One would think by this time the world would realize Obama does this to everybody; or at least anyone outside of those contributing huge sums to his campaign…er, retirement fund…er,…presidential library.
…coming from a clown who, as CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, didn’t “fully understand” the threat to the Khobar Towers, let alone the Twin Towers; and still doesn’t grasp the threat posed by the Chinese, the NoKos, Iran, Islamic terrorism or, for that matter, Russia, given its invasion of the Crimea, Ukraine and misadventures in Syria! Talk about the pot calling the kettle uninformed.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of The Boss, since we’re on the subject of perfect exemplifications of the Peter Principle, meet the California equivalent of the F-35:
“California’s bullet train could cost taxpayers 50% more than estimated — as much as $3.6 billion more.And that’s just for the first 118 miles through the Central Valley, which was supposed to be the easiest part of the route between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
A confidential Federal Railroad Administration risk analysis, obtained by The Times, projects that building bridges, viaducts, trenches and track from Merced to Shafter, just north of Bakersfield, could cost $9.5 billion to $10 billion, compared with the original budget of $6.4 billion.
…About 80% of all bullet train systems incur massive overruns in their construction, according to Bent Flyvbjerg, an infrastructure risk expert at the University of Oxford who has studied such rail projects all over the world. One of the biggest hazards of such mega-projects is a government agency that is attempting to do something highly complex for the first time.
The California system is being built by an independent authority that has never built anything and depends on a large network of consultants and contractors for advice…”
The California taxpayer-funded bullet train disaster was as surely doomed from the start…
…as the Obama presidency!
In a related item which deserves to be featured and read in its entirety, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson details how California’s bullet train travails are pretty much par for the Progressive course, as he relates…
In a big, complex society such as ours, the major features of public life have two main components: There are formal legal arrangements and there are institutions, and the former is not very useful without the latter — that means, for instance, that it isn’t enough to have the First Amendment, you have to have the New York Times, too, or at least something doing the job of the New York Times, which the New York Times itself often fails to do.
President Barack Obama, in his farewell address, struggled clumsily toward that as he shared his concerns that too much Fox News and too many fever-dream Facebook memes are undermining our “common baseline of fact.” He is a lawyer and a politician and, in spite of his reputation, not an especially thoughtful man, so it is unsurprising that he could not quite put his finger on what he was trying to say. Have no fear: It was his last address as president, but I would bet a testicle that he’ll average more speeches per annum in retirement than he did even as a logorrheic president of these United States.
If President Obama does not understand why our institutions and the common ground they once represented are in a shambles, he need not look very far for an explanation: He is a man of the Left, and the Left corrupts every institution it touches: the news media, the educational and academic institutions, the cultural institutions, professional organizations, government bureaucracies, everything from National Geographic to the English department at the University of Texas. This is not a case of “both sides do it” or an instance of a conservative polemicist simply fitting his political opponents for black hats.If you want to understand why Americans have so little faith in institutions that were once granite pillars of respectability, you must understand the Left’s coopting of them.
Consider the case of the New York Times. Hating the self-proclaimed newspaper of record is a great conservative preoccupation (some time back, I oversaw a blog here more or less dedicated to that). But it was not always the case that it was discounted, even by the most gimlet-eyed of conservatives. No doubt that William F. Buckley Jr. found much in the Times to annoy and dismay him, but he also read it every day and cared about what was in it. If you go back and read WFB’s syndicated column, you will find evidence that it was written by a dedicated reader of the Times. By the 1990s, conservatives’ attitude toward the paper had changed dramatically. Rush Limbaugh used to describe his reaction to seeing something noteworthy in the Times thus: “That’s interesting! I wonder if it’s true?”
Of course the Times has long had a bias problem, dating at least back to the infamous reporting of Walter Duranty, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for managing to tour the Soviet Union without seeing any sign of starvation, misery, or oppression. But a healthy institution can have a great many defects before it becomes defective categorically, and, over the years, various kinds of left-ish activism seeped into the Times, on practically every page from sports to the book review. The bias of the Times and of the other major media was not, contra the usual conservative criticism, strictly left-wing. To a significant degree, it was something worse: ordinary partisanship. For most of the decades between the end of World War II and the watershed Republican victories of 1994 and after, Democrats simply ran Washington. If you were close to power — reporters must necessarily be close to power, and many of them fall into the understandable vice of adoring it — you were close to Democrats.
That partisan instinct was and is deeply ingrained in the mainstream media. In his farewell address, President Obama boasted of achieving “marriage equality” for homosexuals, having seemingly forgotten that he ran for president as a candidate opposed to gay marriage. (Hillary Rodham Clinton was opposed as well in 2008.)That Obama the candidate and Obama the president both were given an indulgence on this question from the mainstream media is not a result of their trying to carve out room for disagreement on gay marriage — once Obama and Mrs. Clinton evolved on that issue, dissent became rank bigotry — but was and is simply a vulgar and craven act of partisan self-defense.
Media bias made Rush Limbaugh’s career, giving him more than enough material for three hours a day. Media bias made Fox News, which finds itself in the odd position of being the most popular cable news network while programming a great deal of material about the defects of the media. Because most of the local newspapers that we grew up reading in the pre-Internet era did not have Washington bureaus or foreign correspondents, even those of us who grew up in very conservative areas were treated to a great deal of increasingly obvious and contemptible bias thanks to the Associated Press and other news services. We learned not to trust them, and, as technology began providing us with a rich menu of alternatives, our distrust grew into something like contempt.
But here is the thing: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News did not convince Americans to distrust the New York Times and Dan Rather. The Times and Rather saw to that themselves — talk radio, Fox News, and right-wing Web journals are the result of that alienation, not the cause of it. Institutions matter. As President Obama intuited, we lost something when we lost a common understanding that the news is the news, and that while the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal might not necessarily see the world the same way, we ought not dismiss a claim of fact simply because of the flag under which it was published.
The American Left has long understood the importance of institutions, thus its embarkation some decades ago on its “Long March” through them. It has been remarkably successful: It is very difficult to be an open conservative while seeking a position as, say, a professor of liberal arts. A would-be history professor active in pro-life causes faces all manner of retribution and exclusion that a would-be history professor active in pro-choice causes does not. The public-school bureaucracies and the unions affiliated with them are organs of the Democratic party. The IRS has been, under Barack Obama’s watch, converted into an instrument of politics deployed against conservative organizations, as have other federal agencies. Did Barack Obama organize this or consent to it? Maybe, maybe not.But he and his administration saw to it that those who were commandeering these institutions for political purposes were sheltered from the consequences of doing so. Lois Lerner is not in prison, but enjoying a comfortable federal pension.
So prevalent is this bias — this abuse of power — that conservative organizations that help students connect with scholarships and internships routinely advise them to omit those associations from their CVs if they are seeking work in academia or the media.This is almost exclusively one-sided. (We’d venture to say completely one-sided!)
In his final presidential speech, Obama proposed redrawing congressional districts to make them less partisan. Who in his right mind would trust the people who weaponized the IRS — and who are at this very moment using prosecutors’ offices across the country to try to criminalize global-warming dissent — to do that in a fair and honest way? He proposed new campaign-finance rules that would purportedly reduce the role of money in politics, but who in his right mind would trust him and his colleagues — Lois Lerner, Loretta Lynch, Harry Reid — to oversee such regulations?
Some years ago, I worked at the Institute for Humane Studies, a classical-liberal organization founded in the 1940s by a Cornell professor who had been told that he could not assign his students readings from the economist F. A. Hayek because they were “reactionary.” (Hayek would later win the Nobel prize in economics.) The superiority of central planning, he was told, was settled science, and he was a denier. The consensus was well established, it was unalterable, and it was intellectually irresponsible to question it. Conservative and libertarian counter-institutions ranging from this magazine to the American Enterprise Institute were founded for similar reasons: because the Left had occupied and corrupted the institutions that ought to be doing the intellectual work necessary to a free, liberal, democratic, self-governing republic.
T. S. Eliot once remarked that he was surprised by how much his American students had read but thought that they might be better off if they had read fewer books but had read the same ones. A shared body of knowledge and understanding is indeed desirable, and President Obama is right to lament the death of the institutions that once sustained it.
A more thoughtful man might see the metaphorical blood on his hands.
Or, as we might humbly suggest…
…feel the actual blood running down his wrists! Enjoy your tax-payer funded retirement, you Islamofascist, anti-American son of a bitch. You are truly the greatest scam ever foisted upon the American public since the New Deal and The Great Society.
Forgive the foregoing of all the niceties; this is just the way it is.
Next, in keeping with the joke which was eight years of Obama, we move beyond the cold, harsh light of reality to a story, quite literally, beyond belief, courtesy of the The Jerusalem Post via Drudge:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“A German regional court in the city of Wuppertal affirmed a lower court decision last Friday stating that a violent attempt to burn the city’s synagogue by three men in 2014 was a justified expression of criticism of Israel’s policies.
Johannes Pinnel, a spokesman for the regional court in Wuppertal, outlined the court’s decision in a statement. Three German Palestinians sought to torch the Wuppertal synagogue with Molotov cocktails in July, 2014. The local Wuppertal court panel said in its 2015 decision that the three men wanted to draw “attention to the Gaza conflict” with Israel. The court deemed the attack not to be motivated by antisemitism.
...The court sentenced the three men – the 31-year-old Mohamad E., the 26 year-old Ismail A. and the 20-year-old Mohammad A.—to suspended sentences. The men tossed self-made Molotov cocktails at the synagogue…
The attack caused €800 damage to the synagogue. The original synagogue in Wuppertal was burned by Germans during the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938…
…After the local Wuppertal court decision in 2015, Volker Beck, a leading Green Party MP, said the “attack on the synagogue was motivated by antisemitism” and blasted the court for issuing a decision stating that the goal of the attack was to highlight the war in Gaza. “This is a mistaken decision as far as the motives of the perpetrators are concerned,” he said, adding that the burning of a synagogue in Germany because of the Middle East conflict can be attributed only to antisemitism.
“What do Jews in Germany have to do with the Middle East conflict?Every bit as much as Christians, non-religious people or Muslims in Germany, namely, absolutely nothing.The ignorance of the judiciary toward anti-Semitism is for many Jews in Germany especially alarming, ” said Beck.“
As well as any one with any sense of decency, reality and history anywhere else in the world. Sorry folks, but the leap from burning synagogues…
…to people…
…isn’t nearly as far as some would have you think.
And in today’s Follow-Up Segment, writing at Townhall.com, Leah Barkoukis reports how…
Hold on…give us a minute…seems like we’ve heard this before; yeah, now we remember:
“Therefore, President-elect Trump’s willingness to publicly call out this $1.5 trillion program is good news. However, getting involved in negotiating a better price on incomplete, crippled fighters will not save taxpayers any money in the long run — because the prices being negotiated between Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon are prices designed to fool the public about the F-35’s true costs. Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon both know that any “discount” or price reduction negotiated in public will quickly be made up on the back-end, where a plethora of upgrades, airframe life-extension programs, and uber-expensive spare-parts purchases over the life of the program will easily generate over $200 million for each plane delivered.Consequently, if Trump expends presidential prestige to save a few percent off the top, it won’t solve the underlying problem. Instead, he will only validate a failed program that is a big part of the swamp he is eager to drain as part of his plan to restore our depleted military.“
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