Random Thoughts

Kumbaya Iran and MexAmerCanada

Is it wrong that I find this flat out hysterical?

It’s more than five hours and counting now since the entire White House e-mail system went down.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced the technical snafu at his 1:30 p.m. briefing, apologizing to the media for the e-mail silence this afternoon.

…This follows on the heels of their inability to get the voice-mail system to re-open the White House Comment Line.  Bush staffers got the blame for that, too.  Last week, they were bitching to the Washington Post about having to use PCs instead of Macs

So now we have a Treasury Secretary who can’t figure out his own taxes and a White House that can’t deal with e-mail.  So much for competence.

They never said they were competent. In fact, they said it was time for change; incompetence in performing the most basic job functions is change, no?

In other non-news, two excellent books I just finished reading:

Misunderestimated by Bill Sammon

I’ve long been disgusted by the lack of respect and outright hatred toward President George W. Bush. Misunderestimated gave me a deeper understanding of what it must have been like to be Bush, doing what he truly believed in the core of his being to be best for the safety United States, only to be despised for it.

And good grief, Saddam Hussein was an evil bastard. Sammon gives us a crash course in the history of Iraq’s answer to Hitler, setting the backdrop for 9/11 and the events that shaped the Bush presidency.

I wouldn’t think anyone in America has truly put 9/11 behind them–how many of us initially thought “Is it terrorism?” when US Air flight 1549 came down in the Hudson River? Some memories are shorter than others apparently; It took less than five years for liberal academics to demonize Bush and minimize what happened to our nation in 2001.

While some may point to Bush preventing another terrorist attack after September 11th, in a 2006 New York Times editorial, Ellis saw the 9/11 attacks as a mere footnote in American history: “…it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.”

9/11 is already a footnote? What kind of crack is Joseph Ellis smoking? And people wonder why I refuse to return to teaching at the university level. I’d be exercising my second amendment rights with a fury if I had to put up with morons like that as colleagues.

I understand why Bush was able to leave Washington with his head up and his conscience clear. He kept his promise, and kept us safe for eight years. Now we want to rewrite history and pretend that 9/11 wasn’t all that bad, that radical Islamofacists aren’t enemies of everything the United States represents, and that all we really need is love.

Ed Morrissey points out Obama’s “naiveté” (I think of it as absolute stone blind ignorance) expressed in the al-Aribya interview where Obama addresses the Israel/Palestine conflict as if it were some sort of settlement dispute, and terrorism as if it were limited to Al Qaeda radicals and not supported by a wide swath of the Arab world.

Obama could have taken the opportunity to explain some hard truths while extending the hand of friendship.  Instead, he took the opportunity to pander.

Obama’s from Chicago. That’s what Chicago politicians do. We’d better get used to it, because this is hopenchange leadership. Kumbaya.

International politics is so complicated. The more I read of American and world history, the more I understand the chasmic difference between the way Muslim extremists view life and everything in it and the way we perceive it, the more convinced I am that believing we can just be friends is idiotic. Suicidal even. We are dealing with people who insist the Holocaust is a “big lie,” and who are dedicated to wiping Israel (and all Jews) off the face of the planet. They aren’t exactly rational. And I think Obama is going to make us all find out the hard way–the deadly way–just how much our enemies despise us.

Maybe that’s what we need. Heaven knows if 9/11 wasn’t enough of a wake up call, if we’ve forgotten who did it and why, perhaps we deserve another object lesson.

Speaking of object lessons, this book is full of them:

An Inconvenient Book by Glenn Beck

Funny but thought provoking, Beck hits on everything from date movies to immigration with his trademark self-depreciating humor. The final chapter really gave me pause. I’d been unfamiliar with the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Beck argues that a North American Union akin to the European Union is already in the works, and is at the core of every recent Presidential administration’s failure to address illegal immigration and secure the US borders.

I’m not a tin foil hat wearer, but dang, Beck’s reasoning makes scary sense. Where is our country headed?

And just as it all seems a bit overwhelming, the Anchoress posts something positively serendipitous. Whew.