Sitting In Obama's Chair

Armando Iannucci mocks the empty rhetoric of Democrat wannabe president Obama in a Guardian Unlimited article, "Barack Obama - I'm sure we've seen him somewhere before." I was meandering around Iowa at New Year's during the massive ad campaign to convince Iowans to caucus for him. Every fifteen minutes an ad ran for a Obama where he inspirationally called on his supporters to help him change the world. I'm little impressed by this grandiose speechifying. What part of the world exactly did he want to change first? Obama is a little light on details which makes me leery of him changing my world.

Ianucci notes that Obama spouts "... a rhetoric that soars and takes flight, but alights nowhere. It declares that together we can do anything, but doesn't mention any of the things we can do. It's a perpetual tickle in the nose that never turns into a sneeze. Trying to make sense of what he's saying is like trying to wrap mist."

Exactly.

Ianucci descends into cruel, but delightful, mockery when he considers how Obama might orate about a simple chair:

"This chair can take your weight. This chair can hold your buttocks, 15 inches in the air. This chair, this wooden chair, can support the ass of the white man or the crack of the black man, take the downward pressure of a Jewish girl's behind or the butt of a Buddhist adolescent, it can provide comfort for Muslim buns or Mormon backsides, the withered rump of an unemployed man in Nevada struggling to get his kids through high school and needful of a place to sit and think, the plump can of a single mum in Florida desperately struggling to make ends meet but who can no longer face standing, this chair, made from wood felled from the tallest redwood in Chicago, this chair, if only we believed in it, could sustain America's huddled arse."

Damned if I don't want to sit in Obama's chair after hearing that! If only Obama was president so there would be chairs for everyone!

Saddam By The Numbers

Confederate Yankee takes the new propaganda figures floated by the Left of the number of Iraqis killed in the Iraq war, downsized from the previously preposterous 600,000 to a merely absurd 150,000.

CY accepts the high 150,000 number and calculates that over the first three years of the war that the number covers that comes to about 126 deaths per day.

However, CY calculates that nearly 1.9 million people were killed by Saddam, including the unnecessary deaths in his thwarted wars of conquest in Iran and Kuwait. When that number is distributed over Saddam's 24 year reign, that comes to 235 people killed, on average, per day. And it wouldn't have stopped.

How To Behead

Budding Islamic poetess, Samina Malik, 23, an admirer of the beheader of Nick Berg, Zarqawi, recently published her new poem, "How To Behead," on Islam Online, an immensely popular website for Muslims:

Hold him
Tie the arms behind his back
And bandage his legs together
Just by the ankles
Blindfold the punk
So that he won't hesitate as much
For on seeing the sharp pointy knife
He'll begin to shake
And continuously scream like an eedyat
And jiggle like a jelly
Trust me–this will sure get you angry
It’s better to have at least two or three brothers by your side
Who can hold the fool
Because as soon as the warm sharp knife
Touches his naked flesh
He'll come to know what'll happen
It's not as messy or as hard as some may think,
It's all about the flow of the wrist.
No doubt that the punk will twitch and scream
But ignore the donkey's ass
And continue to slice back and forth
You'll feel the knife hit the wind and food pipe
But don't stop
Continue with all your might.
About now you should feel the knife vibrate,
You can feel the warm heat being given off,
But this is due to the friction being caused.

Samina Malik practices the Religion of Peace in the United Kingdom, where she worked in a Heathrow shop. Unfortunately, her poetry did not elicit the admiration of the British legal system who convicted her of possessing documents likely to be used for terrorism, such as the The Mujaheddin Poisoner’s Handbook, Encyclopaedia Jihad, How To Win In Hand To Hand Combat, How To Make Bombs, and Sniper Manual.

Her page on the social networking website Hi5 (something like Facebook) was introduced as evidence against her at trial, particularly the section titled "Favorite TV Shows":

“Watching videos by my Muslim brothers in Iraq, yep the beheading ones, watching video messages by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri and other videos which show massacres of the kaffirs.”

Malik began her literary career writing love poems at Villiers High School in Southall, Middlesex, then graduated to writing rap poems, emulating Tupac Shakur and 50 Cent, under the name "Lyrical Babe." She turned radical Muslim in 2004 and put on the hijab, changing her nom de plume to "Lyrical Terrorist."

When the cops raided her room, they found a scrap of paper on which she wrote:

"The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom, the need to go increases second by second."

They also found her poems, including this ode to killing infidels:

"Kafirs your time will come soon, and no one will save you from your doom."

I wonder how many lyrical terrorists walk among us.

Outsourcing Gone Wild

We've outsourced computer programming and help desks to India. Even your receptionist may telecommute from Bombay to receive visitors in the lobby via big screen TV. Now they've outsourced motherhood.

For about ten thousand bucks, Western women can hire a woman in the Indian town of Anand to be a surrogate mother for her child. Couples fly in to Dr. Nayna Patel's clinic at Kaival Hospital for one-stop service in commercial surrogacy, which was legalized in India in 2002. The prospective parents are paired with a surrogate mother, one of many who volunteer, some more than once. They sign a contract to pay the surrogate, cover all her medical bills, and the mother agrees to hand over her baby. The father donates sperm which is used to impregnate the surrogate mother in-vitro. Forty babies have been completed so far with fifty more in production.

The womb-for-rent business taps a vast labor pool willing to work cheap. Women are lined up to volunteer at the clinic. The surrogate mom gets about half the ten grand paid, which is fifteen years worth of salary as a $25 per month maid. That's enough to buy a house in Anand. They're counseled to treat their pregnancy as if "someone's child comes to stay at your place for nine months."

That ten grand for an Indian surrogate is way cheaper than the $80,000 an American surrogate mother would charge. The Indian mothers are not necessarily doing the work American mothers won't do. In some cases the American women customers have been rendered infertile by such afflictions as uterine cancer.

Dr. Patel defends her commercial surrogacy clinic: "There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her (own) family. ... If this female wants to help the other one ... why not allow that? ... It's not for any bad cause. They're helping one another to have a new life in this world."

While that may be a legitimate argument, it raises the spectre of Indian baby farms, like commercial turkey farms, mass-producing cut rate infants cheaper than good, honest American labor. I never thought I'd see the day when American mothers were threatened with layoffs only to be replaced by cheaper foreign contractors making discount babies overseas, stacking them deep and selling them cheap. Will we see American nurseries shuttered like the steel mills with new babies being FedExed in from abroad using just-in-time management techniques? This is worse than the invasion of cheap Japanese cars thirty years ago. It hits home hard. Hard! My friends, it will be a sad day for America when even Americans are no longer made in America.

Blue On Blue

Blue on blue is a military term for friendly fire, friendly blue forces firing on fellow blue forces instead of the hostile red forces. In the Democratic "blue" states, it seems the bluest candidate is drawing fire from those who once supported The Big Her. Andrew Sullivan prints an email from a good solid liberal reader telling of the surprising reaction to Hillary's victory in the New Hampshire primary:

Watched the NH returns with some friends last night, and something quite unexpected happened when the AP called it for Clinton -- inexplicable ANGER. I was surrounded by people in their early 30's, registered Democrats, receptive to the Clintons in the 90's, and I swear I thought someone was going to throw their wine glass at the tube during her 'victory' speech. We made a pact last that we all followed through on this morning -- logging on to BarackObama.com and donating $100 each to his campaign (this is the first time ANY of us has donated money to a campaign). Oh, and did I mention we're all New Yorkers?

Are lefties going for Obama as a vote against Hillary? Maybe. The liberals, aside from the true believers, have had enough of the Clintons. They don't like them. They really don't like them.

Camille Paglia explores why with a cutting analysis of Hillary's character, which she sees as formed by her "harsh, domineering father":

"Hillary's feckless, loutish brothers (who are kept at arm's length by her operation) took the brunt of Hugh Rodham's abuse in their genteel but claustrophobic home. Hillary is the barracuda who fought for dominance at their expense. Flashes of that ruthless old family drama have come out repeatedly in this campaign, as when Hillary could barely conceal her sneers at her fellow debaters onstage -- the wimpy, cringing brothers at the dinner table.

"Hillary's willingness to tolerate Bill's compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause -- which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.

"It's no coincidence that Hillary's staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary's rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. ...

"Contemptuous condescension seems to be Hillary's default mode with any male who criticizes her or stands in her way. It's a Nixonian reflex steeped in toxic gender bias. How will that play in the Muslim world? ...

"She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark ("Cue the tears!"). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary's real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House? Day one will just be more of the same."

Yet, Hillary continues her relentless march to the nomination, which she is likely to win. That presents we conservatives with the interesting prospect that the Democrats will nominate somebody to run for president whom they hate more than we do.