It’s Wednesday, September 23rd, 2014…and have you ever wondered if there’s anyone on the planet who’s a bigger fool…
…than James Earl Carter?!? No, The Obamao’s a Marxist ideologue; Carter’s an utter idiot. Though frankly, this really doesn’t differentiate him from the vast majority of his fellow travelers.
But even Carter had more respect than this:
Semper latte, you Marxist bag of douche!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, since we’re on the subject of unwanted intruders at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, here’s Hope ‘n Change‘s thoughts on the recent White House security breach:
“…The intruder, Omar Gonzalez, has now been given medical care, hot meals, counseling, comfortable lodging, a Swedish massage, aromatherapy, a full complement of welfare services, permission to fly without identification or hassles from the TSA, and he’ll eventually be given a comfortable home at an undisclosed location somewhere in the United States at taxpayer expense.
Only kidding! That’s actually the president’s “come on in, everybody’s welcome” policy for the tens of thousands of illegal intruders who violate the borders and land of ordinary riff-raff Americans on a daily basis. Gonzalez, on the other hand, got his ass arrested all to hell and gone for walking on Barry’s lawn.“
Next up, Jim Geraghty reports one of the more lasting impacts of Progressive-inspired moral relativism:
Goodell & Barra: Students of the Obama Era of American Leadership
Does our president just reflect a broad cultural trend in the behavior of leaders, or does he set the tone from the top? Consider some recent examples of leaders of large organizations with important responsibilities, once they find themselves in the public eye:
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told CBS This Morning he never saw the second tape of Rice striking his wife before Monday. He said, “When we make a decision we want to have all the information that’s available. When we met with Ray Rice and his representatives it was ambiguous about what actually happened.” Friday afternoon, he announced the league would be making a new effort in dealing with unacceptable player conduct . . . by forming a special committee.
Then there’s General Motors CEO Mary Barra, whose company has recalled 2.6 million cars with defective ignition switches. The faulty parts have been linked to at least 13 deaths and 54 accidents since 2009 and have led to numerous lawsuits. She said, “I don’t really think there was a cover up. I think what we had, and it was covered in the report, there were silos of information, so people had bits and pieces and didn’t come forward with the information or didn’t act with a sense of urgency, and it simply was unacceptable.”
Did anyone at NBC News ever answer for the decision to hire Chelsea Clinton for $600,000 a year for three years?
Freedom Industries, that company that spilled ten thousand gallons of chemicals into the Elk River, forcing 300,000 residents to stop drinking, cooking, washing or bathing in their tap water, will face a ton of lawsuits. Their management and leadership has been hard to identify, much less hold accountable; apparently no one with the company feels the need to stand before the public and face the consequences of their actions and inaction. (Notice this is a story tailor-made for even the left-leaning MSM — evil corporation pollutes water of innocent people — and yet there’s been little coverage outside of West Virginia.)
These are all private-sector scandals, of course. Every administration and every era has its scandals. What our current moment seems to feature is a bumper crop of (alleged) leaders insisting they can wait out the storm, often displaying a glimpse of indignation at suggestions that they resign because something terrible happened on their watch. Somehow tapes of criminal behavior never reach the folks at the top, nor do reports of a defect in ignition switches.
Everybody’s got rogue-level staffers in Cincinnati, it seems.
You get that joke because you’re a well-read audience, but also because we’ve seen leaders point the finger below them so many times. The moves of the unaccountable leader, caught with a mess on his watch, are so predictable now: This is the first I’m hearing of it. I learned about it from media reports. I’m as outraged as anyone. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. I’m promising a comprehensive review. It will report to me, and I will let you know about the results of that review several news cycles from now. Subtext: Hopefully in a few weeks you’ll have forgotten about it.
No, Obama didn’t invent this “leadership” dynamic, but you can argue America’s frustration with it in the previous administration helped drive the president there: The wrong intelligence about Iraq. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” The Abramoff scandal. The Wall Street meltdown, jeopardizing the entire economy, with the lingering sense that few of those who made the decision to invest heavily in the “toxic assets” ever paid the price for bad judgment.
The country feels deeply betrayed by its governing and economic elites. Enter Obama. He’s elected. In his inaugural, he declares, “In the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things . . . Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those that prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.”
And you know what we got. Stimulus waste; State Department employees on paid leave over Benghazi; “At this point, what difference does it make?”; the VA, where the secretary belatedly discovered an “unacceptable lack of integrity within some of our veterans health facilities”; Obamacare, where Kathleen Sebelius let the president go out and say things about the Healthcare.gov web site she knew wasn’t true, and still kept her job for several months. The NSA.
Now here’s the new IRS commissioner, allegedly in place to clean up the mess of the last one:
Under his management, the agency has ignored and strung out congressional demands for documents and witnesses. Mr. Koskinen waited months to tell Congress the IRS had “lost” the emails of Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center the probe, and arguably only did so because an outside lawsuit revealed that the email record was incomplete. He testified that there were no backup tapes with Lerner emails, but we have since learned there are 760 server drives that may contain copies.
The message has been sent, far and wide: Accountability is for suckers.
Speaking of suckers, as Bret Stephens details in the WSJ, how else would one describe the knuckle-noses who voted for this fool once…let alone TWICE?!?
“I’ve been thinking about this as it becomes clear that, even at an elementary level, Mr. Obama often doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It isn’t so much his analysis of global events that’s wrong, though it is. The deeper problem is the foundation of knowledge on which that analysis is built.
…Every administration tries to spin events its way; every president gets things wrong. Mr. Obama is not exceptional in those respects. Where he stands apart is in his combination of ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance. What does the president know? The simple answer, and maybe the truest, is: not a lot.“
More importantly, what he does know is all wrong, as the crumbs he grasps are just the false tenets of Marxism. In a stark reminder life truly does imitate art, it’s like Rhah were speaking directly to B. Hussein…
…instead of the other unqualified, dope-smoking malcontent who knows more than everyone else.
Since we’re on the subject of those who know sooooo much that just isn’t so, courtesy of Politico via Drudge, the latest from the woman who characterized Conservatives as “as*@oles…but “isn’t a political person”:
Lois Lerner is toxic — and she knows it. But she refuses to recede into anonymity or beg for forgiveness for her role in the IRS tea party-targeting scandal.Lerner dismissed after invoking Fifth Amendment. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lerner said in her first press interview since the scandal broke 16 months ago. “I’m proud of my career and the job I did for this country.”
Lerner is right: she isn’t a political person. She’s a self-serving, lying, hypocritical, treasonous political apparatchik! And she exemplifies the problem with most if not all Liberals. They see nothing wrong whatsoever with any behavior or action, however illegal, egregious or unconstitutional, provided they’re in pursuit of Progressive policies and programs.
Lerner went on to tell Politico, which evidently swallowed her tale of innocence hook, line and sinker…
…she has been the recipient of threats and hate mail, describing how one person called her “the worst person ever in the United States.” “I just thought, ‘Boy, worse than Jeffrey Dahmer?’” Lerner quipped.
Jeffrey Dahmer? No, Lois. More like Edward Snowden; or…
…Bo Bergdahl.
Moving on, if you’re wondering what other logic-defying deeds Progressives plan to unleash upon a largely disinterested Republic, the WSJ offers the answer in what it terms…
The Hooters Precedent
The NLRB says you can tell your boss to @$%#! and still keep your job.
The Hooters restaurant chain isn’t the only place you can expect to hear more salty language in the years ahead. The National Labor Relations Board is increasingly siding with employees who insult their employers.
Hooters drew some unwanted attention last spring when an NLRB administrative law judge ruled in favor of two employees who had been fired for cursing at a co-worker in front of restaurant guests. The two fired employees claimed that their co-worker had fixed a bikini contest in her favor. By allegedly arranging for her boyfriend and best friend to serve as judges, the woman was able to win the $300 first prize while earning the ire of two losing, er, contestants.
Now comes a paper in which attorneys at the Holland & Knight law firm note a disturbing NLRB trend of condoning profanity and insubordination among U.S. workers. They’re warning employers about a pattern of board decisions “that attack sensible, long-standing management standards of conduct.”
Authors Frederick Braid and Loren Forrest note a recent case in which the board sided with an employee of an auto dealership who cursed out the owner in a meeting to discuss compensation. The employee used words not fit for a family newspaper as he insulted the business owner, called him “stupid,” told him that nobody liked him and that he would regret it if he fired the abusive employee. After the dealership went ahead and fired the worker, the NLRB ruled that the business had violated the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB said the employee’s behavior was neither “belligerent” nor “menacing.”
In a case involving Starbucks Corp., report Messrs. Braid and Forrest, “the Board again reinstated an employee” who engaged in profanity-laced tirades against his manager. “The first tirade occurred when the employee felt that his manager was slow to assist him during a busy day at Starbucks. Instead of thanking his manager for the requested assistance, which the manager provided, the employee said, ‘about damn time.'” The worker then used foul language and told his boss to “do everything your damn self.”
The NLRB decided the employee’s behavior was simply a pretext used by Starbucks to fire him for pro-union views. In the Hooters case the NLRB also saw the foul language as simply a pretext to punish employees for exercising their right to engage in “protected concerted activity” regarding the alleged rigging of the bikini contest. At the Obama NLRB, pretty much any behavior can be justified as protected employee “activity.”
Then again, what can…or should…one expect from the folks who classified the Fort Hood massacre as workplace violence?!?
And for those still believing Hillary couldn’t be as bad as The Obamao, The Washington Free Beacon provides the following primer in the perils present in any Progressive politician, let alone Bill Clinton’s worse half:
Previously unpublished correspondence between Hillary Clinton and the late left-wing organizer Saul Alinsky reveal new details about her relationship with the controversial Chicago activist and shed light on her early ideological development.
Clinton met with Alinsky several times in 1968 while writing a Wellesley college thesis about his theory of community organizing. Clinton’s relationship with Alinsky, and her support for his philosophy, continued for several years after she entered Yale law school in 1969, two letters obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. The letters also suggest that Alinsky, who died in 1972, had a deeper influence on Clinton’s early political views than previously known.
A 23-year-old Hillary Clinton was living in Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1971. She was interning at the left-wing law firm Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, known for its radical politics and a client roster that included Black Panthers and other militants.
…Clinton devoted just one paragraph in her memoir Living History to Alinsky, writing that she rejected a job offer from him in 1969 in favor of going to law school. She wrote that she wanted to follow a more conventional path. However, in the 1971 letter, Clinton assured Alinsky that she had “survived law school, slightly bruised, with my belief in and zest for organizing intact.” “The more I’ve seen of places like Yale Law School and the people who haunt them, the more convinced I am that we have the serious business and joy of much work ahead—if the commitment to a free and open society is ever going to mean more than eloquence and frustration,” wrote Clinton.
Then there’s the latest from Michael Barone, who suggests…
“…The Ellis Islanders, blocked from upward mobility at home, brought to America advantages of genetic endowment and cultural tradition—nature and nurture—which enabled them to move upward unusually rapidly.
Asian immigrants seem to be moving upward similarly today. But not the group the Census Bureau calls Hispanics. In my 2001 book The New Americans, I predicted that Hispanics would move upward much as Italians had a century before. That was overoptimistic. There has been little or no upward mobility among third- and fourth-generation Hispanics.
Why the difference? One reason is that current Hispanic immigrants seem to be characterized by economic need rather than second-class status. This is especially so among immigrants from Mexico and illegal immigrants (also mostly from Mexico).
The second reason is that the America that welcomes them today is no longer a nation with equal citizenship for all, but a nation that shunts them into a special, supposedly privileged but also stigmatized, minority group. Anomalously, racial quotas and preferences benefit those never discriminated against in the United States.
Some preferences have hurt more than helped. Steering mortgages to non-creditworthy Hispanics produced foreclosures and personal tragedies — and a financial crisis. As author Michael Gonzalez notes, Hispanic advancement has been minimal in California with its high welfare spending and taxes. Hispanics have done better in low-welfare, low-tax, high-economic-growth Texas…“
But why muddy the waters with facts?!?
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to today’s Environmental Moment, and yet another inconvenient fact:
“…Bastardi said that people are not causing climate change and expects scientific data to eventually back that up.
“The debate on what is going on is over. It is over. Now we just have to see what happens when the Atlantic flips into its cold cycle and the cyclical nature of the sun, whether we return to the temperatures we were in the late seventies as measured by objective satellite readings.”
He commented that the protestors at the climate march were more concerned with their political agenda than climate science. “If you really paid attention to what happened, the mask is off, and I appreciate that those people that organized this came out and let us know who they were. If you look at the list of people, Communist Party USA, Socialists. Fine, if you want to have that debate, that debate should be done at the polling place and should be done in the halls of Congress or try to change laws. It shouldn’t be prostituting the weather and climate for your own needs.”
Don’t forget sullying the precious environment….
…with your plastic drink cups, aluminum cans and other assorted garbage, not to mention…
…uncounted tons of unnecessary carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases!
In a related item detailing Progressives willful disregard of the truth, AEI asks…
“…It would be interesting and fun — but somewhat in the realm of metaphysics — to ask why the UN Climate Summit 2014 is denying the science reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In its fifth assessment report, IPCC notes the recent “pause” in the climate trajectory, despite an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations of about 13 percent since 1990, and despite the predictions of 73 mainstream climate models. And so the scientific basis for the UN’s assertion that “climate change. … is happening now” is entirely obscure.“
Why? Because the facts don’t fit the fiction. Which is the real…
…inconvenient truth!
On the Lighter Side…
Finally, a word from the owner of our new favorite restaurant:
Nor do we!
Magoo
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.