...Obama’s empty, aloof, wasteful ten-minute remarks — during which he swiveled his head from side to side and seemed unable to look into the camera and meet the “eyes of the people”, nattered on about “coming weeks” and committees and November, and was unable or unwilling to break from his standard, overused script — the president proved that a vote of “no confidence” is just. The sharp-dressed politico who Hillary Clinton once derided as receiving too much glory because “he gave a good speech, once,” exposed himself as an aching void of a man, bereft of ideas or energy; a lonely planet, spinning as it fades away.
I say this as someone who opposed his presidency — for precisely the weaknesses that some of his supporters are finally admitting have always existed — but who wants the best for her country, and frankly for The American President. I am concerned about Obama. The guy I saw yesterday seemed barely in control of himself — he seemed angry, frustrated and terribly frightened — like a lightweight who had been thrown into a heavy-weight competition and knew he’d survived this long on luck and kindness, and was anticipating the bell which, this time, would force him to either fully engage or get knocked out.
Hence the deepening of his bunker mentality. The longer he can stay in the corner, huddled with his team, the longer he puts off facing that bell.
Well, the bell is striking. He’s going to have to either pull up his trunks and engage, or we all go down for the count. Forfeiting is not the option of champions.
Yesterday, President Obama took to the podium and proclaimed, . . . we have always been and always will be a triple-A country, and it sounded like empty sentimentalism from a man at a loss for words and for meaningthe kind of helpless, grasping-at-straws thing you say to a defeated friend you are trying to buck up, even as you know you lack the answers, or the resources, to offer either consolation or solutions....
Posted by: Mike ||
08/10/2011 06:48 ||
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#1
He is hoping for a recovery in early 2012. Otherwise...there is no otherwise.
#2
This article is spot on. Some may recall I have used the expression "deepening of his bunker mentality" or simply bunker mentality. Now is the time he can be the most difficult. Anything can happen in his current state of mind. Medical,mental but assuredly denial. Best thing he can do is take several vacations.
#3
His sole motivation is winning re-election. He has been campaigning since the 2008 inauguration. He has not done anything else. An empty suit with no experience at really doing anything. Foisted on us by a very left-wing MSM and groups who wanted their share of the pickings. We are about picked clean.
#6
He has been campaigning since the 2008 inauguration. He has not done anything else.
John, look at his history. He won a nobel prize without doing anything else. He got through law school + law review without doing anything else. He got through the senates (Ill & US) without doing anything else.
[Dawn] Independence is one of those words that is used excessively with the awful price that its meaning becomes more diluted and more meaningless. Pakistain is going to celebrate its Independence Day again on August 14th yet we have become fixated about 'Independence' meaning military might and consolidating our image as a nuclear power. The discussion about Independence should be about individual rights, human dignity and our common humanity -- it should be about our struggles, our efforts and our aspirations for the future. "Independence" as used by the writer, I think, is referring to national independence -- no longer being a colonial possession. Individual rights, human dignity, and common humanity are personal things, existing at a personal level unassociated with national independence, existing whether the country is independent or not.
But every year when we speak about Independence, we as a nation collectively practice a modern day form of slavery. This searing contradiction is nothing short of hypocrisy -- while we speak about 'Independence', in households across Pakistain domestic servants are exploited and abused. Theirs is a suffering that is not talked about, because it isn't 'fashionable' or it doesn't generate enough business for the media machine. But this is our collective shame -- the way in which we treat our fellow citizens demonstrates that we have not yet fully grasped the meaning of Independence or the vision that Muhammad Ali Jinnah had. Perhaps he's discussing individual liberty, which he's assuming to flow from national independence. Pakistain's culture didn't change with independence, and in fact it was allowed to develop into along its traditional lines quite unfettered by the more theoretically gentle influences of the colonial oppressor.
Countless stories of horror, terror and suffering can be heard, seen and read about in our Republic where domestic servants are treated little better than cattle. Women especially have it much worse -- their wages are lower than men and they are more prone to be abused by their employers. Children are employed, yet the rich who employ them don't even bother to enroll them in schools while they send their children to the best institutions of the country. That's purely cultural. Human life in Pakistain is cheap and easily replaced.
The shocking thing is that this is an area where each of us can make an individual difference yet we are oblivious to it. Here is an area where real liberation can be experienced yet our silence speaks volumes about our hypocrisy. But underlying this obscene phenomenon is a deeper question -- do we not consider domestic servants as human? Do we consider them as nothing but slaves who should do our bidding unquestioned and who should be denied opportunities for education that can allow social mobility?
Women are exploited in the most sinister ways, children are robbed of their innocence and the men vanquished and reduced -- these are the effects of domestic servitude as practiced in Pakistain. If Independence means to be liberated from oppression then why do we collectively oppress this vulnerable section of society? Domestic servants have families yet there is no emotional empathy, no human connection or sense of responsibility shown by their rich masters.
This again suggests a frightening lack of moral conscience and yet again poses serious questions about the ethical mindset of modern day Pakistain. There are of course stories where rich employers do their civic duty and help out their domestic servants by providing more opportunities for further employment, education and health but these stories are too few and far between. Instead we hear stories of domestic violence, and in some cases psychological and sexual abuse.
Personally, I have seen that those who question this terrible practice are seen as either 'naive' or dismissed as 'foolish'. We are told the great myth that we can do nothing about this tragedy and instead we can make the best out of a bad situation by participating in this oppression for our own personal benefit. But rich employers can make a great deal of difference. Helping their servants in matters of health, education and employment is not something terribly difficult but merely requires some moral resolve.
The poor have lesser prospects -- does that give the rich the right to exploit, abuse and plunder? Does that provide the justification for the oppression inflicted? What is noble about abusing the weak when one is powerful, and what satisfaction can possibly be gained? How can a democracy function in a country where inequality is rampant, where there is no sense of community?
But more than the workings of our democracy, it is that bond of humanity that has been crushed under the hooves of arrogance and supremacist torture. One fears that the problem has gotten so out of hand -- it presents a worrying scenario of whether Pakistain can ever become 'human' again? Have we become inhumane beyond redemption and beyond salvation -- because make no mistake this is a deeply widespread problem, we all see it in our day to day dealings.
This Independence Day, we as individuals should look within our own households and reflect on how we treat others who happen to be weaker than us, poorer than us, more vulnerable than us not because we are in some ways 'superior' but because of biological chance. The belief that those who serve as domestic servants are always destined for a live of servitude as are their children crushes the egalitarian impulse of Jinnah's Pakistain. These domestic servants have been robbed of this gift of Independence not by some foreign power but by us. We have usurped the rights of our fellow citizens and yet we do not recognize the severity of the crimes and transgressions made.
A nation cannot be composed of master and slaves. Jinnah did not envision such a nation, he fought for Independence. When it comes to the plight of domestic servants, many of us have the power to emulate Jinnah's fight for dignity -- it is a shame we choose to ignore this power.
If we do not face up to these dark deeds that plague the rich and educated of this nation then why bother with Independence at all?
Posted by: Fred ||
08/10/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
If noone's independent in their head, they ain't independent out in the world.
#3
And they export their youth to work as Camel Jockeys in the UAE. Not much national pride there. An inordinate number of Saud limb hackings are from Paks.
An illuminating report on BBC Radio Fours Today programme (0810) this morning said it all about the British riots. Some teenage thugs who were hooding up to go looting were asked why they were doing it. Maybe they couldnt afford the trainers and other goods they were setting out to steal? Yeah, we can afford them, came the reply; but since the goods were there to be robbed, it was an opportunity that couldnt be passed up. What about their parents? Did they know where they were? Yeah, came the reply, but the most they do is shout at me. And as for the police, well the worse that can happen is that Ill get as ASBO (antisocial behaviour order).
Some of the rioters and looters are as young as eight or nine. I then listened to a spokesman for Manchester city council appealing to parents to ensure that their children are not on the streets tonight. Why cant people see what is staring us all in the face? We are not up against merely feral children. We are up against feral parents. Of course the parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or they are helping themselves to the proceeds too.
The parents are the problem; as are, almost certainly, their parents and their parents too. Not that any of them necessarily even know who their parents, in the plural, are. For the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem, behind the total breakdown of any control or self-control amongst the rampaging gangs of children and teenagers who are rioting, burning, robbing, stealing, attacking and murdering, is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a fully committed, hands-on, there-every-day father.
As I have been writing for more than twenty years, a society that embraces mass fatherlessness is a society that is going off the edge of a cliff. There are whole areas of Britain (white as well as black) where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon; where serial generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transitory males by whom these girls and women have yet more children, and whose own daughters inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and utterly dysfunctional parenting.
The result is fatherless boys who are suffused by an existential rage and desperate psychic need, who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at the world around them. And all this is effectively condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the welfare state which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that welfare fatherlessness brings in its train.
And the unutterably wicked thing is that this catastrophe has been deliberately willed upon Britain by left-wing politicians, well-heeled media feminists and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of progressive non-judgmentalism, witlessly prattling about poverty and social justice and hurling execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is in general a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women) and that the state should stop subsidising family and social breakdown and start encouraging married parenthood instead.
What we have seen unfolding before our horrified gaze over the past four days in Britain is the true legacy of Tony Blairs shattering defeat, in the two years or so after he came to power in 1997, at the hands of the ultra-feminists and cultural Marxist wreckers in his Cabinet and party who were determined above all to destroy the traditional nuclear family and institute the sexual free-for-all that exists today. Blair stood virtually alone against Gramscis acolytes, and lost.
One of them, Harriet Harman, was on TV last night preposterously blaming cuts in educational allowances, of all things, for the fact that teenagers and pre-pubescent children have been torching and looting shops and robbing and murdering people in the streets. It was Harman, of course, who was one of the principal forces behind the promotion of lone parenthood and the marginalisation of fathers as the only progressive position. Yet here she is, faced with the Hobbesian scenes of violent anarchy which are the result of those policies, still parroting the same old claptrap and still totally incapable of acknowledging the terrible damage to individuals, social destruction and de-civilisation she has helped wreak.
Add to this the associated breakdown in education, criminal justice and policing that have also taken place over the past three decades as a result of the same long march through the institutions, and you have the explanation of what the British riots actually signify: a society whose intelligentsia has been bent for three decades on social suicide -- and which, having been the first into the Enlightenment, is now, as we can see from the armies of ants torching and looting British cities, leading the way out.
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