Archive for December, 2009

Trickle-Up Economics

Goldman Sachs senior executives are arming themselves with New York gun permits, according to Alice Schroeder on Bloomberg.com. The banksters “are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.”

Herodotus II: East is East and West Is Best

Finally, having dispatched the Neopagans and the barbarian hordes and after orchestrating our glorious victory in Afghanistan, I am ready to return to Herodotus. His theme, as I observed in the first installment, is the conflict between Europe and Asia or, more properly, Greeks and barbarians. In a way, his work can be treated as a kind of essay in definition, that is, he is defining Greekness or Hellenism partly by describing Greek behavior and partly by the contrast, often merely suggested, with barbarians.

War Cries from a Defeated Man

Ritual trumphalism about America’s righteous mission in the closing sentences of his speech did not dispel the distinct impression during President Obama’s 33-minute address to cadets at West Point Tuesday night that we were listening to a man defeated by the challenge of justifying the dispatch of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

Obama’s Exit Strategy

If actions speak louder than words, President Obama is cutting America free of George Bush’s wars and coming home.

For his bottom line Tuesday night was that all U.S. forces will be out of Iraq by mid-2011 and the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan will, on that date, begin to get smaller and smaller.

Fish or Cut Bait

President Obama’s speech on Afghanistan was everything such a speech should be: vapid, dishonest, and confused. Speaking grandly of an exit strategy he never defined, he did not once address the serious question or an entrance strategy. What possible reason did we ever have for going in to that awful place, except to kill people we don’t like? I’ll give Obama this: The man never disappoints; he always lives down to my lowest expectations.

Obama Bumps Charlie Brown

It is impossible to imagine a television network today making a show like A Charlie Brown Christmas. Just think about it: The plot revolves around the production of a Nativity play in a public school, there is no mention of any holiday other than Christmas, it ends with all the Peanuts singing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” and its dramatic highpoint is Linus’ recitation of Luke’s account of the angels appearing to the shepherds on that first Christmas Eve.

Hamlet as War President

Led by a conflicted president of a divided party and nation, America is deepening her involvement in a war in its ninth year with no end in sight.

Only one parallel to Barack Obama’s troop decision comes to mind: the 2007 decision by George W. Bush to ignore the Baker Commission and put Gen. David Petraeus in command of a “surge” of 30,000 troops into Iraq.

Of Government and 10.2 Percent Unemployment

The jobs summit, held amid rightful groaning over a 10.2 percent jobless rate, is case in point concerning the general inefficacy of federal attempts to prescribe for a 300-million-headed economy.