Captain Kick-Ass vs. the 24 Hr News Cycle!

I don't think there were a lot of people who would have predicted that Obama would start making G.W. Bush look good, but that day has come. This not being a political blog per se this is not really my concern, except for what it represents to the big picture. Obama's regime is shamblingly alienating most of America's allies while trying (ineffectually, thank God) to make nice with the old "Axis of Evil".

Perhaps "ineffectually" isn't precise: in effect it has shown America as weak and something that can be ignored or worked around. This will only get worse for them the longer he or someone like him stays in power. Impeachment is unlikely (to date) so we have a couple more years of this to look forward to. If the current Marxist administration succeeds in cratering the American economy in that time, things will get a lot worse before they get better.

It is a common axiom of warfare that the worst course of action is to fail to choose one. Note that choosing to do nothing is a decision; waffling or being paralysed is quite different. Even less contentious than this is the universal axiom "Talk is Cheap". Saying you'll put your "boot on their neck" or convene a council of experts to determine "whose ass to kick" doesn't seem to have accomplished a whole lot. Hell, that's hedging: he has DONE nothing, and done it in the most muddled bureaucratic fashion imaginable. "Talk minus Action equals Zero" was on a shirt I once had, and a 0 looks a lot like an O.

The problem for anyone in the public eye these days is that you can't escape the media. You can make arrangements with the papers and traditional media outlets up to a certain point, but the internet never sleeps and it never forgets. Every thing you ever say or do (or fail to do) is there for the zealots who will run it to ground and post it on their blogs. From there it makes it to other places, and increasingly back into the major media outlets. The majors are owned by people, and people have positions or agendas they want advanced. That limits the sort of thing you will find on Fox, Al-Jazeera, CNN, etc. There is no limit to the variety of viewpoints that the internet ant hill will hold, and thanks to search engines it's all accessible and nearly impossible to suppress.

I stalled on this for several days as it went off track (now two separate posts), and in that time NOTHING HAS HAPPENED with Obama and the Gulf oil spill. There has been more talk, photo ops, and this afternoon there will be an address from the Oval Office, but nothing has actually been done. There is an increasing hum on the internet about Obama and what he's all about. It was always there, of course, but it's starting to take shape and become more coherent. This is an excellent example:

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

Were I a religious type I'd say he was the Anti-Christ, as he fits the bill within that paradigm. I don't believe it's anything as profound as that, merely another sign (groan) of the forces within our societies that want to destroy what we've built. I highly recommend that you read Ms Rabinovich's entire article. They do everything bigger in the US, and I don't see much evidence of a significant political force in Canada that can do what the current manifestation of the Democratic Party is trying to do to the U.S.A. The NDP are most closely equivalent in Socialist mentality, but they are a spent force whose platform has largely been appropriated in pieces by successive centrist governments.

Back on topic, the picture that emerges is of the President of the United States of America who can't actually do anything. Of course there are mechanisms to keep the chief executive from running amok, but the image of a man who got where he is due largely to his demagoguery being exposed as an ineffective elitist by the very media that he manipulated to get there is pretty ironic.