Days I knew as happy sweet sequester’d days . . .

[4est_4est_Gump]

A few weeks ago, Ann Coulter announced that she was bored of American politics and was spending her days watching Turner Classic Movies. I confess that, when it comes to Beltway melodrama, I too am fighting vainly the old ennui, and minded to plump up the pillows and settle back with a bucket of bonbons and a beribboned Shih-tzu for an all-night Norma Shearer marathon. At least, unlike Washington, there’s a chance you may catch something you haven’t already seen a hundred times before. For example, I’ve a yen to see Roberta (RKO, 1935), in which Irene Dunne sings:

Yesterdays
Yesterdays
Days I knew as happy sweet sequester’d days . . .

I believe that was the last known use of this blameless and mellifluous word until it was conscripted by the political class for this month’s dreary Mayan Apocalypse of the Month thrill ride. Say what you like about those Mayan guys, but they only schedule an apocalypse once every 5,126 years. Only Washington would try to pull it off every six weeks. If I understand correctly, by the time you read this, the planes will be dropping from the skies; the drip-feeds in every emergency room will be dry; every creature on the endangered species list will have broken free from our pristine federally manned national parks to be left for roadkill in the potholed asphalt of America’s crumbling interstates; you’ll turn on your bathroom faucet only to find the town reservoir choked with fecal coliform; the Ebola virus will be rampant across Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, and other swing states, where it will nevertheless enjoy higher approval ratings than Marco Rubio and every other prospective GOP nominee. The sequester supposedly cuts $44 billion from the federal budget — or from the rate of growth of the federal budget. Whatever. $44 billion is about what the United States government borrows every nine days, so it’s not a lot. But it’s apparently responsible for everything that matters in American life.

That being so, maybe it would be easier to reinstate this critical $44 billion and cut the other $3.8 trillion, which is apparently responsible for nothing other than Harry Reid’s beloved federally funded cowboy-poetry festival and the cost of the dress uniforms for the military detachment accompanying the first lady at her Oscars appearance. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, warned of “over 170 million jobs that could be lost” thanks to the sequester. There are only 135 million jobs in America, but the sequester gods are so powerful they can eliminate every job in Canada, Britain, and Germany too. Why, because of this weekend’s looming Mayan Apocalypse, President Obama declined to deploy a carrier to the Persian Gulf, concerned that it might be left on the other side of the planet completely sequestered with no fuel to limp back home and insufficient stores in the mess-hall larder to cook up federally compliant slop. So, when the mullahs go nuclear and drop the big one on Tel Aviv, it will be the fault of the Republicans for failing to agree to a prudent, balanced, fiscally responsible plan — like the Senate’s latest deficit-reduction proposal, which, as is traditional, increases the deficit (by $7 billion).

...

Government-by-fake-disaster-movie seems to be going swimmingly for Obama. Every Republican attempt at fiscal discipline now ends with both higher spending and more taxes: That’s the way it went with the Christmas blockbuster Fiscal Cliff, and that’s the way to bet with Les Sequesterables, too. Even the IRS can’t keep up: “Tax season” is upon us, and yet they’re not accepting tax returns from millions of Americans because the IRS hasn’t yet managed to process the tax changes passed in the dead of night at New Year. American government is a joke — and, sadly, not one of those jokes that everybody takes seriously and kicks up a fuss about, like Seth MacFarlane’s “We Saw Your Boobs” song that The New Yorker attacked for its “hostility to women in the workplace” or Joan Rivers’ joke about Heidi Klum’s Oscars gown that Abraham Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League is busy issuing stern denunciations of. No, in an America in which every throwaway gag is a hate crime, Obama’s fake disaster movie of the month is the only joke we all go along with, even though he’s insulting our intelligence far more than Seth and the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus singing “We Saw Your Boobs” to Anne Hathaway and Halle Berry.

Can you pierce the mists of time and go back all the way to the year 2007? Back then, federal spending was 40 percent lower than it is today. In a mere half-decade, has all that 40 percent gravy become so indispensable to the general welfare that not even a teensy-weensy sliver of it can be cut?

If you really believe that, then America is going to die, and a gullible citizenry willing to give this laughable charade the time of day will bear ultimate responsibility. We have seen the boobs, and they are us.

Mark Steyn, NRO

That last line in worthy of Walt Kelly's Pogo...




... maybe even a new age Godot...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Seen boobs? What boobs???

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Have you seen my Hemi?

 

[Wat_Tyler]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Dangerous Times: How Euro-socialism Set off a Fascist Bomb
James Lewis, American Thinker
March 2, 2013

...

This week Europe blew up. The media haven't caught up yet, because they are what they are. But the markets are catching up fast.

This is a huge event for the United States, because our political elite is bound and determined to turn us into Europe. Hasn't the EU found the answer to war and peace and prosperity forever?

Our Democrats believe it. Europe is their model. Every batty new idea they have is copied from the glorious European Union. Twenty years ago they still celebrated the Soviet Union, until that house of cards crumbled. Now they have shifted their fantasy paradise to Europe.

Over there, fifty years of increasingly centralized control have made it impossible for voters to be heard. The political parties are stuck in GroupThink. Only the fascist "protest" parties agitate for reform. The ruling class doesn't listen. They don't have to -- they don't have to run for election.

So European voters fled to the fascists to express their rage and despair. Imagine one out of four US voters going for Lincoln Rockwell, and you get the idea.

In Italy, Beppe Grillo the Clown just received 24% of the vote, the biggest percentage a single party has received since Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, in 1922, another economic crisis year.

The Italian vote gives the Clown control of the Senate, and the biggest voice in the lower house. The Grillini now speak for the capital city of Rome. Since fascism is illegal in Italy, the Five Star Party pretends not to be fascist; but scratch the surface and that old grinning ghost stares back at you.)

The EU and US media are still in denial, but Italian party politicians instantly flew to Berlin to talk with Angela Merkel, and came back to build a common front against Grillo the Clown. But the Joker refused to play. He wants another election in June.

Currency markets are signaling panic. Don't believe the media. Believe the markets.

Europe is our future. It's Obama style of Chicago "governance," and as long as the people were inundated by EU propaganda they believed that Europe had discovered the secret of peace and welfare forever. Talk to any European and that's what you hear. They keep wondering why we don't follow them to Never-Neverland. If you tell question them they turn a deaf ear. They're mentally stuck.

As long as America defends Europe, they will keep hating us and pretending they are running the ocean liner, like kids with plastic steering wheels.

The key to the whole farce is Europe's "democracy deficit," which means that the people can vote for the European Parliament -- but it has no legislative powers at all. The Parliament is a Potemkin front. It has no power to pass binding laws.

On the other hand, the unelected ruling class has centralized more and more power in "Commissions" -- which is what the word "Soviets" used to mean. But the EU has no electoral legitimacy. Nobody votes for the people who really run the place. That means the EU receives no feedback about the impact of its cult-like policy fantasies. When the people wanted a public referendum on the EU, the political class arrogantly told them to go... yes.

In France, the Grand Corps of the State ("Enarques") run the government. Germany and Britain are similar. Together they appoint the European ruling elite. This is the EU socialist Apparat, the Political Machine that controls everything. And yes, there are capitalists, but they work hand-in-glove with the Apparat. It's Crony Social Capitalism (technically the same as fascism).

As a result normal people feel totally powerless. As long as the Ponzi scheme lasts, the victims loved it. The media churned out neo-imperialist propaganda about how Europe had finally discovered peace and welfare forever, and everybody wanted to believe.

Today, southern and eastern Europe are running into a brick wall, designed by Europe's ruling class in its delusional way. The north blames the south, and vice versa. Nobody can stop the ruling class from its mad rush to destruction, so we are seeing a 'protest vote" in Germany, Poland, eastern Europe, and the PIIGS -- the Mediterranean coastal countries plus Ireland.

The only protest party people can vote for are barely disguised fascists: The Five Star party in Italy, Golden Dawn in Greece, Pirate Party in Germany, and fascist insurgents in Hungary.

Here's how it's done. In Italy Beppe Grillo ran as a sly comedian, spinning off conspiracy theories about 'chemtrails" (jet contrails) that poison the Italian people, the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and Illuminati who run the world to oppress the poor, and all the usual paranoid fantasies. But he also attacked massive corruption (which is true) and self-serving politicians (also true), and the euro currency that killed Italian exports (also true). Grillo voiced criticisms that other politicians avoided. Everybody knows about massive corruption, for example. Grillo said it.

Now the Clown has his own sources of money and ideology, which lead straight to Tehran, as we have pointed out. The Clown hates the Jews, and his website mentions "Jews" 2,500 times, and "Iran" 2,500 times. The Islamic Development Bank doesn't charge interest, the Clown tells us. This is pure Islamic fascist propaganda. Banks that loan free money don't exist in the real world, because they can't survive. But demagogues tell sucker lies, and this is a good one. Beppe tells his followers that he will nationalize the banks (like Il Duce) and give away free loans. It's like Obama phones, straight from Obama's stash. The suckers love it.

The Jews run the world by charging "usury" (this is an old, old story in Europe). In Beppe's Fantasyland money comes free, exactly what Islamist propaganda says. Beppe tells the world that "Everything I know about the Middle East I've learned from my father-in-law" Parvin Tajik, who runs a major construction business in Tehran, and therefore has to be in cahoots with the super-corrupt mullahs.

Guess who plays the scapegoat in this age-old drama? Yup.

People laughed at old Beppe the Clown for fifteen years.

Today the joke's on them.

I see boobs...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I'm stealing this one.


rlmao

 

[Wat_Tyler]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

We need a little Patriotism!

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Gone fishin' . . . .

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Red Bull gives you wings!

 

[Wat_Tyler]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

tee hee

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Bizzy Scrote will be along shortly to demand his Royal Tease.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

A tug of the rug!

 

[Byron In Exile]

Days I knew as happy sweet sequester’d days . . .

Mark Steyn, NRO

I lol'd.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I lol'd.

Mark is a funny guy...

 

[WeedSmoke420]

lol...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

...

Though seemingly unrelated, the sequester contretemps have provided a useful context. In the tortured argot of Washington, “sequestration” connotes “a reduction in government spending.” It is thus an exquisite weasel word, the kind that fraud-construction thrives on. Of course, the disease sequestration is meant to treat is only too real — our metastasizing cancer of debt. But the political class that lives today’s high life on tomorrow’s stolen prosperity naturally prefers the illusion of action to the pain that must accompany any real, surgical remedy. So it peddles placebos that have the ring of earnestness and effectiveness: “cuts,” “balanced approach,” and the like.

On examination, these words are seen for the nonsense that they are. In Washington a “cut” is not what your family does when it becomes over-extended — a spending slash, a commitment to live within one’s means. It is a nominal decrease in the rate at which government plans, despite our straits, to increase spending. So a “cut” lards debt on debt . . . just not quite as quickly.

And a “balanced approach”? It sounds so admirably Greek — as in the ancients, not the contemporary Athenians we sadly prefer to emulate. Balance, “moderation in all things,” is great . . . as long as you have a multifaceted problem. But what if your problem, very simply, is that you spend goo-gobs more money than you earn? That does not call for a “balanced” approach. If you think it does, try explaining to the waiter that you’ve decided to pay only half the check for the meal you just devoured because, after all, there should be more “balance.”

Like the sequester molesters, “Arab Spring” devotees have their own fantasy vocabulary. The whoppers are “freedom” and “democracy,” the ideals, we’re told, that have swept the Middle East, even as it sinks into repression, social unrest, and the persecution of religious minorities. Islam and the West use the same words, but we are not conveying the same concepts — just as a “cut” in your budget means something very different from a “cut” in Washington’s.

Freedom? “Let it be known to you that the real meaning of freedom lies in the perfection of slavery,” explained al-Qushayri, a celebrated eleventh-century scholar of Islam.

I offer this bit of Islamist wisdom as an explanation, not a put-down. Not that the distinction matters much. As Spring Fever makes clear, the culture of Middle Eastern Islam is convinced of nothing so much as its own superiority. It does not judge itself by non-Islamic standards, particularly the standards of Western civilization, with which it sees itself in a conflict that will end only when one side prevails.

The dynamic, classical, supremacist Islam of the Middle East teaches that Allah has given mankind, His creation, the gift of sharia: the “path,” the all-purpose societal framework — covering all aspects of life, not just spirituality — for living in dignity through obedience. “Freedom,” in this context, is to make the “free” choice to surrender oneself entirely to this path.

That is the antithesis of a freedom to chart one’s own course, the freedom of the West. Here, Allah is not the sovereign. Our faiths may guide us, but the people are sovereign, with a right to govern civil society as they see fit — including in contradiction of sharia’s provisions, which deny what the West sees as basic civil rights.

Thus the folly of Arab Spring apologists, who envision a new generation of Muslim rulers, popularly elected and thus — the fable goes — responsive to the needs of their “constituents.” Responsive government, however, is the hallmark of societies in which freedom means self-determinism. In the Muslim Middle East, it is foolish to speak of “constituents.” The ruler’s fidelity is not to the people but to Allah. It is for the people not to dream but to obey, as long as the ruler is faithful to sharia. They don’t enjoy the prerogative of deviating from the path.

“Accommodation,” like “constituents,” is a term that echoes through the Arab Spring. Sharia must be accommodated — given pride of place in the Middle East and growing deference in the West. “Accommodation” turns out to be Arab-Spring for “balanced approach,” the oh-so-reasonable packaging of an idea that is actually perverse.

Almost never do we hear that federal law must accommodate, say, the law of Tennessee. When people’s principles are the same, their legal systems — a reflection of their notions about right and wrong — will mesh easily. When there is a conflict, it is not because of a lack of accommodation; it is because either the federal government or the state government is in error. We don’t accommodate error; we correct it, either in the legislature or in the courts.

Calling for “accommodations” is a polite way of saying that cultural values and the legal systems they create are incompatible. When a culture cedes ground to a different culture’s antithetical principle — when, for example, we are told free speech must “accommodate” sharia blasphemy laws that proscribe negative criticism of Islam — that is not a reasonable compromise. It is a corruption of the good. That is how a culturally confident society sees it.

There is a reason why the Islamic supremacists who run the Organization of Islamic Cooperation insisted in 1990 on having their own “Declaration of Human Rights In Islam.” The purportedly Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written by non-Muslim diplomats after the Second World War, does not work for them. Islamist leaders understood that Western concepts of civil rights and human rights do not jibe with sharia. They wanted their own declaration, reflecting their own very different aspirations.

Neither does “democracy” work for the Islamists on the rise across the Middle East — at least, not as we understand it in the West. For us, democracy is not a process but a way of life, a worldview implying basic assumptions about liberty and equality. To the Islamic supremacist, “Democracy is just the train we board to reach our destination,” as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now Turkey’s prime minister, put it in 1998 when he was the mayor — or, as he referred to himself, the imam — of Istanbul.

The destination Erdogan had in mind is power. Not the empowerment of free people that is the genuine augur of spring. The power of the “Arab Spring” is the imposition of perfect slavery.

Andrew C. McCarthy, NRO