Like fallen leaves scattered on the grass of autumn, the following are bits of comments and rejoinders I posted on some of the columns variously indicated by the associated url’s.  I gleaned them into a separate post as I occasionally found sparks of inspiration sparsely intermingled in the ubiquitous morass of tedious verbosity.

Contrary to popular myth, Al Gore did not invent the internet. I submit that his main contribution is in the field of scientific charlatanism, most typically illustrated by the currency and popularity of what is most conveniently known as the established (by consensus) science of “Global Warming.”

The Tragedy of Hyphenated Americans  

It is regrettable but not surprising that Judge Chen sees himself as an Asian-Pacific person who happens to be an American by a confluence of circumstances probably beyond his control as an individual person.
cf, http://townhall.com/columnists/JillianBandes/2009/10/16/aclu_pipeline_for_obama_judges?comments=true#comments

It would have been much more wholesome if he saw himself as an American who happened to have Asian-Pacific ethnicity in his biological hereditary DNA.

That he is an Obama appointment to the Bench is no surprise. After all the POTUS' highest profile nominee to the Judiciary is Justice Sotomayor who saw herself as a Puerto Rican first and an American, only attendant to circumstances beyond her control as an individual. This seems to be the pattern in Obama world. He nurtures the most provincial impulses and grooms the baser evils of our nature.

The most worrisome aspect of all these is how long can this American Republic endure this vicious attacks on all the moral fabrics that make us Americans and proud of being so?

It is noteworthy, that the POTUS as he repeatedly pointed out during, before and after the campaign, is the quintessential hyphenated American: the Audacity of his Hope is the Dream from his Father. His face is different from the other presidents you find on the US dollar bills. But don’t point it out else you are definitely race-baiting.

In essence, he is a Kenyan-American, and Alinskyan-American, a post-partisan-American, a communist-American, a trans-racial-American, a transformational, transformative-American, etc., etc.

A Compromise with Iran

Is like a coin toss where heads they win, tails we lose. It's pretty much akin to the Democrats' notion of "bipartisanship," that is what attends when the Republicans embrace the Democrats' position on any issue.

cf,http://townhall.com/columnists/Column2.aspx?UrlTitle=give_war_a_chance&ns=BillOReilly&dt=10/17/2009&page=full&comments=true&submitted=true

NATO has always been an American defense umbrella from the get go. With a toothless America, NATO is as benign as a Sunday Bridge Club of retired housewives.

With a POTUS who is obsessed with unilateral disarmament, you get a world without arms which results in a world without laws.

The fault, my dear Casius, lies not in our stars but in ourselves: we put a communist pacifist in the White House. That was oh, so nice of us:)

Desperately Trying to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons? The operative word is desperate. You are trying to recruit an ally in Russia who is obsessed with her grandeur of yore. For Russia, this is understandably tolerable. After all you can only aspire for things or a state that you don’t have or are not already. That we consider the Russians as potential allies on any venture, indeed, is desperation of the first order.

Hamlet in the Oval Office

Cf, http://townhall.com/columnists/SandyRios/2009/10/16/obama_is_sure_about_something

To send or not to send (troops to Afghanistan)?
To tell or not to tell (sexual preferences or orientation in the military)?

Will the winter of our discontent shortly follow this, our autumn of vacillation?

An anecdote popularly circulated in my college days tells of a politician who in the heat of a campaign speech passionately promised the audience that he would make sure to build a bridge when elected.

A heckler in the audience pointed out that there is no river needing a bridge in their locality. So the speaker vehemently insisted that he will also guarantee building a river once he is elected, no thanks for the impertinent interruption by the heckler.

The moral of the story is that Obama is the type of politician who promises anyone anything to get applause. That feeds the baser evils of his nature.

Hope and Hype

Cf, http://townhall.com/columnists/SuzanneFields/2009/10/16/the_nobler_nobels

If the Nobel Peace Prize to the POTUS were only for Hope and Hype, then we can breathe easier and dismiss it as one misguided Norwegian joke on America.

I submit to you that it is less benign than a joke and more sinister and malicious in intent: that is to declaw America, at least for the duration of the Obama Administration. What with the POTUS’ continuing buzz about unilateral disarmament, ad nauseam, the Prize is an attempt to leverage the rules of engagements that America adheres to in both international relations and domestic policy.

The message is: a pacifist you aspire to be, a pacifist you shall remain, and we even bribe you for it.

That the Nobel Committee awards a prize for bluster is consistent with the historical fact that the wealth which gave birth to the Nobel Prizes was largely derived from the manufacture and sales of TNT, dynamite and other explosives.

In Full Brutal Context

"There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures."
cf, http://townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2009/10/16/the_democrats%e2%80%99_coming_defeat?page=full&comments=true

If the flood is the 2010 election, don't count the chicks before the eggs are hatched, or even laid. The Clintons also promised the most ethical administration in history. We got, among others, DNA on a blue dress and it was not even deemed an impeachable behavior, just rascally banal and worthy of late night comedy fare.

To prevail in the 2010 off peak elections, we need viable and practicable alternatives, comparable to the "Contract on America." Also, we need bone marrow transplants on the Republicans so that they can exhibit some political spine. Short of that, we get on the "Omitted" side of the Brutal quote.

The POTUS 44 has brilliantly succeeded on what he promised on inauguration day: to remake America in the image of Europe, to be acceptable to the rest of the world, to project the image that is acceptable to the United Nations. With his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, this inaugural promise has been signed, sealed and delivered with a flourish. Now we Americans can be oh, so proud that we have become as sophisticated and civilized as Belgium.

The last U.S. President to receive a Nobel Peace Prize was James Earl Carter who shared the award with one of the greatest ambassadors for peace of them all, the late Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, popularly known as Yasser Arafat. Maybe from here onwards, for the sake of civility and sophisticated decorum, it behooves to formally call the POTUS 44 as Barack Hussein Obama al-Indonesia al-Columbia al-Chicago Abu-Malia Abu-Sasha.

The AP White House Correspondent Jennifer Loven was impertinent enough to ask wherefore the Nobel Peace Prize? Well, let us venture to count the ways:

1.    For apologizing at every opportunity for all that America traditionally stood for, the bastion of freedom and liberty and the successful champion in defense against Nazi fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism.

2.   For groveling to the King of Saudi Arabia, for palling around with Hugo Chavez, for being deferential to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jung Il,  Moammar Gadhafi, and the Castro brothers Fidel and Raol while dumping on Israel.

3.   For buying up toxic assets with taxpayer dollars and for successfully mortgaging the future of generations of Americans (our grandchildren) in the name of ‘spreading the wealth around.’

4.   For institutionalizing within the Federal government the reign of all sorts of czars, more numerous in a mere nine months than Russia had established through centuries of history.

5.   For worshiping in the altar of environmentalism and adopting global warming prevention as a matter of national policy, with the ‘cap and trade (read, cap and tax)’ legislation, lending legitimacy to the notion of “carbon footprint,” no matter that it can bankrupt the domestic energy industry.

6.   For attempting to nationalize the health care industry thereby assuming life and death decisions over each individual American.

The litany can go on but it requires more intestinal fortitude than I can muster. For the fawning millions swift in the vainglorious tide of the cult of personality engulfing the Oval Office, the award might represent an endorsement of their adulation. It might cause the tingling in Chris Matthews’ legs to evolve into an epileptic spasm worthy of a commercial segment in CNN.

The deeper and more sober question is: can this Republic muster enough resilience so as to not allow the tide of vainglory induce an enduring institutional paralysis that would jeopardize our historical claim to be the last best hope of man on earth?