I just read an essay by Dennis Prager which comes very close to saying what I have thought for a long, long time. 

Perhaps it doesn't go far enough - Barack Obama by no means has a monopoly on the sort of mealy-mouthed arrogance that allows him to assume that we should naturally unite behind HIM.   Pat Robertson had an even larger dose of "I love Me-ism" during HIS Presidential campaign, and Huckabee's self-love is both strong and apparently sincere, as is John McCain's, Al Gore's, Rudy Giuliani's and (of course) Hillary Clinton's. 

It's been said half jokingly before, but I am strongly of the opinion that the only person fit to be President of the United States is someone who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the office, and who will demand as part of the deal that he gets to only serve one term for good behavior. 

When you consider the crap that someone has to go through to be elected President of the United States of America, the natural assumption is that anyone who WILLINGLY goes through enough of it to actually be elected is either a crook or one of those unfortunates who pays women lots of money to tie him up and beat him with whips during his off time.

But the scary, scary thing is that the process of running for President is such a nail-pulling pain that the winner of a Presidential election logically must be a control freak of such immense and frightening proportions that he or she NEEDS to have the country all thinking his or her thoughts, surrendering their will to him or her, abdicating what is supposed to be the sovereign status of the American citizen to their newly elected Chief Executive.  

It actually makes sense that after a full Presidential campaign, the winner of the election becomes the kind of self-infatuated psycho which Martin Sheen played so adroitly for two "terms" of the TV series "The West Wing."  After all the talking out of both sides of one's mouth, the surrender of one's integrity to the siren call of the smoky back room, the immolation of one's family life on the altar of political primacy, perhaps Presidents feel as though we should all line up and smooch their fat behinds.

And nothing convinces me more that perhaps it's time we ditched our two-party, directly-elected Presidential system in favor of Parliamentary rule as Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand know it.  They're not perfect by any means, either, but the illusion that one party has all the answers and it makes sense to directly elect a leader based on the amount of crap he or she can throw against the wall and make stick under which we presently suffer is just no good. 

No one man or woman has a vision that is valid for three hundred-plus million people.  It's time we tried to create a system in which the leader rises to the top from LISTENING to the voters, not by TALKING to them incessantly - and often saying contradictory things from one day to the next.  In Britain, no one party has a firm enough lock on power to be able to effectively ignore the voters, the way both major parties are able to here in America (as long as they keep the extremist party faithful happy at convention time).

But let's read what Prager has to say: 

________________________________________ 

"Obama's calls for unity are not what they seem

Dennis Prager

We are repeatedly told by the news media that there is a deep, almost
palpable, yearning among Americans for unity. And Sen. Barack Obama's
repeated and eloquent claims to being able to unite Americans are a major
reason for his present, and very possibly eventual, success in his quest for
his party's nomination for president of the United States.
I do not doubt Mr. Obama's sincerity. The wish that all people be united is
an elemental human desire. But there are two major problems with it. First,
it is not truly honest. Second, it is childish.

First is its dishonesty. Virtually all calls for unity - whether national,
international or religious (as in calls for Christian unity) - do not tell
the whole truth.

If those who call for unity told the whole truth, this is what they would
say: "I want everyone to unite - behind my values. I want everyone who
disagrees with me to change the way they think so that we can all be united.

I myself have no plans to change my positions on any important issues in
order to achieve this unity. So in order to achieve it, I assume that all of
you who differ with me will change your views and values and embrace mine."

Take any important issue that divides Americans and explain exactly how
unity can be achieved without one of the two sides giving up its values and
embracing the other side's values.

Barack Obama wants American troops out of Iraq now. About half of America believes that American troops abandoning Iraq will lead to making that country the world's center of terror and to the greatest victory thus far
for the greatest organized evil in the world today. How, then, will Mr.
Obama achieve unity on Iraq?

Mr. Obama believes in repealing the tax cuts enacted by the Bush
administration. How will he achieve unity on that? Many of us believe that
re-raising taxes will bring on a recession.

And what is the "unity" position on same-sex marriage? Either one supports it or one supports keeping marriage defined as the legal union of a man and a woman. The only way to unite Americans on this issue - and I don't know what is more seminal to civilization than its definition of marriage - is to convince all, or at least most, Americans to embrace one of the two positions.

It is fascinating how little introspection Sen. Obama's "unity" supporters
engage in - they are usually the very people who most forcefully advocate
multiculturalism, who scoff at the idea of an American melting pot and who
oppose something as basic to American unity as declaring English the
country's national language.

Their advocacy of multiculturalism and opposition to declaring English the
national language are proof that the calls of the left-wing supporters of
Barack Obama for American unity are one or more of three things: 1. A call
for all Americans to agree with them and become fellow leftists. 2. A
nice-sounding cover for their left-wing policies. 3. A way to further their
demonizing of the Bush administration as "divisive."

In case the reader should dismiss these observations about calls for unity
as political partisanship, let me make clear that they are equally
applicable to calls for religious unity. For example, one regularly hears
calls by many Christians for Christian unity. But how exactly will this be
achieved? Will Catholics stop believing in their catechism and embrace
Protestant theology, or will Protestants begin to regard the pope Christ's
vicar on earth?

Ironically, one reason America became the freest country in the world was
thanks to its being founded by disunited Christians - all those Protestant
denominations had to figure out a way to live together and make a nation.

Given what Sen. Obama's calls for unity really mean - let's all go left - it
is no wonder he and his calls for unity are enthusiastically embraced by the
liberal media.

For nearly eight years the media and Democrats have labeled President Bush's policies "divisive" simply because they don't agree with them. They are not one whit more divisive than Sen. Obama's positions. A question for
Democrats, the media and other Obama supporters: How exactly are Mr. Obama's left-wing political positions any less "divisive" than President Bush's right-wing positions?

Second, the craving for unity is frequently childish. As we mature we
understand that decent people will differ politically and theologically. The
mature yearn for unity only on a handful of fundamental values, such as: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Beyond such basics, we yearn for civil discourse and tolerance, not unity.

The next time Sen. Obama speaks with his usual passion and eloquence about his desire to unite Americans, someone must ask him two questions: Why are your left-wing positions any less divisive than President Bush's right-wing positions? And if you are so committed to uniting Americans, why did you vote against declaring English our national, i.e., our unifying, language?  Without compelling answers, Sen. Obama's calls for American unity are no more than calls to unite around his politics and him."

__________________

The only point where I disagree with Mr. Prager is, as I said earlier, that Barack Obama isn't the only man in the Presidential race playing this game - they all do to some extent or another.   Huckabee may actually be worse about it than Obama is.  

And if our choice boils down to a self-infatuated left-wing pseudointellectual populist or a self-infatuated right-wing chiliast back room deal cutter who turns dope pushers and rapists loose if they thump their Bibles convincingly enough, that's a dismal choice indeed. 

I first threatened to emigrate to another country if Jimmy Carter were elected, and of course, I didn't put my walking shoes where my mouth was when it came down to hard cases.  But I'm actually practicing ending my sentences with "eh?" now and sampling Molsons (the alcohol-free kind because my liver won't put up with the real thing anymore).  All it'll take is for either of those yo-yo's, or Clinton (please, God, no, not her!) to be elected President.

I guess that I support Fred Dalton Thompson above all the others because he's already demonstrated in the US Senate when he served there between stints in Hollywood that he knows how to listen and how to seek compromises.  If any of the current crop of candidates knows how to listen more than he talks, it's probably Fred Thompson.  He certainly seems to view the office of the Presidency as more of a job and less of a personal entitlement.

Besides, the last time we went with a movie actor as President, it didn't turn out very badly at all.  Won the Cold War, cured the national case of mullygrubs we contracted from Mr. Peanut - yep, going over to the Screen Actors Guild for a President (again) isn't the worst thing we could do by a long shot.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:10 AM MST

Updated: Sunday, 10 February 2008 11:30 AM MST

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Mood:  incredulous

Useful Phrases for the World of 2015:

That kick in the ribs was wonderful, Sir, may I have another?

That's my last kidney. Please consider not harvesting it.

My home is your home - shall we sign the deed now, Comrade?

Of course I'm not resentful because you nuked the West Coast! At least you got Hollywood.

I have just added a new topic category, "Dumb Bipartisan Tricks," to this blog because the White House has really done something dumb, had bipartisan support for it on the Hill, and I just found out about it. I'd feel worse about missing this story when it might have made a difference (a blogger storm during the confirmation hearings, for example), but I made the mistake of thinking that something this heavy would have made the major network news shows. It didn't, that I can tell.

Consider Elaine Chao for a minute. Her father, James S.C. Chao, is chairman and chief executive of Foremost Maritime Corporation of New York. He ships goods to China and buys ships from the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Mr. Chao and Chinese President Jiang Zemin were college classmates in Shanghai and have kept in touch ever since. Chao, his daughter Elaine Chao and her husband, Senator Mitch McConnell visited China and met with Jiang in 1994. In 1995, Chao returned to receive an honorary professorship and presidency at the Shanghai Maritime College, and his daughter went with him then, too.

Now, if you were President of the United States, charged by law and obliged under oath to a God with Whom you're supposedly on good terms with defending the Constitution and the People of our country, and you were choosing someone to be Secretary of Labor - to protect American workers and defend them from unfair competition from overseas, and really do it, not just go through the motions - and along with the President, defend the Constitution and the people of the United States, would you pick this lady?

I have never as much as Emailed, much less met Elaine Chao. I confess that I don't know what she would do if placed in a position where the business and political interests of her father and her husband were to conflict with the good of the workers of the United States and its people in general.

The problem is, it doesn't look good, folks. The People's Republic of China and the United States of America now have interlocking directorates.

Chao has real conflicts of interest and has used her political contacts to get an analyst at the Heritage Foundation (which used to be a conservative think tank, but should be registered as an agent of the Chinese government) fired for saying that the United States should hold up on approval of enhanced trade relations with China until national security issues relating to China were resolved.

Why? Apart from this guy's reports being a large part of the supporting documentation for the Cox Report (which, you may recall, blew the covers all the way off the stories about Chinese espionage at Los Alamos, the transfer of ICBM design information by Loral Hughes to the Chinese Army, and the sale of supercomputers with nuclear weapons design information still on them to China).

It must be hard to see a family friend like Jiang Zemin have his most favored nation trading status and World Trade Organization membership held up because he turns out to have authorized massive spying against our country - spying which had as its object improving Red China's ability to kill Americans. But she got her revenge on that Heritage analyst. And now she's in the Cabinet.

It could also have something to do with Heritage donor Hank Greenberg (who gave Heritage $180,000 in 1998 and at least $100,000 a year for more than a decade) communicating his displeasure with the analyst's reports. Greenberg does a lot of business with Chinese clients through his insurance company AIG (American International Group), and presumably would have to keep Chinese regulators happy to continue doing so. Greenberg and AIG have also been good to Chao's husband Mitch McConnell's Senate campaigns through their PAC. AIG also does a lot of business with Henry Kissinger, who (through Kissinger Associates) has been a tireless hired gun for American companies wanting better access to Chinese markets, and for huge Communist dictatorships wanting better control of Congress. Conversely, Greenberg, who has been a staunch lobbyist for China on the Hill through his US-China Business Council in the past, is rumored to be a prime source of funding for Kissinger's firm.

I don't know who I'm angrier with:

- Bush for nominating someone with a number of clear conflicts of interest (as Secretary of Labor, Chao automatically gets a Top Secret clearance, something someone with her family connections might otherwise have trouble getting, being family friends with the leader of a major military threat to the United States whose generals have threatened to drop a nuclear weapon on Los Angeles if we defend Taiwan independence) or

- Congress for rolling over on her nomination, or

- the mainstream media, who should have been squawking about this incredibly bone-headed move from the word go, drumming the facts I have just outlined into our brains, as they tried to do with those faked Air National Guard memos.

What gives? Bush puts a family friend of someone who had his finger on the button controlling a nuke aimed at L.A. (among other places he is sworn to defend) in the Cabinet and Congress and Big Media give him a pass on it?  I had to get this information from World Net Daily, which is very far from being part of the mainstream media.

Weeeellll, part of the problem is that China has been very bipartisan in how it doles out political contributions.

We all know about how good the Chinese Army (whose Second Artillery Division would be in charge of vaporizing the greater Los Angeles area in the event that we decide to make the Taiwan War a contest) were to Clinton and Gore's campaigns. We aren't as hip to the fact that (for example) Senator Feinstein's (D, Calif) husband is on the board of COSCO [The Chinese Army's Chinese Overseas Shipping Corporation] and has other investments in China. Because of this, Feinstein, who is energetic in drawing attention to Bush foibles that pale in comparison to this, has remained mum. By contrast, the late Paul Wellstone, Senator, renowned liberal Democrat and all-around good guy apparently either didn't drink from the Chinese cup or didn't let it affect him, because he was one of the people who was instrumental in getting Chinese labor camp survivor Harry Wu before Congressional subcommittees to testify about the people we were about to give "normal" trade status to.

I think if it were any other country in the world, except possibly for Russia, the very fact that they have what can only be described as a gulag more horrible than the Soviets' - Stalin, at least, never made side money by harvesting his prisoners organs - would have derailed their chances of getting any trade status with us. Instead, we (and I'm just as guilty here as anyone else) buy tons and tons of things which, for all we know, may have been made by those very prisoners while they wait to die from hunger, disease, or... one organ harvest too many. If Wal-Mart were a sovereign state, they would be China's fifth largest trading partner. How many other Senators, Republican, Democrat or Jim Jeffords, are in China's deep pocket? And why aren't we, the voters aware of this?

When Big Media wants us to know something, we bloody well know it - not only through the news, but what is loosely called the entertainment media. David Letterman has taken the at times lonely position (say, during the Oscars or when the weather's nice in Malibu) of Bush-Hater of the Night, while Jay Leno (who at least is somewhat bipartisan with his jokes and has Dennis Miller over to do stand-up dissections of the Left) also manages to get the Democratic party line out there in his jokes - but they're not plausible jabs at Bush, just the sort of stuff you might expect to get if you're mildly dyslexic or whatever the President is.

Why don't we know about the hijacking of our Government by the Communist Chinese from these guys, or one of the always politically-aware prime-time shows, like Law & Order, whose screenwriters managed to call the President a liar on WMD in Iraq in dialogue between the detectives on the show, or ER, which basically insinuates the Democratic Party's platform into their plot a plank at a time? Oops, I forgot - their advertisers might want to sell stuff in China, too. Isn't the subornment of BOTH major political parties in this country by a foreign power that spies on us intensively, has forced an aircraft of ours down over international waters, and declared its readiness to use nuclear weapons on American cities, AND is in the midst of the greatest military build-up (for any country) since World War II a story for the big mainstream media?

Why haven't even Frontline or Bill Moyers' show NOW run features on this? I always thought the virtue of PBS was its independence from corporate funding (that's baloney - they depend on money from corporate charitable foundations, which means a corporation - ExxonMobil, for example - offended by something they saw on PBS would have to make a phone call to someone else who would make a phone call to PBS.... ) but it seems that even they don't see this elephant pacing around the room - which, again, says loads about the priorities of the foundations which prop PBS up.

The Eleventh Commandment of PBS must be "Thou shalt not make a liberal Democrat look like a unprincipled crook." Especially Senator Hillary Clinton (D, NY), who sits on Wal-Mart's board of directors and whose husband Bill Clinton made sure the Chinese got up-to-date nuclear weapon and ICBM designs in the 1990s, or Senator Barbara Boxer, (D, CA) or Senator Diane Feinstein, both of whom have gotten much more than fortune cookies from the People's Republic of China.

I guess THAT'S where Hitler and Tojo screwed up - they didn't buy the major political parties and the press of England and America off with trade and bribes while they were re-arming for Round Two. The Nazis could have pretty well ridden the Channel ferries into England unopposed. Meanwhile, the Western Continental Divide might have had new significance as the postwar border between Japan and Nazi Germany.

But Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, William Shirer and Andy Rooney wouldn't have been able to say anything to the people had they wanted to, because their bosses, or their bosses' bosses would have been afraid of offending those famous contributors to both parties' political campaigns, Krupp and Mitsubishi.

How's your Chinese, everybody?

WILL SOMEONE INVOLVED WITH THIS MESS GROW A CONSCIENCE, PLEASE? OR A BRAIN, A BRAIN WOULD BE NICE, TOO.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 6:15 PM MDT

Updated: Saturday, 9 September 2006 3:18 PM MDT

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