“This ‘brilliant’ FBI and DEA coordinated sting operation that has, allegedly, ‘uncovered an Iranian ‘plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington and to attack the Saudi and Israeli embassies'”: How does its exposure distract from the investigation into your US-Mexican gun-running operation?” That’s the question I’d have liked to pose to Attorney General Eric Holder, had I been present at the news conference he and FBI Director Robert Mueller gave to a group of journo lap dogs, on October 11.

The indictment is the kind of cloak-and-dagger that belongs in an episode of “The Unit,” not in the courts of a civilized country. To entrap the two defendants, Mansour Arbabsiar and Ali Gholam Shakuri, assistant US attorneys relied on Title 18 of the United States Code. Sections in this “versatile” law were used to ensnare domestic diva Martha Stewart (for fibbing to the Feds about a recipe, not for insider trading).

Indeed, the court complaint has more twists than a serpent’s tail, but none leads conclusively to Teheran, unless Teheran is code for “Surveillance State USA.”

It is befitting that the second defendant is named Gholam. In Jewish folklore “Golem” means zombie. Golem well describes Ali Gholam, who is alleged to have wired funds to Arbabsiar via “an overseas wire transfer from a bank located in a foreign country,” in furtherance “of the plot to kill the Ambassador to the United State of Saudi Arabia.”

According to the claims of the two accused clowns, Gholam is a member of the Iranian Qods Force, a branch of the Iranians Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (the IRGC) that conducts “sensitive covert operations abroad.” If we know anything about the Iranian Special Forces, it is that they are nothing like the schlemiels we’ve just indicted. The two remind me of Chipopo, the hero in a series of Hebrew children’s books I used to devour as a kid in Israel. Chipopo was a monkey. Defendants Mansour and Shakuri’s antics, as detailed in the legal brief that reads like a hastily written potboiler, conjure “Chipopo Joins the IDF,” an adventure in this series. Needless to say, it was not his height that gave the monkey away during basic training.

Enter CS-1.

CS-1 is the chief witness against Holder’s aspiring terrorists, and “a paid confidential source,” who had been “previously charged in connection with a narcotics offense by authorities of a certain U.S. state. In exchange for CS-1’s cooperation … the State charges were dismissed.”

Put it this way, allowing CS-1 to conduct a sting operation is a lot like letting a criminally minded attorney general run guns to Mexico’s drug cartels. Oops. Holder has already done his subversive best to corner that “market” by allegedly authorizing “Operation Fast and Furious,” in which a gang going by the acronym ATF—the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—sold assault rifles to Mexican gangsters and their local gun-runners, who later used their taxpayer-funded ammunition and immunity to gun down innocent Americans and many more, mostly unmentioned, Mexicans. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed with one of these weapons. (When good guys like Agents John Dodson and Lee Casa questioned the practice, they were ordered to “stand down,” or confine their activities to “surveillance.”)

The Feds can be funny. CS-1 and his compadres were told to pose as “associates of a sophisticated and violent international drug-trafficking cartel,” and offer themselves up as assassins for hire to Gholam Shakuri and his Iranian amigos. CS-1 met Team Chipopo in Mexico. It’s almost like our sophisticates were tracing the smuggling routes of Operation Fast and Furious. Or perhaps, these simpletons were simply drawn to the original scene of the crime. “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

At this rate, it is not impossible to imagine America’s attorney general funneling arms to odd-balls in Iran using Operation Fast and Furious as a fig leaf.

In his broken English—a US citizenship requirement—Arbabsiar, a naturalized American, boasted about his culprit-cum-cousin: The man Arbabsiar called the “Colonel” was a “wanted man in America”; “on CNN,” and a top banana in Iran. (I told you this is funny.)

Enough of this nonsense. The FBI often entraps pliable dolts (to better serve their political masters). The seven Miami-based men who were accused of “concocting a plot to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower” come to mind. They were illiterate and probably borderline retarded.

Not even Fouad Ajami, a dedicated Arab neoconservative, managed to divine a motive for this moronic plot, whose targets, conveniently, are satellites of the US. The Saudis and the Israelis would gladly corroborate any American tall tale. And not even A-Jad, much less alleged members of the Qods crack team, would be so foolish as to think a minor Saudi functionary is a worthy target for terror.

On October 3, 2011, days prior to this single arrest (the “Colonel” is still at large in Iran or Cancún), CBS News reported that “Attorney General Eric Holder was sent briefings on the controversial Fast and Furious operation as far back as July 2010,” in contradiction to his statement to Congress.

The Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are breathing down Holder’s neck, about to crack Fast and Furious asunder.

The plot to frame Iran might well have been hatched in Disneyland, the code name for DC.

The notion that not raising the debt-ceiling must necessarily result in the US defaulting on its debt is nonsensical. In so asserting, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is talking tripe. “Tim” has warned of an “economic catastrophe” should the government’s credit limit not be increased, and has guaranteed that a “failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States.”

“Tim,” whose capacity for economic reasoning is tiny, has confused “debt obligations” with “other expenditures.”

As explained by U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, in a January 19 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The amount of money required to continue to make payments on all the U.S. government debt is a small fraction of the amount of revenue the U.S. government raises.” Blogging for the Library of Economics and Liberty’s EconLog, David Henderson made quick work of the Geithner fallacy:

The treasury secretary “is effectively saying that if the government wants to spend x and has only enough money to spend 0.67x, then not spending on the other 0.33x is a failure to keep an obligation. In a political sense, that might be: the government has made a lot of spending promises to a lot of people. But in an economic sense, it’s not. On the narrow issue of whether failure to raise the debt limit would necessarily mean U.S. government default on its debt, Toomey is right and Geithner is wrong.” Here’s the simple math, courtesy of Rep. Ron Paul: “Interest payments on our federal bond debt likely will amount to about $500 billion for fiscal year 2011, an average of $41 billion per month. Federal tax revenues vary by month, but should total around $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion for FY 2011– an average of perhaps $180 billion per month. So clearly the federal government has sufficient tax revenue to make interest payments to our creditors. For now, those interest payments represent about 12 percent of the total federal budget.”

On reflection, the US Treasury takes in enough loot to pay down the interest on the debt as well as a portion of the principal. Matching federal spending with federal revenue: what a concept! And what a tonic to our moribund economy that would be!

To the soul of the subject: The engorged organisms (Anthony D. Weiner is a sample) that currently control the economy from DC can discharge their responsibility to creditors without authorizing more borrowing. To do so, however, they will have to cease their many unconstitutional endeavors, and break the promiscuous promises they’ve made to certain voters at the expense of the vassals, out of whose hides these “promises” are carved.

As it stands, Republicans—and a few Democrats, one of whom has even cosponsored an amendment to cap federal spending—have done no more than perform a budgetary Bonnie and Clyde: If Democrats want to continue the heist and run deficits and debts to eternity, they will need to promise—nudge-nudge; nudge-nudge, know what I mean? know what I mean?”—budget cuts, preferably in the trillions. Or, introduce, not necessarily pass, a balanced-budget amendment.

Another tactic taken by the competing gangs of lawmakers is to guarantee an economic apocalypse if the US government doesn’t continue borrowing apace. This is something the sniveling House Republican Speaker John Boehner has hinted at, but failed to parse. “Apocalypse Now” forecasts cannot be verified, which is why politicians, their in-house economists, and other vested interests make them.

Above all, the emperor’s experts want you to believe that the values and virtues ordinary mortals hold themselves to don’t apply to government; that macroeconomics and microeconomic are two separate solitudes, governed by different laws. But the laws of economics are natural, not political, laws. These very laws Thomas Jefferson was enunciating when he warned that “the greatest danger came from the possibility of legislators plunging citizens into debt.” (Excerpted in “Liberty, State & Union: the Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson,” by Professor Marco Bassani.) “We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.”

When Standard & Poor’s cut the American credit outlook to negative, the Financial Post’s Terence Corcoran mocked the credit ratings agency’s “special talent for arriving at the morgue and predicting the demise of the deceased.”

Indeed, the United States has already passed on as the world’s economic leader. Having flouted Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the “fore horse for oppression and despotism,” after which “taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”

For evidence of the power of the teachers unions acting out on the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, look no further than your property taxes. Almost 50 percent of mine are garnished for “Local School Support.” “Port, Fire, Hospital, Library” constitute a miniscule 5 percent of the property-tax bill. Law enforcement is not even itemized. Other states confiscate even higher percentages from their propertied taxpayers in the service of government-employed teachers.

Yes, do use the term “government unions,” won’t you, as “public sector” or “public servants” implies, incorrectly, that these people serve the public. Besides, have you seen these slackers? In his path breaking book, “The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education,” Peter Brimelow left us with a lasting mental image of our children’s over-sated role models, attending one of the National Education Association’s annual meetings. The same apparition is everywhere apparent in Madison, as teachers “wobble and waddle through the teeming crowds of [supporters] … thighs like tree trunks, bellies billowing, jowls jiggling.”

Over and above the property tax — the federal income tax claims from those who pay it more monies for the educational oink sector. Whether the taxpayer has children in the system or doesn’t; whether he chooses to home-school his offspring or pays for a private school, whether he approves of the job government pedagogues are doing or doesn’t — he has to pay them, even go into hock for them.

To compound it all, America has a most progressive tax code. According to USA Today, the number of Americans who owe no federal income taxes, and do not share in the cost of government, stood at 47 percent in 2009, and is increasing. What has come to pass John C. Calhoun predicted in “A Disquisition on Government,” where he described the devolution of a democracy in which all private property is, eventually, subjected to the vagaries of majority rule. The “conditions and pursuits of the population,” reasoned Calhoun, are so “diversified,” as to clash. (Early Americans were not as incorrigibly optimistic — against all evidence — about human nature as contemporary Americans have become.) “The limited reason and faculties of man,” wrote Vice President Calhoun, “the great diversity of language, customs, pursuits, situation and complexion, and the difficulty of intercourse, with various other causes, have, by their operation, formed a great many separate communities, acting independently of each other.” (And this was before the advent of multiculturalism and mass immigration by progressive central planners.)

Thus the brilliant and prescient Calhoun outlined the manner in which special interests would unite in such an America to form “a compact, organized majority,” to better “control the government and the advantages it confers.” The dispensation to emerge would eventually see “one portion of the community pay in taxes more than it receives back in disbursements; while another [would] receive in disbursements more than it pays in taxes.”

This is the tug of war witnessed in Wisconsin. The “Takers” (tax consumers), organized by the likes of the AFL-CIO, Andy Stern’s Service Employees International Union, and the national and local teachers unions, want the “Makers” (the so-called rich who fund their existence) to support overgenerous pay and pensions in perpetuity. To grant them their wish, these organized interests are accustomed to turning to the Über-parasites: politicians. This time, a politician in the person of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has refused to facilitate the smooth transfer of wealth from those who create it to those who consume it with no thought for the morrow.

According to Manhattan Institute scholar Steven Malanga, “public sector unions … have become the chief lobbyists for higher taxes and more government spending in America.” Writing at RealClearMarkets, Malanga notes that “five decades of public sector unionization have given us a system where … unions have had ability to elect their own bosses, so that every taxpayer effort at reform and restraint over the years has dissolved eventually into new rounds of benefits and perks for government workers. It’s a system without the competitive restraints on both management and labor that exist in the private sector.”

Malanga underscores that “public-sector unions especially have become the nation’s most aggressive advocates for higher taxes and spending. They sponsor tax-raising ballot initiatives and pay for advertising and lobbying campaigns to pressure politicians into voting for them. And they mount multimillion dollar campaigns to defeat efforts by governors and taxpayer groups to roll back taxes.”

Name an initiative to “increase business and income taxes and fight government cuts” in your state —and you’ll discover behind it unions, flush-with member dues, fighting tooth and nail against the common good. In Oregon last year, the SEIU and the Oregon Education Association funded a successful campaign that “raised business and income taxes in the state.” In Washington, the SEIU (state and national locals), the National Education Association, and Washington teachers union locals all united to champion a new income tax, the poster boy for which was William H. Gates Sr., father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. An unfathomably wealthy individual had gotten behind an effort to bilk business men and women of modest means: I suspect that fury over this is what helped defeat this particular union-driven lunge for private property.

A similar specter played out in Arizona, in 2010, and in New Jersey, where “the New Jersey Education Association spent $300,000 a week … [on] radio ads urging tax increases on the rich instead of budget cuts.” And before that in New York in 2008-09, and in California in 2004.

Wealth creators, big and small, pay government teachers. They, in turn, pay the unions, who turn around and agitate for raising taxes on their benefactors. This hapless taxpayer cannot withhold his coerced contribution, cannot leverage it in order to improve the product, and, in general, has no real representation at the negotiating table.

In the aforementioned book, Brimelow recommended that antitrust law be used to bust the “Teacher Trust” (monopoly). We have laws against a conspiracy to monopolize trade or commerce. Being a creature of legal privilege – and a form of legalized thuggery — the “Teacher Trust” ought to be subjected to these laws.

©2011 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
February 25

The 2010 midterm elections were a bloodbath for the Democratic Party. Because there are no mollifying messages to be had from such a political massacre, liberal pols, pundits, and other dominant interests, hastened to soften the “shellacking” by framing it in terms more tolerable.

As they tell it, a gain of more than 60 seats in the House ─ “the biggest party turnover since 1948,” in Ann Coulter’s assessment ─ was no more than a howl for compromise, civility, and bipartisanship. Obama failed to deliver all sweetness and light, as he had promised in 2008. When Americans finally unfurled from the fetal position, they voted to protest the incivility that had deformed the political discourse they hold so dear. Pretty much.

Here’s how Harry Reid rendered this historic election:

“The message that voters throughout Nevada and all across the nation sent to Washington is that they want Democrats, Republicans and Independents to work together to find the common ground needed for real solutions and real progress. … The time for politics is now over. And now that Republicans have more members in both houses of Congress, they must take their responsibility to present bipartisan solutions more seriously.”

Considered “Washington’s most highly regarded columnist’ by both editorial-page editors and members of Congress,” the banal David Broder seconded Reid: “Instead of cooperation, the worst kind of partisanship returned. And instead of changing the way Washington operated, [Obama] seemed to ratify business as usual.” You just know that The John and the mindless schoolmarm of CNN’s “Parker/Spitzer” are agreed.

You heard it from the “Dude” himself (which is how liberal comedians refer to Da Main Man):

“You know, a little over a month ago,” intoned Obama, “we held a town hall meeting in Richmond, Virginia. And one of the most telling questions came from a small business owner who runs a tree care firm. He told me how hard he works and how busy he was; how he doesn’t have time to pay attention to all the back-and-forth in Washington. And he asked, is there hope for us returning to civility in our discourse, to a healthy legislative process.”

The president’s sample businessman omitted the effects of the hulking health-care overhaul on his tree-care enterprise because these were as nothing compared to the discomfort discordant politics have caused him. I knew that.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has more street cred than most. The host of “Hardball” spent the first two years of the Obama presidency in a state of delirium bordering on the sexual. Famous for experiencing something akin to a (daytime) nocturnal emission during Obama’s coronation — “thrill up the leg” Matthews called the incident — Chris later begged Barack to be his “Enforcer,” in the matter of sacking Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Understand: when a liberal like the president shows a bit of that manly magic, “girlie boys” like Chris get giddy.

Given Chris’s well-known carnal affections for Barack Obama, it is unfortunate that the op-ed segment with which he ends the “Hardball” program daily is called “Let Me Finish.” Yesterday, Matthews finished-off by surmising that the “kick in the pants” the president has sustained means that it was now up to Obama to make the Republicans an offer they could not refuse ─ especially with the entire country watching. The challenge for Obama, advised Matthews, is to force Republicans to join him, or look like creeps if they fail to join him.

Chris arrived at his version of the bipartisanship lesson from a different position or angle. But then he is “special.”

Democrats concede that other considerations compounded the electorate’s inconsolable sorrow over America’s impolite politics. They, the Democrats, had been ineffectual in finessing Fabian policies; they did not communicate these well. And, the economic doldrums distracted from the president’s obligation to take “a series of very tough decisions, but decisions that were right,” as he put it.

The blessings of such “sound” initiatives ─ stimulus, bailout, nationalization, cap-and-trade, a moratorium on energy extraction in the Gulf, more war in Afghanistan; and on Arizona, commanding a green-energy economy, a $3,039,000,000,000 addition to the national debt, and massive monetary quantitative easing to facilitate it, on and on ─ were not helped by a factor highlighted repeatedly by the MSNBC broadcasters. When all is said and done, Tea Party America was a bunch of “stump-toothed Appalachian mountain men.”

In other words, spectacularly stupid (and venal to boot).

Traditionally, as this column has quipped, the Democratic and Republican parties have each operated as counterweights in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one entity to the other. As my fellow libertarian Vox Day has observed, no sooner do the Republicans come to power, than they move to the left. When they get their turn, Democrats shuffle to the right. At some point, I predict, John McCain will reach across the aisle and the creeps will converge.

Yes, “reaching across the aisle to get things done” is a euphemism for relinquishing principle in favor of political pragmatism. Barack Obama, Harry Reid, David S. Broder, Chris Matthews ─ you heard it straight from the donkey’s mouth.

Thus, to paraphrase one hardcore tea partier’s fighting words, the only time you want your representative to reach across the aisle is to grab a Democrat or an errant Republican by the throat.

“How do you know there is going to be an economic recovery,” Greta Van Susteren asked GOP dummy, Dana Perino. “There always is; these things go in cycles,” squeaked the Heidi Klum of the commentariat.

Dana, who was once a spokesperson to a man who was barely able to speak, always smiles with pride when her boss’ “modest” government expansion is hearkened to nostalgically on Fox News. You remember the broad sweep of the Bush limited-government program: Medicare Part D, “No Child Left Behind,” and the fiscal fiascos that are the wars in Middle East and South-central Asia. Likewise, Dana seems to think that the economy is much like the menstrual cycle. But even that event grinds to a halt when the hormones run out.

Another day, another dullard. This time it was Liz Cheney, who only sounds weightier than Dana because she’s meatier and less appealing. The two will often form the Fox-panel staple when studiously dumb chicks, SE Cupp, for example, are unavailable to gesture wildly and grimace, as they portentously parrot mind-numbing banalities.

On this occasion, Liz repeated the Republican refrain about the Democrats’ stimulus “not working.” As though it could work. The premise of Liz’ statement is that the various stimuli might have worked, if only, if only… Oh yes, if only GOPers were in charge. If I understand the Republican line for the coming midterms, it is that, thankfully, there is a smart, economically stimulating way for the State to spend money it had lifted from the private economy (and, in the process, crowded out private, productive economic activity).

Time and again, Republicans will explain to us of the booboisie that the stimuli consisted of misguided spending so typical of Democrats, instead of precision-guided make-work projects, the hallmark of Republikeynesian economic “thought.”

With few exceptions, Republican politicians, and their matching Tweedledim and Tweedledimmer cable personalities, seem incapable of countering the fiction that vests central planners with the ability to create viable jobs by appropriating private property, and redistributing it, based on bureaucratic and political considerations. The unsparing critique the likes of dodo Perino, Newt, Dick, Karl, et. al, will invariably voice is that the Dems did not apply the stolen funds the way one ought to have; as the GOPers would have.

Democrats are every bit as good as the gaseous (if gorgeous) Republican babes at dimming debate. For just such as exercise, an execrable bunch convened last Sunday on MSNBC, to “Meet The Press.” A confrontational conversation ensued about the Republicans’ irresponsible tax policy. Against the Republicans, “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory argued that “if you’re concerned, as Republicans say they are, about cutting spending and the deficit, you have to acknowledge that tax cuts are not paid for. It’s still borrowed money,” contended Gregory, evidently paraphrasing the Great Inflator, Alan Greenspan.

Minority leader Mitch McConnell countered with weak utilitarian appeals. “If you push this economy further backward, we’ll get less revenue for the government, not more.” And, “Raising taxes in the middle of a recession on the major job generator in America, small business, is a very, very bad idea.”

Meek Mitch made only fleeting mention of the real problem, and even then incompletely: government spending. Our government’s $1.4 trillion budget deficit, $13.4 trillion debt, not counting $110 trillion in unfunded liabilities ─ these are a consequence of it spending, and promising its constituents, more than it steals.

Democrats think that tax cuts are bad because they will reduce government revenues, which, in turn, will increase its liabilities. As unflinching about fleecing the tax payer, so as to fatten the federal government, Republicans are fond of claiming that tax rate cuts will indirectly increase government revenues by stimulating the economy.

Conveniently lost on representatives of both parties is the distinction between what is mine and what is thine: In other words, private property. Taxes are private property plundered. The government has several ways to pay for its obligations, one of which is to seize private property in the form of taxes. The particular portion of the “stim” and bailouts that was not borrowed or counterfeited by the Fed once belonged to individual Americans. Thus, a tax cut for high-income earners, who also pay most of the taxes, is tantamount to a return of stolen goods.

With a tax cut, the plundering class simply agrees to pilfer less. The notion that you must “pay for tax cuts,” as Gregory put it, is akin to a burglar promising to return the television he stole just as soon as he is in a better financial position.

It’s not the return of some stolen property in the form of a tax cut that poses a problem for the Republicans, come the November midterm elections. The difficulty is that the pigs to which these politicians pander outnumber ─ and are electorally stronger than ─ the productive whom they plunder. The first are feeding off the second and will not let-up. To remove or not to remove the teat of the Welfare State from its primary beneficiaries: that will be the question on the Tuesday following the first Monday, in November.

©2010 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
August 27

Sarah Palin is in the news for a change, not for the most significant thing she has done of late, but for the least significant. Scrap that: Joining the Fox News lineup of analysts is hardly inconsequential, although it is a bad move.

The most important of Palin’s recent maneuvers was to pooh-pooh CPAC. As Politico reported, “Palin had declined an invitation to address the Conservative Political Action Conference next month calling it a forum that will place ‘special interests over core beliefs’ and ‘pocketbook over policy.’

“Was a GOP-Palin political divorce in the offing? Is Palin preparing to part company with “politics as usual” ─ the tired slogan she and Sen. John McCain coined for their campaign? (Palin, of course, had embodied unusual politics on the local level.)

I had sincerely hoped that Sarah Palin had come to realize that reviving the rigor-riddled Republican Party would be like trying to breathe life into a corpse. Neither possible, nor desirable. The CPAC snub, coupled with Palin’s endorsement, last year, of the Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman for the 23rd Congressional District of New York, made it look like she was indeed galloping away from the “GOP, RIP.”

More promising developments followed. Palin will be headlining the First National Tea Party Convention, in Nashville, TN, scheduled for February. She’ll be joined by Michele Bachmann. And, as David Shyster advertised negatively on MSNBC, by WND’s founder and CEO, Joseph Farah.

Against this bright background, Sarah Palin suddenly switched gears and joined the Fox-News pack as one of its jack-of-all-trades experts.

Unfortunately, the governor has a propensity for rambling, run-off sentences, peppered with grating gerunds. Pearls of wisdom are often lost in the prolix answers she gives. Then there is Mrs. Palin’s mindless militarism. You can’t make this up, but on leaving the gubernatorial office, for instance, Palin scolded the media thus: “In honor of the American solder, quit making things up.”

Someone ought to tell Mrs. Palin that idolizing the military ─ and the missions it executes on behalf of its political masters ─ amounts to the worship of Moloch, not the Almighty.

Paramount for Palin, then ─ at least if she wants to survive the ravages of future Fey (Tina) satirization ─ is to fashion herself as an expert, not as a generalist. On energy and environmental issues Palin is indeed an ace. When it comes to the ins-and-outs of the oil and gas industry ─ ownership, extraction, contracts and leases ─ Sarah Palin is as sharp as a tack. On both the philosophical and pragmatic levels, she grasps the urgent need to commercialize America’s abundant resources.

As regards the personal: Because Palin comes from a clan that has lived-off the land by necessity, Mother Palin cherishes “Mother Earth.” (Once a fisherwoman, Sarah lived through an oil spill that decimated her family’s food-supply and living.) Alaska runs in Sarah’s blood stream; its wild life, its seascape and landscapes, as well as man’s reliance on both for muse and … meat.

Money Quote: “Hollywood needs to know: We eat therefore we hunt.”

This Alaskan Diana, goddess of the hunt, is carnivore and conservationist.

From Alaska, lushly described on every page of Going Rogue, cut to the Palin parade on Fox News. In no time at all, Palin was clucking over the merits of the two-party cartel. We are a two-party system, she told Glenn Beck. “The Republican Party, the planks in our platform are, are the best, strongest planks upon which to build a great state, Alaska, a great country.” And while Palin confessed to being tempted to flee the duopoly, she vowed to remain a Republican.

Palin’s assertion is pie-in-the-sky; not pragmatism but falsehood. The Democratic and Republican parties ─ each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one entity to the other.

The standstill state-of-affairs hinges on bamboozling party supporters. As my WND colleague Vox Day has observed, no sooner do the Republicans come to power, than they move to the left. When they get their turn, Democrats shuffle to the right. At some point, McCain reaches across the aisle and the creeps converge.

The Constitution the colluding quislings only ever conjure as a weapon against the opposing, fleetingly dethroned faction. If only Sarah Palin recognized and acted on this intractable reality.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
January 15, 2010

Try as they do to stick to substance (and I mean that in the narrowest sense), any typical exchange between the Obama press pimp and the presstitutes in attendance quickly degenerates as follows:

“Has he had a cigarette since the coronation? Where did He watch the Super Bowl? Who was invited to His White House Super Bowl bash? How late does He work? What’s He reading? Has the First Dog been named yet? Does He cry? Is there a twinkle in His eye?”

The idolatry continues on cable well after the news conferences have ended: Huffed Arianna Huffington:

“Omigod, the Godly One just admitted to screwing up. How different is He from Bush, who stayed the course and took the country over the cliff with him.” Yada, yada…

Obama, who badly wants a war he can call his own, plans on adding 15,000 troops to the Afghanistan front and quite a few trillion to the national debt. In warfare and welfare, he may well live up to the “promise” of Bush. What sets Obama and “W” apart, so far, is the response to their wastrel ways.

Democrats howled for the previous Big Spender’s head, but are intoxicated with Obama’s toxically wasteful policy prescriptions. To them, Obama governing means that at last a “moral” man is in charge of deficit spending. We’re safe; someone good has assumed control of the printing presses. Obama spending the country into oblivion is vastly different from the Republicans doing the same.

But let us give credit where it’s due. Was Bush not first to break the bank? And if deficit spending is a salve for insolvency, why did Bush’s non-stop spending not ward off the depression? The Democratic jackass answer is this: Bush did not spend enough. Barack must—and will—step-up.

An example of the new goodness at work is the president’s $900 billion oink omnibus bill. The lion’s share of the money minted (out of thin air) will go to stupendous, centrally planned projects.

After tax consumers are given tax rebates, Obama and his command-economy commandants will attempt—and fail—to artificially “create” a market for exorbitant, inefficient forms of energy (when oil is affordable and plentiful). They will direct debased dollars into scientific endeavors of their choosing, and they will muscle the medical profession, and further socialize existing healthcare structures. As will they see to it that the most expensive and least effective education bureaucracy in the developed world is flush with funds. “Head Start” non-starter schemes will abound. Many more Americans will be placed on the dole.

Republicans, who only a few weeks back had voted for the outgoing administration’s bailout bonanza, and before that for the Bush stimulus, squealed over the porky parts of Barack’s bill. The Republikeynsians agreed, however, with the Bill’s alleged job-creation thrust.

A good republican (like Ron Paul) would know that government make-work schemes are what the brilliant economist Henry Hazlitt called an “optical illusion”:

[I]f we have trained ourselves to look beyond immediate to secondary consequences, and beyond those who are directly benefited by a government project to others who are indirectly affected, a different picture presents itself. It is true that a particular group of bridgeworkers may receive more employment than otherwise. But the bridge has to be paid for out of taxes. For every dollar that is spent on the bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. … Therefore, for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else.

Projects invented by government with the intention of “providing employment” have a hidden component, as Hazlitt lucidly and painstakingly explained:

We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing. But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence. They are the jobs destroyed by the [billions] taken from the taxpayers. All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project. More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, television technicians, clothing workers, farmers.

But why listen to Henry Hazlitt’s irrefutable logic, when the country’s conmen are counseling a lemming’s lunacy: follow Über-Obama over the cliff.

Yes, lard is in the air everywhere. But so is love. As all the fawning seems to suggest, when Obama screws you over, it just feels right. After all, he has that certain je ne sais quoi.

This is the age of the idiot. The triumph Of Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber in American culture and politics can  no longer  be disputed. However, my modest proposal of last week still stands.

I ventured that the developing consensus among some self-styled elites (as opposed natural elites) with respect to Sarah Palin’s aptitude was premature. I am simply unconvinced Gov. Palin is an exemplar of dumbed down, distaff America.

Smart Alec lefty Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine disagrees. He calls Sarah Palin “a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs. … 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV.” Hardly an argument, is it? (Hence “Smart Alec,” and not smart.)

Once Taibbi dispensed with the niceties, he got dirty. What Palin represents to Taibbi is “being a fat f-cking pig who pins ‘Country First’ buttons on his man titties and chants ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!'”

Another smarmy Smart Alec is the libertine Bill Maher. The host of HBO’s “Real Time” called Palin “a category five moron.” “She thought the Bush doctrine has something to do with forbidding her daughters to shave down there,” he snickered, adding cruelly that “her favorite welcome-home sign on arriving back in Alaska was her daughter’s. It read: ‘I got my period.'”

In case you don’t know him, Maher is the intellectual pigmy who once told TV Talker Joe Scarborough he wanted Bush impeached—but not for anything meaningful, such as, say, prosecuting an illegal and unjust war. Rather, Maher argued impassionedly, and quite seriously, that impeachment proceedings ought to be initiated on no other grounds than that, on 9/11, after Bush had been told by Andrew Card that America had been attacked, he sat put for seven minutes at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. Maher’s motivation for impeachment is as frivolous as the impetus for Clinton’s. (Or as mindless as Maher’s anti-corn syrup carping.)

The Left has offered accolades to individuals infinitely more asinine and far less accomplished than Gov. Palin.

Take Jesse Jackson. I’m completely comfortable calling the revered reverend a deeply silly “dude.” The evidence is incontrovertible and decades old. A public berating of that bit of dreck is long overdue. Granted, Jackson is not running for vice president, but he did run for president. And I’m willing to bet that not many establishment media men have identified Jackson for the jackass he is.

On the subprime mortgage mess Jackson served up a word salad that gave Lauren Caitlin Upton of the 2007 Miss Teen USA fame a run for her money. (Caitlin was asked why so many “Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map.” Her reply included references to “U.S. Americans,” “South Africa,” “Eyeraq,” “Asian countries,” “our children,” each prefaced by the “sophisticated” phrase “such as.”)

The following is vintage Jackson verbiage disgorged to a receptive Amy Goodman of Democracy Now: “22 percent of those subprimes went to African Americans. About 22 percent went to Latinos. But the water came in the ship on the black and brown side”:

“The water did not stay; the water kept coming across. So now what you have is whole communities without their—when one house goes, suddenly the houses lose value. And so, the value is leaving, tax base eroding, schools are suffering, all because unregulated banking up top and lack of fair lending laws. If you were to enforce fair lending laws at the base, the water—you know, the sink—the ship did not sink because chairs blew off the deck; water came in the bottom. And water came in the bottom, because the poor people and middle-class people in fact were taken advantage of and slaughtered.”

The jury is no longer out about Cynthia McKinney’s  intelligence. A former United States Representative and the Green Party’s nominee for president, McKinney is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who believes the Bush administration orchestrated the events of that day. Among her legislative accomplishments: the “Tupac Shakur Records Act.”

The Left didn’t laugh these one-time White-House hopefuls off the political stage, did it?

Presidential candidates, past and present (and their spouses), flock to a television show called “The View,” where they snuggle up to—and play footsie with—some seriously foolish females.

On “The View” the earth is often flat—at least to co-host Sherri Shepherd, who has also “argued,” convincingly to some, that Jesus preceded the Greeks. 

Speaking of the Left’s intelligentsia, unlike Taibbi and Maher, who made a “case” against Palin’s candidacy by cussing, Joy Behar at least tried to “argue.” The result? The most originally asinine anti-Palin argument to date:

“You know, the one thing that I don’t think anybody’s said yet is that she’s very mean to animals, this woman. Why does she have it in for these poor polar bear and the caribou and she aerial kills wolves? That’s a very mean thing to do. … I don’t think that’s very nice, do you?  I think that that’s an important point we should all be looking at.”

So now it’s Palin’s PETA papers that aren’t in order. Put it this way: If Rep. Ron Paul clubbed seals to death on ice floes; I’d still consider him a smashing potential president. (If he fired a trooper who abused his power, all the better.)

For advancing such “argument,” the not-very-bright Behar ought to have been intellectually disemboweled. Needless to say, she’s more often than not applauded by mediacrats.

Besides, and to press my point, what is this standard against which Palin is being measured and found so woefully inadequate? Cheney? Bush? John Kerry? Heinz Kerry? Hillary? Harry Reid? Harriet Miers? King Henry (Paulson)? Barney, had-an-affair-with-a-male-prostitute, Frank? Nancy Pelosi? Al Sharpton? Chuck Schumer? Charlie Rangel? Joe Biden (who stated during the vice presidential debate” that “the Constitution calls for” “same-sex benefits,” when it says nothing about benefits, hetero or homo)?

Come now.

When it comes to their cretinism quotient, there are plenty candidates more qualified than Sarah Palin, starting in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the nation’s editorial rooms.

©2008 By ILANA MERCER
 WorldNetDaily.com
 October 17