept swearing the GOP victories meant nothing, but one of every four voters polled in Virginia said they cast their ballot specifically to register disapproval of Obama policies. (The Economist magazine, November 7, 2009)
The Most Recent Unpleasantness Said To Have Involved A Terrorist-Induced Disaster, the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, has flushed lefties howling out of their burrows. They’re criticizing The Army for failing to act—to have done something, for god’s sake—on evidence it had that the alleged perp, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was an angry and radical Muslim who sent many clues that he was about to blow. Here’s the truth about that: If the Army had so much as blinked an eye at the Muslim major, Democrats and their fellow travelers would have lambasted them for profiling and for racial, religious, and ethnic discrimination, and the ACLU would have sued. A suffocating climate of political correctness, spawned and nurtured by liberals, has brought us to this point, and the Left’s hypocrisy about it is towering. (November 15, 2009)
Obama’s decision to bring the 9/11 Gitmo terrorist detainees to New York for trial in the civilian court system is peculiar only for the willfully delusional. The whole thing is a set-up to trash the Bush Administration, and then to let the bad guys skate free. First, the standard for evidence is higher in a civilian court. The defendants will be able to ask for a jury trial, and that will open the door for radical left advocacy groups to argue—and they will--that a jury of their peers means Muslim jihadists must serve on the jury. The defendants will also be entitled to access to all evidence the government has gathered against them, regardless of its origin. This will force the government to make public huge amounts of highly sensitive and secret information, which will be of great value to terrorists worldwide. If the government does not wish to release this information, it may refuse to surrender some or all of it, and thus all but guarantee a mistrial, and freedom for the bad guys. The trial will also provide terrorism a worldwide propaganda forum, and present horrendous security problems for New York City. Behind all this are the president and his attorney general, Eric Holder, and the whole rabid tribe of Bush-hating crazies. This is going to be a sad and grim experience for our country, but a bonanza for its enemies. (November 16, 2009)

Too Transparent For Comfort

“There are 237 millionaires in the U. S. Senate and House of Representatives. That’s 44 per cent of all members of Congress. One percent of the public at large are millionaires” –The Week magazine, November 20, 2009.

Better To Banish The Entire Family From Planet Earth

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Rhode Island asked Democrat Congressman Patrick Kennedy in 2007 to stop receiving communion because of the congressman’s stance on moral issues, principally involving abortion. Kennedy confirmed this November 21, 2009, when the issue flared again in connection with the health care bill the Dems are trying to ram through Congress. (November 22, 2009)
The Redeemer’s narcissism is already legendary and he hasn’t even finished his first year in office. November brought two more beautiful examples: 1) during a trip to Japan he described himself as “America’s first Pacific president”; (2) in a two-and-a-half minute radio address he gave in lieu of personally traveling to Germany to join others in observing the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Obama mentioned himself as linked to human destiny but failed to mention Ronald Regan or Margaret Thatcher or Pope John Paul, who were instrumental in bringing about the event and the subsequent collapse of Soviet Communism.
Numerous dangerous groups are working to get out the facts and the truth regarding climate and temperatures. One of them, led by meteorologist Anthony Watts, has used hundreds of volunteers to personally visit, inspect, and photograph over 850 of the 1221 climate monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, where “official” temperatures are recorded for the United States. What did they find? “We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat,” Watts said. “In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations (inspected) . . .fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own requirements” for siting such stations. Watts and others claim that global warming advocates preferentially use sites affected by these “heat island effects” in their computations, and that the Weather Service does not adjust its records to account for these siting problems. Watts’ report--Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?--is available for free download at www.globalwarmingheartland.org, or may be ordered at www.heartland.org until Weird Al and Friends hack and destroy the websites. (December 1, 2009).
Another website pressing for the truth about alleged global-warming is www.petitionproject.org. It’s been around many years, and is massively documented with information about peer reviews, funding sources, and other embarrassing matters. (December 7, 2009)

Imagine That! (The Gibbsian Memory Bank, Erased!)

The president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, blundered into deep, deep water November 6, when he said to eager reporters at the White House, “Imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler . . . . ” Well, at least one reporter could. He ran back to his office (at The Weekly Standard magazine), dug into the files, and found 56 photographs taken at anti-Bush protest rallies “just a few years ago,” each poster pairing Bush and Hitler or bearing swastikas, or photos of Bush embellished with a Hitler mustache or Nazi military uniform. The magazine printed all of them on a full page in its November 23, 2009, issue. Beautiful.
The ambush assassination of four police officers in Seattle last week eventually brought us the background news that the murderer, one Maurice Clemmons, had been “pardoned” about nine years ago from a 108-year prison sentence by then Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, the guy who ran for president as a Republican in the 2008 primary elections. This wasn’t quite correct: Huckabee commuted the sentence from 108 years to 47; that made him eligible for parole. The state parole board then pardoned Clemmons and Huckabee signed the pardon recommendation setting him free.) Lefties howled with excitement at this news. Their delight was spiced by memories of how their goofy candidate, Michael Dukakis, was demonized in the 1988 election by Republicans, who relentlessly pointed out Dukakis’ record of pardons in Massachusetts. Huckabee is fair game for criticism. He should be strung up alongside the moronic Dukakis—the Right got its pelt; now the Left has one. Although self-promoted as a conservative, Huckabee’s pardon is a time-honored leftist delusion. The cure for this would be to require that all pardoned offenders be required to live in (or next door to) the home of the judge or gub’nor who signs the release order, for a minimum of five years from release date. That would raise the odds of justice when and if the perp reverts to his default position. (December 5, 2009)

Government Pays Better Than Most Crime

With more than 15 million Americans out of work, life inside the Wonderland Beltway roars on. A report in the December 31, 2009, issue of National Review notes that the federal bureaucracy in the last 12 months has added 13,000 jobs and the number of gub’mint employees making over $100,000 annually has doubled. The average federal worker is paid $71,206 (this does not include an estimated $41,000 in non-salary benefits) while the average private-sector employee earns $40,331. This is what they do to us while we sleep. (December 31, 2009)

Congress And The White House Excepted, Of Course

“ . . . three generations of imbeciles are enough.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Judge, writing in the majority opinion (8-1) in Buck v. Bell (1927). Holmes was in the majority upholding a compulsory sterilization law in Virginia.

Weird Al Is Absolutely Magnificent

Lefties had to swallow hard again when the surpassingly silly Copenhagen global warming crisis summit collapsed with next to nothing accomplished. Delegates returned to their hundreds of countries and spun like crazy. A story erupted from purloined e-mails from some of the “scientists,” revealing how they had shaded wording and manipulated data to support their claims. The year-end edition of The National Review offered a pithy summary, capped by this truly beautiful snapshot of the delusional Al Gore at work: “Al Gore clocked in with the best attempt to wish this story away, telling Slate, “I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old.” Gore repeated this falsehood three times. Slate had to append a correction: Many of the e-mails were written in this decade, the most recent one in 2009. Gore got his facts wrong again when he told a crowd in Copenhagen that one climatologist had predicted a 75 per cent chance that the polar ice caps would be completely melted in five to seven years. When told of Gore’s claim, the climatologist in question said that he predicted the caps would melt a lot, but not completely.” (December 31, 2009)
The Redeemer’s first year? He succeeded in his campaign for office to the extent that he prevented us from knowing about him. His popularity has declined in his first year in office to the extent that he has become known and the masks dropped. He is today what he was as a candidate in 2008: smooth as silk, glib, quick, and clever, but with woefully deficient credentials. Year one has shown him to be what many knew long before: an ideologue. There is a reason why he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate and spent chunks of his life in the company of the likes of The Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. He is inexperienced and naïve. He gave away the first year of his presidency by turning over his signature piece, the healthcare bill, to his radical friends—Pelosi and Reid—in Congress. He exercised terrible leadership by letting them write the legislation, saying little more than “toss something on my desk by August and I’ll sign it.” He is arrogant, and oblivious, and has poor judgment. He is, as Rush Limbaugh has noted, the most inexperienced man in any room he enters. He is petulant childish, and in over his head. He has plenty of time to change all this, and have a successful presidency. It will take a serious re-make of the man, though, and I doubt he is capable of it. (December 31, 2009)
The Redeemer’s attorney general, Eric Holder, is my nominee for the most evil and dangerous man loose in public life today.

	Scoundrels, Knaves & Fools American Pile Whoops & Squawks Splinters From the Bench Indiana University Sports Lists & Other Minutiae Contact the author	2009 \| 2008 \| 2007 \| 2006 \| 2005 \| 2004 \| 2003 \| 2002 \| 2001 \| 2000 \| 1999 \| 1998 \| 1997 \| 1996 \| 1995 \| Pre-1995 Scoundrels, Knaves, and Fools Crafty, All Right A few days into the new year, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson announced he was withdrawing from his nomination to be Commerce Secretary in the Obama Administration. A federal investigation into Richardson’s fund-raising was given as the reason. That prompted the conservative National Review to remind us of a rarely-heard item from Richardson’s biography—that he was drafted as a pitcher by the Kansas City Athletics in the days of his youth. Turns out that was not true, but it took the press (the Albuquerque Journal) until 2005 to “vet the story.” If the gub’nor were left-handed, we could resurrect one of baseball journalism’s great clichés, and call him a “crafty portsider.” As it is, he’s just another crafty guy who got caught. Eric Holder, President Obama’s nominee to be attorney general, testified before Congress that he knew “some of the details” about Marc Rich, but didn’t know that he was an international fugitive. This from the Clinton White House loyalist who engineered the pardon by Sick Willie of 16 Puerto Rican terrorists, and Marc Rich, too, and served Clinton faithfully. Caroline Kennedy quietly withdrew her request to be appointed Senator from the state of New York and the stand-in governor soon after named somebody else to fill the hole left by Hildebeest’s appointment as Secretary of State. Thus ended the ridiculous Kennedy candidacy, which embarrassed even some of my left-leaning friends. Score one for the Obama wing of the Democrat Party, and a loss for the Kennedy-Clintonista crowd. (January 31, 2009) Comedian Dennis Miller nailed it when he said on his radio show, as the news broke that Tom Daschle and some other lesser-known woman were withdrawing from their nominations to front-row spots at the trough because of “tax issues,” that he wished Obama would just cut the crap about being “different” and bringing “change.” At least four of Obama’s nominees have now been caught with blou or trou around ankles—the new Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, being the only one of them without the decency to bow out. This isn’t change. This is more of the same. Obama is just like all the rest of them, now that he can’t spin on the campaign trail and has to actually govern. He is, as Miller noted, a Chicago politician surrounded by corrupt or semi-corrupt people in a corrupt political culture. (February 4, 2009) Dick Cheney Has It Exactly Right AOL News ran one of its snapshot polls in mid-February, asking all of us what we thought of the departed Vice President Dick Cheney. When I checked, almost 162,000 had voted, and 69% of them felt “mostly negative.” Mostly positive got 19% and “neutral” got 12%. This illustrates how effectively the Left has trashed a good man. Cheney is by far my most favorite member of the Dubya Administration, mostly because he treated his enemies on the left the way they richly deserved to be treated—with utter and boiling contempt. Cheney drove them nuts because he was impervious to their criticism. He didn’t need the job, the power, or the glory, and he detested liberals. A man can’t get much better. I’ll miss him deeply. (February 17, 2009) One terrible snapshot is burned into memory after watching Obama’s hour-long address to the nation last night: the head-on camera view of Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seated behind the President. Biden behaved like a sniggering junior high school-aged boy. He was repeatedly seen sly-winking at friends in the audience, once or twice even pointing a finger at someone as he winked. Opposite him, Pelosi was simply horrid top to bottom, from her hair helmet plopped atop her pale, botoxed face with its manic, forced, charm school smile seemingly sewn on, to a knit sweater and skirt of a putrid grey-green color. She leapt to her feet repeatedly with a weird grin-grimace, clapping her hands more rapidly than the vast audience, like the school dork who has no sense of timing or rhythm, looking for all the world like a hysterical six-year-old child jumping up and down. Obama’s performance was superb, with only an occasional partisan wisecrack, and one incomplete sentence—where Barack called for legislation in the names of Republican Orrin Hatch and The Senator From Chappaquiddick (SFC). Obama said that Teddy had “never stopped asking what he could do for his country,” leaving off the crucial observation for anyone honestly describing the SFC’s life—that Teddy should have been asking what he could have done for Mary Jo Kopechne, instead of leaving her to drown. The evening was the usual lovefest, and even Republicans joined in some of it. A Newsweek magazine cover presaged the speech with its headline, “We Are All Socialists Now.” (February 25, 2009) Poor Bobby Jindal. Touted by some as the rising young hope of the Republican Party, the young Louisiana gub’nor gave the GOP reply to the president’s State of the Union speech. It was an utter disaster. Jindahl looked like a fool. He needs to wait 30 or so years before giving another speech. (February 25, 2009) “That’s the joy of being a cynic. You expect nothing; you get less; and you remain serene.” –Charles Krauthammer, on Fox News, when asked for his reaction to President Obama’s signing of a huge spending bill loaded with over 8,000 earmarks, which Obama had promised would not be allowed once he became President. (March 11, 2009) . . . And A Friend of Angelo, Too! “We’re not going to mince words. Chris Dodd is a lying weasel.”—The New Haven Register, in an editorial enumerating numerous Dodd falsehoods the Democrat Connecticut Senator has told about his sweetheart mortgage deal from Countrywide, and his involvement in the AIG bonus scandal. (March, 2009) “I suspect that the wave of populist adulation for Obama is a symptom of our semi-pagan times. Secular liberalism is the faith of the godless, and at the moment Obama resembles nothing so much as an idol who is carried about in triumph for a season or two before, with little warning, that god, too, fails.” –Tom Bethell, senior editor of The American Spectator (April, 2009 issue) Honest Arlen Arlen Specter’s switch from the Republican to the Democrat Party is, if not the first honest thing he’s done in his adult life, then one of them. He would have lost in his last Senate race against Patrick Toomey had not Dubya betrayed the conservative cause and supported Specter. He must have seen polling data which compelled the switch. Toomey is challenging him again in the coming 2010 election. Becoming a Democrat should assure Specter a remaining lifetime at the trough. Republicans are better off without him. (April 28, 2009) Joe’s Five Don’t Count Joe Biden, the current vice president, received five student deferments during the Vietnam War, same as Bush’s Anti-christ veep, Dick Cheney. But you never hear lefties mention Biden’s. Spring Madhouse: Or, If A Woman Blows Us Up Will It Be Called A ‘Woman-Induced Disaster’? One weird thing after another as The One, The Redeemer, Obama, ascended to the throne. After campaigning on a vow to end earmarks, Obama signed his first spending bill containing at least 8,500 of them. Then he went to Europe to apologize for America’s arrogance, hubris, disrespect for Europe’s greatness, and most everything else bad that’s ever happened, anywhere. At least four of the new president’s nominees for cabinet and other posts had to withdraw when it became known that a grand jury investigation (Bill Richardson) and certain unpaid back taxes and unreported income (Timothy Geithner, Tom Daschle and one other minion) lurked in their backgrounds. Geithner was given a free pass and confirmed by Congress because he was too important not to have the job and because his tax “issues” were the fault of Turbotax—and because he was a Democrat, of course. Hildebeest, the new Secretary of State, took an Asian trip she described as a “listening tour” (said the New York Times). There she was asked by a “giggly” Korean girl about “how she knew when she had fallen in love with her husband,” (that would be the legendary Sick Willie), but the Times opted not to present her answer. In Tokyo, the Times reported, she was asked by a “nervous” young woman how she might become as strong as she (Hildebeest) was. “Well,” the Times said she replied, “I played a lot of baseball and I played with a lot of boys.” In Indonesia, Hildy met with more “giggling” students and was a guest on an Indonesian variety show where she talked about teenage pop culture. Obama’s new attorney general, Clintonista pardonmeister Eric Holder, accused Americans of being “a nation of cowards” for not discussing race more often. Janet Napolitano, the former leftwing governor of Arizona and newly-named Homeland Security chieftain, announced in testimony before Congress in February that the nation would not be using the word “terrorism” anymore, but instead would call terrorism “man-induced disaster.” She also said “September 11” and “vulnerability” were being stricken from her vocabulary, and from her department’s. The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ plan to toughen its identification requirements for issuing and renewing state driver’s licenses brought forth—man, this caught us be surprise!—the usual howls of rage from the Left. The BMV wants applicants to present a birth certificate or a passport, two pieces of proof that they live in Indiana, and their Social Security card to prove who they are and where they live. Allegations of racism, discrimination, outrageous human rights violations, and the like are pouring forth. The League of Women Voters claims the new rules are unfair and will make it more difficult for the poor and the elderly and the disadvantaged (code for: Democrat constituents) to cast their ballots. Watch for the ACLU, ACORN, and other Democrat front organizations to join in the legal battle to block these new rules. The U.S. Supreme Court has already upheld Indiana’s voter ID law (The Democrat Party sued over that, and lost), but that doesn’t stop lefties from suing and suing and suing again, and amending their suits and refiling them when they lose in the first attempts. Eventually they will find the judge and court they need, and prevail. (July 22, 2009) Best News Of The Summer, So Far . . . The legendary and potentially unethical William Jefferson, a Democrat and former Louisiana congressman, was found guilty by a federal court jury on 11 of 16 bribery counts as July closed—the most publicized of which involved an FBI sting at his apartment in Wonderland, D.C., which yielded about $100,000 in cash—alleged to be intended as a bribe to the vice president of Nigeria—found wrapped in aluminum foil in his freezer. His leftie apologists hollered racism, called it all lies, lies, lies. His attorney told jurors Jefferson might have been “potentially unethical” but was certainly no criminal, adding that Jefferson was a “victim” of over-zealous prosecutors. Only the delusional bought in. All that remains is to pack this dirtbag off to prison. (July 29, 2009) No, This Is No. 1!! The vile and execrable Senator from Chappaquiddick, Edward M. Kennedy, died today at age 77. If there were any justice in the world, he would have spent the last few decades of his life in prison, and he would be buried in his 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 upside down on the bottom of the tidal channel on Chappaquiddick Island in the exact spot where he abandoned his youthful (she was 28) intern, Mary Jo Kopechne, to drown on the night of July 18,1969. But there is no justice in this travesty, and so we will endure the spectacle of the world’s swells, smarts and chics trooping in to be seen at the funeral and keening and moaning graveside. No matter what they say, the world is a better place with Teddy out of it. (August 28, 2009) “Bellowing on the Senate floor about the meanness, duplicity, cruelty, power-hunger, hypocrisy, and general indecency of Republicans, he was simultaneously understood by the public to be a negligent husband, a serial adulterer, a liar, and a drunk. Maybe the moral exhibitionism in his political life was compensation for the rapacity of his private life. It certainly saved him with the many Democrats who continued to lionize him.”—Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, in an essay on the late Democrat Senator from Chappaquiddick, Edward Kennedy, in the magazine’s September 28, 2009, issue. (October, 2009) “Extremist Mobs” (Democratic National Committee); “pawns of the insurance industry” (Dick Durbin); “Un-American” (Nancy Pelosi); “Un-American” (Steny Hoyer); “Brownshirts” (Rep. Brian Baird, state of Washington); “manufactured” and “Astroturf” (White House press secretary Robert Gibbs); “Evilmongers” (Harry Reid); “fear-mongering” (Barack Obama); “Political Terrorists” (Rep. Baron Hill, Indiana)—List of epithets offered by Democrats to characterize Obamacare critics who made such an awful noise during town hall meetings across the country during the August Congressional recess. (From The Weekly Standard, September 15, 2009 edition). Cheryl Jones of Tobaccoville, North Carolina, has written the editor of USA Today with a truly dangerous insight. Responding to an article about President Obama’s claim we can fund his Obamacare national health industry takeover by uprooting and eliminating billions of dollars of fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid programs, Cheryl noted that, by golly, there’s something mighty odd here: Medicare and Medicare are both gub’mint-run programs, and the President and his lefty friends want to get rid of fraud and waste in both in order to start another federal program run by the same danged old gub’mint which allowed all that fraud and waste in the first place. “You cannot be serious,” Cheryl wrote. But, alas, they are. Still, Cheryl seems one of the few Americans who’ve noticed this. A day or two later another troublemaker wrote to the Indianapolis Star to note that lefties are ever so fond of excoriating industry and business for “unconscionable profits” (a locally-based healthcare company was cited in a recent story as making a 4 percent profit) but have been utterly silent on a news report that the Indiana Lottery, a gub’mint-run business, returns 61 percent of its revenue to lottery players and keeps 26 percent as profit. (September 30, 2009) Something Else Lefties Can’t Blame on Dubya The gub’nor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, was a featured speaker last weekend in Chicago at a big business poohbah conference. Word had just broken that the Olympics selection committee had turned down Chicago’s bid for the 2016 games, and done it insultingly. When Daniels stepped to the podium, he said, “What’s this world coming to, when Chicago can’t even fix an election?” Perfect. (October 4, 2009) George Will had the most insightful comment of any I saw after the Obamas flew over to Copenhagen to make separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee trying to convince it to award the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. Will wrote, “Of the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronoun “I” or “me” 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences was sufficient to convey the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago’s case compelling . . . Perhaps the premise of this otherwise inexplicable trip to Denmark was that there is no difficulty, foreign or domestic, that cannot be melted by the sunshine of the Obama persona.” Soon after their appearance, the committee eliminated Chicago on the first vote, and ultimately settled on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as the host. (October 7, 2009) There Must Be Something Wonderful In The Water Down in South Carolina! “You lie!” –Joe Wilson, a Republican Congressman from South Carolina, during the President’s speech supporting the left’s pending health care legislation. Wilson shouted this right after Obama denied that pending legislation would give free medical care to illegal immigrants. (September 9, 2009) The Financial Times reported in September that in the wake of the savings and loan crisis in the early 1990s, over 1,850 banking executives were prosecuted, and 1,072 were jailed, but that only a handful of miscreants have been prosecuted to date for their roles in the late 2008 meltdown of the financial system. A mere oversight, surely. Oslo Euroweenies Just Love Insulting Us Somewhere in all this grotesqueness, they gave Barack Obama a Nobel Peace prize—not for achievements, but for thinking and talking about peace (this was confirmed by the committee in Oslo). The reaction of many was disbelief, but it quickly became apparent the Nobel Committee was not joking. Obama thus joins Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Kofi Annan and Yassir Arafat on the list of the most preposterous recipients—of almost anything--in history. The award is meaningless if this is all the better they can do. Adding to the disgrace, Obama had been in office only 12 days before the February 1 deadline for nominations. (October 9, 2009) Back to top Don’t Forget The Trash America First Speeches in The UN and Russia . . . “I’m not sure what the international community loved best: his waffling on Afghanistan, pulling defense missiles out of Eastern Europe, turning his back on freedom fighters in Honduras, coddling Castro, siding with Palestinians against Israel, or almost getting tough on Iran.”—Gresham Barrett, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, commenting in an Associated Press story about the Nobel Peace Prize given to Barack Obama. (October 9, 2009) At Last, An American President Who Meets Europe’s Standards . . . “The award of the Nobel Appeasement Prize to President Barack Obama is well deserved. His record is replete with accommodation: his refusal to send defensive missiles to Poland, leaving that nation vulnerable to Russian hegemony; negotiating directly with an illegitimate Iranian regime; badgering Israel while Hamas and Hezbollah reload for their ongoing holocaust campaign; and, most recently, welcoming the Taliban into the political and cultural destruction of Afghanistan. This is what Europe has been looking for in a U.S. president. And thus he wins the Swedish prize for disengagement and retreat.”—Gary L. Shaw, Indianapolis, in a letter to the editor of the Indianapolis Star. (October 20, 2009) Preposterosity, Raised To The Googol Power Pundits and wisecrackers—ever’ danged last one of them practicing The Politics of Personal Destruction---had a field day with the Obama prize. The Internet quickly plugged up with absurdist—but thoroughly believable—jokes about other awards the president had just won. Some were retroactive, like the Olympic Gold Medal he got for watching the Olympics on television, the Emmy he got for a guest appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the NCAA basketball championship trophy and ring he got for playing Midnight Basketball last winter. Cartoonists weighed in waspishly, too. Columnist Cal Thomas pointed out one of the simplest insights—though lefties don’t seem to get it--into human experience: “The Nobel Committee apparently believes that by diplomatically saying, ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance,’ evil people will study war no more and be so impressed by our intentions they will lay down their arms . . . the peace prize concept is flawed because the problem of war does not lie with those who would make peace, but with those who would make war. If the Nobel Committee were realistic, it would stop handing out peace prizes and start issuing awards to those who have confronted evil and produced peace . . . ” Thomas cited Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II who confronted and eventually brought down Soviet Communism, and Bill Clinton for his efforts in stabilizing Bosnia, as people who actually did something about peace, instead of just thinking and talking about it. (October 14, 2009) Newtie weighed in with the observation that he wasn’t surprised that Obama won a Nobel Prize for no accomplishments—after all, American voters gave him the presidency based on the same resume. (October 25, 2009) A-Jad’s Roots! “ . . . the London Daily Telegraph (has) found documents indicating that the Iranian president (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) and notorious Holocaust denier has Jewish roots. Ahmadinejad’s family changed its name from Sabourjian, a Jewish name meaning ‘cloth weaver,’ when it converted to Islam after his birth.” –News Report from The Week magazine, on page 6 of its October 16, 2009, issue. The Daily Telegraph article was printed October 2, 2009. “ . . . sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other.”—Irving Kristol, writing about American liberalism in 1993, quoted in the Spring, 2009 issue of Claremont Review of Books. Oooooh . . . Too Much Transparency! The prestigious London-based magazine, The Economist, reports in its October 10, 2009, issue that a Gallup poll shows that, on average, American citizens believe that 50 cents of every dollar spent by the government is wasted. Even Democrats, whose faith in big government is unbounded, say that 41 cents is wasted. Republicans put the number at 54 cents, and Independents say it’s 55 cents. (October 14, 2009 It can only be a matter of time before some big league baseball player sues to establish his sacred right to wear his cap backwards. He will win, too. (October 16, 2009) Republican candidates won governor races in New Jersey and Virginia on November 3, and lefties continued their mantra that these results really meant nothing, and were certainly no referendum on The One, The Redeemer, or his magnificent presidency. Righties should resist the temptation to think their victories mean anything, or that they’ve even won. For one thing, there’s still plenty of time for Dems to file lawsuits, and to hunt for those lost satchels of absentee ballots (Jimbo Carville, who is still in darkest Florida counting ballots from the 2000 presidential election, would be perfect to lead this search!). There was an unconfirmed rumor, too, that approximately 5,500 busloads of illegals, being hauled to Democrat precincts by ACORN, were somehow shunted off the freeways shortly after entering New Jersey, and became hopelessly lost. If they can be rounded up again, the ACLU is said to be ready to sue on their behalf for being denied their right to vote whenever—and, of course wherever-- they can be found by a Democrat election official. Let’s wait. It’s too early to be celebrating. (November 4, 2009) Lefties kept swearing the GOP victories meant nothing, but one of every four voters polled in Virginia said they cast their ballot specifically to register disapproval of Obama policies. (The Economist magazine, November 7, 2009) The Most Recent Unpleasantness Said To Have Involved A Terrorist-Induced Disaster, the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, has flushed lefties howling out of their burrows. They’re criticizing The Army for failing to act—to have done something, for god’s sake—on evidence it had that the alleged perp, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was an angry and radical Muslim who sent many clues that he was about to blow. Here’s the truth about that: If the Army had so much as blinked an eye at the Muslim major, Democrats and their fellow travelers would have lambasted them for profiling and for racial, religious, and ethnic discrimination, and the ACLU would have sued. A suffocating climate of political correctness, spawned and nurtured by liberals, has brought us to this point, and the Left’s hypocrisy about it is towering. (November 15, 2009) Obama’s decision to bring the 9/11 Gitmo terrorist detainees to New York for trial in the civilian court system is peculiar only for the willfully delusional. The whole thing is a set-up to trash the Bush Administration, and then to let the bad guys skate free. First, the standard for evidence is higher in a civilian court. The defendants will be able to ask for a jury trial, and that will open the door for radical left advocacy groups to argue—and they will--that a jury of their peers means Muslim jihadists must serve on the jury. The defendants will also be entitled to access to all evidence the government has gathered against them, regardless of its origin. This will force the government to make public huge amounts of highly sensitive and secret information, which will be of great value to terrorists worldwide. If the government does not wish to release this information, it may refuse to surrender some or all of it, and thus all but guarantee a mistrial, and freedom for the bad guys. The trial will also provide terrorism a worldwide propaganda forum, and present horrendous security problems for New York City. Behind all this are the president and his attorney general, Eric Holder, and the whole rabid tribe of Bush-hating crazies. This is going to be a sad and grim experience for our country, but a bonanza for its enemies. (November 16, 2009) Too Transparent For Comfort “There are 237 millionaires in the U. S. Senate and House of Representatives. That’s 44 per cent of all members of Congress. One percent of the public at large are millionaires” –The Week magazine, November 20, 2009. Better To Banish The Entire Family From Planet Earth The Roman Catholic Bishop of Rhode Island asked Democrat Congressman Patrick Kennedy in 2007 to stop receiving communion because of the congressman’s stance on moral issues, principally involving abortion. Kennedy confirmed this November 21, 2009, when the issue flared again in connection with the health care bill the Dems are trying to ram through Congress. (November 22, 2009) The Redeemer’s narcissism is already legendary and he hasn’t even finished his first year in office. November brought two more beautiful examples: 1) during a trip to Japan he described himself as “America’s first Pacific president”; (2) in a two-and-a-half minute radio address he gave in lieu of personally traveling to Germany to join others in observing the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Obama mentioned himself as linked to human destiny but failed to mention Ronald Regan or Margaret Thatcher or Pope John Paul, who were instrumental in bringing about the event and the subsequent collapse of Soviet Communism. Numerous dangerous groups are working to get out the facts and the truth regarding climate and temperatures. One of them, led by meteorologist Anthony Watts, has used hundreds of volunteers to personally visit, inspect, and photograph over 850 of the 1221 climate monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, where “official” temperatures are recorded for the United States. What did they find? “We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat,” Watts said. “In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations (inspected) . . .fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own requirements” for siting such stations. Watts and others claim that global warming advocates preferentially use sites affected by these “heat island effects” in their computations, and that the Weather Service does not adjust its records to account for these siting problems. Watts’ report--Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?--is available for free download at www.globalwarmingheartland.org, or may be ordered at www.heartland.org until Weird Al and Friends hack and destroy the websites. (December 1, 2009). Another website pressing for the truth about alleged global-warming is www.petitionproject.org. It’s been around many years, and is massively documented with information about peer reviews, funding sources, and other embarrassing matters. (December 7, 2009) Imagine That! (The Gibbsian Memory Bank, Erased!) The president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, blundered into deep, deep water November 6, when he said to eager reporters at the White House, “Imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler . . . . ” Well, at least one reporter could. He ran back to his office (at The Weekly Standard magazine), dug into the files, and found 56 photographs taken at anti-Bush protest rallies “just a few years ago,” each poster pairing Bush and Hitler or bearing swastikas, or photos of Bush embellished with a Hitler mustache or Nazi military uniform. The magazine printed all of them on a full page in its November 23, 2009, issue. Beautiful. The ambush assassination of four police officers in Seattle last week eventually brought us the background news that the murderer, one Maurice Clemmons, had been “pardoned” about nine years ago from a 108-year prison sentence by then Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, the guy who ran for president as a Republican in the 2008 primary elections. This wasn’t quite correct: Huckabee commuted the sentence from 108 years to 47; that made him eligible for parole. The state parole board then pardoned Clemmons and Huckabee signed the pardon recommendation setting him free.) Lefties howled with excitement at this news. Their delight was spiced by memories of how their goofy candidate, Michael Dukakis, was demonized in the 1988 election by Republicans, who relentlessly pointed out Dukakis’ record of pardons in Massachusetts. Huckabee is fair game for criticism. He should be strung up alongside the moronic Dukakis—the Right got its pelt; now the Left has one. Although self-promoted as a conservative, Huckabee’s pardon is a time-honored leftist delusion. The cure for this would be to require that all pardoned offenders be required to live in (or next door to) the home of the judge or gub’nor who signs the release order, for a minimum of five years from release date. That would raise the odds of justice when and if the perp reverts to his default position. (December 5, 2009) Government Pays Better Than Most Crime With more than 15 million Americans out of work, life inside the Wonderland Beltway roars on. A report in the December 31, 2009, issue of National Review notes that the federal bureaucracy in the last 12 months has added 13,000 jobs and the number of gub’mint employees making over $100,000 annually has doubled. The average federal worker is paid $71,206 (this does not include an estimated $41,000 in non-salary benefits) while the average private-sector employee earns $40,331. This is what they do to us while we sleep. (December 31, 2009) Congress And The White House Excepted, Of Course “ . . . three generations of imbeciles are enough.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Judge, writing in the majority opinion (8-1) in Buck v. Bell (1927). Holmes was in the majority upholding a compulsory sterilization law in Virginia. Weird Al Is Absolutely Magnificent Lefties had to swallow hard again when the surpassingly silly Copenhagen global warming crisis summit collapsed with next to nothing accomplished. Delegates returned to their hundreds of countries and spun like crazy. A story erupted from purloined e-mails from some of the “scientists,” revealing how they had shaded wording and manipulated data to support their claims. The year-end edition of The National Review offered a pithy summary, capped by this truly beautiful snapshot of the delusional Al Gore at work: “Al Gore clocked in with the best attempt to wish this story away, telling Slate, “I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old.” Gore repeated this falsehood three times. Slate had to append a correction: Many of the e-mails were written in this decade, the most recent one in 2009. Gore got his facts wrong again when he told a crowd in Copenhagen that one climatologist had predicted a 75 per cent chance that the polar ice caps would be completely melted in five to seven years. When told of Gore’s claim, the climatologist in question said that he predicted the caps would melt a lot, but not completely.” (December 31, 2009) The Redeemer’s first year? He succeeded in his campaign for office to the extent that he prevented us from knowing about him. His popularity has declined in his first year in office to the extent that he has become known and the masks dropped. He is today what he was as a candidate in 2008: smooth as silk, glib, quick, and clever, but with woefully deficient credentials. Year one has shown him to be what many knew long before: an ideologue. There is a reason why he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate and spent chunks of his life in the company of the likes of The Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. He is inexperienced and naïve. He gave away the first year of his presidency by turning over his signature piece, the healthcare bill, to his radical friends—Pelosi and Reid—in Congress. He exercised terrible leadership by letting them write the legislation, saying little more than “toss something on my desk by August and I’ll sign it.” He is arrogant, and oblivious, and has poor judgment. He is, as Rush Limbaugh has noted, the most inexperienced man in any room he enters. He is petulant childish, and in over his head. He has plenty of time to change all this, and have a successful presidency. It will take a serious re-make of the man, though, and I doubt he is capable of it. (December 31, 2009) The Redeemer’s attorney general, Eric Holder, is my nominee for the most evil and dangerous man loose in public life today.
©2010 Twitfits.com

Scoundrels, Knaves, and Fools