Dear Diary

“Had we not had the hostage crisis,” muses Jimmy Carter philosophically (surely he is using we in the Aristotelian sense, or rather we in the Will Durantian sense of the Aristotelian sense) in his newly released White House Diary, a compendium of his daily entries over the four years of his presidency (culled thoughtfully for his readers from five thousand pages to a trifling six hundred), “I would have won.” Moreover, he adds, with the characteristic Carterian bonhomie, “Had I not had Kennedy as my opponent, who sapped away a portion of the Democratic wing, I would have been re-elected.”

Um-hum.

So much blame, so little time.

·         Had he not also accused his fellow Americans of abandoning their pride “in hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and . . . faith in God”

·         Had he not also charged them with worshipping “self-indulgence and consumption,” and defining human identity “by what one owns”

·         Had he not also blamed the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, and “a system of government that seems incapable of action. . . . a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests [and] every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another” (gosh, doesn’t that sound awfully familiarly like the whinging we’ve heard with regularity from the downturned lips of the White House’s current occupant?)

·         Had he not also celebrated our release from “that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear” before in essence facilitating and then watching with something akin to approval the establishment of a Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua

·         Had he not also not projected American weakness (through his own) and then been forced to vie against Ronald “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Reagan . . .

Had he not also, in other words, been the worst U.S. president ever, before, that is, the Advent of Barack Obama, he would have been re-elected.

Or maybe not? The answer might be found in those excised forty-four hundred pages of his Diary.

Brooklyn Boy Writes:

From Reuters:

White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters during a telephone briefing that in order for Iran to walk through that door [of international engagement], it would have to demonstrate the peaceful intent of its nuclear program.

Let us parse that statement! Just when will Iran have to demonstrate the peaceful intent of its nuclear program? After they build the bomb as a check on Israeli aggression, perhaps? And anyway, Ben Rhodes is not a national security adviser, or rather, would not be in any universe that made sense. He was Obama's top foreign-policy speechwriter and was then made a Deputy National Security adviser . . . for Communications. I suppose it’s possible that he’s not only writing speeches but also dictating foreign policy, in which case it’s time I take my suicide pills.

And do you remember an article a year ago about Rhodes, a big profile in Politico? While he was writing a key Iraq War speech he said he used Google to find inspirational anecdotes about the troops. Because he didn't know anything about the war or our military and had to Google everything. I'm not kidding!

Rhodes is also behind Obama’s telling the story of two Marines who died trying to stop a suicide bomber from entering an American military compound in Iraq.

During “the download,” Obama had told Rhodes he wanted to end on the troops.

“I literally just spent a lot of time Googling,” Rhodes said.

Is it time to move to Canada with Susan Sarandon?

Brooklyn Boy, Patriot

I am trying to vote in my local primary. In the tiny voting room at John Jay High School they do not have a sign up with my election district’s number on it, but I have come prepared and know what to do. Yet there is a snare—at the entrance I hear a Tall-Skinny Democrat complaining on the phone to her (husband? mom? significant other TSD?) that it took a very long time to vote. Why so long? Ah, here is why: The flock of women who were kidnapped and forced into servitude as election observers naturally assume I am a Democrat and fill out the wrong voting card and give me the wrong ballot. There are no Republican ballots. I frown, and after five minutes of riffling at the desk, the Lady in Red Shirt goes off to an invisible closet to find my ballot. I was Dem voter No. 5, now I am GOP voter No. O. A very long line of people (four people) has formed behind me, and I feel like I am trying to buy herpes medicine and GOP hair plugs at the same time.

Confusion reigns, not the dredlocked man with the loud talking who has appointed himself King of Observers. After waiting patiently for the electors of servitude to do something, anything, I take my unobservant hands and pull out the bottom packet of plastic-wrapped ballots from the leaning tower on the desk in front of the Republican election observer. It is the missing GOP ballots. A plot? I frown again. “Is it all right if I open this up and take my ballot? I want to vote now.” Sure, sure, yes yes baby sir. The loose blue plastic wrap is too difficult for the Republican observer to open—this takes a good 60 seconds of arthritic tearing. I am handed my third voting card by the Lady in Red Shirt, this one identifying me as GOP voter No. 1. Huzzah. I scan my ballot with my eyes and pen. My choices: A dairy farmer, a political consultant, a businessman who wants to put welfare recipients in jail and teach them to brush their teeth properly. The electioneers were right: I should have voted for the Democrats.

Two Gentlemen on Obama

Shmalentine: I thought it boring but perhaps intentionally so conventional: Part of an effort to recast him as a boring centrist president rather than a commie Muslim.

Shmoteus: Recast being the operative word—the lines were there on the surface (American exceptionalism, etc.), but it’s impossible to believe anything he says about our place in the world when tomorrow we will still have no real agenda abroad beyond the piecemeal approval of predator drone strikes. It was odd—he managed to avoid talking about actual warfighting in his marquee Iraq speech. I’ve come away with a very blurry memory of what he actually said. Bush was good, our troops were good, our relationship with Iraq is good, everything will soon be better, and we mourn our many losses. It was as though he was forcing you to insert meaning into his words—a true cipher.

Not a wartime president, that one.

Shmalentine: Yes, it is amazing how antiseptic he is (clean, Joe Biden once said) when he has in fact droned out countless Afghan women, children, cousins, neighbors who were in the wrong place when an Obamadrone struck. All that done to avoid complex legal issues that arise from trying to hold them. Easier to drone them out. This from our professor of constitutional law. 


But!! You said “tomorrow we will still have no real agenda abroad beyond the piecemeal approval of predator drone strikes.” How unfair. Tomorrow, precisely, we will have the Peace Dinner. All is not lost: The world’s shortest king will be back in Washington. And Mubarak, Kiwi Black all over his dome. And after 18 months of being kept apart by Mitchell’s incompetence, Abbas and Bibi.

Anyway, tomorrow and the day after there is but one agenda: Winning in 2012. 

Shmoteus: And while we’re speaking of recasting, Obama's new oval office rug has five quotations inscribed in the wool:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—President Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”—Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Government of the people, by the people, for the People”—President Abraham Lincoln
“No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings”—President John F. Kennedy
“The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us”—President Theodore Roosevelt

Each line is by itself quite lovely, but in sum they’re just . . . empty. I like the one in the Jefferson Memorial better: “I pledge upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” 


But then, he don’t.

Shmalentine: It is stupid to put that stuff in a rug so everyone walks all over it. Generally speaking I do not favor rug quotations.

If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem, May My Gun Hand Wither and Ramallah Become My Capital

The city of Ramallah—whose Muqata was once the notorious siege-place of Yasser Arafat and today houses his crypt—is now the seat of the “Palestinian” government, such as it is, and building is booming, reports the Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh; houses are selling, fancy new restaurants are opening, discotheques are thrumming, and five-star hotels are accommodating “a diverse crowd—young and old, Palestinian and Israeli, Americans and Europeans, as well as Christians, Muslims and even Jews.” What is more, “Among the countries that have ‘ambassadors’ and ‘representative offices’ in the city are Argentina, Australia, Austria, Korea, South Africa, Norway, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, China, Poland, Portugal, The Netherlands, Russia, Jordan, Brazil, Finland, Denmark, Ireland, Germany, India, Japan, the Czech Republic, Canada and Mexico.”

Thus, it is fair to say that notwithstanding the many tears, crocodile and otherwise, springing  from the eyes of “Palestinians” over “Al Quds,”or their protestations of love and longing for the city that was left to rot and ruin under the Arab hand and returned to its current Jerusalemite glory only with the tender stewardship of the Jews after 1967, Ramallah is quickly becoming the de facto capital of what may one day be the Palestinian state.

The Palestinian state if, that is, its citizens can renounce once and for all the creeping Islamism that would sooner see them suffering the miseries and oppression of twelfth-century religious and cultural practice than thriving in a modern society; if they can cast off at last the self-strangling mythology of their own victimhood;  and if they can shed their century-old yearning to set the blood of their Jewish neighbors flowing in the streets. And if, that is, those same despised Jewish neighbors can succeed in destroying the Iranian bomb that threatens the potential state, Palestine—whose capital will be Ramallah—no less than the Jewish state, Israel—whose eternal and undivided capital is Jerusalem—which in the meantime the “Palestinians” have erased from their maps and the schoolbooks of their children.

Miss You So Much

Middle East Beer Summit

They are touting it as the resumption of bilateral peace negotiations between Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel and Mahmoud Abbas’s “Palestine”—the crowning achievement of nine months of flitting hither to Jerusalem and thither to Ramallah by George Mitchell for “proximity” talks intended to bring together (for “imity” talks?) a disposed enough Netanyahu and an Abbas so reluctant he was begging the Arab League to hide him; and double that many months of pressure on Bibi by the president of the United States, et al., to make concessions no Israeli leader could possibly make—yet here, so far, is what the team of Obamic geniuses has actually accomplished: A dinner at the White House scheduled for September 1st for three—Obama, Netanyahu, and Abbas—and twenty—“King” Abdullah of Jordan will be among them, as will Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak (who’ll be tearing himself away from his busy schedule of suppressing democracy and imprisoning human rights activists in his own country), Tony Blair, to speak for Salam Fayyad, the author of whatever progress toward modernity there is to be had in Arab Judea and Samaria, and a whole bunch of lackeys, likely including the American tools Dennis Ross and Dan Shapiro (whose embarrassing job it was to try to sell this ludicrousness to the American Jewish community); and, the following day, a trilateral meeting convened by Hillary “Human Rights” Clinton at the State Department. In other words, one mighty big beer summit here, minus the beer.

Nothing good has ever come of decades of American meddling in the Israeli-Arab “peace process”—at best, it’s been a monumental waste of everyone’s time; at worst, it produced the Second Intifada—and nothing good can come of this latest and most farcical effort.

Fitzgerald Flameout: Prosecution Fail

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald indicted a ham sandwich—Rod Blagojevich—on 24 counts, and all he has to show for it is one guilty verdict—making false statements to federal authorities—and a mistrial. What a shame for Mr. Fitzgerald that the mendacious blarney-meister Tim Russert was no longer available to testify. On the other hand, Mr. Russert’s testimony, one may be forgiven for wagering, might have been good only for the prosecution of an innocent man.

Could it be time for Fitzgerald to bag the Judas Cradle and rat torture  and set up shop in another line of business? There’s always Armitage International, where Rich Armitage and his band of fixers ply their trade.  After all, Armitage owes him one—a big one.

Let Them Eat the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Before Marie Antoinette “Farmer in the Dell” Obama’s even had a chance to teach low-income obese children how to sow and harvest and eat like so many little Johnny Appleseeds, her “Let’s Move” initiative may lighten them up perforce, as Dem legislators find they are obliged to slash the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, to pay for it.

“Food stamps have made multiple appearances on the fiscal chopping block because Democrats have few other places to turn to offset the cost of legislation,” The Hill reports. Of course, not everyone is on board: “This is one of the more egregious cases of robbing Peter to pay Paul, and is a vote we do not take lightly,” say Jim McGovern and Keith Ellison. Still, increases in funding for food stamps that were part of the stimulus

were already scheduled to phase out over time. The changes proposed in the state aid and nutrition bills would simply cut off that increase early, in March 2014. Because the cuts would not take effect for more than three years, Democratic leaders have voiced the hope that they will be able to stop them in future legislation.

Stop them in future legislation . . . or not. Three years is a long time, especially these days, especially for the Dems. Stamping out childhood obesity—and food stamps along with it—could have no role to play at all in their struggle to get back into Congress. As for Marie and her courtiers, they, too, may well have moved on to greener pastures—and trimmer children.

Serengeti Loveliness