Pretty much tells it. Roderick – Many times I read whiskey’s posts and tell myself it is over the top but THEN!!!!! I see the evidence. Go look for a job in this market and you will find out that it is skewed to the soft skills not hard ones. Manufacturing, construction and science are damn near dead in this country.

Whatever is in store for this country, The 0bamanation has sold out the Iranians. His taking credit for the protests is just sickening. It makes me ashamed for this country.

http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35303

It couldn’t possibly be from sources like this:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/659dkrod.asp

Nah. I don’t think so.

My sense is that many of the world’s great bloodlettings seem to have occurred as a result of vast populations willfully giving their souls to a leadership that assured them that they were thus absolved of any sin. Although it’s not the initial rationale, they believe that giving their support to their exalted leaders legitimizes any act whatsoever the leaders do to consolidate and retain and exercise power in their name.

Look at this in the context of some of the monumental moral decisions presently contending in our culture. Abortion, for instance – however much compassion you feel for a scared unmarried pregnant teenager, however much you may despise the horrific alternatives of barbaric back-alley coat-hanger abortions, or clandestine butcheries done by drunken incompetents, of lives blighted from the disdain and shunning of smug self-righteous “proper” folk, things are still what they are. Calling a child in the womb “an undifferentiated bit of flesh” does not make it so.

AND YET, we have a huge population of people who have convinced themselves that if they really really really want something enough, the universe is obliged somehow to yield to their desire. If they can find a way to change the definition of words, or use different words to describe a thing in a way that is more to their liking, then reality has been changed by substituting those words for the former words.

This is magical thinking at its worst. It is wishful thinking replacing wholesale any rationale discourse.

These things comprise the conspicuous danger of ANY personality cult that idolizes and advances a single human, especially when that person’s ideology is murky, generic, vague, or worse HIDDEN and deliberately un-specified. Even if the person so celebrated were an actual saint, unsordid in every motive, untainted by any selfish aim, of only the highest morality and filled with compassion and love, such a person can not reside in a hermetically-sealed bubble of wholesomeness. There are always monsters about looking for opportunities to use and manipulate a well-intentioned rube to advance an agenda of their own.

Of course, I don’t mean any disrespect for any incumbent pResident. This description obviously couldn’t possibly apply to him and his followers…

That being said, it’s not Gramscian conspiracies, or Alinsky acolytes, who have somehow magically corrupted a “pure” democracy, or nation, or set of nations. Heck the whole West is like this, something else must be going on.

Which it is — women voters. Women, far more than men, LOVE a Big Man/Strong Man. A Castro, a Chavez, a Nutjob, an Obama. Single Women voted Obama 70-29. Gallup has a new white paper out with the Gender Gap being high, permanent, and a feature of women 18-80.

Men face risks with Big Men. A risk, bluntly, that the Big Man will be more a threat to opportunity, particularly among women, than he offers in patronage. This is why male-oriented Big Men like Pinochet, or Franco, are careful to restrict women’s roles and offer male patronage, to garner support. A man like Castro, or Obama, offers a cult of personality as a “Royal” personage, with often inherited rule passing through the family, and a leveling of most men and exaltation of women, with a few carefully selected “aristocracy” members elevated into the Royal Court. Call this the Royal Model.

Women are just hard-wired to desire and admire men with more power than themselves. It’s why Obama, posing and prancing as the Global First Rockstar, has women and hte female media (but I repeat myself) eating out of his hand. It’s why his Stimulus bill deliberately excludes male employment and is heavy on female employment in government. It’s why the more he prances around like a King of Cool, the more women love him. And men begin to hate him.

The Left is thoroughly feminized, look who calls the shots on campus, on think tanks, in the media. Look at the basis of consumerist society: women. Heck watch a half hour of TV, randomly, in Prime Time on broadcast TV, you’ll see all the commercials appealing to women.

The shift in Preference from an LBJ “Great Society” and male-oriented “stuff” ala physical works, programs to boost middle class numbers, etc. to feel-good utopianism and moral status building is the shift in power and control from a male-oriented society to a female oriented one. The West is mostly run by it’s women, and women being what they are, love powerful, controlling, dominant men. They prefer the violent, exciting, no-compromises, uber-macho, dangerous men like Castro, Chavez, Nutjob, over boring movements proclaiming Democracy.

Ironically, the non-Western women who live in these violent places find them intolerable, given the Big Man royal autocracy that makes them essentially “the Lives of Others” (ala the German film) plaything of whatever powerful man wants them. Or “the Stoning of Soraya M” which is the other side of the same coin of power and dominance.

Nevertheless, Women of the West have such comfortable, settled, “boring” lives that they can afford the pursuit of utopianism and Big Man excitement.

Pretty much all politics in the West flows from the Gender Gap and the unprecedented wealth, power, safety, and security that accrued to people in the West post 1945 and that people cannot handle.

Narcissists are authortarian
“Narcissists are totally and inflexibly authoritarian. In other words, they are suck-ups. They want to be authority figures and, short of that, they want to be associated with authority figures. In their hearts, they know they can’t think well, have no judgment about what matters, are not connected with the world they inhabit, so they cling fanatically to the opinions of people they regard as authority figures –”

…

“Narcissists work for a goal, too, but it’s a different goal: they want power, authority, adulation. Lacking empathy, and lacking also context and affect, narcissists don’t understand how people achieve glory and high standing; they think it’s all arbitrary, it’s all appearances, it’s all who you know. So they try to attach themselves to people who already have what they want, meanwhile making a great show of working hard. Narcissists can put in a shocking amount of time to very little effect. This is partly because they have so little empathy that they don’t know why some work is valued more highly than other work, why some people’s opinions carry more weight than others’.”

They were found last time around. The left just closed their eyes and refused to see. I could post an URL to some of the many cases of WMD that were found, or to the many eyewitnesses that helped relocate WMD but if you won’t open your eyes, it would be a waste of my time.
Besides, the Media refused to publish any stories about WMD being located because they sae it as supporting the Bush administration. Since the Bush administration is gone, it will be up to the historians to decide. They will look at the evidence and say that there WAS WMD in Iraq up until February 2003. They will say that because that is what the evidence says. The evidence the left refuses to open their eyes and see.

So if a modern Leftist sympathizes like Obama with Khoumeini and Ahmadinejad concerning what they have to do like Bull Connor with their batons and fire hoses to retain their phony “sovereignty.” that illicitly grew out of the barrel of a gun, don’t be surprised. But you should join us liberals (of the traditional, conservative type) on the right who condemn leftists everywhere, always and forever. Freedom Now, Freedom Always and Freedom Forever.

Anymore? Socialism (liberals, progressives, Communists, fascists, what ever you want to call them) has ALWAYS been a tool to control the masses and open the way to power for a despot. Always will be.
Some of us understand that, others don’t. The named coined for those that don’t is “useful fools”.
Useful fool is a very hazardous political position. Once the despot has seized power, the fool is no longer useful. The fool actually becomes a danger, since the newly minted tyrant has absolutely no intention of implementing the changes that the Mob listened to him promise. So they are the first put against the wall, to prevent their use by other wanna-be despots.
So Iran shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that isn’t a useful fool. After all, wasn’t it the students that brought down the Shah in ’79? That generation of useful fools was exterminated. The more practicle students understood all along it was about power, with hte only change being who held it. Now it is they who hold power and they know what to do with this generation of useful fools.
The positive aspect of all this is that the delusion of soft power and non-violent revolution hopefully is done. It was never more then a re-write of history anyway.
Stray random thought; Do you suppose Chavez has a business card that say “Have murderous thugs. Will travel.”