Blogito, Ergo Sum - 11 December 2008

The problem is that the Times is wrong, there hasn't been anywhere near enough political peril attached to the crooked business. Biden is arranging, even as we speak, for his son to inherit his senate seat...and he's probably irritated as hell that this had to come out into the open right now. Blago was right, a seat in the Senate is worth millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars over a lifetime and there are only 100 of them at a time. But once a senator, even for only one term, and you are comfortably fixed for life, as are your family and close friends.

And remember this: politicians are so completely and utterly accustomed to asking for and getting money from supporters that they've lost whatever vestiges of a normal moral code that they might have originally possessed. People asked what went wrong with this guy, but the truth is that he'd gotten to the point where he very likely wasn't able to see this as much more than the normal way of doing business, especially in Chicago. After all, the people of Illinois, just like the people of Louisiana and New Jersey, have laughed and joked about their corruption for so long that it's difficult to see how the big dogs can see all that much problem any more.

And kidding ourselves into thinking that Obama wasn't involved is drinking the Kool-Aid...he's already been caught in conflicting statements and the whole ball has barely begun rolling. Obama may not have been in it for actual dollars in hand, but he certainly was involved in terms of political power. Dispensing largesse is how politicians create their power base. And note what Harry Reid has already come out openly with saying: he doesn't want any special election whereby the people of Illinois might elect a Republican! Harry does not want the people to vote for their senator, he wants to manipulate that decision. And so does Obama. And the same holds true in Biden's case, don't you ever doubt it.

And Caroline Kennedy wants Hillary's seat, which one of the fatuous political pundits thinks is deserved because it completes the fairy-tale Camelot story, believe it or not! What a qualification!

The Nobel Prize has been so devalued in recent decades with the selection of people like Arafat and Algore for the prize for PEACE (!) that I'm not as impressed with one as I used to be, although I suppose in the field of physics it might still be respectable enough. My problem is that Obama seems to have bought the whole global warming scam, and Algore is right in the middle of all of his energy team. Either that or Obama has figured out how to profit from the scam.

House Passes Auto Rescue Plan

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and DAVID E. SANGER

The fate of the measure remained uncertain because of shaky support among Senate Republicans.

Afghanistan, which is almost as large as Texas, has fewer U.S. troops (34,000) than New York City has police (35,800). Asked if NATO, which will celebrate its 60th birthday in 2009, might die from its cumulative futilities in Afghanistan, Gates is acerbic: Afghanistan is the "top operational priority" of NATO, "which must never forget that it is a military alliance, not a talk shop." He says NATO nations other than America have approximately 2.5 million people under arms but protracted wheedling is required to get even 10,000 more for Afghanistan, and they come encumbered with caveats that cripple their usefulness.

Still, he thinks there will have to be American boots on Afghanistan's soil for many years because it would be "very difficult" to use "offshore" operations -- Special Forces, cruise missiles and other airstrikes -- to prevent the country from again becoming an incubator of terrorist capabilities. Noting that the first attack on the World Trade Center was in 1993, he says: "We paid a price quickly for turning our backs on Afghanistan after 1989." For that, he says, he shares the blame.

Asked what worries him most, he unhesitatingly answers with one word: "Pakistan." That nation's western region seethes with threats to the regime, and there are groups that hope terrorist attacks such as those in Mumbai can, like the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914, spark a conflagration.

Lights in the building dimmed when he started up his powerful bank of paper-shredders.

And, by the way, be sure to shred anything with my name on it. I mean, what kind of stupid letter is this, anyhow? Search your heart, indeed. Why not his conscience? Same reason?

Democrats in Illinois politics, and particularly Chicago under "Boss" Daley, a role now inherited by his son, imagine that, have been so corrupt for so many decades that it doesn't pay to trust any of them.

And what a surprise to find the Jesse Jacksons involved, huh? I thought it was one of the world's funniest jokes when Jesse senior became spiritual advisor to Bill Clinton...you couldn't make up a story like that one.

This writer says that Janet Napolitano is just the ticket needed for Homeland Security. One can fervently hope so, because Mexico is now pretty scary!

Mexico has changed dramatically - and, in many ways, horrendously. It may well be that the United States faces, in that once culturally rich country, a drug state ruled by mafias who have been killing and wiping out the police and federal authorities who challenge them, particularly along the U.S. border.

There were recently 43 murders in four days in Tijuana; in Juarez, there were 40 "hits," which includes murders, attacks and beheadings; and murders and kidnappings are up across the country. Monica Campbell of Newsweek recently reported on CNN: "The feeling along the border, and I would say throughout Mexico, is that the government has lost control of major parts of the country. ... [T]he law enforcement authorities are so corrupt. They're in collusion with the criminals themselves."

She added: "We're seeing a range of violent acts that have never been seen before in Mexico."

And George W. Grayson, professor of government at the College of William and Mary and arguably America's pre-eminent specialist on Mexico, writes in a recent paper for CIS that we face, in the disintegration of the Mexican state, the ominous possibility that the drug mafias along the border are moving "from honing in on specific victims to indiscriminate terrorism as occurred in Colombia two decades ago." In one nightclub attack in 2006, for instance, the attackers lobbed five human heads onto the dance floor.

She was the first governor to call for National Guard troops on the border, and she has persistently and repeatedly called for Congress to deal with comprehensive immigration reform, not just enforcement.

In 2006, she went so far as to demand that the federal government pay for deploying those National Guard troops along the border to help the overwhelmed U.S. Border Patrol. (The troops originally sent have since been withdrawn, but she has recently called for their redeployment.)

That's what needs to be done, as a beginning. They're called the National Guard, after all. Right now it sounds like America's southern border towns are at high risk...who would want to live there? I always considered central and northern Arizona to be a very fine place, but I'm not so sure any more.

Here's an interesting and indisputable comment by John Fund in the Wall St Journal:

What remains to be seen is whether this episode will put an end to what Chicago Tribune political columnist John Kass calls the national media's "almost willful" fantasy that Mr. Obama and Chicago's political culture have little to do with each other. Mr. Kass notes that the media devoted a lot more time and energy to investigating the inner workings of Sarah Palin's Wasilla, Alaska, than it has looking at Mr. Obama's Chicago connections.

Look at all the effort they put into Troopergate and whether or not she tried to get books removed from the library! Neither one proved to be the case, but look at all of the time and money put into the investigation, and the incredible number of press people who went to Alaska for the first time. Even Maureen Dowd went and found the place could and rough and not very much fun for her type.

To date, Mr. Obama's approach to Illinois corruption has been to congratulate himself for dodging association with it. "I think I have done a good job in rising politically in this environment without being entangled in some of the traditional problems of Chicago politics," he told the Chicago Tribune last spring. At the time, Mr. Obama was being grilled over news that he bought his house through a land deal involving Tony Rezko, a political fixer who was later convicted on 16 corruption counts. Rezko is mentioned dozens of times in the 76-page criminal complaint against Mr. Blagojevich.

Just another guy Obama used to see around the neighborhood...and why not, since he owned the lot next door?

In 2002, Mr. Obama turned up to help Mr. Blagojevich, a staunch ally of Mr. Jones, win the governor's mansion. Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's incoming White House chief of staff, told The New Yorker earlier this year that six years ago he and Mr. Obama "participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor. We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two [other participants]."

Mr. Blagojevich won, but before long, problems surfaced. In 2004, Zalwaynaka Scott, the governor's inspector general, said his administration's efforts to evade merit-selection laws exposed "not merely an ignorance of the law, but complete and utter contempt for the law." Nonetheless, Mr. Obama endorsed Mr. Blagojevich's re-election in 2006.

On Nov. 23, ABC's Jake Tapper reports, senior adviser David Axelrod, in an interview on Chicago's WFLD-TV, said of the president-elect:

"I know he's talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them."

Last night Alexrod released the following statement:

"I was mistaken when I told an interviewer last month that the President-elect has spoken directly to Governor Blagojevich about the Senate vacancy. They did not then or at any time discuss the subject."

One of these statements is false, but which one? The intuitive, if cynical, answer is yesterday's. It is imperative now for Obama to remain unsullied by the scandal, whereas 2½ weeks ago there was no reason for Axelrod not to tell the truth.

I liked the "not then or at any time" part. Never, never, no never, as the Lord High Admiral sang in HMS Pinafore before adding...well, hardly ever.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. writes a note to President Bush in which he mentions something which has always puzzled me:

Last summer the Associated Press reported that a "secret U.S. operation" had transferred 550 metric tons of "yellowcake," "the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program," to Montreal for peaceful purposes. So contrary to what your opponents tell you, the strutting tyrant did have the makings for nuclear weapons. Withal, he had biological and chemical weapons available in a few weeks notice. That is a key finding of the Iraq Survey Group.

I don't understand why this was done with such secrecy, in the first place, and also why the AP reported it but the rest of the American MSM essentially ignored it.

The esteemed Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preaching this past Sunday:

Today. Is December 7. The day that this government killed. Over 80000. Japanese civilians. At Hiroshima in 1941. Two days before giving an additional. 64000. Japanese civilians. At Nagasaki by dropping nuclear bombs on innocent. People.

How many of his audience do you think believed what he said as being the actual truth, since they knew no better?