HHS Secretary Sebelius is Baghdad Bob in Drag…

…and the Obama Administration is having a worse than “Hurricane Katrina” class credibility meltdown unseen in the West since Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s political collapse in July 2008.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made the outrageously untrue statement in Congressional hearings today about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that: ‘The website has never crashed.’

As this Instapundit link makes clear that the split screen between her testimony and objective reality is well into the Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf AKA “Baghdad Bob” territory in terms of “Who are you going to believe, me? Or your lying eyes?”

The bottom line of Pres. Obama’s spokesman for his signature achievement as President getting laughed at as a Democratic Party version of “Baghdad Bob” is a “Pres. George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina” moment.

The Obama Administration’s credibility on domestic policy is now as crippled as his foreign policy was after his Syrian Nerve Gas “Red Line” misadventure. It is all downhill from here.

The final fate of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert now awaits Pres. Obama.

Say Hi to the Whig Party, Boys

So, the main-line establishment GOP – apparently seeing the writing on the wall and determined to make themselves even more irrelevant – is now going to go all-out against Tea Party sympathetic candidates in the next elections. They have seen the enemy and they is us … that is, us small-government, strictly-Constitutionalist, fiscally-responsible, and free-market advocates, who were the means of ensuring certain outcomes in hotly contested races, and that Mitt Romney even had a ghost of a chance in the last round. Nope, obviously those partisans who feel that our government should be guided by strict adherence to the Constitution, not spend more than it takes in, and not be rick-rolled by crony capitalists and the lobbyists who do their bidding, are – to put it frankly – dangerous radicals who must be excised from the GOP organization.

Because, you know, it is so much better to be a meek and polite little opposition party occasionally allowed to dip a snout into the trough. Insisting on a degree of fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution, and truly free markets is apparently just too dogmatic, too radical, and un-collegial within the rarified inside-the-beltway establishment GOP.

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The Replacements and the End of Buying Music

Recently one of my all time favorite bands, The Replacements, got back together and played three shows at Riot Fest.  Of the four original members, one of the Stinson brothers is dead, their replacement guitarist Slim Dunlop has a life threatening disease, and their drummer Chris Mars is a full time artist.  So the last two Replacements, Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson, played shows to rapturous reviews by fellow Gen-X’ers.

I am just kicking myself in the rear that I didn’t go see those shows.  The Chicago show conflicted with a bunch of other things but in hindsight I could have gone off and seen them in Denver (maybe).  Now I am waiting to see if they get back together (or even record some more music) and this time I’ll be sure to go, where ever they play.

After watching some of the songs on You Tube I went to put some more replacements on my iPod while working out and realized that I only had a few snippets from their albums in my collection.  Back when I first ripped the Replacements CD’s a long time ago I only put a few songs from each CD on my computer (trying to save space) and of course the quality was low, at 64 bit.  I realized that I didn’t even have “Tim”, my favorite album, at all.

I started looking around on itunes and now I need to buy these songs for a THIRD time.  I had them all on albums, then CD’s, and now I need to buy them AGAIN, on iTunes?  Really?  And all the while I can hear Dan’s voice in my head saying that he doesn’t buy any music anymore, relying on the internet and services like Pandora / Spotify and for me at least, Sirius / XM (I have it in my car and house and started paying a bit more to stream it and play on my “Jambox” speaker through my iPod or iPhone).

In this case I knew where my old CD’s were… I gave them all (more than a thousand) to my brother, and he was ripping them in some high fidelity manner.  He looked through the stack (they were all out of order because of a flood) and found three CD’s, which I took back, and I will re-rip again and put on my iPod.  After I got home I realized that I didn’t get “Let it Be”, probably my favorite, and I don’t have all the songs on my iPod.  Oh well, I may have to buy a few here and there.

But how long before I don’t buy any music at all?  It can’t be too long.  I don’t buy too many books anymore, and I probably buy less eBooks than I used to buy of the equivalent hardcover variety.  I am consuming paid media at a fraction of the rate that I used to, and can probably see a day when I get rid of everything (I got rid of all my CD’s a while ago, so these three are the last three in my house).

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Radical Islamic Terrorism in Context, pt. 1

How to make sense of radical Islamic terrorism? This violence is barbaric – but it is not senseless. When you understand the society from which savagery has sprung, the cold logic behind these attacks becomes all too apparent.

Image: Smoke rises from the Westgate Mall


Brendon O’Niell says it is time to recognize the sheer barbarity of 21st century Islamic terror attacks:

In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC’s yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word – terrorism – in relation to the bloody assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya at the weekend. Across the commentating board, people are sheepish about pointing out the historically unique lunacy of Islamist violence and its utter detachment from any recognisable moral universe or human values. We have to talk about this barbarism; we have to appreciate how new and unusual it is, how different it is even from the terrorism of the 1970s or of the early twentieth century. We owe it to the victims of these assaults, and to the principle of honest and frank political debate, to face up to the unhinged, morally unanchored nature of Islamist violence in the 21st century.” [1]

I applaud Mr. O’Niell’s frankness. Islamic terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab are savage, barbaric, and evil. Period. They should be seen by all and denounced by all as the monstrous brutes that they have become. Civilization has a pale; this lies beyond it.

But stating this is not enough. We cannot simply name a man a monster — we must try to understand why so many men want to be monsters in the first place. O’Niell is less helpful here:

Time and again, one reads about Islamist attacks that seem to defy not only the most basic of humanity’s moral strictures but also political and even guerrilla logic…. consider the attack on Westgate in Kenya, where both the old and the young, black and white, male and female were targeted. With no clear stated aims from the people who carried the attack out, and no logic to their strange and brutal behaviour, Westgate had more in common with those mass mall and school shootings that are occasionally carried out by disturbed people in the West than it did with the political violence of yesteryear.[2]

There are problems with this line of thought. In his zeal to denounce Islamic terrorism O’Niell makes two errors: 1) He assumes that indiscriminate slaughter of ‘the young and old, black and white, male and female’ is a ‘new and unusual’ development in human history and 2) that the sheer barbarity of these acts ‘defy logic.’

Perhaps the Khwarazmians also thought the slaughter they witnessed was something new under the sun:

The Mongols now entered the town and drove all the inhabitants, nobles and commoners, out on to the plain. For four days and nights the people continued to come out of the town; the Mongols detained them all, separating the women fiom the men. Alas! How many peri-like ones did they drag from the bosom: of their husbands! How many sisters did they separate from their brothers! How many parents were distraught at the ravishment of their virgin daughters!

The Mongols ordered that, apart from four hundred artisans whom they specified and selected from amongst the men and some children, girls and boys, whom they bore into captivity, the whole population, including the women and children, should be killed, and no one, whether woman or man, be spared. The people of Merv were then distributed among the soldiers and levies, and, in short, to each man was allotted the execution of three or four hundred persons.[3]

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