Archive for Hypocrisy
Where’d The Outrage Go?: Afghan Edition
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Imagine, if you will, that George Bush were still president. What do you think the headlines would be like under exactly the same circumstances as obtain today?
While America languishes with unemployment rates not seen since the Great Depression, and an ecological catastrophe in the Gulf seems to be of no concern to the nation’s administration, the president is off yet again playing golf. What will it take to get him to realize the crisis facing the country?
A while ago, ex-first spouse Laura Bush called the MSM journalists “a pack of lying, hypocritical motherfuckers” (or something like that; this is from memory). You might question her choice of words, but there’s no disputing that now that the executive office is filled by America’s first Half-Kenya President, it seems he can get away with anything.
And to think he was elected on the grounds that he’d be “competent” (as opposed to the Old Guy and the Retard of the North). Even though it wasn’t the primary obligation of the Federal government to make up for the preternatural incompetence of all local levels of government in Louisiana/New Orleans, somehow everything connected with Katrina was Bush’s fault, whereas as the gross ineptitude of the Obonga administration’s response to the Oil Mess is getting the full “Get From Jail Free” treatment. (Here’s a leak from a high-level meeting that took place soon after the spill started. “Say, do you guys have an oil disaster plan?” “Why? Do you?” “Why would I ask you if we did.” “Dunno. So do you?” “Do I what?” “Have a plan?” “No, that’s what I asked you!” “Why would you ask me if you have a plan? You should know that.” “Well, do you?” “Do I what?” “Oh, never mind, I’ll ask someone else. Say, do you know who might have a plan?”)
Meanwhile, the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Halliburton Campaign of Terror and Destruction continues apace in Afghanistan, and no one gives a shit. Where’d all the Cindy Sheehans go?
Well, okay, it’s not exactly true that nobody cares.
Shada Parada Rodriguez holds an American flag presented to her during a funeral service for her fallen husband, U.S. Marine Cpl. Nicolas Parada Rodriguez at Arlington Cemetery on May 27, 2010 in Arlington, Virginia. Cpl. Parada Rodriguez of Stafford, Virginia was killed while supporting combat operations in the Helmut Province of Afghanistan.
Nobody who matters gives a shit. Hypocritical motherfuckers.
The Spirituality of Being Obama
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There’s been some doubt about Prez. Barry’s religious beliefs. For a long time, he attended some racist church on the South Side of Chicago, but seemingly that had less to do with God and more to do with convincing the voters that Mr. “My mamma’s a leftist white graduate student who got knocked up by a leftist graduate student from Kenya, who dumped mom for his real wife, and then she dumped me on her white banker mother to raise while she went off to study the natives in Indonesia” is too a bona fide negro with full understanding of the travails of growing up poor and black on the South Side of Chicago.
Seems he got away with that one, and since then hasn’t had much need for either God or the Right Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
But not to worry. Even though he still hasn’t figured out a church in DC that’s religious enough to count as a church but radical enough not to, he is, we’re assured by the Washington Post, a deeply spiritual man, “spirituality” of course being the refuge of a scoundrel who’s unwilling to fess up to his disbelief:
Every morning, sometimes as early as 5:30 a.m., a short religious passage comes across President Obama’s BlackBerry, sent by one of his aides.
At other moments, Obama prays privately, his advisers said. And when he takes his family to Camp David on the weekends, a Navy chaplain ministers to them, with the daughters attending a form of Sunday school there.
More than a year into his presidency, Obama has not chosen a church in Washington, and has attended services just four times. No single figure has assumed the role of spiritual adviser — publicly, at least — or filled the vacancy created when Obama disavowed his former Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
When Obama appears at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Thursday morning — a regular presidential ritual — it will mark the rare occasion when he puts religion in the foreground. In that appearance, he will discuss “the need for civility in the public square, and how Americans can work together in a spirit of goodwill,” a senior administration official said.
Yet close advisers to the president said the role of faith, while subtle, has been noticeable in and around the Obama White House. One senior official described the president as “a prayerful guy.” Another said that Obama has consulted religious leaders less often for his own personal guidance than for help walking through major public decisions — such as during the Afghanistan review process, when he sought advice on the ethical implications of war.
A third senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, said Obama’s private religious beliefs have helped sustain his temperament during trying times in office. “Part of that even temperament comes from his faith which is an important component,” Jarrett said. Asked why the public did not hear much about his faith during his first year in office, she nodded and said, “He’s had a lot on his plate.”
…
The messages come from “a range of sources,” an official said — sometimes a passage of Scripture or, on an upbeat day, a psalm. At other times the daily message will come from a book that Dubois thinks the president would enjoy. More than once the devotional has been culled from the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, the Protestant theologian who wrote extensively on the “just war” theory, which Obama has cited in his thinking about Afghanistan and in his Nobel prize acceptance speech. Other devotionals come from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, which Obama was given as a gift at last year’s prayer breakfast.
This year, Obama will “stress the importance of an openness to compromise and differing perspectives,” a senior official said, and will discuss the need “to disagree without being disagreeable and to step out of our comfort zones to bridge divides.” First lady Michelle Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jarrett are also scheduled to attend.
Oh, so let’s get this “spirituality” straight. He prays to God, who in turns tells him he’s a great guy and shouldn’t worry about all that criticism. And now that he’s reached a dead-end with his leftist agenda after spending a year telling anyone who disagrees with him to get out of the way, it’s time for “civility” because that’s what God tells me.
Loyal readers of the Lair will know that Keyser doesn’t spare the time of day to a non-existent God, but he’s willing to respect people who have legitimately held religious views and abide by them. This, on the other hand, is a load of self-serving bullshit.
Then again, no one says who exactly he’s praying to. Maybe it’s Lenin. That at least would be plausible.
What We Say, Not What We Do: Enviro-Bullshit Edition
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Keyser always finds the hypocrisy of the enviro-hystericists amusing. They caterwaul about how if everyone doesn’t go back to a “carbon-neutral” lifestyle reminiscent of the Neolithic, the polar bears will all be belly up by the next (non-existent) ice season. And at the same time, they jet-set across the globe to various Enviro-Frenzy Conferences spewing out enough exhaust to kill a shit load of polar bears. (Keyser hopes he’s correct in thinking that the technical term for a herd of polar bears is a “shit load,” like a “gaggle” of geese, a “murder” of leftards, and a “frenzy” of enviro-freaks).
If they really expect Keyser to buy into this crap, they’ll at least have to pretend a bit harder that they actually believe it themselves. Case in point:
On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit to save the world“, which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.
“We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention,” she says. “But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report.”
Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”
And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen. “The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.”
The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.
Well. We can’t expect the enviro-fascists to take a fucking bus or ride around on a bike, now do we?
Anyway, since they clearly don’t believe in their own scare stories, then neither does Keyser.
There Will Be Blood: Afghanistan Edition
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Of course, lots of people have been talking about the Prevaricator-in-Chief’s big Afghanistan speech last, and since Keyser has been mentioning his skepticism about the whole “campaign” for some time, he figures he should chuck in his own two dinar’s worth, even at the expense of saying what others have already said.
Basically, the Great Equivocator didn’t disappoint. So long as what you expecting was disappointment. He did his glib best to square the circle. He’ll give the military close to what they asked for, but not quite all. Why he quibbled about 4000 troops is hard to fathom. Presumably, that way he can say to the Kos Krazies, “See? I didn’t just do what they wanted, but I was decisive in giving them only 30,000 potential casualties instead of their excessive demand for 34,000.”
The extra troops won’t get their for many months (maybe not even by the summer of 2010), and then he’ll start the big non-post-victory withdrawal in 2011. WTF? He’s sending them in for basically a year and a few months? What for?
Well, of course, this may be entirely a coincidence, but it certainly will be felicitous for Barry that he can get the troops back a good half year before the caucuses and what not start up for the 2012 election campaign, when he’ll have to avoid getting Ted Kennedied from the left wing of the leftist conspiracy of the Democrat Party. (For the enlightenment of the many urban hipsters who read the Lair, Ted Kennedy challenged incumbent president Jimmy Carter in 1980 on the grounds that Pres. “Hey, you nice Iranian kids, look I brought the KY for you!” Carter wasn’t incompetent enough for leftard sensibilities.
In the meanwhile, Barry can tell the Lieberman types to STFU because, by heavens, his being decisive in getting US troops killed in a war he has no intention of winning. Because, let’s face it, he gave no indication of what the point of the exercise is.
“We must deny al-Qaeda a safe haven,” Obama said “We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum. … And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan’s security forces and government.”
Deny them a safe haven and stop the “momentum” of the Taliban, huh? Well, if that hasn’t got “victory” written all over it, then Robert de Nero’s nose must not be working right. But out of idle curiosity, how exactly do you gauge whether they’ve lost momentum in the 12+ months that the US is implementing “Plan Barry”? Do they have to move backwards, or is standing still good enough? Come to think of it, Keyser hated calculus in high school, but surely “reserved momentum” just means that their rate of momentum is slowing down, doesn’t it?
Such calculations are irrelevant, however, as this heap of bullshit is based not on military or diplomatic considerations but on nothing but his own political interests. He’ll go on with the war a bit in the short term (after all, claiming that Afghanistan was so important allowed him to campaign against involvement in Iraq as a distraction from the “real” war, which of course he didn’t actually give a shit about, but now he’s stuck with that position), but then bail soon enough that he can go into the primaries and say, “See? I did bail, after all.”
You know, the leftards used to make the charge of being a “chicken hawk” against those who favored the war against Iraq, meaning that without being personally involved, they supported a war that would cost the lives of young soldiers. (Supposedly, chicken hawks prey on the young.) But whatever one thinks of the advisability of Bush et co.’s wars, there is no doubting that they genuinely believed that they were doing the right thing. Barry’s pretty much obviously pursuing in a half-assed way a plan that he doesn’t believe in at all. He’s the true “chicken hawk,” killing other people for no other purpose than his own political advancement. Barry’s not Pres. Chicken Hawk, but Pres. Chicken Shit.
This is in fact a policy that is guaranteed to fail. The US is in Afghanistan because Bush took a “stand” and stuck with it. That is, he decided that ousting the Taliban and Al-qaeda was a necessary objective and held to that plan (even it’s been executed in a somewhat lackadaisical way) for years, despite much opposition. Barry, on the other hand, is maintaining that stand for a very limited period of time and has announced in advance the time when he’s pulling out. You could call this so-called strategy “stand and run.”
Why is it bound to fail? Because you’ve already told you’re opponents how long they have to stick it out. The guys on the other side know that all they have to do is avoid complete defeat before the summer of 2011 and they’ve in effect won. You think 30,000 extra troops will bring the “smell of victory in the morning” by then under such circumstances? Perhaps they can, but that seems a tall order. And it also should be pretty clear to them that they can’t count on any real support for Barry, particularly since his “parameters” for the operation clearly don’t envision the only sort of outcome that would result in a loss for the other guys. “Denying Al-qaeda a safe haven” and “reversing the momentum of the Taliban” certainly does not sound like a policy that would result in their eradication, does it?
And what exactly is the foreseen outcome of this in terms of Afghanistan itself? Supposedly that the pro-US forces there (meaning the army loyal to Karzai, whom Barry called corrupt!) will maintain control after the “stand and run” policy has run its course. Let’s go back to India just after the Second World War. The British actually ruled the joint with a comparatively tiny number of Brits and a large number of Indians working for them in the police and military. So long as the British showed every sign of staying, the local “collaborators” were happy to enforce order for them. But once it became clear after the war that the British had neither the means nor the will to stay, the system of policing began to break down, because the locals who worked with/for the British could tell that their side was about to pull out and leave them in the lurch, so it made no sense for them to stay loyal to a government that soon would be gone. Or let’s go a few steps closer and think of South Vietnam in the period 1973-75. Once the US pulled out and it was clear that the US wouldn’t help substantively, the ARV (as the South Vietnamese army was called) stuck it out for a while but collapsed precipitously in the face of a determined attack from the North.
Now let’s think of things from the point of view of those who support Karzai and the US intervention. On the one side, we have the Taliban etc. whose goal is to get the infidels out of the country. On the other, we’ve got the US – whose stated goal is to get the infidels out of the country, by 2011. Which side do you think is going to win, and what do you think your actions are likely to be in, say, the spring of 2011?
It took Obama nearly a year to come up with this ingenious policy, did it? To Keyser, it reeks of self-serving bullshit. Say what you will of Bush, at least you knew what he stood for and why he was doing what he’s going. Actually, come to think of it, the same applies to Barry. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Afghanistan or the extra 30,000 troops he’s committed. This is simply a way of cutting and running before the primaries of 2012 in a way that will cause him the least grief. As for the large numbers of soldiers (from the US and elsewhere) whose lives will be converted into pieces of cloth to be given as mementos to grieving spouses and children, well, that’s the price of glory. His. [Update: Come to think of it, the people likely to get killed in Afghanistan probably vote Republican anyway, so this whole thing really is a win-win deal from Barry's perspective.]
Keyser never liked Barry to begin with. But now Obama has prove himself to be despicable. This policy is contemptible and disgusting.
Barry, you now own this war. The blood’s on your hands. Oh, and if you care, in the photo up there
The widow of US Corp Charles Gaffney watches as her twin daughters Mia and Cara receive a flag during their father’s funeral in Arlington, Virginia, after he was killed in Afghanistan by enemy fire.
Maybe you go to one of these things, now that you’re commander-in-chief, and they’re dying for your policy. Nah. You’ve got better things to do. Got a meeting to “strategize” with Axelrod and the boys!
Michelle Obama: Woman of the People
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It appears that Mrs. Barry is one of us. The only question is who is “us”?
This is old news, but funny nonetheless:
Let’s say you’re preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don’t have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?
Here’s how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:
The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.
Then, and only then, could Obama purchase her leafy greens. “Now it’s time to buy some food,” she told several hundred people who came to watch. “Let’s shop!”
What was that old phrase? Oh, yes. “Let them eat arugula!“
Thought Experiment: Roman Polanski Edition
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This whole extradition of Roman Polanski thing is once again revealing to Keyser his difficulties in understanding the rational used by leftists. Or at any rate, it’s making it clear yet again that their thought processes must work by some different sort of standard than Keyser’s.
Readers probably know that Polanski was convicted thirty years ago of having sex with a minor and that he fled the US under circumstances that had something to do with the trial judge baulking at an agreed-upon sentence. Since then he’s lived in European “exile” (which shouldn’t be so bad, since after all he is a European). You know, Keyser can remember from all those years ago that there was talk that the girl “looked older” than she was. At the time, Keyser assumed that this meant a sixteen-year-old who looked grown up. Turns out the girl was 13. You can hardly mistake a 13-year-old for an adult, especially when (as it turns out) you’re fucking her both ways, now can you?
Now, Keyser likes Chinatown as much as the next person (and probably more than most – it’s a great movie). But does that really matter in this context? Apparently it does, as lots of Hollywood big names have signed a petition saying that it’s awful for him to be extradited back to the US from Switzerland. (Parenthetically, let’s note under the “are you sure that’s a good idea?” category that one of the signers is Woody Allen, who famously shtupped, then married his adoptive daughter. Apparently Polanski was right in noting years ago in connection with his case that “Everyone wants to fuck your girls!”
Just this morning, Keyser came across this op-ed piece about Polanski by the novelist Robert Harris:
I make no apology for feeling desperately sorry for him. The almost pornographic relish with which his critics are retelling the lurid details of the assault (strange behavior, one might think, for those who profess concern for the victim) makes it hard to consider the case rationally. Of course what happened cannot be excused, either legally or ethically.
But Ms. Geimer [the victim] wants it dropped, to shield her family from distress, and Mr. Polanski’s own young children, to whom he is a doting father, want him home. He is no threat to the public. The original judicial procedure was undeniably murky. So cui bono, as the Romans used to say — who benefits?
Er, justice, and the notion that if you commit a crime, you have to pay the penalty, regardless of how many friends you have in Hollywood?
So, let’s conduct a little thought experiment. Instead of the convicted sodomizer of thirteen-year-old being a respected Hollywood director, let’s pretend that it was, say, Donald Trump. (And let’s hasten to add that Keyser has absolutely no reason to suspect the Donald of any such crime. This is just a “for instance” involving a very different sort of public figure.) Do we really imagine that the “artistic elite” would come rushing out to clamor against the imposition of the due penalty for being a fugitive from justice after his conviction of this crime? Why, no, Keyser does not in fact believe that under such circumstances, the “celebrities” would argue, as the aptly named “Whoopi” Goldberg did, that sodomizing a thirteen-year-old was maybe rape but not rape-rape.
The cognitive dissonance of this is what gets to Keyser. Is it really the case that these people have no conception of abstract reasoning and simply come up with any stupid argument they can to fit in with their preconceptions of who/what they do/don’t like on the basis of the person/thing in question’s connection with the leftist establishment? If you’re “one of them,” then anything goes, but if not, how dare you defile the innocence of a young girl’s life?
Turns out it’s not so much what you do so much as whose hot tub you do it in (Jack Nicholson’s, in this case).
Then again, maybe these Hollywood types believe their own stuff. As Noah Cross (who, oddly enough, is guilty of sex with his own minor daughter, so he’s a sort of Polanski/Allen hybrid) says in the movie, “I don’t blame myself. You see, Mr. Gitts, most people never have to face the fact that in the right place and the right time, they’re capable of anything.”
Algore: Hypocrite-in-Chief
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