WTF?!?!?!?!

I read about this on Drudge the other morning and thought I had hallucinated it. I read the article a second time and sure enough, that's what it said. Because the news article didn't provide a link to verify the story I went to the source to find it and, lo and behold, he actually did say it.

"But the long-term deficit and debt that we have accumulated is unsustainable. We can't keep on just borrowing from China, or borrowing from other countries -- (applause) -- because part of it is, we have to pay for -- we have to pay interest on that debt. And that means that we're mortgaging our children's future with more and more debt, but what's also true is that at some point they're just going to get tired of buying our debt. And when that happens, we will really have to raise interest rates to be able to borrow, and that will raise interest rates for everybody -- on your auto loan, on your mortgage, on -- so it will have a dampening effect on the economy."

"A dampening effect"? Ladies and Gentlemen, it is now official; Barack Obama, the President of the United States of America, completely understands the negative impact the policies he has implemented during his first 100 days in office will have on our country.

And yet we march on.

Either this man is the greatest demagogue to ever occupy the White House or I have completely lost my fucking mind.

Hostis Humani Generis

Bret Stephens nails it in this article in The Wall Street Journal:

"Piracy, of course, is hardly the only form of barbarism at work today: There are the suicide bombers on Israeli buses, the stonings of Iranian women, and so on. But piracy is certainly the most primordial of them, and our collective inability to deal with it says much about how far we've regressed in the pursuit of what is mistakenly thought of as a more humane policy. A society that erases the memory of how it overcame barbarism in the past inevitably loses sight of the meaning of civilization, and the means of sustaining it."

I Am Sure Of The Road

Gerard Van der Leun offers his comment about the "performance art" coming out of Yale:

"As it did for the outlaws and junkies of my old green house, the road that leads forever down has nothing but pleasures along the way, and there are never any real social consequences for taking it. We don't do "consequences" in this country any more. Instead we reward those that discover, as Shvarts has, new and ever more deeply depraved depths.

And don't think this little episode of glorifying multiple spontaneous abortions is the end. I often think "Surely, we've reached the bottom." And just as often I am reminded, as I am by the depraved Ms. Shvarts, that there really is no bottom; that an ever increasingly part of our "culture" (What a laugh!) has fallen more than half in love with easeful death, and will have it.

This is the triumph of the lie -- the lie of the mind to the soul that we so deeply prefer above all other lies.

People have actually come to believe that labeling something "art" gives it a Get-Out-Of-Condemnation-Free card; that there really is some sort of immutable and unwritten social rule that if I say something is "art," then everyone who says what I am about is depraved, sick, and evil must simply back off. It matters little that time will consign the 'art' of Shvarts to the sewer of works that vanish. What matters is that in her little time here she has already managed to degrade the souls of others just a little more, just a little deeper."

Tipping Point

I have a great deal of sympathy for the students of Virginia Tech as well as the victims of other "gun-free zone" shootings. By now, I think it has become abundantly clear that evil does not follow the rules. And as a result, sometimes those well meaning rules put us at an even greater disadvantage.

I sense that this PostSecret is from a student who finds herself at a crossroads - between survivor and victim.
She has been exposed to a brutal reality and we can debate how best to keep it from happening again. But the fact remains that evil ignores the rules. I would submit that having a plan to exit every room you enter should not be viewed as paranoid. It should be viewed as practical common sense. Whether you choose to go to the next level by arming yourself is a personal decision and a decision many are not willing to make - so an exit strategy is a viable alternative. Then again, only worrying about "when the gunman comes" is not productive.

It may also be instructional to consult someone with vast experience and who better than the Marines. Their rules are fairly straight forward "Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet." Does this apply to civilians too? Only if you want to be the survivor and not the victim.

Spot On!

My brother-in-law sent me this and you absolutely must spend the next six minutes watching it. The man crams more common sense into this video than I thought possible.

Can you argue with anything he says?

The Belmont Club

I found this in the comments section over at The Belmont Club. It is just one example of the fine writing Wretchard often provides on his site:

"I saw a comment from an Egyptian a while back that Islamism would not be repudiated there until after it had triumphed.

This was the situation with respect to Communism too. It was an evil which seemed to have irreversibly convinced clerics, writers, artists -- all of them blinded by it's dark stardust -- that it was good. Nobody could see its evil except those who had lived under it. It was proof against verbal argument. Only experience could refute it. The price of admission to enlightenment was the willingness to pass through the Gulag.

And therefore many concluded, from the 1960s to the 1980s, that it was the inevitable wave of the future. All that is, except the men of faith. People like John Paul and Ronald Reagan shamed the intellectuals with their faith. They understood that not only was "the Shadow a passing thing" but that it could not stand up to the light.

When Ronald Reagan said, "tear down that wall" it was the hardest thing in the world to have said at the time. No intellectual could have uttered those words. It was a wholly unreasonable demand. I'm sure Ronald knew that it was unreasonable. But he didn't care; because though unreasonable it was true.

I think the War on Terror will be won by the side which understands that Muslims -- like the Russians -- are men. It will be won by those who know that ignorance, cruelty, obscurantism and death have no appeal to the best of men; that there is forever truth and high beauty beyond the power of evil to mar."

Evil

William F. Buckley has weighed in on the Virginia Tech shootings with the most insigtful comment I have yet seen (emphasis added):

"So you are left with the most violent shooting attack in American history committed by someone you don’t have an apparatus for successfully disqualifying or isolating.

We need, then, to return to the paradox: The most modern scientific methods aren’t refined enough to discover the most dangerous people in our society.

Pretty soon we’ll forget, not the horror of what happened, but the presumption that we can discover and attack evil, other than by the cultivation of biblical rules for human behavior."