Random Thoughts

He’s not the boss of me

I hate that it’s been two months since my last blog. How did that happen?!

I could blame my silence on the frenzy of wrapping up my college courses and student teaching classes, and the labor of finishing the credentialing process, and the traveling and excitement of Eldest Son’s college graduation/commissioning followed immediately by entertaining inlaws followed by an ongoing series of ridiculously futile attempts including one particularly heartbreaking interviewed-but-not-hired episode to find a teaching position in a state that is laying off teachers right and left.

You get the picture. I clearly lack dedication to my writing. Or something.

Speaking of pictures, this one is a keeper:

Eldest Son (first man on left) has been commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force. My baby boy, who entered the world 22 years ago a whopping 4 lbs. 6 oz. preemie, is now a man ready and willing to serve his country.

Along with all the discussions we’ve had lately, we’ve talked about his Commander in Chief. Eldest Son reminded me that Obama IS his boss–which ironically makes ME Eldest Son’s boss, as theoretically our elected officials including the President work for us, the voting citizenry (yes, I know, you can stop the cynical laughter, I said “theoretically”).

Eldest Son reminded me of the oath of enlistment that he swore:

I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

It’s worth remembering that our soldiers swear first and foremost, above all else, to defend the U.S. Constitution. This does not change, regardless of the current president’s views on that document. While he has agreed to obey the orders of the President, Eldest Son’s loyalty is not to Obama, it is to the U.S> Constitution. That really is a marvelous fact.

Eldest Son also pointed out that he and his fellow soldiers give up their Constitutionally granted right to free speech in order to defend that right for the rest of our country. Obviously that’s something a certain general forgot. Eldest Son has not though, and regardless of what his opinions might be he refuses to engage in dialogue that might be construed as disrespectful to his CINC.

Good man. I could not be more proud of him.

I am not so constrained in my speech however, and I’m frustrated by the willful ignorance that seems to increasingly characterize this administration.

There’s stupid, and then there’s stupid. During his speech on immigration today, President Obama misquoted a line from Emma Lazarus‘ poem “The New Colossus” that appears on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

I don’t expect Obama to know the poem. I do expect him to have people intelligent enough to look it up and provide the accurate text for him to read off his teleprompter. Obviously they’re neither capable nor concerned about little details like that.

Tunku Varadarajan at The Daily Beast comments  that the entire speech sounded like something penned by an overeager 18 year old:

…one is inclined to conclude that his speech was written by someone who has just graduated from high school and has a young head brimming with social studies. This being President Obama, however, one can conclude that he will have written a fair portion of the speech himself, and, in so concluding, one would be struck forcefully by how banal the speech was. It was, if one can say such a thing, the acme of boilerplate, so utterly conventional was it in its narrative of American immigration.

I’ve taught high school students, and most of the ones I taught were capable of better rhetoric than that speech. They also would quote the Lazarus poem correctly. This administration makes Clinton’s look like Mensa candidates.

What really caught my attention though was this line (see the 16th paragraph) Obama spouted:

…being an American is not a matter of blood or birth.  It’s a matter of faith.  It’s a matter of fidelity to the shared values that we all hold so dear.

Excuse me? Being an American most certainly IS a matter of birth when it comes to citizenship. You aren’t born here, you aren’t an American citizen until you apply for and are given that status. Being an American is spelled out explicitly in the United States Constitution’s 14th Amendment:

1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I would bet real money that neither Obama nor his people are concerned with the 14th Amendment except insofar as they can completely avoid dealing with it on any level.

Days like this I want to wake up and find it’s 2012 already. I’m just thankful that the people actually running the USAF (and all other branches of the military) aren’t Obama cronies, but rather people who will continue to do their jobs long after this administration is only a bad memory.

Recommended reading

In an effort to get my head out of vacation mode where it’s loitered for the past week, and back into functioning synapse mode, I’ve been perusing the blogosphere.

And I’ve found some very worthwhile reading.

Breath of the Beast is perhaps the most thought provoking blog I’ve read in a long time; both the content and the style of Yaacov Ben Moshe are deeply personal yet universal.

…all you have to do is pay attention, believe what you see and hear and have the strength not to deny it. Evil will almost always inform you of its presence and intentions.

And for pure New England clear eyed wit and wisdom, check out New England Republican.

For heartfelt challenge and inspiration, The Doctor is In is a must-read. He had me hooked as soon as I saw him quote from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, complete with a Dore’ illustration. Of the practice of medicine, he says,

It is a high calling, this profession — words which, while true, seem fatuous and hackneyed in an age marked by hard science and even harder cynicism. It is a vocation fraught with paradoxes and contradictions: compassion and cold steel; empathy and enervation; arrogance and humiliation; deep satisfaction and bone-wrenching sadness. Its rewards, while rich, seemingly come at the cost of your very life, as the slow extravasation from countless battle wounds weaken the spirit and shock the soul, sapping your strength, leaving but an empty, fractured vessel, gloriously engraved on the outside but pervious and parched within.

It is no one thing, this weariness, but a score.

His words are all the more powerful given the radical shifts occurring in our health care system.

Check out those blogs; they’re well worth the time. And now, I’m going to spend some time compiling lesson plans, because Monday will come, and I’d better be ready for it.

Tacky is as tacky does…

The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised Rahm Emmanuel used the phrase “f—ing retards” in a White House meeting.

We knew he was a snake when Obama picked him up. He’s probably just echoing what his boss thinks anyway.

His apology is worthless at this point; let the man display better behavior for a year or two and then I’ll believe he’s truly changed his crude speaking ways.

And pigs will fly. Backwards. Through the Oval Office.

Allahpundit over at HotAir points out just how ridiculous Rahm’s apology really is.

The Obama Administration: The epitome of class and dignity. Only really, really not.

And in other news, FLOTUS Michelle publicly humiliates her daughters to authenticate her new pet cause: Childhood obesity.

Nothing like having your mama air your personal health concerns in front of the entire freaking world.

These people redefine classless and tacky on a daily basis.

Comedy gold

My nominee for the best write up on Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize:  Frank J. Fleming at Pajamas Media with “The ‘I’m-Not-Bush’ Prize and its Uselessness.”

It’s like they have a Nobel Prize for Unicorns to hand out, and since there really isn’t anyone who makes much sense for it, they just hand it out to whoever fits their political agenda. And, being part of the international community — which is stupid — the committee’s choices have started to be just mind-numbingly ludicrous until they reached the low point on Friday morning.

Obama was nominated for the Peace Prize twelve days into his presidency — before he even began to aspire to become as useless as he’s been so far — and somehow this Nobel committee came to the conclusion that he did something worthy of an award. Their justification for giving him the prize, in its entirety?

“Hee not Booosh! Scroo u Booosh!”

…An awesome response would be for Obama to bomb Iran’s nuclear facility the day after receiving the prize, but that’s something a man would do. That’s something Reagan would do. Obama’s too much of a sissy for awesomeness like that, and that’s why the international community loves him. So, in my opinion, should Obama have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? Of course he should have; it’s a useless-moron prize. Obama is the most prominent useless idiot out there right now; I can’t name a better candidate.

Even SNL can’t resist mocking the situation.

And as far as cartoon fodder goes, it’s priceless. Check out TMFo at Christmas Ghost.

This entire administration would be pure comedy gold, if only our country’s future wasn’t at stake.

And we remain the losers

I really don’t care who wins the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, Al Gore has one, as did Yassar Arafat. Clearly, they’ll give the thing to just about anyone. Still, it does make me feel rather nauseous to think that a man can be given a Nobel Peace Prize merely for talking about what he wants to do, who took office only two weeks before the Prize nomination deadline. Amazing. But then again, the man in question got to the presidency on nothing more substantive than that by which he gained the Nobel Prize, so in a weird, rather eerie way, it all fits.

It doesn’t make life in these United States one whit better for anyone beside the President either. We don’t need a Nobel Prize winner, we need a person who is actually doing things.

At this moment, many Americans are longing for a President who is more bully, less pulpit. The President who leased his immense inaugural good will to the hungry appropriators writing the stimulus bill, who has not stopped negotiating health-care reform except to say what is nonnegotiable, whose solicitude for the wheelers and dealers who drove the financial system into a ditch leaves the rest of us wondering who has our back, has always shown great promise, said the right things, affirmed every time he opens his mouth that he understands the fears we face and the hopes we hold. But he presides over a capital whose day-to-day functioning has become part travesty, part tragedy; wasteful, blind, vain, petty, where even the best-intentioned reformers measure their progress with teaspoons. There comes a time when a President needs to take a real risk - and putting his prestige on the line to win the Olympics for his hometown does not remotely count.

Ah well, Obama doesn’t need to do anything to get applause. He merely needs to exist.

And then I think about nominee Greg Mortenson, and my heart aches.

Compare this to Greg Mortenson, nominated for the prize by some members of Congress, whom the bookies gave 20-to-1 odds of winning. Son of a missionary, a former Army medic and mountaineer, he has made it his mission to build schools for girls in places where opium dealers and tribal warlords kill people for trying. His Central Asia Institute has built more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan - a mission which has, along the way, inspired millions of people to view the protection and education of girls as a key to peace and prosperity and progress.

Thing is, Greg Mortenson doesn’t need a Nobel Peace Prize. His ego, unlike that of the current US President, does not demand public notice. Winning–or not winning–a clearly meaningless award will not change him at all. He will go on dedicating the days of his life to true service of others, working “in the trenches,” unknown by most of mankind even while making a very real, lasting change in the lives of others.

Mahatma Gandhi never won the Nobel Prize either. I’d say Mortenson is in excellent company.

Locutusprime at Brutally Honest explains the true worth of this dubious prize:

The Nobel Peace prize is nothing that is won. It is simply given. And it is nothing more than the door prize awarded by the collective thinking of anti American Marxist and communist around the world. It has absolutely less than nothing to do with the origins of its original inception or concept. The prize is nothing more than a booby prize awarded by the anti west, anti capitalism, anti democracy cabal of Marxist communist dissidents and their dregs in academia.

Confederate Yankee underscores the absurdity of it all:

Nobel committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland was pressed by the media to explain why Obama deserved the award, and could only offer this defense: “As to whether the prize was given too early in Mr. Obama’s presidency, he said: ‘We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future but for what he has done in the previous year. We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do’.”
Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace Prizefor campaigning for President.

Wordsmith at Flopping Aces posits that Bush really ought to be credited/blamed for Obama’s Nobel.

Neo-neocon reminds us of the inherent bias of the Nobel commitee, and that 1990 Nobel winner Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the fall of the Soviet Union.

American Power considers the ramifications of Obama’s Nobel Prize upon Afghanistan and Iraq.

And The Anchoress thinks that Michelle ought to have shared in the award.

Edited to add…

A look at the nominees who were passed over. If anything underscores the worthlessness of a Nobel Peace Prize, a comparison of relative accomplishments ought to do it.

Copenhagen Fail

I was amused to hear that the 2016 Olympics went to Brazil. I guess the IOC must be racist. After all, anyone who doesn’t think whatever Obama wants is The Right Thing To Do must be a racist, right? Isn’t that what Jimmy Carter said? And we all know what a great president he was.

Donald Sensing offers a spot-on explanation of the whole point behind Obama’s Copenhagen Fail:

So why did Obama go to Copenhagen? It was not really to see Chicago through. Like everything else in his life, Chicago was simply a tool to serve a purpose and selection of the city as 2016’s venue was not actually important to that purpose.

The purpose of the trip was simply to splash Obama’s photo on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, to provide video of him basking in the personal adulation of the European crowd, an adulation that remains very real there even while Obama’s popularity slides at home.

H/T Brutally Honest. Sensing’s entire article is well worth the read as he illuminates with startling clarity the Obama administration:  It’s a Peter Principle Presidency.  Back in February, Kyle-Anne Shiver at The American Thinker noted shortly after Obama took office, “The perfect collision of Murphy’s Law with the Peter Principle has arrived to explode in our faces.”

Even ultra-liberal comedy powerhouse Saturday Night Live is pointing out the obvious:

(H/T Flopping Aces). It would be funnier if it weren’t so darned true.

He didn’t know what he was signing

You can’t make this stuff up.

President Obama’s “green jobs” adviser is distancing himself from the “9/11 truthers” — Americans who say the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks may have been an inside job — releasing a statement late Thursday that says he didn’t read carefully a petition he signed in 2004 calling for an investigation into the Bush administration’s knowledge of an impending attack.

In the statement, Van Jones also apologized again for several inflammatory remarks he made prior to joining the Obama administration. It was his second apology in two days.

An aide to Jones told FOX News on Thursday night that the green jobs czar “did not carefully review the language in the petition.” The aide did not say when Jones signed the petition or when he became aware of the controversy…

Jones’ second mea culpa comes after a Wednesday apology in which Jones said he uttered “offensive words” in February when he called Republicans “assholes.” He said the remarks “do not reflect the views of this administration” and its bipartisan aims.

But such statements just scratch the surface of Jones’ past commentary, and could present a dilemma for the Obama administration as it struggles to pass health care reforms and other priorities, including a climate change bill championed by Jones.

Jones has consistently leaned on racially charged language, pointing the finger at “white polluters and the white environmentalists” for “steering poison” to minority communities, as he makes the case for lifting up low-income and minority communities with better environmental policy.

A declared “communist” during the 1990s, Jones once associated with a group that looked to Mao Zedong as an inspiration.

Jones’ exceptional past is reminiscent of associations noted during the presidential campaign, when then-Sen. Barack Obama doggedly fended off claims that he was tied to radicals and overzealous activists.

But with now-President Obama entering the perhaps trickiest phase of his young presidency — building the kind of consensus around health care reform that President Clinton could not — a divisive figure could prove disfiguring.

You think?

Everyone knows congressmen don’t read bills before they sign them. So why should Jones be responsible for signing a nutjob petition? I mean, really, do we expect people in Obama’s administration to be conscientious and diligent, ethical and honest? Of course not! Remember, this is the president who put a tax cheat in charge of the IRS, the first of a string of nominated tax evaders including Tom Daschle, Ron Kirk, and Nancy Killefer.

Given how willing Obama is to take on people with all kinds of unsavory past political and financial baggage, it’s amazing that he’s way behind in hiring for key administration positions (H/T The Moderate Voice)

While career employees or holdovers fill many posts on a temporary basis, Mr. Obama does not have his own people enacting programs central to his mission. He is trying to fix the financial markets but does not have an assistant treasury secretary for financial markets. He is spending more money on transportation than anyone since Dwight D. Eisenhower but does not have his own inspector general watching how the dollars are used. He is fighting two wars but does not have an Army secretary…He has invited major powers to a summit on nuclear nonproliferation but does not have an assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation.

Honestly, it’s better than the Marx Brothers. Heck, put Joe Biden at a microphone and it’s darned close to a Marx Brother’s movie (as envisioned by Moneyrunner at The Virginian)…

Gateway Pundit reveals even more of Van Jones’ wacked background.

And Michelle Malkin describes the pattern we are seeing as

…a leitmotif that runs through my czar, cabinet, and nominee withdrawal chapters of Culture of Corruption: Obama czardom is the deliberate end-run around transparency. Van Jones did not just accidentally slip through the cracks of the Obama vetters. They knew what he espoused before they installed him.

If only it was all simply a movie, and the well being of our country was not at stake.