Barrel Strength

During the campaign, no-drama-obama approach won plaudits from across the political spectrum.  Today Obama veered off that path and compared AIG to a suicide bomber.

“The same is true with AIG,” he said. “It was the right thing to do to step in. Here’s the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.”

This sudden change in character is surprising and has left several people puzzled.  Fortunately we now have a view of machinations in the White House, thanks to a blog started by somebody on the inside, namely TOTUS.   TOTUS provides the following insight when questioned.

Did he convey the level of anger you hoped for regarding what you told him to say about AIG?
This was my bad. It’s tough to insert instructions, like [FROWN] or [SMILE], because in the heat of the moment, Big Guy might actually read it aloud, like “I am sorry [frown] that Senator Dodd and my Democratic colleagues on the Hill were singularly responsible for the AIG bonus protections.” That would be embarrassing and possibly indicate to unsuspecting viewers that The Man was reading off a teleprompter. And we don’t want that. And even if He did screw up, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that there is an electronic-shock mechanism on the podium used when he makes those kinds of mistakes … so far as you know.

TOTUS’ blog is a must read!

1. There is no limit to human hypocrisy, including my own.

2. There is a fixed amount of intolerance; its targets are periodically dispersed, concentrated or re-fashioned.

3. All conscious beings know everything anyway.

4. The principal determinant of outcomes, in any situation of uncertainty, is the model people have of the world.

I thought of these so long ago they are still encoded in Word Perfect, but I thought they should be shared with the world.

I can imagine a language existing which has one word for the concept expressed in law #2 by “dispersed, concentrated or re-fashioned”, such as “squatched”, or “remelded”. It would be the sign of a tyranny that all private demons and enemeies are concentrated into one target: the infidels, the Jews, the kulaks, the capitalists, the Tutsis, and so forth. It is the sign of a pluralist democracy that the targets of intolerance are dispersed, and mutiform. Call this Corollary #1 of Dalwhinnie’s Second Law.

More to follow.

Remember the Michael Crichton book whose eponymous subject was subject to increasingly violent and more frequent seizures?  How is this different from living under the Obama dispensation?  The shocks to my system are arriving more often, and they send me into worse paroxyms. This hour’s -

“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Some of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners could be released into the United States while others could be put on trial in the American court system, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Wednesday.”

In an earlier time, barriers of skepticism would automatically go up against things like this. Not any more. Those shields are down. The photon torpedoes of fantasy made real are causing real damage.

Some political stories develop a myth of their own.  The NYT story in 1988, that President Bush was “amazed” when he saw grocery price scanners, was a complete fabrication, yet it took hold in the psyche of the electorate.  Unfortunately for Andrew Rosenthal, the reporter behind this lie, he did not win a Pulitzer for this.  This is indeed fortunate, as there won’t be any calls for him to return the Pulitzer as has been suggested for another NYT reporter, Walter Duranty, who did win the coveted prize after reports that denied the famine in Ukraine during Stalin’s reign.

Another similar event related to the “uni-directional impact generator”, aka hammer, swept through the psyche of the electorate in early 1980s.

Two decades later, perhaps the most enduring example of government waste is the $436 Pentagon hammer. The ignominious piece of hardware, though hardly the most egregious purchase of the time, struck a chord with the American public and became an emblem of the Department of Defense’s procurement scandals of the 1980s.

The broad coverage accorded to the AIG bonus issue might lead to this becoming the seminal event of the Obama administration, especially given the ineptness and lack of knowledge displayed by the government.  The Chris Dodd circus, no-i-didn’t-yes-i-did, went on to highlight this.