Happy Quatro de Cinco!

A fawning press tried to explain his gaffe away, but couldn't.  I guess his teleprompter isn't bilingual.

It seems that Eric Holder is back in the news

He put himself in the limelight with a bold assertion:

Eric Holder, the former attorney general of the United States, former political hack for boss man Barack Obama, penned a scathing piece in The Washington Post against today Attorney General William Barr, calling him, get this, hold the phone, grab a seat and take a breath — “nakedly partisan.”

Well allrightee, then.

The linked article does a great job skewering Holder's nonsense, but only briefly mentions what got Holder held in Contempt (the first Cabinet Secretary in the Republic's history to be so held) - the "Fast and Furious" gun running operation that got Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry shot.

Well, not everyone has forgotten Fast And Furious.  Ammo.com has a great overview of that whole fiasco that is worth a read.

Me, I think that this is a sign that the investigation is showing signs of closing in on Obama himself.  The noise that you hear is the Palace Guard is closing ranks to protect The One.  It's the kicked dog that yelps.

The mockery started really early in Obama's first administration

From ten years ago, only nine months into Obama's first term.  Funny that nobody makes up stuff like this about Donald Trump.

Originally posted October 22, 2019.

Obandoke, omae

Hey dude, feel your soul heal:

A contributor to a mailing list for Japanese-English translation that I read reports that the verb obamu is gaining currency on the Kyoto University campus. He writes, “It means something along the lines of, ‘to ignore anything which appears to make you likely to fail or (be) wrong, and blindly surge ahead (preferably chanting, “yes we can, yes we can”)’.” He adds that he heard a friend jokingly try to cheer someone up by saying, “obandoke, omae.” (オバんどけ、お前.) 

If I had to translate that on the fly, it would come out something like, “Lighten up and think positive, guy!”

There do seem to be different interpretations - as you'd expect for a neologism:

I found it as an entry dated 22 September in a collection of slang and modern usage put together by the Japanese Teachers’ Network in Kitakyushu. Here’s what they write: 

obamu: (v.) To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think “Yes we can, Yes we can,” and proceed with optimism using those facts as an inspiration (literally, as fuel). It is used to elicit success in a personal endeavor. One explanation holds that it is the opposite of kobamu. (拒む, which means to refuse, reject, or oppose).

They give the following example: 

ほら、何落ち込んでいるんだよ。オバめよ、オバめ。 

Or, “Hey, why are you so down in the dumps? Cheer up, cheer up!”

So to those who find themselves newly added to the unemployment rolls, or to one-time allies in Eastern Europe facing alone a newly resurgent Russian Bear, let me just say "Hey, why are you so down in the dumps?  Obandoke, omae!"

Ampontan is a very interesting blog that gives you inside baseubaru from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Hat tip: Don Surbur.

Trump continues to dismantle Obama's legacy

Obama got us into the Syrian quagmire - what motivated him is a mystery to me - but like The One's other "pen and phone" initiatives, The Donald is sweeping it into the dustbin of history.  I believe that this is a major reason for the hysterical reaction of most of the Press.

But this is a winning issue for Trump.  Why did Obama get us into Syria in the first place?  Nobody knows, nobody told us.  Why should we spend American blood and treasure to stay there now?  Nobody knows, nobody will tell us.

Okay then.  Oh, and this is really funny:

I called the Obama Administration 8 months into his first term

I posted this ten years ago, after the first few months of Obama's first term.  It's held up really well over the intervening ten years.  The Trump presidency casts  things into even sharper focus.  With the benefit of this "compare and contrast" I would add the following about Obama which pretty much kept him from accomplishing anything at all in 8 years:

• Obama never did anything except run for office.  Trump, while not a self-made millionaire/billionaire tried and failed at many things over his career.  He learned from those and used them to succeed at many more things.  Obama entirely lacked this perspective.

• Trump's goals are tangible, Obama's goals were ideological.  This lets Trump look to make deals with the other side, but prevented Obama from doing the same.  Obamacare passing on a party-line vote using reconciliation to get a half-done bill enacted after Ted Kennedy's Senate seat was won by a Republican tells you everything you need to know about Obama's desire to negotiate.

• It is impossible to see Obama's Iranian deal as anything other than Obama being ideologically determined to weaken this country and to the Iranians smelling weakness.  That part of the old post holds up really well.

• The Democratic Party looked to Obama to bring victory, and his administrations were a series of epic electoral disasters, at both the federal and state levels.  The analogy in the post is particularly solid.

But we hadn't seen either of these when I wrote this post.  However, both of these reinforce my assessment of Obama in October 2009.  Perhaps the only mistake I made in the post was offering too much of the benefit of the doubt to the man.  I put it down to incompetence, when it was the inability to work with others.

Originally posted October 2, 2009

Unready

The Battle of Maldon is probably the second oldest epic poem in the English language (only Beowulf is older). It tells the tale of Earl Britnoth, who fell in battle against the invading Vikings in 991 AD. The poem is so old that it is in Old English, the still Germanic root of our current language. J.R.R. Tolkein was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature, and published a translation of the poem.

A story this old only survives if it speaks to something deep in the soul of the people of the time. What spoke to them was how Britnoth's hearth companions - his bodyguard, his huskarls - fought to the death over their slain lord's body. Despite the victory, the Viking army was so mauled that it sailed for home. People remembered their sacrifice because it stood in stark contrast to the cowardly actions of the king.

The 970s were the high water mark of the Anglo-Saxon empire. King Edgar was overlord - Emperor, really - of lesser kings in a united Britain. The realm was powerful, feared, and so at peace.

Until Ethelred the Unready. Coming to the throne as a boy in 979 when his brother Edward was murdered, he had to rely on advisers to defend his kingdom during the 980s. It was a brutal era, and it didn't take long for predictors to start stalking the weakened kingdom.

Ethelred means "noble counsel", from the root raed (council, advice). The Anglo-Saxons were great lovers of puns, and it was gallows humor that gave his nickname: unraed - "no council" - from which we get Unready.

Ethelred! Ethelred!
Spent his royal life in bed;
one shoe off and one shoe on,
greatly loved by everyone.

Ethelred couldn't make up his mind - he couldn't formulate a plan and stick to it. And so he dithered: strong for a time until he met some minor difficulty, then weak when he could have pressed his enemies and won. They smelled blood, and what had started in the 970s as small plunder raids turned into all out invasions by Viking armies intent on inflicting the maximum damage possible.

They were after Danegeld - a ransom for them to go away. Rather than doing their own plundering, they got Ethelred to do it for them: collect taxes to pay them off. The problem, of course is well known.  Once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane. Ethelred found the price kept rising: 10,000 pounds (992), 16,000 (994), 24,000 (1002), 36,000 (1007), 48,000 (1012). At this point, the Vikings wanted the whole prize, and Ethelred had to flee to France the next year.

His cruelty - such as his order to kill all male Danes in his kingdom in 1002 - was something his people could tolerate; indeed, it was a cruel time. His fecklessness was a different story, because he couldn't provide what all leaders must: victory. He couldn't win. Coming to the throne too young, he never learned how to lead.

We're seeing this today, in the Oval Office. The Obama administration is long on promises, but short on victories. They rammed the "stimulus" through Congress (we can blame the Bush administration for the Bank bailout), but since then their agenda has stalled. Cap and Trade is languishing in committee, unlikely to pass. His Health care plan is a shambles, with five competing plans and a fragmented Democratic party that smells defeat in the 2010 elections. We see the echo of Ethelred here: no mandate to buy insurance (candidate Obama), a mandate that people must buy it (today), a required "public option" (April), no required public option (today).

His foreign policy is a disaster: retreat from the Russians (no missile defense in eastern Europe), no sanctions for Iran (even the French are disgusted), retreat from victory in Afghanistan, unable to convince the International Olympic Committee to pick Chicago.

The more people see him - at home and abroad - the less they fear him. Like Ethelred, he may have a ruthless streak, but in October - what should be the high water mark of his power and influence - he seems unready. He thinks too highly of himself but he doesn't know how to accomplish his goals, he keeps changing his goals, his enemies are increasingly confident, and he surrounds himself with unraed - bad council.

We've seen this story before, and it doesn't end well.  
þa wearð afeallen þæs folces ealdor, Æþelredes eorl;

Then was the folk’s prince fallen, Ethelred’s earl. All saw there, his hearth-companions, that their lord lay. Then valiant thegns went forth there,
men undaunted eagerly hastened: they all wished, then, one of two things— to leave life or loved one avenge.

Britnoth's headless body was brought back to Ely Cathedral, where he lies to this day. On his tomb is carved BRITHNOTHUS, NORTHUMBRIORUM DUX, PRAELIO CAESUS A DANIS A.D. DCCCCXCI. "Britnoth, Duke of Northumbria. He fell in battle against the Danes in the Year of Our Lord 991".

Sacrificed by a feckless leader. May we fare better.

LOL

Seen on reddit/r/The_Donald:

This is funny enough for me to dig up my old post tag from the Obama years ...

Ooh, snap!

Seen on Gab.ai.

Obama to resign?

He denies the demand to step down:

Flexing its new-found political muscle in ousting its co-founder Brendan Eich for having been "anti-gay-marriage," Mozilla has upped the ante by demanding that President Obama resign for having raised funds in 2008 and 2010 for candidates known to oppose gay marriage and for having said in his own campaign in 2008 that "marriage is only between a man and a woman."

I hear that he's going to go on TV to address the Nation.

Man, this is all getting confusing ...

Vladimir Putin's March Madness picks

Looks about right.

Ah, that "Reset" button

Seems to have worked rather too well.  Nyet, tovarich?



Seems that reset was an overload ...

Knock knock

Who's there?

Idiot ...

This meme looks like it may have legs.

(via)

The aching growing of the Progressive Left

When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

- John Steinbeck, East Of Eden

Things I did not know

I did not know that President Obama's pajama boy has an imaginary Canadian girlfriend.  Snerk.

Of course, there's a Hello Kitty tie in.  I see this as the hand of your Gormogons in action. I mean, a lot of Obamacare is pretty well explained if you posit a time traveling robot, a blood soaked Autocrat, and a orbiting sun control satellite controlled by Confucius.  I mean, it all suddenly makes sense now, doesn't it?

Let the mockery begin

Now that the Democrats in Congress voted for Obamacare, we're finding out what's in it.  Hilarity ensues.

There are a bunch more here.

Obamacare for your car

I laughed and laughed.

Actually, this kind of makes sense

Mocking the Lightbringer - TheOnesDay® No. 23

It's Wednesday, time to mock the Left's Plasticine Jesus.  This pretty well sums it up after the last week:

Remember Alinsky's rules, folks.  Mockery is a powerful weapon to undermine the egos of the too self-satisfied.  And make them live up to their own ideals - I plan on showing this to lefties who were all about "Smart Diplomacy" 5 years ago.

And if I were evil, for added snark I might ask whether the placement of Obama's hand relates to the "Reset" (actually mistranslated as "Overload") button.  But that would be really evil.  I'd be ashamed of myself if I ever did anything like that.

Wow. That's pretty brutal.

I'm not saying that it's wrong, just that it's brutal.

Someone ask him how you change the oil on that danged thing.

Why can't America be more like Europe?

"Eco-Friendly" German to open one new coal fired electricity generation plant a month in 2013.

If only our unilateralist cowboy President would listen to our European allies ...

Smartest. President. Ever.

But ZOMGSarahPalinissodumb!!!1!eleventy!!!

(via)