HALF-FULL REPORT 10/09/09

The conversations at the Cosmos Club this week were very subdued.  As it has been for generations, this is where the true power elite of Washington gathers.  Whether it was in the East Garden Bar, the Old Club Room, or the Members Dining Room, the savviest veterans of Capitol Hill and K Street – Democrat and Republican – had a tone of fear and seriousness you didn’t hear the week before.

Something had scared them.  Scared them like an earthquake had fractured their political foundations.  The one whispered word you could overhear more than any other was "Copenhagen."

For them, President and Mrs. Zero flying off to Copenhagen to beg the International Olympics Committee for Chicago and being rejected was not a matter of humiliation.  It was scales falling off their eyes, and in an eye-blink realizing the enormity of the mistake America made last November.

And at breakfast in the Garden Dining Room this morning (10/09), there were hardly conversations at all, just shocked silence. The consequences of giving a president afflicted with pathological egomania combined with pathological amateurishness the Nobel Peace Prize were so grave they were speechless.

These grizzled hard-nosed guys can handle egomaniacs and ideologues, for DC is overrun with such folk.  What they can’t handle, what actually scares them, is off-the-wall bozo sophomoric amateurs in positions of real power.  And if the amateur in question is at the apex of real power and is so nutso narcissistic that he can’t be educated to be less amateurish, now they start to freak out.

One basic rule that all presidents adhere to, Dem or Pub makes no difference, is they never risk the prestige of the presidency on a negotiation that could result in public humiliation.  It’s always negotiated by White House Sherpas in advance so it’s a done deal, and the POTUS just shows up for the applause and photo-ops.

The Copenhagen Fiasco has scared every pro in Washington because it was Total Absolute Amateur City by a presidential ego run amok.

So Cosmos is quiet this morning, as everyone realizes this pathological ego is now on steroids with this farce of a peace prize. 

***
You won’t, however, hear any conspiracy talk at Cosmos.  For that you have to go to the GOP’s favorite watering hole, the Capitol Hill Club.  Not a few Pub Congressistas were speculating there over a quick cup of morning coffee that George Soros must have paid off the Norwegian Nobel Committee to counter Zero’s humiliation in Copenhagen and being ridiculed on Saturday Night Live.

Maybe.  Becoming an object of ridicule is often irrecoverably deadly to a politician.  For a long time, comedians just couldn’t tell jokes about The One.  Then Bill Maher on HBO had this zinger:

"Hey, Mr. President! You’re skinny and in a hurry and in love with a nice lady, but so is Lindsay Lohan. And just like Lindsay, we see your name in the paper a lot but we’re kind of wondering when you’re actually going to do something."

Ha-ha.  But when (10/03) the great bastion of liberal comedy, Saturday Night Live, ridicules Zero, now it’s serious.

So serious that NBC yanked it off YouTube, and SNL won’t let it load on its site.  As of today (10/09),  YouTube is still carrying it embedded in a clip of Greta Van Susteren on Fox News.  Let’s see how long this stays up:

***
"Donnaredskin" really nailed it on the Forum in describing what Sarah Palin means by "Going Rogue":

"To Palin, going rogue is going against your own party, throwing out corrupt Republican politicians and sending them to trial by jury. To not go rogue is to acquiesce to the good ole boy network and to the traditional back scratching of beltway politics."

That’s why, of course, the Republican establishment is doing everything it can to block her ascent to the GOP nomination in 2012 – pumping up Pawlenty and even Huckabee, sending out a steady stream of snarky hit pieces to an eager media.

After all, Palin "made her bones" in Alaska politics by going after RINOs.  She was first elected mayor of Wasilla in 1996 by defeating a three-term Republican incumbent, John Stein, whom she denounced for "wasteful spending and high taxes."

No state in the US was more dominated by a corrupt Republican establishment than Alaska.  Palin went straight after state party chair Randy Ruedrich and got him fired as the powerful commissioner of the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.  She did the same thing to state Attorney General Gregg Renkes.

Then she proceeded to defeat Republican incumbent governor Frank Murkowski in the 2006 primary – and wiped out (48%-40%) former Dem governor Tony Knowles in the general.  At age 42.

The explosive public anger today across America is not directed at the Democrat Party so much as it is directed at the "Court Party" of establishment elites of both Dems and Pubs – as explained by Jack Kelly in Palin Country.  Palin is going rogue against this Court Party, and the RINOs in it know she has them in her gunsights.

***
Yet that is only one thing she will be going rogue on.  Another is the "new normal."

The standard business cycle is for an economy to run stable with normal economic growth until a boom takes off, which ultimately results in a crash, after which things get back to normal stability again.

This time, we are being told, the economy will revert to a "new normal," in which joblessness will remain persistently high and GDP growth persistently low compared to "old normals."  Such is being predicted by heavyweights in the business world who also happen to be big donors to the Democrat Party.

This is no accident, comrades.  This "new normal" is exactly the economy the Zerocrats want – for all the solutions they will offer to help the jobless will avoid real capitalist job creation like the plague, and instead be programs to make the unemployed more dependent on government than ever.  People who are dependent upon you vote for you.

Expect Palin to point this out – and vividly.

***
OK, can we have some fun now?  On her very first day as a freshman Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor trashed her image as a "wise Latina," and morphed instead to the bemusement of all in attendance, into a yipping Chihuahua.

Oral arguments for a case are limited to a maximum of 60 minutes.  She proceeded to hog the entire hour for one case – asking almost three dozen questions in a fit of acute oral diarrhea. 

Justice Motormouth didn’t let her fellow Justices get their questions in edgewise, to their distinct annoyance.  Scalia has now – privately – dubbed her "La Chihuahua," while Roberts has quietly solicited suggestions from his colleagues as to how best to politely shut her up.

The consensus among Court-watchers is, the result of her blabbing and obnoxiousness will be zero effect on Court decisions at best – and could even provoke a Justice wavering on a case to vote the opposite of what she demands.

***
For more fun, we ride the HFR magic carpet to Egypt – where Moslem leaders are in an Islamic tizzy over the latest product from China.

It’s the Artificial Virginity Hymen, on sale now at your local bazaar for $29.50.  The product description is designed to make Moslem male chauvinist pigs go berserk:

"No more worry about losing your virginity. With this product, you can have your first night back anytime. Insert this artificial hymen into your vagina carefully. It will expand a little and make you feel tight. When your lover penetrate, it will ooze out a liquid that look like blood not too much but just the right amount. Add in a few moans and groans, you will pass through undetectable. Its easy to use, clinically proven non-toxic to human and has no side effects, no pain to use and no allergic reaction."

Now that is cool. That’s how capitalism achieves women’s liberation. It won’t be a big seller here in the US – what loser wants to marry a virgin?  But it sure will be in MoslemLand – so naturally its male-controlled governments, such as Egypt’s, are making it illegal.  Seems they’ve never heard of online sales delivered in plain brown paper, or the black market.

The next step in this social evolution is for Moslem women to start demanding men must be virgins or they won’t marry them – and that includes dalliances with little boys, the favorite pastime of Moslem men.  Maybe that could put an end to Islamic Virginity Neurosis.

***
Who said this?

"One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project.

Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We have an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.

As always, the issue with socialized medicine is freedom.  The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government.

But then doctors aren’t equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can’t live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it’s only a short step to dictating where he will go. . . .

All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay.

And pretty soon your son won’t decide, when he’s in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do."

That was Ronald Reagan.  In 1961 – almost fifty years ago.  A recording was made of his 11-minute speech, and it’s worth listening to entire – if only to hear his voice, and to remind us that Providence blessed America with this extraordinary man just when we needed him.  The sound of his voice made me cry in gratitude.

Will Providence bless us once again with another extraordinary American?  Only if America is wise enough to choose him – or her.