Nine years and still lying -- what a sad tribute to the victims of 9/11

This was in today's Toronto Star:

Obama described with admiration how former President George W. Bush drew a “crystal-clear” line between the attackers of Al Qaeda and the immense religion they purported to represent.

Bush helped Americans understand “we were at war with terrorists and murderers who had perverted Islam, had stolen its banner to carry out their outrageous acts,” said Obama.

“And I was so proud of the country rallying around that idea, that notion that we are not going to be divided by religion; we're not going to be divided by ethnicity ... It is absolutely important now for the overwhelming majority of the American people to hang on to that thing which is best in us, a belief in religious tolerance ... we have to make sure we don't start turning on each other.”

Nine years and counting and they still do not get it:

1) The Islamists who brought down the World Trade Centre did not "steal" Islam and did not "pervert" it. The religious prescription for waging jihad against the enemies of Allah (i.e. non-believers) is as authentic in the Islamic holy lexicon as "turning the other cheek" is in Christianity. And it is not a few of these; the estimated number of Islamists worldwide is nearly 5 times the entire population of Canada.

2) Belief in religious tolerance does not provide a moral obligation to allow religious intolerance to be suborned. Islam is not a tolerant religion. When the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defence of the United States have to appeal to an obscure nutbar in Florida to desist from his announced intention to burn Korans lest dire consequences flow around the world in Muslim countries why would the same people be castigating Americans to be tolerant.

3) Just because you may not consider yourself at war with Islam does not mean that Islam may not be at war with you.

As long as the political leaders in the western world continue to lie and obfuscate the real problem that has become more and more evident to the ordinary people that these leaders are duty bound to protect, they will continue to slide down the slope of untrustworthiness. One would think they would start changing their tunes if for no other reason than to retain political position.

The ever-popular populism

------------------------------LINDA McCUAIG ------------------------

The lesson for today class is on “populism”.

The idea for this lesson was triggered by an unintentionally funny column in today’s Toronto Star, by leftist writer, Linda McCuaig. She is commenting on the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, taking the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in the state of Massachusetts.

McCuaig says:

It's the notion that he's a populist that sticks in my craw.
It's his alleged populism that led to his dramatic upset win last week in Ted Kennedy's old seat.

Right-wingers like Brown hide the elitism of their agenda by presenting themselves as ordinary working types, as truck-driving, gun-toting folk who may have just slaughtered something with their bare hands in the back shed.

Right-wingers can’t be populists? Where does that come from?

Populism is not the prerogative of either the left or the right. It is an expression, articulated by a leader or would-be leader, of the aspirations of the people.

It works like this. The candidate licks his or her finger and sticks it up in the air to see which way the wind is blowing in politics and then says, “If that is the direction the people are marching, then, by golly, I am going to run to the front of the parade, grab the marshal’s baton, and lead them.”

Certainly, during his election campaign I would have pegged Barack Obama as a populist with all his appeals to hope and change and a New Jerusalem for the United States. But that would be OK for McCuaig, because Obama is clearly a leftie, so he owns the turf, according to her.

She says:

After being elected with a mandate for change, Barack Obama has seemed powerless to change much, continuing the giveaways and deference to Wall Street.
No wonder the people are in revolt.

Stung by Brown's victory, Obama moved last week to recapture some populist ground, announcing previously stalled plans to bring in tough new banking regulations.

Interesting, since the very first thing Obama demonstrated when he nailed the office of President is that he is anything but a populist. He is of the powerful elite class (Columbia, Harvard) and associates himself with other powerful elites. His picks for cabinet posts showed that. And, after all, if you are going to count Warren Buffet as one of your important advisers, how populist can you be?

The Pew Research Center just released its findings on the political concerns of the American people. Here is the chart from that report.


Obama has so far struck out on the economic recovery, which is the top priority of Americans. Ditto for jobs, the second most important concern. He has failed on the terrorism front (Fort Hood, Detroit), the third highest category.

He hasn’t done anything on social security and his education initiatives, whatever they might be, are still in the starting gate. The confusing health care bill appears to be damaging Medicare, or at least, is putting it in some doubt.

Deficit reduction ranks ahead of health care and the military ranks ahead of health insurance. Financial regulation is way down the list and, coming in dead last, is global warming.

So, the President is focused on things like global warming, reforming health care, and financial regulation, and appears to be paying no attention to deficit reduction which ranks as the seventh most important thing on a list of 21 concerns. In fact, on deficits, he seems to be going in the opposite direction, which can only make this issue climb farther up the list of importance.

He is marching in the opposite direction to the people and leading his own parade of elites.

Simply attacking big banks is not going to recapture populist sentiment for Obama when financial regulation ranks so low in order of importance.

Anyway, why does McCuaig think populism is such an important agenda?

About Brown, she says:

Meanwhile, beware of truck-driving centerfolds in sheep's clothing. Underneath that buff populist skin may be just another wily wolf working for Wall Street.

Or, one might add, beware of populists who are working for things other than Wall Street.

Here are four pictures of famous populists. The first two were lefties and the last two were right-wingers. Can you name them? Hints - the last one was a Republican and the second last was a Democrat.




The lesson really is to beware of populism period.

A Bronx Cheer for the big guy at the end of the aughts

It is customary at the end of a year to reflect on the events of that year and what we might have learned from them, for better or for worse. The same sort of exercise applies to the end of a decade. Often media writes these reflections up as the most “newsworthy” stories, etc. Since media claims to be the gatekeeper of news, this is kind of a poor man’s Academy Award show, where industry insiders pat themselves on the back for their picks.

I am a blogger, so screw MSM. I’ll sort my way through the decade.

With respect to the past year, I would say that climate science gets the top billing.

First, we had the Copenhagen conference, two years in the planning, which was supposed to set the stage for an embryonic world government to deal with planetary resources. By any measure it completely failed. It was probably the last gasp of something Maurice Strong put in motion 30 years ago.

Many of the same sad bunch will meet in Mexico City next year, but it won’t hold a candle to the promise that was to be Copenhagen.

Second, we had the leaked or hacked e-mails from the climate science top dogs who admitted to themselves, if not to us, that the science is anything but settled. Leaving aside the career jealousies and the attempts to control the peer review process that were evident in these 2,000 pages of e-mails, they puzzled over the hiatus in warming for the past decade, had no explanation for it, admitted it did not fit the theory, and began to doubt their own analysis and the data behind it. They clearly demonstrated that they had really no idea why the world of the past warmed or cooled, having dismissed ice core samples as being imprecise and having trouble making tree ring data fit the theory as well.

I am told relentlessly by fans of AGW that the medieval warm period is irrelevant, and in any case, we don’t know enough about it, and that all that matters is the dramatic rise in the past century of CO2. This is unprecedented they tell me.

How do we know, I say, when we don’t anything reliable about the past? Logic fails here for reasons I get into later.

What also fails to knock these folks off their game is that the temperature and the CO2 have not been consistent. For periods in the past century, including the last decade, the temperature has not been inexorably rising as the AGW says it should since the CO2 has been unalterably rising.

I would say that many more people believed the AGW hypothesis than disbelieved it at the beginning of this decade and, at the end of the decade, these numbers have reversed, with more disbelieving it than believing it. This will have political consequences.

During this decade, I would say religion was the most important driver in world affairs. And by that I mean religion in its broadest sense, including the religion of global warming.

We started the decade believing a new era of reason, science and rationalism would prevail. Not more than a year passed and we saw religious zealots of Islamic persuasion carry out audacious suicide attacks on the cities of New York and Washington.

One of the fallouts from these attacks was the new stringent security rules that air travelers were subjected to before they could board airplanes. At the end of the decade, yet another in a long line of Islamic attempts at murder by aircraft in Detroit has led to even more onerous impositions on air travelers.

So, on behalf of all civilian aviation, let’s give Mohammed a big Bronx cheer.

One of the things that began to dawn on western societies during this decade was the impact of Islam, not just in Islamic countries, but in the heart of western civilization. We have not yet found a way to effectively deal with this foreign political-religio philosophy and I expect the next decade will see us increasingly absorbed by that issue.

One of the things that has become clearer near the end of the decade, however, is that, like the doubts that have begun to permeate over the certainty of climate science, the rose-coloured lenses that viewed Islam as “one of the world’s great religions” and a “religion of peace” have cracked and fallen away.

In Europe, the people are either voting with their feet, leaving for non-European western nations, or are organizing populist political parties that take aim at Islam as a menace. The political establishment in Europe is on shaky ground having spent its political capital during the decade appeasing and propping up Muslims while simultaneously suppressing nascent European nationalism. Its cupboard is nearly bare and I would expect to see the old guard swept away in future elections by those who do not wish to see the Islamification of Europe. After all, there are still many more Europeans who vote than Islamists and they know they will have to act politically soon while they still can.

The outcome will not be pretty.

Australia has shown some muscle in dealing with the issue, but Canada appears to be still very much asleep at the switch.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Americans have elected an anachronism to the highest office. Just as the rest of the world begins to march down a different path opposing Islam, President Obama runs around the planet praising the religion to the skies, misrepresenting it in the process, and promising to defend the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab, ignoring the right of Muslim women not to wear the hijab.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that his efforts are viewed by the Islamic world as weakness, and by even some of the jellyfish European politicians as foolish, and by the American public as misguided.

The day after the Fort Hood massacre, Obama cautioned the public not to jump to conclusions. Three days after the attempt to blow up the airplane in Detroit he has not said anything to the American public. Air travel in the United States is in complete turmoil, but not a word directly from the President. Perhaps if the news stories had been framed, not as another Muslim terrorist at it again, but as white people arresting a black man on board an airplane, he would be inclined to be more loquacious.

Unless he shifts ground within the next year, he will probably suffer the worst fate a President can endure; he will lose his moral authority to govern.

The irrelevance of Copenhagen and the relevance of the burka

If you ever wondered whether the world-wide meeting in Copenhagen this week has any relevance to the real world, this news story from Politico.com should sort that out for you pretty quickly.

COPENHAGEN –Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe plan to address negotiators at international climate talks in Copenhagen next week.


The three leaders are listed in a line-up of more than 180 government officials published in a United Nations schedule of speakers. Each head of state will have up to three minutes to address roughly 700 delegates, reporter, observers and civil society groups.


The assistant president of Sudan, Nafie Ali Nafie kicks off the speeches at noon on Wednesday.


Nafie chairs the G-77 group, a block of developing nations pushing hard for more money and stricter emissions cuts from rich countries.


Mostapha Zaher, director-general of Afghanistan's Environmental Protection Agency, is listed as the final speaker. He’ll take the podium slightly before 2 a.m. next Friday.


Other leaders addressing the conference include everyone from Saad Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon, to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.


Roughly 110 world leaders plan to attend the talks, an unprecedented number for a climate conference. Typically, only a handful of top leaders attend the negotiations. President Barack Obama is expected at the meeting on Friday.

Note that the speakers are limited to 3 minutes each. The Iranian leader was limited to 15 minutes at the United Nations and went on and on and on for 40 minutes without interference from the Chair. With Mugabe and Chavez scheduled as well, look for more CO2 to be spewed into the atmosphere than is produced in this country in one year. I would like to see any of these three limit themselves to 3 minutes.

You may be wondering why I led off with the picture. It is a woman in the U.S. midwest who is dressed to deal with the deep freeze that is currently setting new temperature lows in North America as a result of global warming. I included the picture because I have been opposed to the Burka, but I think I may have discovered a practical use for this garment in combatting the intense cold caused by global warming.

'Nuff said

What's this war for?

In a recent column by Tarek Fatah in The National Post, he says we have lost the war in Afghanistan, we should acknowledge defeat and we should bring home our troops now before any more of them are killed.

I don’t agree with him.

I normally have a lot of time for Fatah. He is one of a handful of Muslims who calls for the reform of the religion. For his efforts, he and his family have been threatened with death by other Muslims.

Fatah is the author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, a book that has been reasonably well-received by the public and was a runner-up in the 2009 Donner Prize for the best books on Canadian public policy. The book discredits the notion of a world-wide Caliphate from an historical perspective.

However, this column is the most defeatist I have ever read. If he had written this kind of thing in 1942 about the war with the Axis Powers, he probably would have been locked up for sedition.

Fatah says:

We have lost the war. The Islamist jihadis have won it. We must acknowledge defeat and bring our troops home.

In a war between those who desire death and those who treasure their RRSPs and IRAs, the outcome is predictable. Canadian soldiers are professional, but mission-less armies have never fared well on the battlefield. American soldiers, who enlist primarily with the objective of obtaining a college degree, will never be able to defeat their counterparts, who view their freshman year as starting in paradise on the banks of rivers of milk and honey surrounded by 72 virgins.

This is hyperbole, of course, because there are many Americans who did not enlist for a free ride into college, but to avenge 9/11 and to do what the American military exists to do; i.e., keep the country secure.

We are told that we are involved in an “asymmetrical” war and that different strategies and tactics need to be employed if we are to “win” it. Asymmetrical is just a fancy name for guerrilla warfare and guerilla wars have been won; the British in South Africa, Kenya and Malaya, as examples. The more recent one is the defeat of the Tamil Tigers by the government of Sri Lanka.

However, those conflicts were carried out in confined geographical territories, where the combatants on the other side did not have easy access to outside material support, or had little room to maneuver, and where the victorious party could effectively bottle them up in less and less defendable territory.

The problem with the war against radical Islam is that it recruits its “soldiers” from everywhere, including our own country, and it can supply them from a bottomless armory of small arms and explosives, available mainly through the helpful manufacturing and distribution by the very governments who send their armies to fight these zealots.

So, just as the military needs to think differently about how it combats non-state agents of a death cult, we, the people, need to consider redefining what we mean by defeat and victory. Sometimes a victory is merely keeping somebody at bay.

Did we experience a victory over the Soviet Union like we did over Germany and Japan? Clearly not. But we defeated it just the same. We contained its expansion and it eventually imploded.

That is how we need to think about victory with respect to radical Islam. Keep it off balance, bottle it up, interdict it wherever it appears, and discredit it at all times. As long as Islam lives, the death cult will never go away, but it can be contained and its harmful effects minimized.

I agree with Fatah that we should bring home the troops, but only when our commitment to Afghanistan ends in 2011. The Islamists will crow about it, but we accomplished what we set out to do which was to disrupt al Qaeda and chase away the Taliban government.

In the future, we should not set ourselves lofty goals of bringing democracy to these backwater Islamic states. We should just interfere enough to derail any emerging threats and then let them sort out their own messes. The strategy is containment and successful containment is a victory. Had we identified this goal early on, we would have withdrawn from Afghanistan long ago and not found ourselves in the current quagmire of endless warfare.

Israel employs such a strategy with its neighbours. It fights them when necessary, inflicts a military beating, without complete conquest, and then goes back to the status quo. It is instructive that Lebanon’s belligerent Nasrallah declared war on Israel in 2006 in support of Hamas’s dustup with the Jewish state and got such a bloody nose from that encounter that he stayed well away from its re-run in 2008.

Although I disagree with Fatah about claiming a defeat and running home now, I do agree with this sentiment.

In the U. S., a bumbling President who knows the threat of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood ideology very well still bends over backwards and welcomes the bearers of this doctrine into his inner circle.

Imagine fighting the U. S. S. R. without confronting the ideology of Stalinism. Could we have won? Not a chance. Today we are fighting Islamist jihad-ism, yet neither Obama nor the British PM nor Harper or Ignatieff dare utter one word against the ideology that attacked us all on 9/11. So what is this war for?

We have to have a clearer idea of the enemy we are fighting and who our real friends and allies are in the Islamic world.

Silly little men and their self-importance

The current Labour government of the United Kingdom is a pathetic excuse for a government. Labour is traditionally not supportive of the monarchy, but the latest flip of the bird to her Maj really takes the cake.

It appears that the government of France is planning a big ceremony to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy by allied forces on June 6, 1944. This was the beginning of the liberation of France, and ultimately Europe, from the Nazis. When I say allied forces I am referring to Americans, the British and the Canadians. The Americans came ashore at beaches named Omaha and Utah. The British landed at Sword and Gold. The Canadians took Juno beach.

But, the President of France, who appears to be desperate to kiss Barack Obama’s ass, has only invited the Americans to the celebration. Now, Obama would be the first to fall all over himself to remind everybody that he wasn’t even born in 1944, so don’t blame him for American casualties on those beaches. Neither was French President Sarkozy.

In fact, the only head of state in this quartet that actually was alive in 1944 and participated in the relieve of bombing victims in London and worked on repairing military vehicles during the Second World War is Queen Elizabeth. She would like to attend but protocol requires that she be invited. She cannot ask, but she can indicate that if she were asked she would be happy to attend. The signals were given, but Sarkozy did not respond. He did however invite the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, when Brown said he would like to come.

I think I am fairly safe in saying that any surviving veterans who attend the occasion couldn’t give a rat’s ass if Gordon Brown showed up, but would be tickled pink to see the Queen. Brown should do the decent thing, if any Labour politician knows what those words mean, and press Sarkozy to invite the Queen, and, if he fails to do so, not attend himself.

The Queen represents a generation who understood noblesse oblige. We are now governed by lesser people whose grasp of history and ceremony is negligible.

Let us hope that Obama has passed the stage where he thinks DVDs and iPods make swell gifts to other heads of state. Let us also hope that Sarkozy can overcome his obvious inferiority complex in Obama’s presence.

The end of an era -- what wll the "Obama Doctrine" look like

A few months ago there was a lot of bumpf going on in the media about whether Obama would emulate Franklin Roosevelt.

Roosevelt kept the U.S. out of World War Two until 1942. Canada was at war in 1939. Roosevelt supported Canada in the war before America got into it by buiding warplanes, parking them at the border, and allowing Canadians to cross over and tow them across into Canadian territory.

Last night one of the nostalgic A.M. radio stations played a tape of Bob Hope entertaining Canadian soldiers at Camp Borden in Ontario in 1944. Hope sang his famous "Thanks for the Memories" theme song with the lyrics alterted to praise the alliance between Canada and the U.S. and to remark on the "open" border between the two countries.

Although Hope has since passed from the scene, Canada is still involved in military alliances with the United States, NATO, NORAD and in joint command operations in Afghanistan.

This story appeared this morning courtesy of Canadian Press.

WASHINGTON -- A senior official in the Obama administration doused hopes yesterday that the Canadian border will be treated differently than the beefed-up Mexican boundary where drug violence is escalating.

"One of the things that we need to be sensitive to is the very real feelings among southern border states and in Mexico that if things are being done on the Mexican border, they should also be done on the Canadian border," Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, told a Canada-U.S. border conference.

She also said there would be no further delay of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which will require adults entering the United States from Canada to present a passport as of June 1. "It is a real border and we need to address it as a real border," she said.

If this is a true reflection of the current state of Obamaland thinking about international cooperation, then I think he will come to resemble the 5th President, James Monroe, who is best remembered for the "Monroe Doctrine" advising Europeans to stay out of America's back yard, except in this case, we are the Europeans.

It seems that military alliances no longer have the mystique they used to have.

Obama demonstrates the problem of negotiating against yourself

I used to negotiate collective agreements with labour unions. I took courses in negotiations and communications to improve my skills and I had a lot of hands-on experience over 25 years.

One of the key things you learn is not to negotiate against yourself. There is a strong tendency to make a unilateral offer in the hope that this will instill a movement from the other side on something it is demanding. This never works. The other party interprets this as weakness, takes the offering, and doubles down on its demands for the rest of its shopping list.

One of the best examples internationally was the abandonment of Gaza by Israel, a unilateral move after years of trying to trade land for recognition and peace. Triumphant Palestinian militants claimed victory in their long fight with Israel and promptly promoted two military clashes by bombarding Israel with rockets and kidnapping its soldiers.

We can also see this playing out with President Obama.

First, he gave a television interview to an Arab television network talking about his new deal desires for the Middle East and claiming the U.S. was wrong in its previous policies.

Next, he wrote a letter to the Iranian president saying much the same. The immediate response from Ahmadinejad was that America must first apologize for all its “crimes” against Iran. That is, Obama must do more groveling to Iran – no promise of anything in return, of course.

Obama had already received public criticism for unnecessarily torpedoing long-standing U.S. policy in his television remarks without clearly replacing it. He was told this would have negative consequences. Yet he proceeded with the letter and, guess what, he got the predicted response.

One would have thought by that point a bright, thoughtful chief executive would have considered what his path was yielding and planned it differently; like maybe authorizing secret meetings of senior officials with their Iranian counterparts to explore avenues of cooperation that could be turned into public relations successes and real progress.

That would be a different president than this one, apparently.

He has now ripped a page right out of Osama bin Laden’s playbook and released a video translated into Farsi all about his good wishes for Iran and wanting a handshake and a hug.

And what did this effort yield?

Ahmadinejad’s boss, the Ayatollah Kamenei spoke at a large gathering of the faithful, whose mood was best defined by incessant chanting of “Death to America”, and said that deeds must precede words. In short, Obama must take unilateral steps that favour Iran before Iran will even consider some reciprocity.

Who is advising Obama? Will he listen to anybody, besides the voice in his own head? Let us hope so, because he is clearly naïve.

I worry more about Russia, than I do about Iran. The last time the United States elected a young “hopey-changey” president who went to Berlin and gave inspirational speeches the Russians severely put the U.S. to the test by placing nuclear armed rockets in Cuba. That was a very scary time for those of us who experienced it.

I think it will not be very long, after this Iranian demonstration, that Mr. Putin will be pushing Mr. Obama up against a wall just to see what he is made of.

Colour me puzzled

I am beginning to think Barack Obama is not America’s first black president as much as he is its first chameleon president. His colours change with his background.

His supporters seem mystified by some of the things he is doing, like proposing to carry on the war in Afghanistan and leave a substantial number of troops in Iraq. These people must have been soaring on his rhetoric and not paying much attention to the devil (i.e. the details) because those are the things he said he would do, including attacking Pakistan.

But what puzzles me is some of this other stuff that seems to contradict what he stands for.

Colour me complacent

President”Hopey-Changey Guy” to borrow a conceit from Mark Steyn, was going to provide radically different government from his predecessor. Yet as this story shows, conservatives are really happy with the way he is handling the terrorist file, because he is not in any particular hurry to dismantle the operations set up by George Bush.

Colour me invisible

Not so happy are the tens of thousands of veterans, particularly those who have been physically or mentally damaged, from fighting their country’s battles. President “Fix the Health Care System” intends to offload the financing of their care on the private insurance industry. The problem with the U.S. health care system which he was supposed to fix is the private insurance industry.

Colour me red (either with anger or embarrassment, take your pick)

Then we find that President “Outraged” has instructed his minions to do everything possible to demand that AIG not pay bonuses to its managers. That seems to be a very principled stance, on behalf of U.S. taxpayers. Left off the table, however, is the more than $100,000 AIG contributed to Obama’s election campaign. Some outrage is good, but too much outrage would be over the top, I guess.

The more the Presidents change, the more the rhetoric remains the same

This evening I picked my wife up from work and as we drove home she asked me if I had watched the inauguration of Barack Obama on television. When I responded in the negative she was surprised. She went on about the historical moment when a black man gets the top job, etc.

I thought about my indifference and I suppose it gets down to two things. The first is that the more things are hyped the more suspicious I become of the substance. I am a person who prefers the steak to the sizzle.

We went down this same road in Canada in 1968 when Pierre Elliott Trudeau won the election – all the same razzle-dazzle, all the same over inflated rhetoric about how he was going to change things for the better, etc., etc.

Four years later we wondered what the shouting had been about. The media were still fascinated by him, but all the things that everybody said he would do seemed quaintly naïve.

He was going to curb the Quebec separatists – they became stronger and organized a political party that won the Quebec election. He was going to make us self-sufficient in energy and ended up alienating western Canada so badly that it resulted in the fracturing of the federal conservative party and wrecked healthy democracy in this country for 15 years. He made his name as the former Justice Minister by amending antiquated divorce, marriage and sexual laws and was portrayed as a hip liberal reformer. However, as Prime Minister, he declared the War Measures Act in effect and suspended civil liberties in Canada, rounding up and detaining a rag-tag bunch of lefty socialists in Montreal – measures that a hard-ass like Dick Cheney could only have wet dreams about.

The second thing is that I have spent my life working in and around politics and politicians. I have done everything in politics there is to do except run for public office (and I turned down two opportunities to do that). One of the liabilities of such a resume is that I have listened to more than my share of political speeches. Further, I have written many of them. They bore me. Well, maybe not the ones I write, but all the others.

I turned on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to see what he would do with the inauguration spectacle. He had a hilarious bit in which he played portions of Obama’s speech that were nearly exact replicas of Bush’s rhetoric. No surprise.

It’s what they do that counts, never what they say they are going to do.

Why I will not be jumping up and down and shedding tears of joy over Obama's inaugaration

Today is quite the day. People in the United States and Canada, as well as elsewhere in the world, are celebrating the end of the terms of the 43rd U.S. President and the beginning of the first term of the 44th, Barack Hussein Obama. To me, this will just be another day. Don't get me wrong, I wish him well and hope he is the most successful President that ever occupied the White House. I sincerely hope he can do all the things the faithful think he can do: walk on water, stop oceans from rising, heal the divide, bring world peace, etc., etc. But I am a realist. And the thing that makes me a realist is the realization that how we in the west think about the world is very different from how other people think about it. Obama does not have a rich resume on the international front.

Just as an example of what I am writing about, consider these excepts from the January 16 sermon by Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, chairman of Iran's Guardian Council, aired on Iranian television:

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati: "God bless the President of Venezuela, who enthusiastically and courageously expelled the Israeli ambassador. Shame on the useless Arab rulers who, unlike Venezuela - which is not even an Islamic country - have not severed political ties [with Israel]. Does this cost you anything? Are you afraid of America? You should be afraid, because you lack faith and courage, and your peoples have no respect for you. So why shouldn’t you be afraid? You fear for your positions. You should be afraid.

"But come and join your people. In every country, the people are ready... Of course, the worst are Saudi Arabia and Egypt, because they are the great regional powers.

"When a demonstration took place somewhere in Saudi Arabia, it was silenced. They do not give people room to breathe there. At least in Egypt, there were some [demonstrations], but even there, silence rules. Sometimes we see [Mubarak] obeying America, and sometimes, we see that he is an ally of Israel.

"What is left for the people to do? They should fear the day when the people’s revolution, the rage of God, and the rage of the people grab them by their clothes and drag them down to collapse." [...]


"People Are Truly Amazed When They Watch a President [Obama]... Saying: 'My Only Concern is to Find a Dog For My Daughter'"

"The world is on a steep decline towards collapse. People are truly amazed when they watch a president [Obama] laughing and saying: 'My only concern is to find a dog for my daughter.' Phooey on you and those who voted for you! Is this how it should be? A president is not ashamed to be thinking about a dog, rather than about [the Israeli] foreign minister? This is how it is - they want to rule the world."


"Every Time I See That Woman’s [Livni's] Face, I Wish Somebody Would 'Waste' a Bullet On Her"

"On the other hand, every time I see that woman’s face, I wish somebody would 'waste' a bullet on her. I watched her say... First, she goes and shakes hands with the Egyptian president. Shame on him for shaking a woman’s hand - especially an enemy.

[...]

"I hope that the day will come - as conveyed in a message by our dear leader - when we all celebrate the victory of Hamas in Jerusalem, God willing."

Livini is Israel's Foreign Minister.

Tough to heal a divide with a cleric speaking for the religion of peace who thinks like Jannati.

Thanks to memri for the quotation.

George Jonas's take on Obama's election and democracy

The ever interesting George Jonas has a thought-provoking column in today's National Post.

The Sarah Palin factor

Many conservative pundits are blaming the MSM for John McCain's loss of the presidential race to Barack Obama. There is no doubt that the MSM picked Obama very early on when he became a real contender against Hillary Clinton and paved his way to the White House with largely uncritical and unexamined coverage. I have seen the same sort of thing happen in Canada, notably with the media cornation of the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

It is a tribute to the discernment of the American voters that Obama only won by 5% of the popular vote, although he swept the electoral college vote. Obama outspent McCain by a much larger margin than the results would warrant, about $10 per vote versus $6 per vote. Additionally, McCain's campaign was a bit of a shambles, seeming to lurch all over the place with no clear message about what he would do to fix the U.S. On the other side, Obama's campaign came off as flawlessly as a space shuttle launch. His only flub was when he let his guard down and referred to people in the northern midwest as losers "clinging to their guns and their religion." But even in those states he did well.

I always thought that Obama was a good-looking guy, in a $1,500 suit, with a great speaking voice and a good command of English, who was overly ambitious, given his thin credentials. If he had a counterpart in Canada, who publicly reeks personal ambition, it would be Jack Layton, leader of the NDP.

His record of public service in government was very slight and not without question marks. Some of the people he was associated with were dubious characters and I thought his remark about his grandmother's racism when she was still alive to hear it was disgraceful.

It remains to be seen whether his presidency can match his rhetoric. For the sake of the United States and the world, I sincerely hope so.

For my part, I thought the turning point in the election was McCain bringing in Sarah Palin as the VP candidate. After initially giving a shot of adrenaline to the GOP campaign, she quickly became an albatross. It was the Katie Couric interview that caused many people to say, "She said what?"

Up to that point McCain had a clear edge in putting himself forward as a much more experienced guy than Obama, and his age was not then telling against him. Once Palin entered the picture, people began to think about his age and the chance that he might not finish his term in office and (shudder)Palin might be the decision maker. She effectively removed Obama's Achilles' heel, the inexperience factor, and replaced it with the ageism concern.

It was not the MSM that created Sarah Palin, she sank the GOP campaign all on her own, with her lack of general knowlege, her inarticulate syntax, and her country bumpkin colloquialisms and saucy little winks. Simply by pronouncing the "g" on the words ending in "ing" would have gone a long way to boost her apparent intelligence factor.

If she was supposed to appeal to the Christian right wing with her "end of days" beliefs, why didn't McCain pick Mike Huckabee, a very credible candidate from that end of the political spectrum, and equally as folksy and likeable, but without the "how dumb can she be" question hanging over his head?

The devil is in the details, or, when it is appropriate to sweat the small stuff

You really have to hand it to the American election machine for its entertainment value. For months and months we have been treated to a savage fight between the Democratic candidates until Obama finally prevailed, but not without the party being severely scarred. This battle consumed about $500 million.

Now that the dust has settled, what is the latest issue?

Obama might not even be legally eligible to hold the office of President.

Article 2 of the United States' Constitution states:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

The blogosphere is beginning to raise questions about the domocile of his birth. Officially, he was born in Hawaii. Apparently, that state treats birth certificates as a private matter. And Obama has declined to offer his certificate up for scrutiny. It is being suggested that since his father was Kenyan it is important to ensure he was born in the U.S.

John McCain was similarly challenged because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. He submitted his birth records to the Senate which declared him to be natural born beause he was born on a U.S. military base.

I don't know why Obama would withhold his documentation and give his political enemies just one more thing to challenge his credibilty or make the case he is elitist, but I really wonder why the Democratic Party, at the point at which candidates register to represent the party as the presidential candidate, would not insist, as a first step to acceptance of the registration, that the candidates prove the natural born requirement. It seems such an obvious thing to do.

If you managed a trucking company and somebody walked in the door to get a job as a driver, wouldn't you first want to satisfy yourself that the guy had a current valid driver's license before you bothered with anything else on his resume? Why should a trucker be put to a higher standard of elibility than the President of the United States?

What happens if it turns out Obama is not eligible?

Obama and the bucks

This is an interesting article on how Obama managed to raise twice as much money as Hillary.

Chinese junkets and political disconnect from reality

Barack Obama made a telling comment about politicians in his book The Audacity of Hope. The longer one is in office, he said, "the narrower the scope of your interactions.

"You may fight it with town-hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighbourhood, but your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent."

This comes to mind in the face of the obstinacy of the mayor of Toronto, David Miller, and the Ontario government, insisting on going to China when the rest of the world is rioting every time the Chinese militarily-guarded Olympic flame passes through a new city on its global "good will" tour.

I once was a member of a board of directors of an international organization that held annual meetings in different cities in the world. It was an honour competed for and, like the Olympics, a city applied and was awarded the right to host the event several years in advance. A few months before the meeting was to be held in Beijing, the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred. We switched the venue to another city in Europe on short notice. China put a lot of pressure on us to keep it in Beijing, but we rejected it.

This is a time to seriously consider boycotting the games, not trotting off on junkets that will only be used by the Chinese authorities as evidence that the Tibet business makes no difference to anyone outside China.