LVII
Ah, but my Computations, People say,
Reduced the Year to better reckoning?--Nay
'Twas only striking from the Calendar
Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday.

          -- Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,

 

 To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,    

Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride       

With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.  

Then the most prevalent speculation in the media was: “where could he be going at 2:30am”? To which, the near-billion dollar valuation of the Woods estate notwithstanding, my retort was: “he was probably trying to be at the head of the line of black weekend (pun not intended) shoppers at the nearby mall.” This is not entirely preposterous considering that Tiger Woods has been rather notable for his go-getter demeanor.

However the proverbially Clintonian “Bimbo Eruptions” promptly kicked in. The saga unfolded far beyond the traditionally tolerable envelope of tabloid titillations to become unquestionably tantamount to moral turpitudes of the grossest order. Traditionally, golf and moral turpitude would not fit harmoniously in the same sentence. But then again, in the age of Obama, adherence to tradition has increasingly and alarmingly become rather taboo. 

If the point needs illustration, until the ascendancy of BHO into the Oval Office, apologizing for America was never a part of Presidential rules of engagement, either domestically or, least of all, abroad. Neither was selective financial “bailout” of the private sector on the premise that some organizations are “too big to fail;” after which some of them did fail anyway (cf, e.g., Chrysler with Fiat as the sequel). It has to be noted parenthetically that the Oslo acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize was the rare and most welcome exception.

This is by no means to claim that Obama invented the “reset button.” On the contrary, as Andrew Fogg, the Golf Hypnotist, has sufficiently documented, it has been a valuable widget in the arsenal of most great champion golfers. In politics, it has been a valuable tool since Adam and Eve were driven out of Paradise. Or in the original formulation of John Milton, the classic “reset button” was sanctioned by the Devil himself:

To Tiger’s laudable credit, he elected to own up to the shenanigans and vowed to make amends when he announced his decision to take “an indefinite break” [from golf] to repair his marriage. We can only wish him well. It is indeed heartening that he seems to have the support and encouragement of his fellow professional golfers. By contrast, the POTUS does not seem to lose any opportunity to disown the pitfalls of his administration and blame his predecessor. The POTUS also enjoys the support of most of his fellow liberal Democrats in Congress and in the beholden corridors of punditland. Is this just a simple case of badge of honor among thieves and thugs in the latter; and of looking after your source of revenue in the former?

On the ledger of accountability, at least EldrickTigerWoods has proved the better man than Barack Hussein Obama. As I have pointed out in an earlier blog post, on the ledger of race and racial identity, Eldrick Tiger was way ahead of Barack Hussein. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. The next time we elect a president, we should make certain that the fellow (or lady) is an accomplished golfer. We shall then at least would be more likely to have a president who owns up to the administration’s mistakes and shortcomings rather than commission a search for a scapegoat.

I delved into the subject of accountability earlier elsewhere, albeit perhaps in a slightly different context, but nonetheless relevant:

(XVIII)              [4]

            To put the fault on my ill-attitude

 So-called, yourself you find acquit from blame

            Yet blameless be, what worth a fortitude? --

            Mischief breeds malice, should itself disclaim!

            Were conscience from all blemish fully free

            Its force of judgment should all times prevail,

            And so prevailing, would perforce decree

            Exclude such things bedeemed as boding ill

            From all affairs you deign to undertake;

            So undertaken, merits are your own

            To cherish; else, for ills amends to make.

            Laurels anon, save such as Laurels won:

               Self-absolution but redeem in pain

               The sinner -- not the sinning, nor the sin!

It can hardly be overemphasized, that the opportunity to redeem oneself with another chance is an integral part of the American Dream. As long as we do not forget the transgression, the transgressor can be forgiven. In the specific case of Tiger, I contend that the ultimate judge and jury should be Elin and her children. I would hasten to add that barring being absolved by these judge and jury, Tiger’s place in the hallowed pantheons of golfing history has been irreparably diminished and damaged and his quest to surpass Jack Nicklaus’ records has practically ended with the escalade affair.

Should that eventuality come to pass, his records should be adorned with a multitude of asterisks. And for all Tiger’s greatness in golfing skills and demeanor, he shall have been reduced to a mere footnote to the accomplishments of great and near-greats: people who by a confluence of both designed and fortuitous circumstances have somehow managed to get the better angels of their natures reign supreme over the baser devils of their decadence.

Some Corollary Angles

Mary Grabar, writing in Pajamas Media, had painstakingly deplored the appearance of giving a pass to Tiger’s co-conspirators in sin:

. . . Some black media commentators have criticized Woods for excluding black women.

Woods’ mistresses and flings, ranging from cocktail waitresses to porn stars, are being made into minor celebrities. They share attention with the prostitute, Ashley Dupre, who brought down Governor Eliot Spitzer.

But rarely are these women the objects of opprobrium. When one TV commentator called these women “bimbos,” he was shot down by the host for his lack of respect. . . .

 To this I had replied in the “comment” section (edited accordingly for the sake of clarity):

Forget about the women. As far as we know not one of them took a celibacy vow. Even if they did, they were only “pursuing their happiness” as in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, prescribed for and enshrined in The Declaration of Independence.

On the other hand, if memory serves from the vows I took, Tiger would have sworn to “forsake all others, etc. etc.” Besides, the cocktail waitress is only responsible for the drinks being served with the most titillating ambiance practicable. The golfer on the other hand, is responsible to the integrity and honesty with which the game of golf is traditionally perceived and appropriately associated.

Tiger’s escapades have just made golf compatible with moral turpitude, an association not traditionally heard or seen in the annals of the exalted game.

This is coming from someone who has won exactly one golf hackers’ tournament and a party to three marital vows (serially of course).

I regret not having pointed out that Ashley Dupre did not bring down Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer was taken down by the cumulative weight and inertia of his hypocrisy so characteristic of the typical liberal Deomcrat: publicly crusading to close down prostitution while cavorting as one of the prostitution industry’s most high profile patron.

It is very easy indeed, to get sidetracked by collateral considerations. That the feminist movement has irreparably damaged the essence of American womanhood, is to my mind beyond any debate. Nevertheless, some people, myself definitely excluded, call that progress. It has, at the same time effectively castrated the American males’ potency respecting societal and social graces. The death of chivalry as ushered in by the feminist movement has robbed American society of the more pleasant graces of social decorum and is a definite disservice to traditional civility.

Indulgence in the most prurient of our reflexes is as old as humankind itself and certainly predated Tiger Woods and his picadillos by ages if not eons. The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch at Madrid’s Museo del Prado is dated approximately circa 1500 A.D. In fact we need not document the Hedonistic rituals of antiquity to come to terms with the reality that we all came into being as results of the prurient indulgence of exactly one generation prior to our own.

When all is said and done, we all fit into the catalogue concocted by the brilliant wit of Omar Khayyam, in the ageless Rubaiyat:

LXVIII
We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;

LXIX
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

The “fault,” at this juncture, is giving credibility to Al Gore. It was understandable that Bill Clinton would sell Al Gore as a presidential timber. When he was picked for Vice President, I chalked it up to Clinton’s attempt at getting a life insurance. With Al Gore in line for succession to the Oval Office, who was going to want to harm a President William Jefferson Clinton? The Democrats have such a perverted sense of reality.

The point is, after reading Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance,” it is one of the few “wonders of the world” that anybody could give Al Gore an iota of credibility. That book established Gore’s bona fides, beyond any shadow of a doubt, as a certifiable charlatan. But then again, not very many people may have read it. (Full disclosure: I got it from a $1-book stand and I read it commuting to/from work in the NYC subway.)

Some might deem it an exercise in futility to focus on Al Gore at this juncture in history. With the advent of the transformational, transcendent Obama, Gore himself is history. I wish it were quite that simple and harmless. Gore, being the self-proclaimed high priest of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) duly ordained by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, has successfully charmed the public into accepting his balderdash as gospel.

The same intellectual dysfunction and disconnect that were dismissive of “Earth in the Balance” have embraced the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and allowed it to creep into our educational system. It is analogous to making “Earth in the Balance” a required reading material for high school seniors as a pre-requisite for graduation. 

It is noteworthy that this same dysfunction allowed the elevation of BHO to the Oval Office to become the Ditherer-in-chief and make America the laughing stock of the world, not to mention the de facto betrayal of our troops who are holding forth in Afghanistan.

It matters little that Al Gore is gallivanting around the globe with his huge ‘Carbon Footprint’ making millions of dollars in the process, peddling fictitious literature billed as gospel. What is most crucial is that the Obama regime with all the powers and resources of the Federal Government at its disposal is buying into and espousing the Al Gore agenda hook, line and sinker. Anybody who dares to sound a note of alarm or caution is vilified as naysayers intent on obstructing the President, or worse, as racist opposing the President’s agenda because he happens to be black.

It behooves to keep in mind that one of the premises of “An Inconvenient Truth” is the mantra that the science of Global Warming is a settled issue. That there is an overwhelming consensus within the scientific community does not make the belief a well established body of knowledge. Science is not a matter of faith and consensus. It is a matter of verifiable facts and phenomena that can be replicated repeatedly under carefully controlled constraints.

It used to be that scientific theory was established by a preponderance of verifiable evidence. Not anymore. In the age of Gore and Obama, science is established by a preponderance of repeated incantation, followed by a preponderance of favorable media coverage.

Consensus does not a science make. Carbon Footprint and Carbon Offset, are not scientific concepts. They are political constructs, concocted for propaganda, designed to politically and financially benefit their proponents. It has as much basis in reality as did mortgage-backed securities which obliterated the real estate market and the entire financial system needed a multi-billion dollar bailout.

Beneath the Veneer of Hypocritical Rhetoric

Anthropogenic Global Warming, as postulated by the Kyoto Protocol is not even a scientific theory. It is only an unprovable hypothesis. The notion of "Greenhouse Effect" postulated in the context of the entire planet earth is, at best, an extrapolation of boundary value conditions, not otherwise warranted by experimental constraints.

It is the process of experimentation that elevates an hypothesis into a theory, i.e., when replicable results supportive of the hypothesis are obtained, repeatedly. No such experimentation has been deployed in support of Anthropogenic Global Warming. A computer simulation is not an experiment. It is nothing but an exercise in modeling reality. Its validity depends largely on the set of assumptions that govern the set of process relationships stipulated in the model. It does not prove anything, by any stretch of the imagination.

At the time of this writing, there is a brewing scandal surrounding the apparent falsification of ‘scientific’ data by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglea in the UK, known to be the intellectual brain thrust for AGW.  It is a breach of protocol governing scientific inquiry that would have warranted sending the offenders to the stakes, if not for the fact that doing so would be a serious sacrilege to the noble memory of Giordano Bruno.

For the sake of pedagogical integrity, let us disregard the potential ramifications of such a scandal and confine ourselves to verifiable facts. Carbon dioxide accounts for 0.0314 vol % of the atmosphere and ranks fourth in the distribution after nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. This amount constitutes 1.5% of the total carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and hydrosphere, the dissolved component accounting for 98.5% of the total.

People exhale carbon dioxide all their lives. Lower forms of being in the biosphere generously discharge it from the other end, an activity most notably attributed to cattle. Plants use it in photosynthesis. Coral reefs use it to produce more coral reefs, to eventually become limestone and marble, eons hence.

With all these multitude of phenomena in which carbon dioxide is involved, where is the research that isolates in a quantifiable format, the human contribution? The answer appropriately brings to mind a quatrain from Omar Khayyam:

 XLVII 

When You and I behind the Veil are past, 

Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last, 

Which of our Coming and Departure heeds 

As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast. 

Notwithstanding the bloated egos of most politicians and some 

punditocrats, our physical universe as pertains to the planet earth, 

is still heliocentric. Much of what is going on that affects the 

temperature mostly is influenced by solar activity, or lack thereof.

Temperature fluctuations are well documented in the historical geologic record. They are somewhat loosely correlated with solar magnetic storms or sun spots (emphasis mine):

“At over 1.4 million kilometers (869,919 miles) wide, the Sun contains 99.86 percent of the mass of the entire solar system: well over a million Earths could fit inside its bulk. The total energy radiated by the Sun averages 383 billion trillion kilowatts, the equivalent of the energy generated by 100 billion tons of TNT exploding each and every second.”

Not even all the messianic powers of Barack Hussein Obama, reinforced by all the major bloviators in Capitol Hill (think Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Harry Reid, Chuck Schummer, etc.) has any prayer of reversing the influence of these staggering numbers.  So, where does the urgent call to action by the Global Warmists come from? Let’s take a look at another, rather longer, historical record (emphasis mine):

“Based on a combination of historical trends over the last several thousand years with the recent trends reasonably attributable to anthropogenic causes of temperature increase, it appears that some small additional increase might be reasonably possible (but not certain) by 2100, but most likely within a range < 0.4^OC, which would put it in the range of several warm periods in historical times that were particularly productive times.”

On a normal day in either winter or summer, when my HVAC system is engaged in the house, I suffer through a greater temperature variation going from the first floor couch to my computer room on the second floor. The answer is painfully obvious. The urgency is analogous to the avowed need to pass the stimulus bill of thousands of pages without being read, let alone analyzed by those who have to vote on it.

To propose to deploy inordinate resources for Global Warming is political folly worthy of celebration only in The United Nations. Let American taxpayers not have anything to do with it.

          Due faith and courage for your future course,

          Be best prepared to emulate with pride

          The brave defenders of your sacred shores.

          Allow not blunt your own awakening

          By rhetoric that politicians use

          To thwart your conscience into weakening

          The selfsame vehemence of vengeance's cause,

          The which would break the fetters of your soul

          And tear the mask of shameless tyranny.

          Default's the cross of falsehood bearing all

          Unreason for your seeming destiny

                   To drown, in surfeit, bliss of ignorance,

                   To crown, in glory, sweet irrelevance!!        

Having introduced this locution in an earlier article, I hasten to stake my claim as the one to have originated the phraseology. Thus, if and when it wiggles itself into an unheralded immortality in the hallowed pantheons of political discourse, there should be no mistaking on who first minted it.

Mistaken attribution may not lead to a distortion of history with momentous repercussions on the subsequent unfolding of events. But accuracy in reporting is important; otherwise injustice becomes an acceptable integral part to the praxis and history of scholarship. Becoming so would, ipso facto, defeat the very sine qua non of history.

For instance, the catchy "nattering nabobs of negativism" is often mistakenly attributed to Vice President Spiro Agnew just because he was the first on record to have uttered it in public. However, it was minted behind the scenes by then speechwriter William Safire, whose “On Language” column justified The New York Times being delivered to my doorsteps for several years.

The Agnew attribution may not have changed the course of history. I however deem it an injustice to Safire’s contribution to the national political discourse in particular, and to language scholarship in general.

I have come to the inevitable conclusion that President Obama’s ascendancy to the Oval Office was made possible mainly by a failure of the majority of the American electorate to recognize a multitude of patterns concerning Barack Hussein Obama, the individual, his modus operandi, and its cumulative impact to our national polity. These include, among others, his associations, his teleprompter enhanced eloquence, his penchant to obfuscate information obstinately, his flair for the dramatic and sensational, etc., in endless litany.

Granted, there were countless enablers along the way. But the genius of Obama lies in his gambit that taken as a litany, or a laundry list of seemingly harmless lapses of judgment, his modus operandi could not harm him politically. He was in effect counting on the statistical certitude that the majority of the electorate could not muster a gestalt perception of himself as a politician. Therefore Americans as the electorate are inherently incapable of knowing how harmful Obama is to America.

It is a certainty because the electorate as a collection of minds and individual conscience and consciousness, constitute a few drops of genius in a bucket of mediocrity. This is not to denigrate the intelligence of the American electorate. It is just to recognize the undeniable brutal reality that statistically, the nonchalant John and Jane Doe “cannot care less” amongst us do vastly outnumber the “you never can fool me” Einstein and Heisenberg amongst us.

To invoke the original far-reaching conclusive formulation of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in its entirety, "Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality. Trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster. Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster. It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived: understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses, qualities we admire and qualities we do not admire, competencies and incompetencies, assets and debits; that the success of each human life is not measured externally but internally; that all of the rewards we can confer on each other, the most precious is a place as a valued fellow citizen."

I deem it pointless to dwell again on the litany of sins. Aside from having peripherally dealt with it earlier elsewhere myself, the internet literature alone is replete with brilliant and incisive documentation. To single out the most notable few I recently found: Victor Davis Hanson has repeatedly analyzed Obama’s lapses in judgment. Thomas Sowell pointed out with unmistakable emphasis how ruinous Obama’s czaring of America is to the country. Joan Swirsky pushed the envelope even further by delving into who could possibly be calling the shots.

The enablers demand revisiting because they, too, constitute a pattern. It requires getting to the forest without being distracted by the trees. The so-called main stream media, exemplified to notoriety by the “tingling legs” of Chris Matthews, being blatantly functioning as a de facto propaganda outlet for Obama does not need any journalistic sourcing. That the “hope and change” mantra took political traction, thanks to the acolyte media has become a common knowledge.

It is however usually under-appreciated that the Clinton Paradigm ushered in with facility the arrival of the Obama Paradigm. The ultimate political insider Richard Morris architected triangulation as an effective tactical maneuver to attain the strategy of political survival. This enabled the Clinton presidency to recalibrate its bearings, to survive Newt’s “Contract for America” revolution and introduce a new standard for Presidential behavior. The Clinton era effectively corroded the nation’s sensibilities.

After the nation have accepted the mantra that the Lewinsky Affair was about “only just sex,” “everybody does it,” “does not amount to impeachable behavior,” the crush and burn methodology of Rahm Emanuel became as benign to the nation as a cub scouts fire drill. On his inauguration speech, Obama enjoined the nation to help him remake America and more than half of the nation gave him a standing ovation.

Little did the applauders suspect that what he had in mind was to convert America to be the leading debtor nation after a long tradition of being a reliable creditor nation. Little did the nation suspect that what he had in mind was to downsize the private sector, the very dependable engine of wealth creation, in order that union and government bureaucracies, become the undisputed purveyor of the perverted “golden rule,” that he who has the gold makes the rules.

As a matter of pedagogical illustration let us take the recently passed House Bill which is popularly deemed the PelosiCare version of ObamaCare.  I had neither the latitude nor the forbearance to deal with the thousands of pages of the full text. Hence, I searched the CRS summary page for the text strings “establish” and “prohibit.” The search returned ten hits for “establish” and five hits for “prohibit.”

Without going into a tedious and toilsome cost-benefit analysis of the implications of the search result, it is safe to conclude that at the very least, when PelosiCare becomes the law of the land, we are guaranteed five more constraints to what can be done, without fear of violating the law. Whether they be czars, commissions, committees, or panels of sorts, there shall be ten more units of bureaucracy to function as instruments of governance.

Let me remind, in passing, all those who breathed a sigh of relief on the report that Sen. Lindsey Graham pronounced the Bill a DOA (dead on arrival) in the Senate, to take the relief with the proverbial grain of salt. The venerable Senator issued a similar verdict on the Sotomayor confirmation. She was then the nominee. She is now Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Would calling Senator Graham’s office for an explanation serve any purpose? I suspect it would be an exercise in futility.

Finally, recognizing a paradigm is one thing; being cognizant of its enduring legacy is quite another. I deem it proper and fitting to apply the modifier repugnant to emphasize the reality that every facet of the Obama agenda has the guaranteed effect of undermining the principles which serve as the foundation of Americanism, the vaunted last best hope of mankind on earth.

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?