I mean, I know we’re supposed to pretend that Obama is a great Dad, that he cares about the US in his own way — he just happens to think the founding and all the structural controls instituted as part of the Constitution’s framing are quaint, non-binding, and racist / sexist / xenophobic, et al., and so as an act of love, wants to fundamentally transform the country he so loves — and that just because he’s a liberal Democrat is no reason to question his patriotism. Doing so makes us no better than those who berated Bush for 8 years — mostly because all criticism is equal, and can’t we all just get along?
Okay. There, I’ve put out the perfunctory caveat. So now I’m free to proceed.
And the question at hand is, “whose side is Obama on?”
Now, before we get caught up in leftist semantics — “who says there are two sides? Why do you view complicated matters in black and white? HOW DARE YOU QUESTION OUR PATRIOTISM!, etc” — let me just say this: do shut up, progs. I don’t care what you have to say because it’s you and your type who are so bent on counter-revolution against the one place on earth where liberty has been, as a matter of its foundational social contract, both ensured and structurally insured, through both the Declaration of Independence and its insistence upon natural rights as the anchor of liberty and individual autonomy, and the Constitution, which sought new ways to protect those rights from men (and women) who would by nature look to circumvent them. It is you who wish to see us reduced to cogs in some group narrative, then “nudged” by bureaucrats and technocrats, crony capitalists and corporatists, social engineers and radical egalitarians, into subjecthood.
And I ain’t interested in any of that. So you first, assholes.
But back on topic: we know Obama is no fan of the Constitution. We know he doesn’t believe in or abide separation of powers. We know he doesn’t respect border security or national sovereignty, having refused to enforce federal immigration law and having noted — at a West Point commencement address — that he won’t stop rogue states from acting because the US has refused, in the past, to cede its sovereign powers to the UN, a bureaucratic body made up mostly of representatives of socialist or totalitarian states and a long-time heartthrob of the trasnational progressive movement. We know that he doesn’t value individual privacy, as the NSA scandal shows and as ObamaCare’s data collection requirements reinforce. We know he doesn’t much care for the military, having gutted it as best he could, having shut down its memorials during the partial government shut down, and having slept through an attack that left Americans to perish in some African hellhole. We know that he despises his political “enemies” moreso than he does any foreign actor — showing far more contempt for the “teabaggers” than for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members are more welcome in the White House than is Israel’s head of state.
And now, we see that he may be actively replenishing the Taliban — and by proxy, al Qaeda — in a move that will put every future US soldier’s life in even greater peril. Andrew McCarthy explains:
President Obama finally completed the prisoner swap he has been pleading with the Taliban for years to accept. While the president draws down American forces in Afghanistan and hamstrings our remaining troops with unconscionable combat rules of engagement that make both offensive operations and self-defense extremely difficult, the Taliban get back five of their most experienced, most virulently anti-American commanders.
In return, thanks to the president’s negotiations with the terrorists, we receive U.S. Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl — who, according to several of his fellow soldiers, walked off his post in 2009 before being captured by the Taliban. (For more on this, see Greg Pollowitz’s post at The Feed.) This was shortly after Sergeant Bergdahl reportedly e-mailed his parents that “the US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at,” that he was “ashamed to even be an American,” and that “the horror that is America is disgusting.”
Sergeant Bergdahl’s father, Robert, was by Mr. Obama’s side during Saturday’s Rose Garden press conference, at which the president announced Sergeant Bergdahl’s return but carefully avoiding mention of the jihadi-windfall the Taliban received in exchange. Mr. Bergdahl is an anti-war activist campaigning for the release of all jihadists detained at Guantanamo Bay. His Twitter account, @bobbergdahl, has apparently now deleted a tweet from four days ago, in which he said, in echoes of Islamic supremacist rhetoric, “@ABalkhi I am still working to free all Guantanamo prisoners. God will repay for the death of every Afghan child, ameen!”
We have been warning for years here that Obama was negotiating with the Taliban — even as he duplicitously bragged that the U.S. had “removed the Taliban government.” The president and his minions reportedly even turned for mediation help to Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi — the top Muslim Brotherhood sharia jurist who issued a fatwa in 2003 calling for violent jihad against American troops and support personnel in Iraq. (Indeed, the administration has hosted Qaradawi’s sidekick, Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah — who also signed the fatwa — at the White House for consultations . . . and the State Department was embarrassed to be caught touting bin Bayyah just a week ago.)
Nearly two years ago, I noted that Obama had just sweetened the pot on a longstanding offer to release the five Taliban leaders — beseeching the Taliban just to agree to participate in Afghan peace talks, not to make any actual concessions (other than freeing Sergeant Bergdahl).
As Reuters reported at the time:
The revised proposal, a concession from an earlier U.S. offer, would alter the sequence of the move of five senior Taliban figures held for years at the U.S. military prison to the Gulf state of Qatar, sources familiar with the issue said. U.S. officials have hoped the prisoner exchange, proposed as a good-faith move in initial discussions between U.S. negotiators and Taliban officials, would open the door to peace talks between militants and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The revised proposal would send all five Taliban prisoners to Qatar first, said sources who spoke on condition of anonymity. Only then would the Taliban be required to release Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the only U.S. prisoner of war. Previously, U.S. officials had proposed dividing the Taliban prisoners into two groups, and requiring Bergdahl’s release as a good-faith gesture to come before the second group of prisoners would be moved out of Guantanamo.
The Obama administration has never designated the Afghan Taliban as a terrorist organization. (The Bush State Department similarly failed to designate the Taliban, although President Bush did designate the group as a terrorist organization in an executive order that, pursuant to a congressional statute, criminalized the conducting of various financial transactions with it.) In 2012, the Obama White House made much of the fact that it had finally designated a close Taliban confederate, the Haqqani Network, as a terrorist organization. But as Eli Lake reported earlier this year, the administration refrained from using the designation to seize assets — which is the whole point.
Plain and simple, President Obama has never had any intention to confront and defeat the Taliban. As I observed back in 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, pronounced in a memo explaining U.S. strategy that the war in that country was the Afghans’ war, not ours. In his estimation, our troops’ primary reason for being there was not to defeat America’s enemies but to enable the Afghans to build a better life, and therefore “our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population” — meaning, to protect Afghans.
Obama’s overriding goal has been to end the war, not to win it — as if it were possible, by walking away, to end a war that the enemy started and continues to fight. […]
[…]
At The Weekly Standard, Tom Joscelyn profiles the five Taliban commanders Obama has released. They include Mullah Mohammed Fazl, perhaps the Taliban’s senior warrior (its “army chief of staff”) and a longtime al-Qaeda ally; Mullah Norullah Noori, a senior military commander who fought side-by-side with al-Qaeda; Abdul Haq Wasiq, a senior Taliban intelligence official who helped train al-Qaeda and fought with it against U.S. forces after 9/11; Khairullah Khairkhwa, a Taliban governor and al-Qaeda trainer who brokered an alliance with Iran to collaborate against American-led forces; and Mohammed Nabi, who worked with the Haqqani Nnetwork and al-Qaeda to coordinate attacks against American and coalition forces.
Meet the new Afghanistan, same as the old Afghanistan. In Obama’s America, “This is how wars end in the 21st century.”
To hammer home the point, and to square the circle with respect to my introduction in this post, Roger Kimball provides the necessary perspective. From “The Law Requires…”:
What a quaint phrase! Not quaint for you and me, of course. For us plebs, what the law requires is, well, what the law requires. To the letter, Kemo Sabe. But how about for our masters in Washington, especially for the master-in-chief, Barack Obama? What, exactly, does the law require of him? That he follow and (see Article II of the U.S. Constitution) “faithfully execute” the laws? Not hardly. Andrew McCarthy’s new book Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment (not officially published until Tuesday but available now on Amazon) provides a sort of catalogue or cornucopia of Obama’s lawlessness. I won’t rehearse that litany here except to mention these key words:
- Benghazi
- Obamacare (“If you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan, period.”)
- IRS
- Immigration
- et very much cetera (think Fast & Furious, Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, making recess appointments when Congress not in recess, Solyndra — really, read Faithless Execution)
When it comes to lawlessness, Obama is the gift that keeps on giving. If Congress passes a law that is Constitutional but that he happens not to like: no problem. He just won’t enforce it (ask the folks in Arizona about immigration laws). Perhaps Congress fails to pass a law about something that he does want done: that’s no problem, either, because he has learned that there is no cost to governing by decree. The latest instance of presidential lawlessness concerns the Taliban’s release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan in exchange for five high-level Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. Naturally, one rejoices at the release of an American solider after nearly five years of captivity in the savage hell-hole of Afghanistan. But as Rep. Howard McKeon and Sen. James Inhofe observed yesterday, “America has maintained a prohibition on negotiating with terrorists for good reason. Trading five senior Taliban leaders from detention in Guantanamo Bay for Bergdahl’s release may have consequences for the rest of our forces and all Americans.” Prediction: you’ll see many more Americans captured and held for ransom now that the Taliban knows our policy of not negotiating with terrorists implies that, if you push a little, we will happily negotiate with terrorists.
There’s also the little matter of how the transfer was arranged. As the Washington Post reports, “Lawmakers were not notified of the Guantanamo detainees’ transfer until after it occurred.” But, the report continues, “the law requires the defense secretary to notify relevant congressional committees at least 30 days before making any transfers of prisoners, to explain the reason and to provide assurances that those released would not be in a position to reengage in activities that could threaten the United States or its interests.” “The law requires.” Ha, ha, ha. This is King Obama we’re talking about, not you or me. Apparently, he can do whatever he pleases, from calling on the IRS to harass his political opponents to selectively enforcing to law to imprisoning video makers who are convenient scapegoats. […]
[…]
Are you worried yet?
To which I say, some of us have been worried since way back before it was okay to show your worry, or to voice your indignation. We’ve been worried — and vocally so — about since back when Obama was still a Good Man, and our criticisms could conceivably been seen as racist, unhelpful, and on par with the criticisms the left launched against Bush (who, lest we forget, wasn’t raised by communist revolutionaries and suckled on the political teat of Weathermen, critical race theorist, Black Liberation Theology, and radical chic Palestinian anti-semitism. But still! Think of how the moderates will react!).
Obama is not only overwhelming our economic system with debt and dependency; he’s not only trying to drive up the price of electricity and, in so doing, of just about every consumer good and every measure of productivity; he’s not only seeking a social transformation from a society based around the sovereignty of the individual with one based upon the wishes of the collective as deciphered by the elect and the elite; but he is making our very existence as a country far more tenuous, having lit fires in the Middle East, the far east, Russia, and South America — all while weakening our defenses and providing further incentives to have illegals rush our borders (with the GOP and it’s beholden establishment bulls along happily for the ride, promising cheap labor to the cronies who fund them in exchange for that funding).
So if no one else is going to say it, I will: Obama is not on our side and he never was. He’s a fictional construct, someone sold to us as a post-racial, post-partisan academic pragmatist who, it turns out, is a race-baiting, hyperpartisan anti-intellectual autocrat and ideologue — one who was put forward to cynically play on our nation’s national shame over slavery and who is a creation of the New Left and its decades long strategy to take over the Democratic Party and install into office one of its own, a counter-revolutionary, an anti-American thug whose every move has been to show contempt for our way of life, our founding beliefs, and our history — all while pushing an agenda that is designed to grow a centralized government, institute the mechanisms for a command and control economy, weaken our reach diplomatically and militarily, and push the kind of radical egalitarianism that turns citizens into subjects and is enforced by a police power controlled by the ruling class, who of course aren’t required to accede to the new egalitarianism.
It has, with this President, always been thus. And our enemies have known it, even while we were told we were racist extremists for noticing — by mouthpieces for both parties.
That some people are finally starting to wake up to the fact is a good thing, I suppose — though it may be a bit too late. And hell, it may just be that, having stuck their fingers in the wind, they feel that this is the best way to draw eyes to their malleable political advice.
Welcome to the fight, fellas. Proceed to take it over as if it’s always been yours. We Hobbity Visigoths promise not to notice.
(h/t sdferr and geoff B)
It isn’t for lack of time to prepare that Articles of Impeachment will not issue from the House Judiciary Committee no later than Wednesday this week. Nope, they’ve had plenty of time to write those before now. Instead, it’s for lack of interest respecting the primary law of the land, which law, we see, is gone.
Can’t we just have the entire House impeached for failing to perform their Constitutional duty and issuing Articles of Impeachment in the first place?
Can’t we just have the entire House impeached. . . ?
Can we? Hmmm, dunno.
J. Christian Adams: Bergdahl: They don’t care ab0ut the law, get over it.
Silly hobbit. Everyone knows Obama is on the side of Hope and Change. Because he’s Historic, don’chya know?
And there’s just no arguing with History.
But…but…but…Rush wants him to FAIL and he really is a Good Man!!!
Truly, we’re too stupid to survive this asshole. Especially the really “smart” grasshoppers among us.
Of course! Especially when they can just change it so easily.
J. Christian Adams: Bergdahl: They don’t care ab0ut the law, get over it.
Ilya Somin agrees, sdferr.
If the impeachment threat still had any teeth, the prospect of being impeached, convicted, removed from office, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to face a firing squad might help keep scoundrels from getting into politics in the first place.
it’s also fair to ask whose side the military is on
the pentagon piggies are going along with this farce pretty enthusiastically so far
how embarrassing this must be for enlisted people
That’s a good expression McG, “if the threat of impeachment had any teeth”, I mean.
Granting ourselves a modicum of license to examine the question, what do we mean when we say such and such has teeth, and in particular, here in this question of the impeachment clauses of our un-revered Constitution? I don’t intend to suggest we don’t know what this means, but instead, to suggest seriously for a moment, that we actually look into the phenomenological aspect of that meaning, to dig deeper into the simpler constituent beliefs and assumptions of our expression. What is it, what’s going on under the surface or within the incalculable mass of the people — possibly hidden from view, possibly not, or some of both — that contributes substance to our metaphor “to bite”? Or perhaps I should say, denies substance to this idea where we suspect the substructure or foundation has gone missing? (And I agree, it has gone missing.)
Andrew McCarthy has done this, I would reckon, despite my not having read his book. But then, I don’t think I have a need to read his book, since I believe I have been advocating many of the ideas I understand he presents for months now, however insufficiently in my meager efforts.
But rather than hold forth on this question, may I prefer that others chime in if the interest happens to arise?
The military is on the side of the chain of command and civilian control.
And you may thank God for it.
Beta dogs don’t bite alphas. Weepy is a beta.
the chain of command and the civilians in control are fascists
The US military is on their side.
Thank you God.
I’m this close to deleting comments wholesale.
I forgot. Griefer has got to grief. My mistake.
The last time I was this tempted to stomp a commenter, I gave my keys to the site back to Jeff instead. I don’t think it’ll come to that this time around, but the Tourette’s act was tired and outdated six years ago.
Someone who can get through to the tin-plated toon needs to stage an intervention. If I owned this site he’d already be long-gone and long-forgotten.
Mr. McGehee i do not trust the sanctity or integrity of any branch of government after what we seen at the irs and the fcc and the epa and the blm and the nps and the doj and et cetera and so on and so on
and when the US military goes along with a fascist scheme like the bergdahl blunder what so undermines national security and what so deepens the imperilment of both american soldiers and americans in general
it’s scary
censor me if you want I don’t care
you still can’t touch my roses
You have no conception about anything military, let alone about any investigations that have been conducted, might be being conducted, or are going to be conducted, but in the meantime, unless Bergdahl is charged under the UCMJ, the military is obliged to treat him as any other Soldier. That is how the military functions, and is remarkably fair in that regard, if not always swift.
Also bear in mind, if such a thing is possible for you, that the military did not get a vote in the conditions under which Bergdahl was repatriated, so your rantings about “going along with a fascist scheme” are just more of your gibberish.
If, in the end, Bergdahl is found to have deserted with no coercerion, he will be dealt with accordingly. In the meantime, however, and regardless of whether he turns out to be a sinner or saint, he has done something you in your poncey littly world would never dream nor deign to do, specifically raise his hand to undergo the training and go and get his ass shot at.
A drama queen to the end, eh ? You should stick to things you know about, as limited as that may be.
It isn’t what you say that bugs me, Tourette’s-yfeet — it’s the infantile way you say it. You make everyone who might be inclined to agree with you look like an inarticulate, petulant child.
If you really believe whatever substance underlies your babble, express it like a grown-up. Otherwise I’ll continue to regard you as a barely-tolerable-at-your-best moby.
ok then Mr. McGehee
I understand what you’re saying I think.
it’s like the saga of cindy and buddy
there’s a lot going on in this scene of harrowing violence and rampant cruelty, but the most important thing to learn is to be nice to people even if they don’t talk real good
Mr. fahrt there’s no way around the fact that the military colluded with america’s whore president to circumvent the law
not a proud day for anyone involved
plus Hot Air says on top of it all the military lied lied lied to the parents of the soldiers what got slaughtered trying to round up lil bowe peep
nope
not a proud day
“you still can’t touch my roses”
I can copy your pocket full of poses though.
love that song
“Beta dogs don’t bite alphas. ”
That’s dogs. Apes is mad different. In the right time and place betas will rip an alpha to shreds. And about 50 % of the time the alpha deserves it. Usually though the play is to manipulate another alpha to go step on the troublesome alpha’s dick. But once the community is not serving to many of the betas it gets remodeled in the night either by diaspora, or with much howling and red stained sticks. And of course trauma or stress can make an alpha behave like a beta and training can make a beta seem like an alpha such that with reinforcement it more or less becomes an alpha.
But dogs know 85,000 things from one butt sniff and they run a little faster. The most successful dogs tend to be infantilized compared to their wild counterparts.
Life is all about tradeoffs and exchanges right up to the fimbulwinter and Gotterdamerung..
Do tell, Perry Mason, how did that come to pass ? What were the actual acts of “collusion” ? Do you think the commanders on the ground were consulted, or just told to execute ? Were the ground commanders supposed to say no ?
Did you know (OK, I know you don’t) that in WWII Churchill lied and the city of Coventry being bombed nigh flat to protect the secret that we could read German codes ? You seem to think you are the second coming of Clausewitz, do you think it would have been a great idea to telegraph to the world at the time that we were looking for this guy ? Do you think the Taliban might have changed their tactics in response ? Perhaps even killed him if the heat got too hot – bear in mind, regardless of opinion, only one guy knows what really happened at the time, and he isn’t talking yet.
vive la france news
French town begs for a McDonald’s
i don’t know why the people in charge of the terrorists let the terrorists scamper free without ascertaining that they were acting in accordance with the law
i guess it’s just how they fucking roll
Bergdahl Facebook Page Blows Up: ‘Our orders were to kill on contact’
Footprints of Denis McDonough Prep Again – Susan Rice: “He [Bergdahl] Served His Country With Honor and Distinction”….
That “kill on contact” stinks to high heaven of bulllshit, but figures to pop up as leftist provocation.
Newrouter, my own opinion of this guy is not pretty, but as this develops, everybody needs to be taking things with a salt lick, this being the age of the innarwebs, all the guys who are going to have claimed to have known Bergdahl, he will have been in the only division sized platoon in history, and the target of more “black ops” than Castro.
his dad thanking allan for his release did it for me.
like those pink himalaya salt bricks you sometimes serve appetizers on
Newrouter,
Yeah, Bergdahl pere isn’t exactly helping the narrative that Bergdahl fils is strictly on the level.
Therein, if the “official” is being accurate, lies the nut, the unresolved question whether Bergdahl was malicious, or just an idiot.
Maybe both, first one then the other.
Want to Know Just How Close the Muslim Brotherhood Is to the Obama Admin?
This entire nasty trade episode seems a preeminent example of the IWonPenPhoners believing their own praising press clippings, as if they thought the could pull this shit off with a minimal propaganda preparation, paint their boy Bowe as a suffering hero, the Talib monsters as bit players and the press would swallow the script and then the moronic nation never be the wiser.
Let’s hope they keep this up another couple of weeks, eh? They’ll then be lucky to get out of town alive.
How to brilliantly succeed in any and all foreign policy endeavors. Have an extremely simple goal, and always be the one who decides if that goal was met.
andy mccarthy making the case for impeachment of iwonpenphone on levin’s show
That’s pretty weird insofar as stupid shit is all they know how to do. Of course the hinge is the absence of the little kid insisting the Emperor guy is naked.
Walid Shoebat reveals disturbing comments and YouTube activity of Bowe Bergdahl’s father
“I understand what you’re saying I think.”
Period lurking on the right flank, general von Nitwitz!
Hard aport!!!
Check out the IWonPenPhone apologist Mark Jacobson on Megyn Kelly’s show. Propagandist, straight up.
Don’t judge HonorAndDistinctionBowe, sez he. He’s just a poor putupon kid. Not to mention a very useful tool in the IWonPenPhone scheme of things.
I think what’s gone missing is the sense of being a)bound by a b)well-known agreement. It’s happened — in my estimation, obviously — in two ways in different amounts in different people.
The first is in being bound. The idea that the ongoing agreement is enforceable. That a group of representatives would use their given powers to this end is generally now considered trumped by pamphleteers of such caliber as Voxers or Politicos. To my mind, this is folly. This is not true, currently, but it may become true later. Representatives could — at this moment — still use their powers as intended and face only repercussions in the polling booth if they considered it worth the effort to do so. They’d lose what, exactly, if they were right by honor but wrong by the people’s opinion? Their positions in the government. Well, back to the private sector then. Back to honest and useful employment.
The second is the predicate of “well-known”. This I consider currently lost and, for what it’s worth, more foundational, as you asked of the “phenomenological aspect”. Conservatives conserve what?
What’s the thing we’re saying is better, prudentially, to stick with as compared to whatever essay might be penned at Salon or Slate tomorrow?
(I know that I avoided the question of the specifics of impeachment but it’s of a sort with all the rest in my mind.)
the liars have found their bridge too far
>Well whaddya know: The topic of impeachment reared its head at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday.
Jonathan Strong’s report here at NRO noted the wincing consternation of GOP-leadership aides at utterances of the “i-word” during the testimony of prominent legal experts. For the Republican establishment, it seems, history begins and ends in the 1990s: No matter how times have perilously changed, any talk of shutdowns or impeachment is bad, bad, bad. Yes, the Obama “uber-presidency,” as left-of-center law professor Jonathan Turley called it, has enveloped the nation in what he conceded is “the most serious constitutional crisis . . . of my lifetime,” but GOP strategists would just as soon have us chattering about immigration “reform” and bravely balancing the federal budget by, oh, around 2040.
But as we discussed in this August column — back when the first anniversary of the Benghazi massacre loomed, back when many Americans still believed that if they liked their health-insurance plans, they could keep their health-insurance plans — it is not crazy to talk about impeaching President Obama. And if you’re going to have a congressional hearing about systematic presidential lawlessness, it is only natural that the word “impeachment” gets bandied about. Not only is impeachment the intended constitutional remedy for systematic presidential lawlessness; it is, practically speaking, the only remedy.
It is beyond cavil that the president is willfully undermining the constitutional system that he swore to preserve, protect, and defend. He presumes to rewrite, and dramatically alter, the laws he vowed to execute faithfully — not once in a blue moon but as a deliberate scheme of governance.
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Before he took office, Obama boldly promised supporters that he would “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” That is just what he is doing. There is fraud in the uber-presidency, but no mystery: Most of Obama’s unconstitutional usurpations are happening in broad daylight. He brags that his “waivers” — i.e., his unilateral amending, repealing, or non-enforcement — of statutory provisions show him to be far-seeing and pragmatic, not lawless. That, of course, is the standard dictatorial self-image. Obama is the answer to Tom Friedman’s China-envying prayers….<
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From nr’s link: “In theory, then, nothing in government can happen unless the House, with ultimate power over the purse, agrees to fund it. ”
This is, for the moment, undeniably true.
If we’re worried about the IRS we might ask the people who write their checks why they allow such abuses. Same with the EPA. Same with all the rest.
I’m a touch confused bh, about a minor thing I think, but since I’m guessing you’re still around I’ll ask on the belief you can clear it up easily. So, what’s the antecedent of that “this” in “this is not true currently but it may become true later”? I’m confused because the previous proposition that “now considered trumped by pamphleteers . . .etc. ” does appear true. So the latter “this” what? Refers to the next proposition, i.e. that politicians can go ahead and vote their consciences as intended? Anyway, maybe you see what I mean.
pikachu news
Sarah Palin Blasts Obama: No Mr. President, a Soldier Expressing Horrid Anti-US Beliefs Is Not “Honorable Service” …Unless That Is Your Standard
don’t touch that rose dude
“This”= the belief that third-rate hacks actually have more power* than the House of Representatives, sdferr. Actual power as compared to nebulous, zeitgeisty power.
My phrasing may be poor here. What I mean to say is that the the House can do much, much more tomorrow than Ezra Klein can. Drastically more. Levels of magnitude more.
That’s today. Tomorrow? Who knows? Once we slouch into imperium then the hangers-on will actually hold that real and very non-theoretical power.
Ah, ok, good. That’s right, I think. The cession of power to the so-called pragmatic don’tmentionimpeachmenters is folly indeed.
I’ve been thinking all day it’s something like a Roman legionnaire taking his gladius to the backside of his own knees, slicing through the sinew just as warring columns of contestants meet to do battle.
Worse, they slice mentis.
I think anyways. My Latin is like my Greek is like my French is like my English.
Terrible.
In truth, I want a portmanteau of animus and mentis. Is there such a scribble?
I dunno Latin for shit, but take mentis as more or less what, thinking parts, ney?
Yeah, mentis for brain and animus for heart, to my soft, donkey-kicked brain.
This sort of affront strikes both it seems.
I don’t know, I’m not much of a dualist, but the language seems to call for it. You could make my brain cry and my heart think in equal measure, I reckon’.
To return to the teeth or the bite, it’s to my mind a kind of — what used to be spoken of as “right opinion”, or in Tocqueville’s term [a thing] rightly understood. Behind that it seems is simple knowledge of a necessary, albeit limited sort. It’s the living knowledge in people, our people, sitting in their faculty of right opinion in that old sense, that’s gone missing. Which in turn necessitates McCarthy’s quest to teach the right understanding of impeachment in order to open any possible path to it. But what a shame that this elementary operation should have to be necessary at this too late date.
We’re all just those little heart/brain homoculi sitting behind our eyes one way or the other.
homonculi, perhaps
Homunculi used to spark Descartes in me, but anymore it just throws me back to Men in Black.
That’s what I figure is just straight up lost now, sdferr. If progressivism is absurd in its assertion that you can purple your eyepatch with a rooster because it’s new and exciting then our forgetting that it’s always worked better to put on your pants before your shoes is shameful. Just shameful.
I believe animus gets used as a root/highfalutin substitution for animosity, but that may be a narrow derivation.
Latin for “heart,” as translated in the Romance languages, shares its root with English word “core,” e.g. Sp. corazon and Fr. coeur.
So while I don’t know exactly what animus means and concede its apparent relationship to “animate,” I think that goes less to heart and more to spirit (in a sense different from espiritus or whatever it properly is).
If I’m right about any of that, credit half a semester of 7th-grade Latin.
>The carpet crawlers heed their callers
You gotta get in to get out
There’s only one direction
In the faces that I see
And it’s upward to the ceiling
Where the chamber’s said to be
Like the forest fight for sunlight
That takes root in every tree
They are pulled up by a magnet
Believing they’re free<
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The Greeks used thumos parallel to something like animus did they not? That’s the spirited gorge that rises in Achilles against his perception of disrespect by Agamemnon, to take the usual example. The “source” of his anger and the “driver” of his ambition to excel.
Anima, on the other hand, I’ve seen used as a translation of psyche, in our word, soul.
I could ask Google Translate…
(The Catholic Church just had to drop Latin for regular Mass before I started Catholic school!)
>We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender.
Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.
You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” <
That’s very interesting, McG.
Core is much like my vague internal hand-wavings when I was trying to find some sort of word for emotional self but then I went to my personal homonculus for that.
I do like coeur as it births courage which seems to put us in the right vicinity.
Seems like thumos/animus and anima are sides of the same coin, with the former being more in the way of passion than soul, but both within our present-day understanding, at least, of “spirit.”
We say “take heart”, but don’t mean it like Henny Youngman meant his wife, not in the least.
Yes, thymos, as well. These words are closer than my own, fellas.
Very good.
So you may have been on it after all, bh.
“Tomorrow? Who knows?”
Ahyep.
parsleyos sageos rosemarios thymos
this is very close to how i do roasted carrots if you add a little curry
Soul holds ’em all: reason, appetite, spirit, passions — ’em being “parts” of the animated beings. But what are parts save distinguishable differences? So for Aristotle’s “On the Soul”, “peri psyche, “de anima”, he’s looking at both whole and part.
For certain though, when Harvey Mansfield talks about thumos (and he talks a lot about thumos) he generally translates it “spiritedness”, which is about as good as we can get that way I think.
>You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down: [up] man’s old — old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.<
important ? what to do with fresh dill?
Creamed pickled herring and onion takes dill nicely.
Spirit derives from spir as in respiration. It has to do with moving air, wind, breath of life, etc.
Animus and Anima in current usage is Jungian archetype(inherent nature stuff that is not learned nor a reaction to the environment). Supposedly the female unconscious self is male (since women have to suppress their male side to do what women need to do in life) and the male unconscious self is female thus women have a hateful competitive stern unyielding animus lurking within their surface self and men have a nurturing sensitive empathetic anima restrained in their deep psychological caverns because they need to shout and endure pain and kill things with spears in life.
To the ancients anima was also a wind that moves or breath of life that separated the living things from the unliving inert things.
Animus was the logical mind to the Romans.
Other similar “life force” concepts were the vitalism (the vitae, the blood) or the phlebos (the veins) or the sanguinary(the blood in the biological health sense which mainly dealt with mood as composed by the balance of the fluid humors ).
In Geek the intellect is Nous which discerns truth from illusion. (also understanding, reason, the analytical mind)
Phroneos is wisdom, will, mental-balance
Sapient was thinking but comes from sapher ‘to taste’ by which they meant to correctly perceive things for what they were.
Then you have descriptive stuff like brilliant (bright), keen (very sharp), clear headed(not cloudy or hazy), scholarly (like those academy dudes), educated (filled up!), astute(crafty), Perspicacious (from perspicax to see or notice things), erudite (to have had ones rude ignorance removed! like e-rude basically)
Sorry, just spit balling.
Fresh dill is for bitches! You got to age that shit.
sammins like dill too
i used to make a white bean and sammin soup that featured a lot of dill
I accidentally used fresh, baby dill confusing it for fennel frond when plating last week. (We were plating a 16-top. Mistakes are occasionally made.)
Looks nice with laid upon some pureed red thai paste and mandarin but it still isn’t fennel. Nope. Not at all. It did walk though. Yep, that happened.
with=when, second paragraph, above
maybe you should make flash cards
Baked Salmon with Mustard-Dill Sauce
If the flash card said something like, “Don’t be a dumbass, dumbass” and it was just that one that I kept looking at over and over again. Then? Yeah, maybe.
I could use dill to make dillybobbers if I could find a recipe.
I suppose I could use a hushpuppy recipe but I wouldn’t know how much dill to use.
And if I do it wrong my hushpuppies would taste like Adidas.
what’s so great about pw: failamerica imploding let’s talk about dill! have a safe week all.
Hagios pneuma . . . it’s fun to explosively say pneuma out loud.
So bh, are you on the line? Or are you garnishing and delivering? Or what’s up with that?
I do everything, sdferr, at some point or another over the course of any given month. Wash dishes, run expo, work the line, bus tables, etc… at that joint.
I also clean fish, handle accounting, man the phones, buy diesel for boats, etc… at that other joint.
I’m trying to learn the businesses. In another couple years I might even be a worthwhile manager.
Sounds like a heap of fun, alongside a heap of a heap. Good to have a long stride, I’ll bet.
my apologies to pwers. baracky makes me sad all the thyme.
Honestly? Yeah, it is. I learn something new every hour or so and I sleep pretty well.
Other than that? There isn’t an employee who hasn’t seen me clean a toilet or fix a couple mechanical problems when it’s mattered now. This builds respect. It’s a slow thing but that’s probably for the best.
It’s okay, nr — he drives us all nutmeg.
Heh, respect is good, in the “he may be a douche but he’s our douche” kinda way. No, I jest. No, I’m laughing too hard to jest.
Oh, you’d laugh even harder with a few anecdotes, sdferr. I’ve gathered a few now.
In case I’m missing something, I’d certainly hope that anyone making fun of the dill conversation wasn’t poo-pooing any discussion of the Federalist Papers a couple years ago as useless nonsense.
I’ll repeat what I said above: What do conservatives conserve? If that doesn’t matter to you, you don’t matter.
with basil
steely dan – barrytown
It is frustrating, you know, to hear both about how our republic becomes ever more ungrounded while simultaneously hearing about how boring Locke and Hobbes and #51 are.
When Germany invaded the USSR the very next day all the left was on point that we must get involved on the side of
USSRBritain.So why in the age of texting, Tweeting, email and cell phones can’t the whole of the Administration stay in line behind the daily talking point switches?
Steely Dan Change of the Guard 1972
Typed and deleted a couple comments, Geoff. I really have no idea.
I’ve typed and deleted several myself on the subject you and sdferr have kicked around.
I think the constant polling slows the concentration of signal effect down. They have to kick a hail mary to have ANYTHING to say, work on a plan B & C, and try to make the campaign people happy, and the unions and cronies, and that takes a while to cohere into a singular monolithic message from the whole enchilada. Integration of bullshit from many heads is hard.
The True, the Good and the Beautiful
A Conservative is a speed bump between the lunatic in a superman cape and the canyon. And Sadly the conservative is tied to the lunatic by the ankles so he’s either got to be a damned fine speed bump (and we have not been lately) or he’s got to cut the rope. Or down down down he go.
Yeah I’ve been sitting in the cave looking at the fire shadows on the wall lately. Sorry Plato.
a conservative is a silly monkey
Larry Correia tonight on a lot of crap from some twerp who writes a sci-fi author/AV/pop-culture gossip column for the Guardian.
” here are a few of my thoughts about what it really means when a libprog demands an apology.
Rule number one. Never apologize for something that shouldn’t be apologized for. Check out all the various firings, purges, boycotts, and cancellations. Apologizing for causing their outrage is you taking responsibility for their ignorance and inability to control their own emotions. Apologizing to the perpetually outraged means they own you. You have declared yourself guilty and vulnerable to their threats. It is like negotiating with terrorists. Give into their demands and you’re just encouraging them to blow something else up. ”
Yeppers!
More fun:
“One funny note about my super helpful fans over the last few days, Damien or his readers dismissed some of my defenders on Twitter because they were “Straight White Males”… Turns out on some of these guys they were wrong on race or orientation, but Damien’s is the inclusive side, because obviously all minorities’ beliefs are color coded for liberal convenience.”
You can read more of Larry going ultra-super-apeshit upside the big fat pointed head of the UK’s dumbest living man:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/06/03/fisking-the-guardians-village-idiot-part-2/
The ‘dillo and Wendell the Manatee need to team up.
Another great excerpt of the carnage wave:
” But that’s just me personally, looking at Damien’s primary argument from the big picture view, Sad Puppies being some sort of anti-diversity campaign is even stupider. It requires the belief that true diversity is only skin deep. It means true diversity is always agreeing with the every absurd complaint of the perpetually outraged. It requires the belief that to truly represent the diversity of the entire planet, you’ve got to be in lockstep with a bunch of left wing pseudo-intellectual crybabies from the first world. Anybody with a few functioning brain cells to rub together knows that’s crap. Those morons aren’t even the majority in the west, let alone Bangladesh or Budapest.
While he was condemning the history of genre fiction, I want you to think about the absurd hubris in this statement of Damien’s:
———————
We live in a world of seven billion human beings, whose culture has not been reflected or rewarded in ‘the mainstream’. Science fiction – from cult novels that reach a few thousand readers, to blockbuster movies and video games that dominate contemporary culture – has the potential to talk across every remaining boundary in our modern world. That makes it, in my opinion, potentially the most important cultural form of the 21st century. To claim that potential, it cannot afford to give way to the petulant protests of boys who do not like to share their toys
———————-
At least I have toys to share.
Who the fuck do you think you are, Damien, deciding what is suitable for the whole world? You’re a pathetic little worm of no accomplishment who makes his living critiquing people who actually create things. Where do you get off determining what are acceptable thoughts to represent all of humanity?
Check your privilege, motherfucker.
You got it backwards. A novelist’s job is to tell a story, not reflect or reward or whatever pretentious nonsense you’re spewing. Get off your high horse. We answer to them. We create work, and then the readers are going to decide what reflects them, not some unctuous little shit stain like you, and the reward is when those individuals decide they like the author enough to pay them. They’re seven billion individuals, you tool, not color coded stereotypes for you to speak for. Of them, a couple billion would stone you to death on principle, and most of the rest would wonder why you are such a worthless sack of crap.
The novelist’s job is to tell a story. Your job is to be a useless leech. Now get back to work. All those lies aren’t going to manufacture themselves.”
So sayeth forcefully the back of the hand of Sir Larry Du Correia.
And all of this hubub in the sci-fi “community” (which is a bit like the ‘roach spray purchasing’ “community” or the ‘owns an unplayed ukulele’ “community” ) the proceeds mainly from somebody have a twitter fight with Vox Day a year ago or so.
Basically a bunch of leftists want to declare all non leftist curated sci-fi as atavistic, horrible, inauthentic and evil and make the default reaction of a sci-fi customer to be taking a shit on it, sight unseen. Sadly they are being outsold by the heretics right now who have new publishing options that do not require public kowtowing to Manhatten tastes.
Larry ain’t having it.
The American and British wanna be soviets are nastily promoting the people’s revolutionary new literature in anticipation of in future resorting to firmer steps if required.
Hot buttered puppies, yum.
Looks like there is handwriting on the wall . . .
. . . and the wall surrounds Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
It appears that despite the silence from the IWonPenPhoners concerning their “plans”, the message has not escaped notice altogether amidst the Americans’ justifiable outrage against the release of the Talib Five in exchange for the deserter.
What’s the message?
IWonPenPhone has winked to the Talib, as well as all the rest of the genocidal islamist jihadis, signally them that they hold the solution to IWonPenPhone’s otherwise impossible mission to empty Guantanamo of their jihadist brothers.
So we can expect many more such “exchanges” to come, some with even higher ratios of killers to unfortunate American captives or even possibly merely American-allied captives. The “mission” has just left the starting line, the race is on, there are a little less than three years to empty the tank, to run the race. Now go.
Leave the economic and diplomatic carnage to engulf President NotObama in 2017.
Jarrett, you magnificent bastard!
That’s okay, because you have to be capable of enjoyment to be silly. All liberals are capable of is lust.
Those are Oakschottian categories, by the way. Substitute satisfaction for enjoyment and insatiable longing for lust, if you’re getting hung up.
So I wrote that last comment about emptying Guantanamo before I had bothered to survey the usual internet scene (I tend to do most every day). Now that I’ve looked around, I find evidence right round the horizon that ClownDisaster’s plan for emptying Guantanamo is as plain a thing as the sun shining in a cloudless sky.
Uh oh. Will that be a problem for the IWonPenPhoners?
Maybe not, at least not so long as the obvious Constitutional remedy — impeachment — remains outside the bounds our representatives allow of consideration. The successful delegitimation of our scheme of government is nearly complete. An act and an absence of an act, both make a fait accompli. Good, then. Nearly done. The peace of the grave beckons. Sit quietly, representatives, the pain will not last long.