The Innermost Doll of Failure

A farmer in Boise, Idaho once compared the attack methods of a pack of wolves and a mountain lion.

Mountain lions or cougars have the reputation of killing with efficiency and, if there are such things in the high desert food chain, some mercy and grace. The big cats keep bloodshed to a minimum and they kill quickly.

Wolves employ far sloppier methods in their hunts. A cow might take her last breath of air amid a scene of flattened brush, trampled ground, drag marks and smears of blood–lots of blood. Nadeau calls such scenes “struggle sites.” These sites can stretch hundreds of yards–a seasoned crime scene investigator might call the scene “gruesome” and the cause of death “brutal….

“They’re not trying to kill it, they’re trying to eat it,” Deb Lord says of the wolves’ attack methods, which often leave their victims partially consumed before they finally die of blood loss or violent injuries.

One thing wolves do is circle the victim. “Wolves would usually approach from downwind. Both to scent the animal and probably to prevent their scent from being carried to their prey. Suspicious and cautious by nature, this will usually entail some circling and observation, but at a distance.”

Where the animal is unable to flee, is either tied grazing, in a fenced area or in the case of the deer floundering in deep snow … I have seen them circle quite close to the animal (within a few meters).

I believe they just do this to assess the risk. Is the animal really helpless, does whatever has caused the animal to be unable to flee pose a risk to the hunter.

Just a basic cautious assessment, because they are able to do so, whereas with a fleeing animal they cannot take the time. The animal would be out of reach by the time they assessed the risk.

This comparison suggests itself in politics after Sarah Palin was reported as advocating the impeachment of president Obama while John Boehner chose to lead his pack of wolves in filing a lawsuit. The Voice of America reports:

And you thought you’d heard the last from Sarah Palin? Not so fast! The former Alaska governor is back on the national stage, leading a new conservative charge to impeach President Barack Obama. …

In a recent column, Palin cited the immigration crisis on the southern border as the “last straw” in what she described as the president’s “purposeful dereliction of duty.” Palin wrote on the conservative website Breitbart.com that the president’s “rewarding of lawlessness, including his own, is the foundational problem here.” She went on: “It’s time to impeach, and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.”

Boehner is warier. As the Washington Post reports, the speaker has decided to sue the president, as if he believed his political quarry to be still dangerous. The lawsuit is less confrontational. Boehner aims to do some circling.

Former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Tuesday joined a growing chorus of Republicans calling for the impeachment of Obama, writing in an op-ed that the influx of young illegal immigrants over the southern border “is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, ‘no mas.'”

“I disagree,” Boehner said when asked by reporters Wednesday morning. When a reporter pointed out that some House Republicans also are calling for impeachment, Boehner said again: “I disagree.”

Boehner’s comments came after Palin said Tuesday night on Fox News that the speaker’s planned lawsuit against Obama over his use of executive power is a weak maneuver. “You don’t bring a lawsuit to a gunfight,” she said. “There’s no place for lawyers on the front lines.”

Even so the speaker has begun the slow stalk. MSNBC reports that “Speaker John Boehner has released a bill that would authorize him to sue the White House over its implementation of the Affordable Care Act.”

“The current president believes he has the power to make his own laws – at times even boasting about it,” Boehner said in a statement Thursday. “He has said that if Congress won’t make the laws he wants, he’ll go ahead and make them himself, and in the case of the employer mandate in his health care law, that’s exactly what he did.”…

“In 2013, the president changed the health care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it,” Boehner said. “That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own.”

There: he’s done it. No mention of immigration though, the speaker is saving that for a separate context. For now though he’s chimed in in a roundabout kind of way about the situation on the border.

Earlier Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner erupted in anger over what he called Obama’s lack of leadership on the issue, telling reporters that “this is a problem of the President’s own making.” “He’s been President for five and a half years,” the Ohio Republican thundered. “When is he going to take responsibility for something?”

However slow the circling, the Daily Beast is thunderstruck that it’s begun at all.

Well, this is really happening. Speaker of the House John Boehner asked his chamber to authorize taking President Obama to court. The draft resolution alleges that Obama changed the Affordable Care Act, a law, without Congress voting. “No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own,” Boehner said in a statement. (Obama delayed the employer mandate for insurance one year.) Next Wednesday, the House Rules Committee will hold its first hearing on the resolution, deciding whether or not to authorize a lawsuit. Earlier on Thursday, Obama addressed the GOP members calling for the suit at an event in Texas: “Really? Really? For what? You’re going to sue me for doing my job?”

Yes it’s started. After the wolves come the vultures. Just now CNN, citing Reuters, reports that Germany has just expelled the CIA chief of station. “Germany told the CIA station chief in Berlin to leave the country on Thursday in a dramatic display of anger from Chancellor Angela Merkel at the behaviour of a close ally after officials unearthed two suspected U.S. spies.” This happens only days after Bahrain expelled an assistant secretary of state, Tom Malinowski. The BBC reports:

A US diplomat has been ordered to leave Bahrain after meeting members of a leading Shia opposition group, say Bahrain officials.

Tom Malinowski, US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, went to Bahrain on Sunday.

While there, he met members of al-Wefaq, a move which the foreign ministry of Bahrain says intervened in the country’s domestic affairs.

Germany’s action reflect the fact that Obama’s been silently impeached as Leader of the Free World. Obama wanted America to be treated like “normal country” — well he got it. Earth to Obama: this also means you are just a normal man: the Lightworker Halo has been turned off. Recently Merkel has been acting like she’s the new leader of the West. But then Germany is a greater power and her ambitions are understandable. When Bahrain starts reading Obama the riot act, you wonder if it’s buzzard time.

So far, as Bryan Preston notes, Obama has been laughing it off. Laughing off the IRS, NSA, Benghazi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Obamacare and border scandals. Ha-ha-ha. Ho-ho-ho. Preston has a remarkable series of photographs showing the president just cracking up before a grim faced governor Rick Perry.

Out in the dark the howling starts. Awoooo.

But the real news isn’t the proposal of Palin, but Boehner. Boehner would never go in the water unless he was reasonably sure it was safe. If he and his merry lupine band are circling, it’s only because they smell weakness. They can taste the fear. Wolves have a developed temporal sense. They know that the prey’s status changes from hour to hour; it may still be strong now, but is it weakening. Awooooo.

The unfortunate truth is that, like a set of Matryoshka dolls, the scenario is repeated recursively. In the outermost doll level al-Qaeda, Isis, Putin and China are stalking America. Further on in unemployment is haunting the average man. And so on. Obama is merely the innermost doll of failure. The only question is which level of doll the wolves get first. The president’s blunders have endangered not just his political life, but perhaps the actual lives of individual people throughout the world.

If he could stop laughing for a moment maybe he’d see that.

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