Munchausen by Obama

It was just a typical, hum-drum Tuesday at a Burlington Coat Factory in Columbus, Ohio. Then an unnamed woman rolled up in a limousine and said, "Hey everybody! Free coats!"



In the video, that cop's nervousness is palpable when he has to go in front of that crowd and tell them, "sorry, but...scram." It's not clear whether this was before or after the point where the angry mob on the inside of the store trashed the place and looted merchandise.

There was a TV news crew on the scene when the woman announced the shopping spree and started writing rubber checks to people for their rent. Why is her face pixeled out? I smell a conspiracy. Was this Elvis in blackface and a high-pitched voice? Obama in a fat suit and fright wig?

Well, no. It was just a crazy lady who has a history of phony 911 calls and creating disturbances.




"She's not a crazy type of person who goes out and causes trouble," said the lady's daughter. Wait a minute. I mean no disrespect, and I have all the compassion in the world for crazy people, but isn't "a crazy type of person who goes out and causes trouble" specifically what your mom has been for quite a long time, according to your own account and by the eyewitness testimony of Burlington Coat Factory employees and the angry mob who trashed and looted the store? If the camera crew had bothered to ask a customer his opinion of your mother as he put a coat rack through a plate glass window, he might well have said "she's a crazy type of person who goes out and causes trouble!" SMASH!!

This woman will, in all likelihood, face jail time and/or confinement in a mental institution. Her supposed good intentions ("she wanted to help people, she just didn't have the means to help") won't matter a bit to the state of Ohio or to Burlington Coat Factory's attorneys.

But this poor lady was just following the lead of another great philanthropist, who never let a lack of "the means to help" stop him.

Of course, some might say that his methods of helping (particularly given that his favored engine of charity lacks the means) don't really help. Some might even say that he has no real interest in helping people to begin with. They might even say that his desire to "help" has more to do with a disordered impulse toward self-aggrandizement and need for attention and approval, even if such attention and approval can only be had on borrowed time, until everyone realizes that he didn't really win the lottery.

And that's really the point. What happens when some of these same people realize that the government doesn't have any money after all, and that their coats aren't free?



I guess it's likely that they won't ever know, which, under the circumstances, isn't all bad. I suppose if our schools had any interest in producing free citizens (as opposed to cowed and compliant proles), the uprisings would take place a lot sooner. And they wouldn't have the nearest inanimate object (like the Burlington Coat Factory) as their target.

Back on the Job! (sort of)

I apologize to my readers for being AWOL for the past couple of weeks. I've had several things going on (including a fabulous vacation, which I may be lucky enough to write about soon) that have prevented me from corresponding with you lately.

On the other hand, most of my readers already realize this, because you were on the trip as well. This is an organ with a very small circulation.

Thanks for your patience. There is much more in pipeline, I promise.

Saturday Night/Sunday Morning TV Nostalgia

When I was about five years old, I thought this ...was the coolest dude...I had ever seen:



"We have met the enemy, and he is us!?" Wow. That would just confuse TV watchers today. Sure enough, in 1998, the state had this PSA remade almost shot-for-shot, with updated music, a new guy portraying Tennessee Trash, and without the environmentalist variation on the Commodore Perry quote which nobody gets now but which apparently was commonplace in the late '70s.

Which leads me to another bit of generational gappage. The state did a follow up depicting a couple of senior citizens doing their civic duty and confronting Mr. Trash:



When I was a kid, threatening to tell his mother got Tennessee to clean up his act. Nowadays, if Elrod and Elvira tried this, ol' TT would blow them away with the snub-nosed .38 he keeps beneath all the Hardee's bags under his seat.

And I sat through a lot of this type of thing on bitter January and February mornings, waiting to find out if I would have to go to school:

Yaaaay!! Peace in Our Time!!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090918/ap_on_re_eu/eu_eastern_europe_missile_defense_22

And this happened yesterday, the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in World War II.

Tuck in Your Sheet, Jimmah

racist n 1: One who believes that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capabilities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. 2: Anyone who is winning an argument with a leftist.

I grew up with a more or less received perception of Jimmy Carter as a kindhearted and honest man who had been an utterly incompetent president.

For many years, including my own five- to seven-year flirtation with the politics of the Left that began in high school, my subsequent rejection of those politics, and the few years I passed in political apathy, I never encountered much to make me rethink my opinion of the man. I, and just about everyone I knew, could see clearly that here was a guy "too nice for his own good," a man who, by the time I came of age, was a grandfatherly, charitable figure who built houses for poor people and traveled the world on missions of peace to brutal foreign dictators. His soft-spoken Georgia accent and his gentle demeanor seemed to be proofs of his turn-the-other-cheek Christianity, if also of his Henry VI-like unsuitability for power.

This is hardly a flattering picture. But I'm beginning to think that it's the best of all possible pictures of himself that Carter has a right to expect. Because when you start to pay attention to his record and read up on him even a little bit, that picture starts to change dramatically. Carter's history turns out to be more one of unwanted diplomatic interference (through which he has generally misrepresented the aims and aspirations of tyrants the world over at the expense of his own country), of joining the chorus of left-wing hyenas mindlessly baying at Pres. Bush and the U.S. generally over the past eight years, of acceptance of the paradigms of open anti-Semites and insulting comments about those who oppose the totalitarian inclinations of the current president. To my way of thinking, all this merits a reexamination of Carter's past and his present. A good place to start is this piece in Commentary by Joshua Muravchik. That will take you a while, but when you're finished there, you can move on to this shorter editorial in National Review Online.

All this has been quite an education for me. I no longer believe that Jimmy Carter is a bumbling good Samaritan or a quixotic missionary for world peace or that he was a prototype anti-segregationist. He's just another grasping, narcissistic left-wing ideologue, trying to shame his opponents in the current policy debates into ceasing their scrutiny and their thoughts about the Left's proposals.

It's Florida-UT Weekend!

Rep. Corrine Brown, via Six Meat Buffet:

Epidemiological Correctness Run Amuck

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hassles NBC head White House correspondent Chuck Todd about sneezing the right way:



Yeah, but sneezing in the crook of your arm runs the risk of having the snail trail effect on your suit coat. Now if the guy had been a newspaper reporter, he probably would have slept in his suit coat the night before, but still...