Entitlement Syndrome

Oh, how the mighty are falling

These last few weeks in the presidency of Barack Obama – filled with missteps on health care (where nobody in the Congress fears him, and his demands to get something done go unheeded by even those in his own party) and his seeming false bravado when it comes to a nuclear-armed Iran — has begun to prove out the notion that our current president is most likely temperamentally unsuited to handle the rigors of the presidency.

Proof of such a thesis lies all around us.  Jay Cost, writing in today’s Real Clear Politics, says that he thinks Obama is having a problem with small ‘r’ republicanism.  In other words, the President doesn’t seem to get that the republic which he helps to govern derives its powers from the governed; which means he shouldn’t believe himself the be-all, end-all royal personage his demeanor seems to suggest he really thinks he is.

One tends to see the sort of worshipful adoration of all things Obama that much of academia (schoolchildren singing songs of praise to Obama) and the media seems comfortable with in many a nation where the leader rules first through a cult of personality and then later — when the mask slips away or the emperor begins to understand he really has no clothes — through force of arms.  North Korea comes immediately to mind, with its murals of Kim Jong-il everywhere one looks.

And like North Korea — whose problems seem to be much more than the in-over-his-head “Dear Leader” could ever hope to handle — the issues confronting the United States on both the domestic and international fronts appear to have flummoxed Mr. Obama to a degree that can’t help but to remind one of the flailing about that the 39th president, Jimmy Carter, did without end, especially in the last couple years of his thankfully short tenure.

Americans as a whole don’t usually take to the worship of elected leaders (they’re not our rulers but our representatives, after all) and they quickly start losing patience with a president who can’t even deign to pretend to be just like “one of us,” however flawed “one of us” might tend to be from time to time.  It’s just as certain that the 24/7 “All Barack, All the Time” nature of his presidency is starting to grate badly on more than a few of the people he’s going to need if he hopes to stave off electoral disaster in 2010 and 2012.

Polls indicate independents are deserting Mr. Obama in droves, and his uncertain and sometimes-confusing handling of the matter of additional troops for Afghanistan and what to do about an Iranian leadership that seems hell bent on acquiring nuclear weapons — which they’ll certainly use at some point in the future — point out the truth that Obama’s affected brainy exterior is just hiding a man who’s great at running for office but hasn’t a clue when it comes to what to do with the office once he attains it.

His act plays well in Tehran, at least

Yet, onward he soldiers, content that schoolchildren everywhere are being forced to sing like little Pioneers in some Cuban or Soviet-style educational center while Rome burns all around him.  And much like his Democratic forbears before him (especially Carter) going back to Lyndon Johnson — who horribly botched the prosecution of the military effort in Vietnam — Obama is proving serially incapable of knowing when and how to use the nation’s might in all the right ways.

Instead, we’re forced to watch a U.S. president stand before the United Nations and tell that august body — which is composed more of tinpot dictators and America-hating regimes the world over than of solid friends and stable democracies — that we’re done as a force on the world stage and that he, as de facto leader of the free world, would be uncomfortable in continuing to handle the reins of world leadership.  The Grand Apology Tour continues unabated, it seems.

It also looks like he’s doubled down on that hand, too, with his ineffectual handling of the Iranian nuclear weapons development program which even the most obtuse leftist has to admit is – indeed — aimed at making a bomb and not for some sort of energy delivery system.  It’s a sad day when the French — famous the world over as milquetoasts — seem to be sterner on the issue than is our own President.

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Well, at least dictators love him

I love the title to this little piece, but I can’t claim the distinction of coming up with the honorific “President Pantywaist” to describe Barack Obama.  That belongs to the inimitable Gerald Warner of the UK Telegraph.  He’s yet another reason to thank our stars that our essential DNA, as Americans in character, regardless of where we all actually came from, originates in the old-time British fighting spirit evidenced by Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill.  He’s also really been right on the mark about our President and his essential spinelessness, it appears to me.

As to that lack of actual backbone on the part of the former community organizer, does anybody care to bet there’s going to be a lot of talk about what to do with Iran and its seeming unalterable drive to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities but that there’s not going to be a lot actually done about it, at least from Barack Obama?  I’ve seen this game before from more than a few U.S. Presidents, sadly. 

The Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter was particularly spineless but several others also found Iran to be too tough a nut to crack and ended up just kicking the can down the road to the point where the can is now packed full of plutonium and uranium and will most likely end up as a dirty bomb in some American or western European metropolis or, worse yet, as an actual nuclear device that’s detonated in Tel Aviv or New York City.

Anyway, Paul Mirengoff over at Powerline has a great piece about Obama, Israel, Iran and the fact something actually will — probably, maybe — be done about the Islamic Republic…but it won’t be by Obama or the United States.  Once again, the Israelis are on their own, it seems.  Here’s an excerpt:

-  Thanks to President Obama, the odds that effective action will be taken against Iran’s nuclear weapons program have increased in recent months, and perhaps significantly. Not action by the U.S. of course; Obama intends to fiddle and diddle indefinitely. But Obama’s conduct has made it more likely that Israel will attack Iran.

Read the rest here.

Lest anybody think I’m all doom-and-gloom about Iran (I am, actually, given that I can remember having to deal with Iran — in my own small way as a military servicemember — off and on from 1979 until I finally punched out a few years ago), here are a few stories that really are doom and gloom:

“Speakly timidly and don’t carry a stick” – Stephen F. Hayes (Weekly Standard)

“Obama’s totally overwhelmed” – Ralph Peters (New York Post)

“How to lose friends…” – David Harsanyi (RCP)

One of my favorite science fiction writers of all time is David Brin.  Most people know of his work from the dreadful movie adaptation of his book “The Postman,” which starred Kevin Costner but had almost nothing to do with the actual message Brin was trying to send in the novel of the same name.  But Brin is far more appreciated among sci-fi fans for his Uplift universe books and for which he’s rightly been celebrated by critics.

In one of the early books in the series entitled Startide Rising, a main protagonist makes the observation — to a highly educated member of the academic community, naturally — that … “You don’t negotiate with barbarians … when you give them everything they want they’ll take it, thank you politely and then boil you in oil anyway.”  I don’t have the book right in front of me, but that’s pretty spot on and it’s the sentiment that counts anyway, I’d say.

This guy has a clue about dealing with Islamic fanatics?

This is the situation in which the President finds himself.  For sure, Obama’s a big believer in the power of speechifying and the beauty that lies within his oration as a tool to sway even the most intransigent people and nations to his point of view. 

But it just doesn’t work in many instances, and Iran is a prime example of how a person can end up literally talking himself to death when dealing with folks who desire nothing more than to return civilization to medieval mores and ideals and will do anything to make that vision become reality.

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“Violent G20 protests in Pittsburgh” – TimesOnline

“Dislike Obama?  You must be racist” -  Mark Steyn (Macleans)

“The reemerging Republican majority?” – Henry Olsen (RCP)

“Netanyahu to UN:  “Have you no shame?“” – Scott Johnson (Powerline)

“Support LT Daniel Cnossen” - Michelle Malkin

** Navy Lieutenant and SEAL Team operator Daniel Cnossen was gravely wounded earlier this month, and lost both his legs when a land mine went off beneath him.  He is currently recuperating from his injuries at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, MD.

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She had something to say in Hong Kong

More later.  For now, here’s a link to Palin’s speech today to the CLSA-Asia Pacific Markets forum held in Hong Kong.  The piece, by Bloomberg’s Daniel Ten Kate, can’t help but try to get in a few subtle digs but I suppose that’s par for the course when it comes to anything having to do with the former Alaska governor.

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I suppose he never heard of Yosi Sergant either?

Back in the days of Joseph Stalin, that madman and his cabal made good use of the talents of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who had a natural ability to take the Soviet inclination to turn art and bend it to the will of the country’s communist rulers and produce cinematic works that glorified Soviet accomplishment.  His silent films Battleship Potemkin and October ( a film commissioned by the Soviets to honor the tenth anniversary of the revolution) rank among the best examples of  montage (especially the Soviet kind) in film to this day.

After a period where old Sergei had fallen somewhat out of favor with the regime — but hadn’t gotten the chop like so many others who Stalin and his wolfpack of advisers found suspicious — he was brought back, and delivered two classic historical epics; Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible.  In the first, Eisenstein produced a masterpiece of propaganda that told the story of the defeat of the Teutonic Knights by the brave Russian people of the 13th century.

Ivan the Terrible, which was produced in two parts (the first being filmed from 1942 to 1944, with the second not seeing the light of day until 1958, five years after the death of Stalin) was again epic in scope and depicted the first Tsar (Czar) of all Russia as a national hero, though this 16th century tyrant was more comfortable wallowing in extreme horror and vast cruelty, at least by modern-day standards.  It aint’ easy bein’ a gangstah, either today or way back then, it seems.

Now, I’m not saying that Barack Obama is in any way similar to Joseph Stalin or Ivan the Terrible (especially Ivan, who’d have a peasant’s head hacked off just for blinking the wrong way), but I’m sure one can see the parallels between Stalin and Obama when it comes to trying to “control the message,” so to speak.  And it certainly seems that that desire is being read loud and clear by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which has been caught out in a number of Obama-supporting lies the last several weeks.

Andrew Breitbart and his Big Hollywood pitbull of a bean-spiller about the NEA, Patrick Courrielche, seem to have caught the NEA with its pants fully down and all the fishing tackle showing in showing that high muckety-mucks at the nation’s premier federal organization dedicated to funding the “arts” (Really?  Giving money to artists who depict a small crucifix of Jesus Christ submerged in a bucket of urine is funding of the arts?) have joined the official Obama Love Train. 

Showing an email trail between the White House that runs through the NEA and then out to what the sender of the email (one Yosi Sergant, who was coordinating with White House staffer Buffy Wicks…hey, where do artists and leftists come up with their names, by the way?) called all the “artists, producers…and just plain, cool people!” to the table to discuss how best to aid the President in selling his message to the masses. 

I suppose he's never heard of the NEA, either

Well knock me over with a feather at the thought that this administration would be actively engaged in trying to control not only the medium but also the message when it comes to ginning up popular support for Obama and all of his policies.  Not that it seems to be doing much good — if polls are any indication – but should anybody be surprised at this latest brazen move (brazen until Sergant, the NEA and Wicks were caught at it) by the executive branch to politicize “just about everything,” as George Will characterized it in his excellent recent piece on the matter?

Michelle Malkin, doing the work that other actual journalists (as opposed to us whiners and complainers in the blogosphere, I’ve been told) refuse to do when it comes to investigating anything having to do with the President, has a great follow-up piece on the NEA and its funding of “art.” 

Leaving aside whether the government should even be remotely associated with giving taxpayer dollars to “artists” (whatever that term has been corrupted to mean, these days) to produce art, it ought to be at least a bit unsettling to reasonable people that we’re seeing an increasing and uncomfortably close relationship developing between a class of citizens who are normally thought of as really speaking “truth to power” on occasion and an executive branch that looks for all the world like a gang of Stalin-wannabes when it comes to trying to politicize even artistry.

Eisenstein did much the same for Stalin.  What a pity that the folks over at the NEA can’t even see the dangers involved in letting the organs of the state begin to do the same to their own organization.  As for me; give me a painting of several dogs sitting around a poker table and smoking cigars any day of the week over what passes for “art” nowadays.

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Wasn't patriotism once celebrated?

Okay, I admit that Time magazine polemicist Joe Klein (a polemicist is a writer who’s paid more for his opinion than for stating anything backed up by fact, just like Maureen Dowd over at the New York Times, for example, and yours truly)  — who’s lately decided to prove his superiority as an observer of all things political by taking after Sarah Palin — is at times equally as despised by those on the Left as he is by us over here on the Right side of things.

At least as it applies to his attacks on Palin, it seems there’s good reason for conservatives and others holding similar views to really dislike Klein, who appears to be bordering on irrational mindlessness in his determination to make sure the former Alaska governor remains scorned by his fellows in the New York-DC mainstream media elite.

Let’s take a look at the two people in this little dance for a minute.  Klein attended the Hackley School, a private college prep institution located in the chi-chi districts of Tarrytown, New York that was founded in 1899 and is a member of the elite Ivy Preparatory School League.

From there, the young and future writer of Primary Colors (though he tried to have it both ways, penning the story as “Anonymous”) – which was a thinly disguised look-see at Bill Clinton and his cabal during the 1992 presidential primaries — made the arduous trek all the way over to the University of Pennsylvania (usually called “Penn”), a fine Ivy League institution filled to the brim with history, tradition and all that other rah-rah, siss-boom-bah stuff, where he graduated in 1968 with a degree in American Civilization (huh?).

Hardly resembles life in Alaska, does it?

Now, don’t get me wrong:  I think all of that high-minded attainment of education on the part of Klein is great (I have to say that, because my wife is also a graduate — from the school of dental medicine – of Penn, and she’d kill me if I didn’t put in a good word for the place), but is it the be-all end-all of either education or of learning everything you need to know about life and the human condition?  Most fair-minded folks would say of course not.

By now, most are familiar with the compelling life story of Sarah Palin (nee Heath) – born in Idaho to a science teacher/track coach and his school secretary wife who, like other pioneer families throughout America’s history, decided to pick up stakes and head north and west, in this case to Alaska. 

The state and its bold, wild beauty and willingness to let folks go far as they and their talents could take them (or fail as miserably as they’d like, whenever the mood struck them) seemed to suit the Heaths very well.  Certainly, the young Sarah took to the place like an Alaska salmon takes to an upstream swim.

In high school — no Ivy prep institution, certainly, but my guess is the vast majority of Americans attend schools much like the one in Wasilla, Alaska — she captained the ladies basketball team, leading it to the state championship as a point guard.  She also ran cross country (which instilled in her a love of running that she carries to this day) and was the leader of the school’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes. 

Before heading off to college — she attended five of them in the six years she took to attain a bachelor’s degree in communications — she competed as a beauty queen, winning the town’s pageant and then finishing in the top-3 at the state contest later that year.

Finally landing at the University of Idaho, she bore down and put in the effort it took to grab that degree (with an emphasis on journalism) and headed back to her beloved state, where she worked as a sports reporter for a local newspaper and as a sportscaster for two different Anchorage television stations. 

Honestly, most liberal thinkers would call a fellow liberal’s Palin-like journey to be one of “self-discovery and personal reflection.”  They’d refer to the future Alaska governor’s early life in the same way, if they were being intellectually honest, but most — like Klein — don’t seem to be willing to do so when it comes to somebody as quintessentially American in just about every aspect, as is Sarah Palin.

Palin eloped in 1988 — saying that she did so to spare her parents the expense of a large wedding — to marry the man to whom she’s still joined; childhood sweetheart Todd.  Over the course of their twenty-plus year marriage, they’ve continued to have children and raise them the best they could, all while working hard to build a home and run a business in addition to Sarah gaining a life as a very successful statewide politician while Todd moved up the ladder to a position as a supervisor for an oil company up on Alaska’s North Slope. 

Additionally, Palin’s oldest son has just returned the other day from a year-long tour in Iraq as a soldier with the U.S. Army, and she and her husband are raising young Trig, who was born with Down Syndrome.  Daughters Bristol, Willow and Piper all pitch in and help out, with Bristol now raising her own child.  By all accounts, Todd and Sarah are parents par excellence.

Love for country, love for son

In short, much of Palin’s life story — when set free of the vicious leftwing characterization of her as being some sort of hillbilly trailer trash — is the stuff of Old Hollywood scripts and Frank Capra-esque film treatments.  At the least, it certainly would serve as an outstanding example of how Americans and their families – big, boisterous and rumble-tumble as most are — are normally celebrated.

Not to criticize Joe Klein too harshly (though his writings at time invite such criticisms), but I’m fairly certain most mainstream Americans love the story of a middle class American girl who’s worked hard her whole life, gotten her education when and where she could, stayed married to the same person for over two decades, is still in the process of raising three of her five children and  has been an unabashed patriot and lover of our country for pretty much her whole life.

Compare that to a quite frankly pedestrian story about yet another Northeast born-and-bred liberal who attended a tony prep academy and then a full-on Ivy League school before heading off to write, dammit, write about the “American Condition.” 

To me, that story just smacks of more ironic self-detachment and a smirkiness towards the very country which gave said Northeast liberal much, much more than he’d have ever been able to attain were he born anywhere else on the planet.  After all, there certainly doesn’t seem to have been much pioneer spirit in those Northeastern genes, it appears to me. 

 Today’s liberals and writers like Klein seem more to be the folks who — once their ancestors had carved out a place in the wilderness — decided to stay safe and cozy and warm while people like Sarah Palin’s parents and others before them struck out for the great unknown.   Palin, who’s a pioneer woman down to the very core of her being, should be celebrated for her life story, and will be, one day.  Of that, there should be no doubt.

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Today’s reports come on the heels of yesterday’s announcement by President Obama that the U.S. was stopping work on developing a land-based missile defense shield aimed at preventing its Eastern European allies (especially Poland and Czechoslovakia) from suffering a possible ballistic missile attack by Iran in the future.

All indications on the part of the United States — which had been badgered by the Russian government and de facto strongman and former president Vladimir Putin to pull the plug on Eastern European missile defense ever since the Bush administration announced the shield program — say that there was no quid pro quo expected from the Russians for the U.S. deciding to stop shield deployment.

I guess we’ll know the truth of that if Russia continues with the sale of one of its anti-aircraft defense systems to the Islamic Republic, as it had decided to do earlier in the year.  If the system is scotched, then we’ll know there was, indeed, a behind-the-scenes deal. 

But, has Obama and his team been taken to the cleaners on this?  After all, even if he were to succeed in getting the anti-aircraft defense system sale cancelled, what does that mean the U.S. will also have to give up on when it comes to Iran and its nuclear program?  Stronger and even more intrusive sanctions that might deter that country from developing a weapon which it will most certainly place on a ballistic missile that’s aimed at the heart of Israel or other U.S. allies?

It hardly seems like a fair fight

The current intelligence picture, which Mr. Obama seems to feel indicates that Iran is more focused on short and intermediate-range missile capabilities than on longer-range birds — which the missile shield was intended to handle — is extremely muddled and no great reason seems to exist for the U.S. to pull out of missile defense at the present time, protestations on the part of Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the contrary.

It seems that in one stroke, the administration has pulled the rug out from two allies directly and shown other U.S. friends that it continues to be feckless and more interested in appeasing enemies than in helping to defend friends. 

This is hardly a good position for the President to put himself in, especially after news has broken that the always-timorous IAEA seems to be running a bit of interference for Iran when it comes to that country and all the hard work its been doing to develop a nuclear weapon.

Again, it seems like it’s better to be an enemy of the U.S. (in the case of Iran) or at least a nation which lines up against the America on foreign diplomatic or global security issues (as in the case of Russia) than it is to be a friend.  The Poles and the Czechs are finding this out the hard way, too.

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An Elmer Gantry for the modern age

I’m hearing that Barack Obama plans on making the rounds of most of the Sunday morning news shows this upcoming weekend, and I’m thinking; What?  We don’t already know you’re in favor of health care reform?  Of cap and trade?  Of just about anything a “right” thinking leftist loves and adores?

Has there been a day — or even an hour in any day since January 20th of this year — that the President hasn’t been on the airwaves, imploring us to believe the sky was about to fall down upon our heads for real this time?

Surely, as an incipient and ever-growing (and mainstream media-supported) cult of personality, Mr. Obama is doing a land office business in the sale of “yes we cans” and “we have a moral obligation tos…” these days.  Really, he actually seems to be playing the main character from the 1927 Sinclair Lewis novel Elmer Gantry. 

In all of this, the President has been both con man and evangelist in the new-style Gantry morality play which he kicked off with his speech to a moonstruck 2004 Democratic convention.

He’s still riding the wave to this day, aided and abetted by a Jim Lefferts-like media, at once dying to expose Obama for the huckster he really is but also captivated by his charm and cunning. 

It didn’t seem to go too well for crusading big city reporter Lefferts in the novel — at least morally — as he eventually helped Gantry to fight off an indignant crowd that had sought to punish the con man/evangelist for his assorted lies. 

Eventually, Gantry achieved a kind of redemption, though I don’t see this being possible in the case of either the President or of the media which has so slavishly attended to his every need since he kicked off his presidential campaign back in 2007.

Sadly, both parties in this relationship seem enchanted with themselves, and are drinking deeply from the well of mutal admiration that both Mr. Obama and the mainstream media so willingly dive into — in search of shiny pennies — with depressing regularity.  

The fact that reporters on the Obama beat haven’t yet run from the White House press briefing room in lunatic fury at the antics of the President and his supporters in seeking to keep him in front of us 24/7/365 is testament to the enduring, slobbering love affair (props to you, Mr. Bernard Goldberg) with this president that much of the press is afraid might someday end. 

Yes, but the press loves him

Somewhere, Sinclair Lewis and others like H. L. Mencken (especially Mencken, who was no friend of the Right but was equally contemptuous of many of the antics of the Roosevelt-era Left) are sitting together and looking at the goings on between this President and the media and wondering how the fourth estate ever let itself be so hoodwinked.

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Can they even see how compromised they've become?

Part of the fallout from the whole “ACORN-getting-busted-teaching-folks-how-to-be-better-pimps-and-prostitutes” thing is a long-overdue examination of the role of the mainstream media (I prefer the term “LameStream” Media) in basically covering up for the sins of the far Left these days.

The dissembling and weak excuses issuing forth from more than a few of the so-called “giants” in the media (the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC’s Charlie Gibson…who admitted to not even knowing, or caring, about the ACORN dustup etc.) over why they failed to even demonstrate a smidgeon of curiosity about what Barack Obama’s favorite community organization was up to these days is highly amusing and says much about how far many news organizations have strayed from journalistic principles, I’d say.

Now, many papers are shedding readers and losing market share for many reasons — including failing to adapt to the digital millennium in which we all live — but one issue that continually crops up is that many people simply don’t believe that traditional media outlets (especially the old guard LameStream entities like the Times and the Post, along with the three major networks and MSNBC) are capable of being impartial in most instances.

The shameless rah-rah cheerleading and boosterism for the Obama campaign in the run-up to last year’s presidential election was just prelude to the full-on vicious attack led by much of the media against the growing Tea Party movement.  Stories on “tea baggers” (a derogatory term many leftists seem to be intimately familiar with, for some reason) dominate instead of a thoughtful examination of just why many folks — for the first time in their lives — are engaging in political activism.

The employment of many a cheap, trite and inaccurate trope — especially the racial one, which is being trotted out by the Times’ Maureen Dowd, among others — is the order of the day for much of the mainstream press, which seems clearly to have taken sides in the protests against ObamaCare and the general direction in which the President is seeking to take the country.

I suppose it’s easier to just scream that people are racist — in seeking to shut off debate — than it is to attempt to win them over through the strength of a clear and plain-spoken vision that attempts to be inclusive and common sense and attractive to a broad base.  Instead, we’re given a “We won” from the administration and a “That’s right, they won” from an Obama-worshipping media machine.

I long for the days when a news organization tried to play it straight down the middle and endeavored to just give us the “news” without also feeding us a load of tripe about why the media outlet itself feels the news was either good or bad.  I tend to believe we can decide such things for ourselves as long as we get hard fact and not a lot of analysis from supposedly impartial “journalists.”

Children of the Corn, indeed

And therein lays the heart of the problem.  It seems that too many journalists today are more worried about providing their own ideological slant to a hard news story in order to influence what their readers or viewers will take away from the news itself. 

If they’re going to do that, perhaps they shouldn’t label themselves journalists.  There’s plenty of room, after all, out here in the commentariat and I’m sure we could find a spot on the bench for folks like Contessa Brewer or David Schuster or Nora O’Donnell, who was once nothing more than what industry observers called an “info-babe.”

She seems to have moved up to the big leagues as far as leftist orthodoxy goes, though that league (or fever swamp, as the case may be) certainly seems to be full of top-notch ideologues, these days.

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Funny...he doesn't look like a gangster

Yesterday, the United States Senate — perhaps finally starting to see the train coming down the tracks and bearing down upon it in the form of vicious public scorn of Congress and anybody, from any party, who inhabits (or infests) the place — voted 83-7 to voted to approve an amendment that would preclude ACORN from receiving DOT and HUD federal funding in the future.

My initial take is that this is a very good thing.  ACORN has been receiving federal dollars — under both Democratic and Republican administrations – going back to the early 1990s (something like 53 million, in total) to, in effect, undermine the very government from whose teat it so greedily sucks.  Truly, this is a case where a recent immigrant to our shores might say in his best East Indian accent “Only in Ah-mare-ee-kah!”

Leaving aside the brazen audacity of an organization which has had a hand-in-hand relationship with the Democratic Party for at least this last decade, I find myself bemused on a number of fronts.

For one, ACORN  has had what can only be described as a scandalous week, with many more of them soon to appear, we’re being told.  This alone should have been enough to get through to even the least intelligent among the members of “the greatest deliberative body in the world.” 

But no, it didn’t.  There were actually 7 Senators (really, 6 Dems and one “Independent”) who are so beholden to the criminal, uh…I mean  community organization that they just couldn’t find it within themselves to vote with their peers on this matter.

Is he the leader of the pack?

The most charitable characterization of ACORN’s guilt in more than a few instances is that there looks to be  a mountain of evidence of unlawful and illegal activity which is being carried on by Barack Obama’s favorite community organization.  And that’s being charitable, remember.

That didn’t seem to phase the “Big Seven,” though, many of whom said (if they were willing to go on the record at all) that it was unfair to the wider mission of the group, and which the junior Senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand, said would hurt more people than the action against ACORN would help.

I don’t know about that sort of utilitarian — and extremely foolish — argument, and I especially don’t why somebody who once professed to be a Blue Dog Democrat in the House of Representatives would align herself with what are basically criminal elements.  But, she’s from the Empire State and she has to appease the New York City base of voters she so desperately needs in the 2010 election, as morally reprehensible as that move is.

The rest of the gang of pathetickers consists of what we might call “the usual suspects:”

-  Roland Burris and Dick Durbin, of Illinois

-  Pat Leahy and the socialist Bernie Sanders, of Vermont

-  Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island

-  And a mild shocker in Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey. 

Again, it looks like Casey — who appears to fallen far away from the tree that was his father (a pro-lifer, no less) — saw that he’d better throw in with the devil standing in front of him rather than go against that devil’s big voting bloc existing in the big cities lying in the eastern part of the state.

Burris and Durbin — one an amiable dunce who owes his presence in the senate to disgraced former governor Rod Blagojevich and the other a man more comfortable referring to American troops as Nazis or worst — are joined at the hip to Barack Obama and wouldn’t go against him under any circumstance, so they’ll eventually reap what they’ve helped to sow, I’d say.

Pat Leahy jumped the shark long ago and is only a millimeter from descending into full-on moonbattery, lately.  He’d be in good company, though, as his partner there would be his fellow Vermonter, the always entertaining and manic Bernie Sanders, who probably only calls himself a socialist because even the folks in Vermont — at present — couldn’t stomach having a real communist as one of their elected representatives.

Sanders is his man in the Senate

Sheldon Whitehouse, who hails from Rhode Island, has support for organizations like ACORN deeply embedded within his DNA.  I was once stationed in that fine New England state, where I spent some time at the large Navy base at Newport, and I don’t remember the politicians there back then being quite so shabbily radical.  Heck, the place even has a Republican governor these days.  What’s going on?

What are we to make of a group of men (and one woman) who don’t have the moral compass necessary to navigate through such shoals in order to get their constituencies to safe harbor? 

What does it say about the voters who pass judgment on these folks (with the exception of Burris, who engineered a governor’s appointment)?  History will not judge either group kindly, I’d say.

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