Random Thoughts

Armenians, Turkey, and the Sky is Blue

The US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has declared that the mass killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey during 1915  was genocide.

WASHINGTON — The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted narrowly on Thursday to condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians early in the last century, defying a last-minute plea from the Obama administration to forgo a vote that seemed sure to offend Turkey and jeopardize delicate efforts at Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.

And it only took them 95 years to make this astute observation.

Next up, the US Senate will declare that the sky is blue.

The Armenians were NOT killed. Even if there’s proof, it never happened.

And now Turkey is unhappy with the US.

But to Turks, what happened in 1915 was, at most, just one more messy piece of a very messy war that spelled the end of a once-powerful empire. They reject the conclusions of historians and the term genocide, saying there was no premeditation in the deaths, no systematic attempt to destroy a people. Indeed, in Turkey today it remains a crime — “insulting Turkishness” — to even raise the issue of what happened to the Armenians.

Of course it wasn’t “systematic;” herding hundreds of thousands of people away from their homes and villages, executing them by the tens of thousands, sending tens of thousands of them on a forced death march, it was…spontaneous? A whim? No, wait, I remember the excuse: “They all moved away.”

Turkey has perfected the art of national denial. Suck it up, admit to your country’s past sins, and maybe then you can legitimately move past them Until then, they are hanging like a rotting albatross around your collective necks.

For those who are unaware of this holocaust and the subsequent efforts to pretend it never happened, a little reading might be useful.

Yes, they’re clickable. I’m all about education, especially in the face of deliberate, willful ignorance.

Nothing like this really ought to surprise me anymore. From the national to the personal, if we’re not ignoring killing, we’re celebrating it. H/T Brutally Honest. Days like this, I despair for humanity.

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.

I may throw up on you…

Sometimes I think we’re living in an alternate universe. Or maybe it’s like the new Star Trek movie…someone accidentally sucked the US into a black hole, and now we’re living out a reality where everything that had meaning, everything of substance, has been tweaked and twisted, and things just are wacked.

Like maybe Ronald Reagan was never President.

And Lee Iacocca never resurrected Chrysler. In the new reality Iacocca doesn’t even get to keep his company car.

And the French President and US President, having determined that Britain is irrelevant, are sucking up to one another so hard it makes my Miele vacuum look like a tired old broom.

And the US Government has decided that significant donors to the GOP can no longer own American car dealerships. Doug Ross offers an eye-opening breakdown of what dealerships are being targeted for closure.

If that’s not enough, some brilliant DC policymakers are considering implementing a nationwide VAT (value added tax). Just what we need with rising unemployment, sinking home values and the tax burden we already carry.

A VAT is a tax on the transfer of goods and services that ultimately is borne by the consumer. Highly visible, it would increase the cost of just about everything, from a carton of eggs to a visit with a lawyer. It is also hugely regressive, falling heavily on the poor. But VAT advocates say those negatives could be offset by using the proceeds to pay for health care for every American — a tangible benefit that would be highly valuable to low-income families.

…Orszag has hired a prominent VAT advocate to advise him on health care: Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and author of the 2008 book “Health Care, Guaranteed.” Meanwhile, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, chairman of a task force Obama assigned to study the tax system, has expressed at least tentative support for a VAT.

My head might just implode. All that’s left is to find out that the past 29 years never happened.

Meanwhile, Obama’s Energy Secretary wants us to paint our roofs white.

Speaking at the opening of the St. James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, for which The Times is media partner, Professor Chu said that this approach could have a vast impact.

By lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the color of cement, it would be possible to cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world’s cars off the roads for 11 years, he said.

Dude. Seriously. Feel free to come paint every single one of my roof’s bazillion concrete tiles white. And be sure to replace any you break in the process.

How the crap they’d begin to pay to repave the roads in my state–a state which is so deep in the red it’s hemorrhaging–I have no idea. Probably via some sort of Global Warming/Road Resurfacing tax.

Good luck with that.

We are so screwed…

I have tried not to read too much into the obvious diplomatic ignorance of Obama & Co.

The shallow treatment of and ridiculous (and utterly useless) gift to the British Prime Minister? Obama’s thinking like a young guy and/or he’s got a 20 year old advising him on what’s appropriate.

The equally juvenile gift to the Queen of England? Obama’s thinking like a young guy and/or he’s got a 20 year old advising him on what’s appropriate.

Michelle Obama putting her arm around the Queen? Same 20 year old is advising her on what’s appropriate.

Obama bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia?

WHAT?!

Tell me the President of the United States did not bow to another head of state. Lie to me if you must.

I’m sure Israel loved that. Every single deceased president from George Washington to Ronald Reagan is now spinning in his grave.

Thomas Lifson of American Thinker points out how completely inappropriate Obama’s bow is, and how the MSM is determined to ignore it.

Obama is either a total diplomatic fool, or he really thinks the King of Saudi Arabia (a country known for its barbaric treatment of women, among other things) is more important and more worthy of honor than the President of the United States of America.

Given that Obama is the current POTUS, sadly he’s probably right.

And then there’s his proclamation that the US will lead the world in nuclear disarmament. Again, WHAT?!

Nuclear weapons are the most dangerous legacies of the Cold War,” Obama said in a speech in front of a huge crowd outside the medieval Prague Castle in the Czech Republic. “The U.S. will take concrete steps. … We will begin the work of reducing our arsenals and stockpiles.

He talked about doing this back in the autumn of 2007, long before he became a presidential front runner. Of all the asininity he’s proposed, this right now, in the face of North Korea’s nuclear tests, seems particularly wrongheaded. Unless he intends to demonstrate defensive weakness to the watching world.

Charles Krauthamer explains it succinctly: Obama thinks the United States is “arrogant.” He’s bent on apologizing to Europe for us all.

H/T Brutally Honest.

If this is “presidential leadership,” we are so screwed.