Obama's "Red Line"

Obama and the Sybil

Commander-in-Chief Obama is lurching toward military intervention in a Mideast civil war.  This stupidity will be committed in an attempt to save face for carelessly shooting off his mouth about Red Lines.  As you'd expect, John McCain likes the idea, and so does Lindsay Graham.

Amateur Hour continues in Washington, home of the worst political class in the nation's history.

If you're determined to intercede militarily, at least get the timing right. As long as two of your enemies are fighting each other -- say, the Assad regime vs. the Islamists, to grab a random example -- stand back and let them go at it until one side is thoroughly beaten and defeated. Then you intercede and kill the winner.

But, no.

Byron

Ho-Hum

Barack "Trayvon" Obama has not been heard from, ditto for Jesse, Al, and the rest of the race pimps.

Wrong narrative, useless for political or financial purposes.

So forgetaboudit.  Nothing to see here, nothing at all.


COPS: 'Bored' Black Teens Kill White Baseball Player 'For Fun'...

Were Accused Killers Really 'Bored?' 

Australian tourists urged to boycott USA...


The gun control nuts are already blaming the gun. If these thugs had beaten the guy to death with a shovel, I guess they'd have to blame the shovel.  If they'd strangled him to death with kite string, the blame would lie with the kite string.

In certain circles, thinking of this sort is considered to be the height of intelligent analysis...

Byron

The lesson?

Bambi Meets Godzilla In The Middle East

It's disheartening, but since the time of the Pharaohs, stability in that part of the world appears always to depend on some version of Strong Man Rule:  A dictator backed by military force, wielding enough raw power to keep the lid on by any and every means necessary.  It's not for the squeamish, but the trains run on time, and attempts at other forms of government seem to degenerate into bloody Hobbesian chaos.

Maybe democratic pluralism is simply not a realistic possibility as long as a society remains essentially tribal: If it's going to function at all, somebody heavy has to sit on it. If that's true, then democracy will fail in the face of strong tribal divisions. Used as just another weapon for dominating enemy groups, democracy may well make things worse.

So, what's the lesson, bring back Mubarak, et al.?  If that's not the lesson, what is?

Byron

Hilarious

The Nanny State in full and glorious flower:

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest crime-fighting idea had a lot of people riled up on Friday. 

The mayor wants to fingerprint more than 600,000 people who live in public housing. He said it would be done to make the projects safer.

Absolutely.  You could also determine who drank out of that illegal 32-oz drink cup so they could be re-educated.  And maybe find prints on discarded cigarette butts so the proper authorities could track down the perps and pack them off to detox for their own good.

Still, I find this a half-hearted measure.  Much better to microchip all public housing occupants so their activities and whereabouts can be tracked in real time, 24/7.  Nobody should object unless they're up to no good, right?  We care enough about dogs to have them microchipped -- shouldn't we be equally concerned about our public housing folk?  Of course, and while we're at it, let's get a DNA sample, too. Why the hell not?

Michael Bloomberg: Building the better society that you will eventually grow to like.

It's all good.

Byron

Disastrously stupid foreign policy

AQ to fill post-Assad vacuum in Syria?

Breathtaking incompetence by the clueless Obama Administration is handing the eastern and southern rim of the Mediterranean to Al Qaeda -- creating an extensive, heavily-armed base and launching platform for world-wide Jihad.

It's the nightmare made real by a foolish, kumbaya foreign policy, the same worldview that handed Iran to the ayatollahs who blissfully continue their program to develop nuclear weapons and the rockets to deliver them. 

We should have strongly supported the newly-elected government of Iraq, left Mubarak in power in Egypt, Kadhafi in Libya, and made sure Assad retained control of Syria.  Any "democratic reform" movement was bound to be weak, poorly organized, and quickly shoved aside by militant Islamists. 

It's no mystery why Putin has zero respect for Obama, if that much. The Europeans are very much threatened by these developments -- militarily, economically, culturally, demographically -- and weary of empty speechifying from a bumbling U.S. president who sits in relative safety an ocean away.  

Byron