Democrat promises
“Nineteen ninety-four was the year the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the UK all sat side by side at a long table in Hungary to sign what would be known as the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.
The brief document is far from a comprehensive treaty or even a security guarantee, but its intent and purpose was clear. Ukraine was giving up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world under heavy pressure from Russia and the United States. In exchange, Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma wanted a public pledge from Clinton, Yeltsin, and John Major that they would “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”
Obviously Russia violated the agreement when it invaded and then annexed Crimea in March 2014. As for the other signatories, there are no means of enforcement in the memo[.]
…
[W]hat does it say when twenty years later Ukraine is practically helpless against the giant nuclear-backed war machine of Vladimir Putin and the United States tells Ukraine sorry, but it should have read the fine print in Budapest?
…It tells the world that American security promises are worthless (and British ones, for good measure). The only point of Budapest was to demonstrate to any potential aggressor–all eyes on the Russian bear next door, obviously–that the United States was putting Ukraine under its nuclear wing. If such displays are meaningless, and having one’s own nuclear weapon is the only way to be safe from aggression, it will not take long for other countries to move full speed toward acquiring them. Japan and Taiwan count on America to deter China. South Korea counts on America to deter North Korea. And whether they admit to it or note, half of the nations in the Middle East have rejected a push for nuclear weapons to match Israel’s because of America’s long shadow. It is difficult to see that restraint lasting very long if President Obama continues to meet Russian military aggression with weak sanctions, worthless negotiations, and expressions of deep concern.”
Gary Kasparov, “Winter Is Coming” 2015, pp. 51-53.
With respect to the Obama/Kerry agreement with Iran, evidently nuclear agreements signed by American Democrats aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.
The Tangled Clinton Web
the Era of Bad Faith
How Jon Stewart Gave Us Obama
(. . .and New Plains, and TruthColorado, and McShay, and the Democrats haunting the halls of Elbert County government)
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 11, 2015 @ 12:55 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage
Generation Xers mourning Stewart’s departure ought to be thanking the man who made the awkward comedian’s long tenure of pulling faces while making snide remarks possible; President Bush.
George W. Bush made Jon Stewart. Even Stewart has admitted that his show came into its own when Bush did. A world in which a President Gore spent eight years sonorously lecturing Americans about his love for the trees is also a world in which Jon Stewart would be out there doing pizza commercials.
It was Bush’s victory that took a flailing cable show hosted by an irritating little standup comedian with more neurotic tics than a flea-bitten Woody Allen and turned him into the voice of liberalism. Stewart’s nervous smirk and his passive aggressive mockery became the zeitgeist of urban Democrats nervously responding to Bush’s popularity and the rise of American patriotism after September 11.
The Democratic Party was out of ideas. The politicians who would become some of Bush’s most fevered critics were still following the president’s cues. A newly serious America was confronting a world war.
Stewart’s disingenuousness, veering from ironic detachment to self-righteous hectoring, undermined real sincerity with fake sincerity. The Daily Show’s audience of hipster yuppies cheered their newfound faith in sincere cynicism while the calculated ironic distance of his comedy kept him safe from critics. Even while he attacked the media’s dishonesty, his own routine was the most dishonest of them all.
His fake news was real news, biased and spun with punch lines. It was fake news that was real and just as fake as the rest of the news. The truth was that the lie was still a lie.
What Stewart offered a party dragged down by a morose Gore and Kerry was the promise of cool. Their former figurehead had started out playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show only to decay into a bloated red-faced mess. With towers burning and wars rising, Stewart was to be their bridge to a cooler and younger 21st century that an aging Democratic Party no longer seemed able to grapple with.
Jon Stewart didn’t actually have cool, but he could offer it up inversely by way of mockery. Like a school paper’s drama critic, he might not be cool, but by railing against others, he could deny coolness to them.
Stewart wasn’t funny and knew little about politics. Unqualified to be in politics, journalism or even comedy, he straddled the line by casting himself as a critic of the media and politics. In his new role, he just had to be funny by the standards of politics and politically knowledgeable by the standard of comedians. It was a low bar that he just managed to limbo under. All he had to was to go after the right targets.
Audiences in retro glasses clapped like electroshocked seals at his every grimace and the media declared that his fake news was what real news should be. And worst of all, they meant it.
The media found Stewart refreshing not because he kept them honest, but because he encouraged their worst partisan instincts for dishonesty. The news anchors at their desks wished that they could say the things that he said. And some of them began to say them. Today the line has blurred so much that NBC News was thinking of offering Stewart a gig on Meet the Press.
While Bush may have made Stewart, Jon Stewart then made Obama. Barack Obama was a political version of Jon Stewart; a dishonest entertainer turning politics into a joke and then faking a theatrical sincerity while throwing out every possible distraction to cover up his dishonesty and bad faith.
Stewart provided a counterpoint to Bush’s real sincerity with fake sincerity. It was a joke that Stephen Colbert would polish into a single mindless routine. The flip side of the routine was that flippancy equaled sincerity. If the sincerity of patriotism and the devoutness of faith were a joke, then anyone who was joking was bound to be sincere. Those were the clown shoes to be filled by hope and change.
Obama’s fake self-awareness made him seem authentic in a social media society composed of reflective levels of personality. What Stewart offered Democrats was an evasive viewpoint without accountability. And nothing quite appeals to the cowardly instincts of a political hack like being able to take a political position without being held accountable for it. But it was Obama who truly embraced politics without accountability, transforming every issue into a joke or referencing it back to his own biography.
While he may have come out on the stage with a unique personal story, what kept Obama competitive was his skill at refracting everything through layers of irony and self-awareness. His approach was to borrow Stewart’s own routine without any of its ambiguity. Stewart’s pretense of triangulation became Obama’s obsession with turning his radical left-wing politics into an imaginary middle ground.
Stewart and Obama had come out of a political movement trying to respond to September 11 without having the first idea how to do so. Stewart’s comedy paved the way for minimizing the threat while inflating the absurdity of those trying to fight it. It is an approach that Obama continues to embrace.
Both men have pretended that they aren’t ideologues. They have acted as if the left is a third way, rather than the same old way, selling that dishonest message through style, not substance.
Jon Stewart did not offer an alternative to the media. He was what the media was becoming. The merging of opinion and reporting along with the overlay of cynical humor over every story have become ubiquitous. Stewart didn’t pave the way for a better media. He paved the way for Buzzfeed, Vice, Politico and Vox. He turned the news into a joke with an agenda… which is exactly what it is now.
Obama was an equally fake alternative. He didn’t offer inspiration, but manipulation. His new ideas were the same old ideas packaged around his personality, around new styles and designs fed through social media and media appearances. Unwilling to connect with opponents, reporters and even voters, he then settled for digging in on his grievances and breaking the rules by ruling the country unilaterally.
Generation X cynicism fused with millennial brand awareness to create a political monster who might not be able to lie to the people all the time, but who cynically made the existence of his lies irrelevant.
Stewart’s Daily Show had offered an antidote to the Bush era of patriotism, sincerity and decency. Its antidote was passive aggressive ridicule and political satire as sincerity. After the Bush era ended, Stewart and his fellow comedians had little left to do except take on the job of defending Obama, while occasionally critiquing him. They had become the official court jesters of the Democratic Party.
It’s no wonder that Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, anticipating eight more years of Hillary, have chosen to move on. The genre has long since outlived its original response to 9/11 sincerity. It now exists only to feed on itself. To act as a comedic Media Matters churning out viral videos slamming opponents for some sin against the left while pretending to be part of mainstream consensus.
Jon Stewart gave us the era of Obama. As that era of bad faith comes to a close, so does his own.
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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/how-jon-stewart-gave-us-obama/
Live by the sword, and die by it too.
Post by Brooks Imperial.
Last I checked, politics is not an EEOC protected category.
Democrats might begin to find it harder to get a job. After all, why should an employer hire people who believe in socialist non-merit based rewards? Employers are in business to compete in the market, make a profit, and thereby stay in business. It’s only reasonable for employers to seek employees who won’t undermine their businesses and the market system.
It’s time for conservatives to start impacting the Left where they can feel it – in their paychecks.
Thomasson and Corrado rebutted
Mr. Thomasson and Mr. Corrado published an open letter to two new members of the Planning Commission today.
It contains a number of errors: [Read more…]
Rick Brown on discretion
discretion – A public official’s power or right to act in certain circumstances according to personal judgment and conscience. [Black’s Law Dictionary]
Mr. Brown – the Democrat Party official placed on to the Elbert County Planning Commission by BOCC member Larry Ross, a recent Democrat himself – does not trust the Republican majority on the BOCC to administer the law in the best interest of Elbert County.
Mr. Brown pushes regulations that, in the name of discretion, remove all discretion from the process.
First off, this is an impossible task. Second, if Mr. Brown has his way Elbert County will be saddled with an impossibly tortuous body of regulatory law for oil and gas development that will put a stop to all oil and gas development.
Coincidentally, this has been Mr. Brown’s, and Larry Ross’s, objective all along.
Mr. Brown is on the Planning Commission to push the left’s agenda by any means possible. If he can’t control the wording of the regulatory law, his fallback strategy is to delay the implementation of it. Either one serves the purpose of preventing oil and gas development. Brown is a determinist who intends to dictate the zoning law out of the mistaken belief that law can control human behavior. While law can certainly influence human behavior, law will never control people to the extent the left believes.
It’s a mistake to put legal zealots in Planning Commission seats. All they need is a foot in the door to insinuate anything they desire into the process. That’s what lawyers do – they build cases out of thin air.
Take a step back from the particular points Mr. Brown and company ceaselessly argue. Look at the one-way trend toward their objective of obstructing oil and gas development. For almost 3 years now in Elbert County, their contributions to this nascent oil and gas industry have been about: control, delay, refusal, preemption, denial, suspension, constriction, prevention, etc., all performed in the name of good regulations.
Bullshit.
Are we not supposed to notice that nothing that they suggest actually facilitates this industry?
B_Imperial
so many assumptions
Mr. Corrado certainly hates the Tea Party. [Read more…]
a “hands on” party leader
Those who cast the votes decide nothing.
Those who count the votes decide everything.
Attributed to Stalin
Stand Strong in the HOUSE
Sixteen days into the government shutdown, we know; [Read more…]
disconnected reasoning
From an 8/8/2013 letter in the Elbert County Sun:
Note that Mr. Brown does not dispute that operational conflicts with COGCC rules exist in the proposed Elbert County Oil & Gas regulations that he helped write. Apparently he’s accepted the reality of the COGCC warnings from the May 14th study session.
But look at his first construction above – the county should pass the oil and gas regulations, thereby cause an economic grievance to a developer, and then discover through litigation whether the state has subject matter jurisdiction on the question of COGCC regulatory occupation of the field. Doesn’t this sound like the much ridiculed Pelosi construct of having to pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it? Do all Democrats think this way?
But let’s move on. Brown next admits an answer to the above conundrum – “let’s assume the state has the legal capacity to file such a lawsuit,” thereby begging a question of what he hoped to achieve in his setup. But let’s not get lost in the weeds as Brown pivots to his next construct – that if the county and Commissioner Rowland consider a given regulatory issue to be a surface matter, while the state considers that same regulatory issue to be an operational matter within its regulatory domain, then the state has “no basis for a lawsuit.” What?
According to Brown, all a county need do is decide that something is within their jurisdiction, and that decision somehow binds the COGCC to go along – unless the COGCC decides not to, and instead puts an operator into a process of asking the BOCC for a waiver.
Let’s see, is that a waiver from the county regulation, or is that a waiver from the COGCC regulation. Mr. Brown doesn’t say, but surely a county that has the power to redefine operational conflicts into surface matters, and thereby remove the basis for a COGCC lawsuit, must also have the power to excuse compliance with COGCC regulations when it sees fit to do so.
Where do counties get such power over the state? In the imagination of Mr. Brown is where. I don’t think Mr. Rowland is the one confused here. But I do worry that Mr. Brown’s “logic” will appear persuasive to people not prepared for such deceptive reasoning.
After weaving his magical brew, Mr. Brown closes with an appeal to Mr. Rowland’s ministerial vanity. Good grief. Is there no panderingly offensive depth to which Brown won’t sink?
B_Imperial
hyperbolic times
Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh
Polite debate is no longer the accepted norm in our society. The liberal left is not tolerating divergent opinions, they want them eliminated. Outrageous labels, personal threats, and even violence have escalated during what used to be polite discourse and disagreements of opinion. [Read more…]
the Democrat way: Trail of Fears
Politics Under Democracy, H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy, 1926, pp. 41-44.
Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, i.e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!” It has been so in the United States since the earliest days. [Read more…]
not so smart
condolences
Critics painted me as a defender of the old guard. Ha! The only things I defended in this election cycle were competence, sound management, realistic thinking, and the rule of law. Tragically, these bedrock principles did not win today in the Elbert County Republican Party primary. Well, the principles still exist, and it appears I will have plenty more opportunities to defend them in the future.
Come November, commissioner choices will be between agenda driven liberals and, um, agenda driven liberals. I’m sure this prospect has the New-Plains democrats, populists, and leftists, dancing in their switch grass patches tonight, however, consequences for the county will be grim.
We’ll see ubiquitous zoning and higher taxes. We’ll see environmentalism and its basket of unfounded mythologies unleashed in a flurry of ersatz relevancy as they consume the public discourse. We’ll experience these mythologies fail in an expensive protracted drama full of denial and blame. We’ll see none of these agenda progenitors take responsibility when their no-growth, anti-industrial, country-in-county ideas further impoverish Elbert County. We’ll see the few of us who use their 1st Am. right to dissent from these prevailing insanities called more names, if that’s even possible at this point.
I never wrote for the sake of the old guard. I wrote for the sake of limited sound government. A voting minority of Elbert County voted for bigger more intrusive government. They made a big mistake, and the county government they’ve chosen for all of us will make us pay dearly for it. That’s what unbridled government does to people and these people are all about the unbridling of government power.
The left has won. You’re not going to like these new-strange bedfellows when they start implementing their plans for you.
B_Imperial
Rowland’s corruption made easy
Interesting that the candidate who’s principle planks are TRANSPARENCY and ACCOUNTABILITY, advocates subterfuge tonight at caucus in the delegate selection process to the county assembly.
See Robert Rowland’s COUNTY CAUCUS MADE EASY
How do I participate?
Caucus is easy, and fun. Here are the simple steps to becoming part of the solution for Elbert County.
You will need to be prepared to speak briefly to explain to everyone why you want to be a delegate.
What is the purpose and what is the strategy?
While you will not be asked or required to represent or disclose your choice of candidate for any race to become a delegate to the Assembly, there are strategies that are important.
That’s it, you will determine if the candidate(s) you want to see elected as County Commissioner, Colorado House Representative, District 64 and others make it to the ballot and get a chance to represent you for the next four years.
Really? That’s all? How fun! How empowering. You choose the candidates, don’t worry about representative government, transparency or accountability. Mr. Rowland will handle those things for you.
At precinct 13 delegates will be asked which candidates for commissioner they support, because delegates carry the voice of the caucus, and real Republicans actually practice transparency and accountability. Real Republicans don’t just pay lip service to their ideals.