Nihilist in Golf Pants
Mark Steyn dubs Obama President Plus-Fours, and then explores “The Audacity of Golf:”
On Libya, the Audacity of Golf seems to have done the trick: Nobody’s in the mood for a no-fly zone in another thankless distant hellhole just as Iraq and Hoogivsastan have dropped off the news. And yeah, gas seems to be going up, and, when 40 percent of Americans work in minimal-skill service jobs, it makes a difference to the economic viability of those jobs whether you’re driving there at a dollar-eighty per gallon or four bucks. “We have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” said Steven Chu, now Obama’s energy secretary, in 2008. We’re getting there. It’s just shy of ten bucks per in Britain, but there’s no reason a fuel policy for small, densely populated nations can’t work for Wyoming, because we’re investing in all those high-speed rail links. So you’ll be able to commute from your home in Rattlesnake, Nevada to your job in North Rattlesnake, Nevada via the Joseph Robinette Biden Delaware, Lackawanna, Atchison, Topeka, Sante Fe & Canadian Pacific High-Speed Interchange Facility & Federal Stimulus Mausoleum in Wilmington.
How will we power the trains? Nukes? Oh, perish the thought. Not after those whachamacallits in Japan failed to withstand the thingummy from the whoozis. Obviously, if something can’t shrug off one of the five most powerful earthquakes ever recorded, then we shouldn’t have anything to do with it at all, no way, no how. Instead, we should “invest” in “green jobs,” and then you’ll be able to commute to your overnight shift at the KwikkiKrap because the high-speed trains will have giant wind turbines nailed to the roof of the caboose, at least until the next of kin of boxcar-riding hobos caught in the slipstream file a class-action suit. And by then you won’t need to commute to the KwikkiKrap because they’ll have cut the night shift after the drop-off in vehicular traffic was so severe they had to change the sign to “CASHIER CARRIES LESS THAN $3.79 IN CHANGE.” But that proved to be the biggest stimulus to the American sign-manufacturing industry since they had to make all those “THIS TWO-HUNDRED YARD STRETCH OF SCARIFIED PAVEMENT BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE AMERICA RECOVERY & REDISTRIBUTION ACT” sign, so that’s even more good news.
The Audacity of Golf may yet prove a potent message. Many Americans seem disinclined to heed warnings, especially of stuff that Harry Reid assures us is a long way off. Change we can believe in? Thanks but no thanks. We’ll wait till it happens. In New Orleans, they waited till the hurricane hit, and then the cops walked off the job, and the fleet of evacuation buses lay empty and abandoned, and enterprising locals fired on army engineers repairing the 17th Street Canal, and less ambitious types went a-lootin’, and, when the feds showed up to hand out emergency debit cards, they spent them at strip joints, and of the refugees who fled to Texas 45 percent turned out to have a criminal record and the Houston homicide rate went up 23 percent.
So imagine if last week’s earthquake and tsunami had hit Louisiana.
Oh, but that’s different. See also, liberal reaction to each president dispatching an aircraft carrier to a far-off tsunami-ravaged region, or “Obama vs. Obama on War Justification.”
(Headline via Garrison Keillor. Not to be confused with this Nihilist in Golf Pants, of course.)
“We have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” said Steven Chu, now Obama’s energy secretary, in 2008.
It speaks to the economic illiteracy of this miserable administration that they would see boosting gasoline prices as something that had to be figured out. Almost any college student that has spent any time sitting NEAR an economics book could have explained it to them. I guess to modern “intellectuals”, doing the impossible and the improbable is easy (just have congress pass a law that they don’t read) but bumbling your way into national disasters takes real talent.
The 2005 blogpost Ed linked to about scorn being heaped upon GW Bush by clueless Euros for sending the aircraft carrier to the Indonesians for tsunami relief has to be reread:
On Christmas Day, a disaster visited the human race. Hundreds of thousands of people, quietly living their lives on the edge of the sea were killed. They were killed, not by suicide bombers or suitcase nukes or crazed men hijacking planes into buildings. They were killed with simple seawater. Those that were killed weren’t just simple minded fools who wandered lemming like out into the unusually low tide, only to be mowed down by the sudden flood. They were people enjoying the sights from the second story of a hotel when the ocean rose up to engulf them. The horror of it all hasn’t even begun to sink in to most of us.
[snip]
Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro colleagues tossed this little turd out to no one in particular:
“See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, there’s a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier….”
After which he and many of my Euro colleagues laughed out loud.
And then they looked at me. I wasn’t laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.
I’m afraid I was “unprofessional;” I let it loose -
“Hmmm, let’s see, what would be the ideal ship to send to a disaster; now what kind of ship would we want?
Something with its own inexhaustible power supply?
Something that can produce 900,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water?
Something with its own airfield? So that after producing the fresh water, it could help distribute it?
Something with 4 hospitals and lots of open space for emergency supplies?
Something with a global communications facility to make the coordination of disaster relief in the region easier?
Well “Franz”, us peasants in America call that kind of ship an “Aircraft Carrier”. We have 12 of them. How many do you have? Oh that’s right, NONE. Lucky for you and the rest of the world, we are the kind of people who share. Even with people we don’t like. In fact, if memory serves, once upon a time we peasants spent a ton of money and lives rescuing people who we had once tried to kill and who tried to kill us.
Do you know who those people were? That’s right Franz, Europeans.
There’s a French Aircraft carrier? Where is it? Right where it belongs! In France of course! Oh why should the French Navy dirty their uniforms helping people on the other side of the globe. How Simplesse…
The day an American has to move a European out of the way to help in some part of the world it will be a great day in the world, you sniggering little f**knob…”
The room fell silent. My Hindi friend then said quietly to the Euros:
“Can you let your hatred of George Bush end for just one minute? There are people dying! And what are your countries doing? Amazon.com has helped more than France has. You all have a role to play in the world, why can’t you see that? Thank God for the US Navy, they don’t have to come and help, but they are. They helped you once and you should all thank God they did. They didn’t have to, and no one but them would have done so. I’m ashamed of you all…”
He left the room, shaking and in tears. The frustration of being on the other side of the globe, unable to do anything to assist and faced with people who could not set aside their asininity long enough to reach out and help was too much for him to bear. I just shook my head and left. The Euros stood speechless.
Later in the breakroom, one of the laughing Euros caught me and extended his hand in an apology. I asked him where he was from, he said “a town outside of Berlin.” He is a young man, in his early 20′s.
I asked him if he knew of a man named Gail Halvorsen.
He said no.
I said “that’s a shame” and walked away to find my Hindi friend.
Posted @ January 03, 2005 08:25 PM
I wish I could have been there….
I like to call him the embodiment of the “Putter Principle”. when one reaches his maximum level of incompetence within an organization, he goes golfing.
I just googled Halvorsen. Today’s left would no doubt ridicule him as a bible thumper for his missionary work,sounding just like the Euroturds in your story.
Nihilists.. Fuck ME.
I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.
The Dude! Thanks for abiding by.