Introducing ...

Baby B

He's black! He's white! He's lived in Asia! And with a trusty unicorn animal companion Baby B is saving the world with nuancy nuance, thoughtful thinking and rhetorical rhetoric. Finally, a book for progressive children of all ages. A story that needs to be told. And shared! Coming soon in serial form. And no, it will not be available at the corporate chains. Only here. Straight to the people! For free. The business model of our more humane, sustainable future.

Toddler in Chief.

If there's anything more creepy than the totalitarian imagery which accompanied Obama's campaign, it's revisiting it now that people have the full measure of the baby-in-chief. The otherworldly glow of a messiah that followers projected upon him was idiotic and gross from the outset, but in hindsight it looks rather more like Mayans in the throes of ecstasy whilst virgins are offered up for the gods. It took less than a year for him to reduce his own iconography to hilarious kitsch.

State of the Union

The poor bastard still thinks he's President of Hydeparkberkeleycambridge and that the people, the political opposition, some members of his own party, the Supreme Court and reality are simply irritants in his imagined plotline of The Barack Obama Story. He has no instinct for survival, just a double dose of smug preening and delusional arrogance. This is not going to end well unless some old-school Japanese monsters save him from his taunting of Godzilla. Even a fellatic media won't be able to help once more people start to completely turn against him. Tick. Tock.

Obama the incompetent.

It's gonna be all Obama here leading up to his teleprompter's State of the Union address. Today is more stickers with the kind of ugly-looking imagery leftard artists employ when "speaking truth to power" in their own neighborhoods. I stare and laugh at this crap every day wondering who they're speaking to exactly. One another obviously. Or me. Maybe it's a concerted effort to bug out the 10% or so of us who suffer their idiocy in silence. But, as always, I can only note that it wouldn't take a massive carpet bombing of winger responses to give such neighborhoods the vapors and set the leftosphere ablaze with hysteria. "Who are these people just like us who mock and secretly hate us?" Heh.

Spooky.

This piece by one of my favorite illustrators really cried out for a little bit of Obamafication. Community organizers from hell. The creepy and thuggish underbelly of progressivism. And Chicago. Too perfect to resist.

Thanks for the prize, bitches.

Let the Iraq revisionism begin. Again.

If reading or hearing Peggy Noonan is to be subjected to nauseating prose with the color palate of a five year old girl then Thomas Friedman is her stylistic little boy equivalent. Guess what? Gee whiz! And that's not all!!! The world is really flat. Guys, today you can walk your way from Bangalore to Sunnyvale in a NANOSECOND and I talked to the very people in Rangoon, Belize and Papua New Guinea who are making this happen!

Tommy was kind enough to part ways with his Tonka Trucks and run inside to be with the grown ups yesterday, and guess what!?!?!? He has something important to say!

In 2003, the United States, under President Bush, invaded Iraq to change the regime. Terrible postwar execution and unrelenting attempts by Al Qaeda to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war turned the Iraqi geopolitical space into a different problem — a maelstrom of violence for four years, with U.S. troops caught in the middle. A huge price was paid by Iraqis and Americans. This was the Iraq that Barack Obama ran against.

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda and Iraqi Shiites against pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq. There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

Uh, nope. Obama ran against the very idea that we went there in the first place. He got his street cred from speaking at a rally when he was a nobody with no burden to vote or knowledge of the intelligence a Senator has access to. Whatever criticisms he levied were not rooted in knowledge but in ideology and political posturing. He not only opposed the surge and argued that any sectarian bloodbath which might ensue if we left was fine by him but refused to acknowledge the success of the surge, acknowledge the heavy moral component to our engagement there in the first place or so much as think in terms of victory.

The fact that Obama has talked tough re: Pakistan is merely a variant on the standard rhetorical ploys of the left. The old "the sanctions on Iraq are killing children/what's that? Depose Saddam?/The sanctions on Iraq are working" shuffle.

Like an opportunistic dillhole, Friedman is doing the little boy's work of returning to the scene of an intervention he advocated but hiding behind the skirt of someone who opposed the bad stuff which ensued, just like he did, and pretending that the two positions were borne of comparable insights.

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national security credentials than that.

This is where I lose my lunch. The Iraq that Obama is inheriting is in no way to his credit. And when Friedman assures us that the Lightworker will play this smart, what he of course means is that Obama now has the burden of being a grown up. The left could blame Bush for rendition in spite of it being a practice which predated his administration. They could raise holy hell about Guantanamo and FISA when they were abstract principles rather than a function of their burden to keep Americans safe. They could call Bush a liar for faulty intelligence in spite of concurrence among our putative allies, even those who opposed our "illegal invasion" to enforce UN resolutions which were the result of a cease fire agreement when Clinton bombed the shit out of the country not long before.

Only the left could argue that this whole venture was an unholy corporate venture for oil and simultaneously rant about Iraq's massive oil revenue surplus while we foot the bill for their reconstruction. These people are a gaggle of hideous emotional infants.

Nothing which transpires from here on in will enhance the Democrats' national security credentials. They forfeited any pretense of it with eight years of bad faith and ill will. History will be the final judge for Bush, but for a weasel like Friedman who is trying to have it both ways the judgment is already in.

Black Friday (updated)

I originally posted this because the developing meme on the left that Bush was to blame for the Black Friday shopping deaths was too hilarious to ignore. But it gets better, because it is colliding with arguments that Obama is responsible for the 3% Black Friday sales increase over last year.

From the New York Times:

From the Great Depression, we remember the bread lines. From the oil shocks of the 1970s, we recall lines of cars snaking from gas stations. And from our current moment, we may come to remember scenes like the one at a Long Island Wal-Mart in the dawn after Thanksgiving, when 2,000 frantic shoppers trampled to death an employee who stood between them and the bargains within. It was a tragedy, yet it did not feel like an accident.

... Wages for most Americans have fallen in real terms over the last eight years. Pensions have been turned into 401(k) plans that have just relinquished half their value to an angry market. Health benefits have been downgraded or eliminated altogether. Working hours are being slashed, and full-time workers are having to settle for jobs through temp agencies.

Indeed, this was the situation for the unfortunate man who found himself working at the Valley Stream Wal-Mart at 5 a.m. Friday, a temp at a company emblematic of low wages and weak benefits, earning his dollars by trying to police an unruly crowd worried about missing out.

In a sense, the American economy has become a kind of piñata — lots of treats in there, but no guarantee that you will get any, making people prone to frenzy and sending some home bruised.

It seemed fitting then, in a tragic way, that the holiday season began with violence fueled by desperation; with a mob making a frantic reach for things they wanted badly, knowing they might go home empty-handed.

I suppose this is the sort of smarmy melodrama one should expect when papers like the Times employ liberal tool English majors from liberal arts colleges as business reporters.

Exactly eight years ago people started living beyond their means, buying more house than they can afford and getting mortgages when they don't even have sufficient credit for a cell phone plan. And, of course, Wal-Mart, which was responsible for the lion's share of the US productivity gains during the Clinton miracle, turned stone cold buggin' evil on day one of Bushco.

One would almost forget that global energy demand has skyrocketed thanks to the cheap labor 90's. Or that the idiotic drive to convert crops to biofuels has caused food prices to shoot up. Add these to an already existing housing bubble and one is left to ponder exacly how this economic slump was anything short of inevitable.

Thankfully, things will soon be run by the party who thinks we can solve our energy problems with unicorn farts and spent years playing naked Twister with the GSE's. And that means that mobs who crush the door guy at Wal-Mart can go back to being uncouth morons responsible for their own behavior instead of being unwitting victims of Bush.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Lay a little blame at the feet of the government, for exhorting Americans to spend more money and shake off that recession gripping the nation. Lay some blame on the media, for stoking the hype surrounding one day of retailing which is, in fact, nothing more than the first of 28 shopping days left until Christmas, with cable news hawking footage of ravenous shoppers storming the doors of stores opening at 4 am.

And in Palm Desert, California, where police say an argument preceded the shooting at a Toys "R" Us, lay some blame on a gun-happy culture which encourages the resolution of simple domestic disputes with the pulling of a trigger.

...... Retailers already were calling this the worst shopping season in six years. Now it's unquestionable. If this is shopping, we might be better off with a recession.

This one is a little less pointed but still rather moronic in its effort at social commentary. One wonders, if indeed the government and advertisers worked the entire country into a Black Friday frenzy, how it is exactly that only a few people died in a couple of incidents. After all, during the same time window it appears that standing next to Plaxico Burress at a night club was almost as dangerous.

George Stephanopoulis on This Week:

President-elect Obama also said this week in a series of press conferences that he held Monday through Wednesday on the economy and laying out his economic team. You got to give him credit for one thing at least: ever since the leak of Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary at 3:00 last Friday, the Dow has gone up 17%, the S&P has gone up 19%. So at least there's been a vote of confidence in the markets for president-elect Obama…And Black Friday, that’s exactly right, sales up three percent surprisingly on Black Friday. So, is this about the Obama economic team?

But wait. Sales were up? This wasn't desperation. It was optimism about Obama! The transition between a Republican administration and a Democrat one is a confusing and challenging time for the left. So many well-worn narratives to shed and so many new ones to cultivate.