• Hillary Clinton,  Mark Steyn,  Michael Ramirez

    Hillary Clinton Lip-Synced More than Beyoncé

     

    Read all of Mark Steyn’s excellent post on Hillary Clinton and Benghazi.

    A couple of days later, it fell to the 45th president-in-waiting to encapsulate the ethos of the age in one deft sound bite: What difference does it make? Hillary Clinton’s instantly famous riposte at the Benghazi hearings is such a perfect distillation that it surely deserves to be the national motto of the United States. They should put it on Paul Krugman’s trillion-dollar coin, and in the presidential oath: “Do you solemnly swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?” “Sure. What difference, at this point, does it make?” Well, it’s the difference between cool and reality – and, as Hillary’s confident reply appeared to suggest, and the delirious media reception of it confirmed, reality comes a poor second in the Obama era. The presumption of conservatives has always been that, one day, cold, dull reality would pierce the klieg-light sheen of Obama’s glamour. Indeed, that was the premise of Mitt Romney’s reductive presidential campaign. But, just as Beyoncé will always be way cooler than some no-name operatic soprano or a male voice choir, so Obama will always be cooler than a bunch of squaresville yawneroos boring on about jobs and debt and entitlement reform. Hillary’s cocksure sneer to Sen. Johnson of Wisconsin made it explicit. At a basic level, the “difference” is the difference between truth and falsity, but the subtext took it a stage further: no matter what actually happened that night in Benghazi, you poor sad loser Republicans will never succeed in imposing that reality and its consequences on this administration.

  • Mark Steyn,  Pinboard Links,  The Sunday Flap

    The Sunday Flap: October 30, 2011

    These are my links and comments for  Sunday, October 30th:

  • Day By Day,  Mark Steyn

    Day By Day August 7, 2011 – In Vino Veritas

    Day By Day by Chris Muir

    Chris, the problem is most Americans are tired of all of the BS and have withdrawn from the political process. Most voters mire than likely could not pass an American Civics test.

    And, look what has happened. America is disappearing as we know it.

    Tomorrow Mark Steyn’s new book will be available, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon.

    Buy the book, laugh and get ready for the future, if Americans don’t take back their country from the LEFT.

    By the way, I am still in Las Vegas on vacation, won my first small poker tournament, ran about 12 miles today and will blog when I have the time.

    I have friends arriving in Las Vegas tomorrow afternoon and the Epic Poker League Main Event starts Tuesday AM. So, regular blogging won’t occur until next week.

    Previous:

    The Day By Day Archive

  • American Debt Linit,  American Economy,  Barack Obama,  Mark Steyn

    Mark Steyn: Planless Dems

    Mark Steyn

    In this post, Mark Steyn talks about the austerity budgets in Europe and what may be coming very soon to the United States, if the Congress and President Obama do not get serious about government spending.

    It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street — and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more — and nobody’s downgrading them.

    Well, don’t worry. It’s coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional.

    In the debt-ridden treasuries of Europe, they’re talking “austerity.” In the debt-ridden treasury of Washington, they’re talking about more spending (Kathleen Sebelius is touting new women’s health programs to be made available “without cost.”) At the risk (in Samuel Johnson’s words) of settling the precedence between a louse and a flea, I think Europe’s political discourse is marginally less deranged than ours. The president is said to be “the adult in the room” because he is reported to be in favor of raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.

    By the year 2036.

    If something is not done soon, the financial markets will react for the Congress and the President.

    It won’t be pretty and all the POLS will be able to do will be to try to blame the other side.

    Why can’t they simply pass a short term compromise and have the great debate in 2012?

    Or, does President Obama relish a financial crisis for re-election demagoguery?

  • American Debt Linit,  Mark Steyn

    Mark Steyn: No Bargaining with Barack Obluffer

    Mark Steyn

    Another masterful piece from Mark Steyn.

    There is something surreal and unnerving about the so-called “debt ceiling” negotiations staggering on in Washington. In the real world, negotiations on an increase in one’s debt limit are conducted between the borrower and the lender. Only in Washington is a debt increase negotiated between two groups of borrowers.

    Actually, it’s more accurate to call them two groups of spenders. On the one side are Obama and the Democrats, who in a negotiation supposedly intended to reduce American indebtedness are (surprise!) proposing massive increasing in spending (an extra $33 billion for Pell Grants, for example). The Democrat position is: You guys always complain that we spend spend spend like there’s (what’s the phrase again?) no tomorrow, so be grateful that we’re now proposing to spend spend spend spend like there’s no this evening.

    On the other side are the Republicans, who are the closest anybody gets to representing, albeit somewhat tentatively and less than fullthroatedly, the actual borrowers – that’s to say, you and your children and grandchildren. But in essence the spenders are negotiating among themselves how much debt they’re going to burden you with. It’s like you and your missus announcing you’ve set your new credit limit at $1.3 million, and then telling the bank to send demands for repayment to Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s kindergartner next door.

    Nothing good is going to come from these ludicrously protracted negotiations over laughably meaningless accounting sleights-of-hand scheduled to kick in circa 2020. All the charade does is confirm to prudent analysts around the world that the depraved ruling class of the United States cannot self-correct, and, indeed, has no desire to.

    Read all of the piece.

    The charade had better self-correct or we will be no more.

    The time is NOW.

  • Mark Steyn

    Mark Steyn: Obama’s Road to Nowhere

    Mark Steyn
    Obama’s Road to Nowhere – This is Main Street, Obamaville: All bumps, no road.
    The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.

    In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels.

    The oceans will do just fine. It’s America that’s drowning.
    What a great piece, as always from Mark Steyn – read it all.
  • Anthony Weiner,  Mark Steyn,  Michael Ramirez

    Mark Steyn: Weiner Helping Junk the Country

    Mark Steyn

    This is hilarious – so read it all.

    After the tumult of the First World War, noted Winston Churchill, only the intractability of the Irish Question had emerged unscathed:

    “Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed,” he told the House of Commons. “But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again.”

    And so it goes after another tumultuous week in American politics. Nearly a third of homeowners are “underwater” – that’s to say, they owe more on their mortgages than the property is worth. Private-sector job growth has all but vanished. The House of Representatives voted not to raise the debt ceiling.

    But as the debt ceiling subsides – or, at any rate, stays put – we see the dreary steeple of Anthony Weiner emerging from his Twitpic crotch shot.

    For the benefit of the few remaining American coeds Rep. Weiner isn’t following on Twitter, the congressman’s initial position when his groin Tweet went viral was that his Twitter had been hacked. Could happen to anyone. From last Thursday’s edition of The Daily Telegraph:

    “British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaida online magazine and replaced bomb making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes.”

  • Barack Obama,  Democrats,  Mark Steyn

    Mark Steyn: Losing the Future

    Mark Steyn

    Vegas is no longer the world’s biggest gambling resort; America is.

    After the revelations that the $38.5 billion 2011 budget cut will in reality either cut a mere $352 million from the 2011 budget or, in fact, increase it by $3 billion, it might be easier just to build a replica White House, Capitol, and Congressional Budget Office at the new Beltway Casino next to Caesar’s Palace. Vegas is no longer the world’s biggest gambling resort; America is. Barack Obama says we need to “win the future,” and one more roll of the dice should do it: a trillion dollars of chips on the stimulus came up empty but let’s pile another couple trillion on Obamacare, and “high-speed rail,” and “green jobs,” and “broadband access” . . . And all the while Wayne Newton is singing “Danke Schoen” in Chinese. But don’t worry, we’re not just throwing our money away. We’re playing to a system! The president calls it “investing in the future.”

    How do you “invest in the future”? By borrowing $188 million every hour. That’s what the government of the United States is doing. It’s spending one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have every hour of every day of every week — all for your future!

    Read all of Mark Steyn’s excellent piece.

    We have come to the breaking point, fellow Americans, and it is time to take back American from the Obama Democrats.