Different people will respond to such a headline in different ways. For instance, liberal peacenik types won’t be able to get through the article without an ample supply of Kleenex. Heartless conservatives on the other hand may read it with gleeful abandon. And pragmatists may wonder why they should believe anything lawyers say.

My own personal reaction to the headline is, yeah, and your point is what exactly? Okay, obviously, the point is to make us all feel sorry for the poor detainees, all of whom claim to be guilty of nothing more than having been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and been swept up by infidel crusaders out to conquer their land. But most of us have sense enough to know better than that.

Anyway, a certain well-known Guantanamo detainee is one of the focal points of the new insanity claims being made by lawyers. That would be one Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who once happened to be Osama bin Laden’s personal driver and who could soon become the first detainee to be tried for war crimes at Gitmo.

Right now, he should be busily working on his defense, but alas, say his lawyers, he can’t because he has been driven insane by his confinement. He is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of his imprisonment “boil his mind.”

Further, in a letter to his lawyers in February, he complained that, “Conditions are asphalt, excrement and worse. Why, why, why?”

Well, because, because, because, Salim, you were the personal driver for the world’s most wanted terrorist who is responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents. That sorta makes you an accessory, doesn’t it? But why not try and look at the positive side of your situation? Would you rather have been in one of the twin towers when they came crashing down because of your boss’ diabolical plan? Or would you rather have been one of those who leaped from the buildings because they preferred that to burning alive?

If your mind is boiling right now, it ought to be over the guilt you should be feeling if you had any sort of normal human conscience rather than boiling over your personal confinement. Nonetheless, one of the main assertions in the IHT article goes like this: “Critics have long asserted that Guantanamo’s climate-controlled isolation is a breeding ground for insanity.”

Don’t make me laugh. You wanna talk about a “breeding ground for insanity?” Then let’s talk about the one that stretches from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east and covers most of what’s in between. It’s called the Muslim world and its contribution to the world is radical Islam, which is synonymous with insanity.

Here in America all it takes is for one religious kook to phone in a bomb threat to an abortion clinic and the media falls all over itself declaring that the country is on the brink of take-over by right-wing, bible-thumping fundamentalists who are going to take us back to the days of inquisitions and witch trials. But if mad hatter jihadists are running wild in every corner of the globe indiscriminately killing innocents in the name of establishing a new worldwide Islamic caliphate, we’re all expected to be religiously tolerant and culturally sensitive.

If we have been lucky enough to capture several hundred of the countless multitudes of Islamist nihilists who are out to bring down Western civilization, then as far as I’m concerned that’s a great thing and I don’t really care how despondent or hallucinatory they become in their Gitmo cells. What I care about is that they’re not out slaughtering great masses of innocent people in the name of one of the most insane causes to ever come down the pike.

If Islam is powerful enough to inspire people to enthusiastically kill themselves and many others in its name, then it ought to be powerful enough to assuage the mental anguish of its followers who are unlucky enough to get caught and imprisoned. They’re getting three squares a day, their own copies of the Koran, prayer mats and signs pointing in the direction of Mecca. They’ve got everything they need to commune with Allah to their hearts’ content.

And after all, according to Muslim belief, nothing happens unless Allah wills it. Therefore, if you are Muslim and you find yourself sitting in a cell in Guantanamo hearing voices and with drool running down your chin, guess who wants it that way?

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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No worries, says Carter, it’s not a negotiation, it’s just a friendly little meet-and-greet for the purpose of information sharing and he feels “quite at ease in doing this.” The problem with having such a meeting between a bloodthirsty band of terrorists and an American ex-president is that it lends a certain degree of legitimacy to Hamas and says that, hey, they’re just like any other elected government and we ought to deal with them even though we don’t think they’re particularly swell.

In Carter’s own words: “I think that it’s very important that at least someone meet with the Hamas leaders to express their views, to ascertain what flexibility they have, to try to induce them to stop all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel . . . and things of this kind.”

It all sounds so beguilingly commonsensical–unless you know anything at all about Hamas. Carter certainly does, but in his ego-stoking quest for peace he apparently has an amazing ability in his brain to compartmentalize away any information — such as reality, for instance — that would deter his mission. Someone ought to stick a copy of the Hamas Charter in his face anyway and beg him to avoid a humiliating and possibly damaging trip to Hamasastan. Speaking of the Hamas Charter, here’s a couple of choice highlights which all by themselves would settle the matter if reason were to prevail:

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

These and other nuggets of Hamas ideology make it pretty clear where they’re coming from. They’re not about “flexibility,” but unfortunately, Carter is all about “vain endeavors.” Often cited as the country’s worst president, at least in the modern era, he never ceases to try and build on his one widely perceived success, which was to jockey a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.

But reasoning with Egypt is not remotely comparable to reasoning with Hamas. That’s because Hamas exists for one reason and one reason only: to destroy Israel.

But wait just a minute, some astute readers may say. Hasn’t Hamas in recent times modified its views such that coexistence with Israel would be possible if Israel would withdraw from all Palestinian occupied territories back to the borders as they were before the ‘67 war and if Israel would grant all Palestinians the “right of return?” Well, okay, yes it has, but the one nattering and insurmountable problem of such a scenario is that it would be national suicide for Israel, which kind of makes it not particularly worthwhile as a point from which to start negotiations.

We know what happened when Israel pulled out of tiny Gaza. The formerly occupied territory became a base for terror operations practically overnight and rockets have rained down on Israel on a daily basis ever since. So much for trading land for peace. As for the “right of return,” Palestinians — most of whom would never have lived there to begin with — would simply overrun the country and the next thing you know, no more Israel, which, of course, is Hamas’ ultimate goal.

As of this writing, Carter has so far had a meeting in the West Bank with an ex-minister in Hamas’ government and still has plans to meet with top terror Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, in Syria. In Carter’s desperation to build a respectable legacy in what remaining time he has left on earth, he instead continues to further mire himself on the wrong side of history.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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“We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable.”

Holy cow! Compared to this guy, Al Gore is seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. “An Inconvenient Truth” never even mentions the prospect of cannibalism.

Later in the interview, Turner admitted to Rose that he’s “always suffered from foot-in-the-mouth disease,” and then he added, “I’ve gotten a lot better, though. It’s been a long time since anybody caught me saying something stupid.”

Huh? Hel-lo-o! Earth to Ted. You just said that in a few decades the world will lay in post-apocalyptic ruin where most of humanity will have perished and the ones left will have become cannibals, all because of anthropogenic global warming. I can’t scream this loud enough: That qualifies as stupid! It is unimaginable, inconceivable stupidity on a perversely grandiloquent scale. It makes every stupid thing you’ve ever said sound like the epitome of carefully measured prudence. You’re busted, again, and you’re too clueless to even know you’re busted.

And yet, I’ve seen figures in oil paintings that were less impassive than Rose during Turner’s bug-eyed adumbration about a devastated world populated by cannibals. Perhaps he would have gotten more animated if Turner had said something really radical, like, say, all government funding for urban bike paths should be curtailed.

Turner also said in the interview that “we can’t win in Iraq. We’re being beaten by insurgents who don’t even have any tanks, they don’t have a headquarters, they don’t have a Pentagon, we don’t even know if they have any generals.”

I guess Turner hasn’t heard about that thing called the surge that has exceeded most expectations. Doesn’t matter, because according to Ted the insurgents are “patriots” who “don’t like us because we invaded their country and occupied it. Nobody likes to be invaded.”

But everybody loves being lorded over by a ruthless, mass-murdering totalitarian who maintains power through a never-ending reign of terror in which people are snatched up and imprisoned at will, children are tortured in front of their parents and people are dropped head first into shredding machines, right? What Iraqi “patriot” in his right mind would want to be liberated from that?

Keep it coming, Teddy. As maddening as it can be sometimes, we still love having you around.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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According to Nikki Finke in his “Deadline Hollywood” column, an anonymous “studio source” provided this answer: “It’s a function of the marketplace not being ready to address this conflict in a dramatic way because the war itself is something that’s unresolved yet.”

Are you buying that? Okay, that might conceivably be a small part of it, but the studio source left out the other part, the more glaringly obvious part, the part that’s like the elephant standing in the middle of the lobby of the studio’s main office, whose presence no one can bear to acknowledge even as the line on the profit/loss chart continues to plummet.

And that part is — hang on to your hat for a startling revelation — that the Iraq war movies that have been released so far have all been overwhelmingly negative in their portrayals of American soldiers and the American mission in Iraq. “Redacted,” “Lions For Lambs,” “In the Valley of Elah.” They’ve all been relentless downers and they’ve all been unmitigated flops.

But wait a minute. Is “Stop Loss” as bad as all the others? Well, admittedly, no, and that’s even according to some conservative reviewers. The movie actually deals with a very legitimate issue that is worthy of debate. The title “Stop Loss” refers to a contractual provision that allows the military to extend a soldier’s tour of duty after he has already technically served his normal hitch.

Naturally, one of the main characters in the movie finds himself getting stop-lossed after he has returned home with every intention of leaving the service, which, of course, makes the military look bad. And, of course, other returning soldiers in the movie are depicted as damaged goods whose readjustment to home life is hampered by drinking, fighting and various bizarre behaviors, all of which are the presumed psychological costs of having been in combat in Iraq. More negativity. Has there ever been a soldier who served honorably in combat in Iraq and/or returned home without having been turned into an antisocial time bomb? Not according to Hollywood.

When are these filmmakers going to connect the dots? Do they really think this is what American audiences want to see? It may well be that the majority of Americans wish we had never gotten into this war, but that doesn’t mean they want to see the country’s finest young people depicted as rapists, murderers or even just run-of-the-mill, psychologically damaged basket cases returning from combat.

Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Does that mean that filmmakers in Hollywood have completely lost their marbles? No, not exactly. What it means is that there are those filmmakers in Hollywood who resolutely refuse to compromise their “art,” not to mention their radical leftist politics, in the name of the almighty dollar.

It’s all very noble in an artistic kind of way, but if they keep it up, some of them may soon be seen on the street holding signs that say “Will make antiwar films for food.”

So, movie goers aren’t “ready to address this conflict in a dramatic way?” Stop it, already. We’re plenty ready. We just want to see it addressed fairly. Message to Hollywood: If you want to make a movie about the Iraq war that does boffo box office, try depicting American soldiers as the noble freedom fighters that they are rather than as a bunch of brainwashed contract killers who are morally no better than al-Qaida.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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Okay, I didn’t write the above vivid opening dripping with tropical ambiance. It’s from the introduction to an article entitled “At island retreat, Branson and friends seek to save a world ‘on fire,’” which appeared in the International Herald Tribune.

That would be the world renowned Richard Branson, by the way, who created Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Holidays, Virgin Classics, Virgin Broadcasting, Virgin Hotels and a veritable slew of other Virginal businesses which helped make him the 236th richest man in the world (net worth nearly $8 billion). Hey, if a theme works, why not milk it for all it’s worth?

Anyway, here’s the “sobering question” he popped to his gaggle of fabulous friends (which included Google mogul Larry Page, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair): “So, do we really think the world is on fire?” (Translation: Are we all in agreement that global warming is real, that it’s caused by man and that it poses a grave threat to the planet?)

Here, here! Of course we agree! How could we not? The science is settled. Debate is over. Denying it is like denying the Holocaust. More Dom Perignon all around! Oh, and Jeeves, see to it that the jet is ready. We’re breakfasting in Tortola in the morning.

Or something like that. The Caribbean getaway was the idea of Richard Stromback, a former professional hockey player, of all things, who later became a successful clean-technology entrepreneur. The purpose of the gathering was to try and figure out what to do about the scourge of global warming and, in true entrepreneurial fashion, get even richer in the process.

Don’t you just love it when a gaggle of rich liberal entrepreneurs gather together on a fabulous Caribbean estate, having arrived by yacht and private jet, to plot how they’re going to save the world and make a ton of money doing it? You have to admit it’s better than those old-fashioned robber barons who once ravished the earth and worked people like draft animals until they were spent. These guys are thoroughly modern and oh so politically correct with their environmental and social consciousness.

Which is all very marvelous, but what if the planet doesn’t actually need saving from global warming and their noble mission is just a self-delusional crock? What if . . .

What if the earth was actually now in the process of cooling? Well, the more fundamentalist believers in climate change among you may say that extremes of cold, along with every other weather extreme one can think of, all falls within the hypothesized parameters of anthropogenic global warming.

That’s right. Take it from Amir Delju, for instance, the senior scientific coordinator of the World Meteorological Organization’s climate program. He wants us to know that “the more frequent occurrence of extreme events all over the world — floods in Australia, heavy snowfall in the Middle East — can also be signs of warming.”

In other words, he’s stacking the deck such that no matter what happens meteorologically in the short term, he and his climate change pals are going to sit back and say, yep, just like we told you, global warming.

But even Delju has at least allowed for the possibility, however miniscule, of a reversal of global warming when he said that temperatures would have to be flat for several years before a lack of new record warm years would become significant. Well, guess what? They’re becoming significant.

The warmest year thus far recorded was back in 1998 and temperatures had basically plateaued so far this century. But the real kicker is that according to all four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS), global temperatures have dropped precipitously during the past year. In fact — and if you’ve always been skeptical about worst case global warming predictions you’ll want to savor this — it’s been the single fastest one-year temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

What that means is that an entire century’s worth of global warming allegedly caused by the activities of man has been wiped out in a single year. No one knows why, of course, since the workings of the earth’s atmosphere are so unfathomably complex. It might be solar, it might be who knows what else. But at the very least, reasonable people have to acknowledge the possibility that maybe the world’s coastal cities aren’t going to be under 20 feet of water by century’s end after all.

This one-year temperature drop seems like more than an inconsequential factoid, but apparently none of this managed to filter its way down to Richard Branson’s lushly sumptuous Caribbean island. Oblivious to the many serious doubts about global warming orthodoxy that continue to crop up, the green-minded masters of the universe spent their time “hashing over ideas in Branson’s new open-air yoga pavilion. Talk ranged from the practicality of electric-powered cars to how much money would have to be invested in biofuels to reduce the price of crude to $35 a barrel, a prospect Khosla said was possible within the next 15 years.”

If you believe biofuels are ever going to drive the price of crude to $35 a barrel, I’ve got a Cape Cod wind farm I’d like to sell you, cheap. In fact, the latest line on biofuels is that they might do more harm than good to the planet and its people because of increases in food prices and increased gas emissions due to the deforestation required to grow the crops.

Okay, you might say, so let Branson and his mega-wealthy pals have their lavish brainstorming session anyway. Even if global warming doesn’t present the threat they think it does, what harm can it do if they come up with new green technologies or find a way to make alternative energy sources economically viable? At least they’re not spending their time like capitalist pigs of yore looking for pristine locations to strip mine or dumping toxic waste in our rivers and streams.

Well, yes, but on the other hand there’s that old saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So, for instance, while replacing crude with biofuels sounds warm and fuzzy and planet-friendly, as already mentioned, it’s coming under more and more scrutiny and criticism as something that might do more harm than good. Therefore, if Branson and the boys were to use their influence to help mainstream biofuels . . . Well, you see the potential problem.

What about electric cars, then? The problem is, where’s the non-polluting, non-emissive electricity going to come from? The only viable source for such electricity on a large scale is nuclear and you can forget about that, the environmentalists won’t have it. Otherwise, the generation of most electricity still pollutes and creates emissions.

Well, then, solar power? Maybe next century. Hydrogen? Ditto. Wind? Don’t make me laugh.

Maybe nothing at all will come out of the high-class Caribbean confab beyond a few days of extravagant frolicking amongst the filthy rich. That wouldn’t be a particularly bad outcome. And perhaps Tony Blair said it best when asked if the nations of the world could ever work together to do something about greenhouse gases: “We have an agreement that there should be an agreement. But there’s no agreement on what that agreement should be.”

Here, here!

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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And then, just in the nick of time perhaps, almost like manna from heaven, along came the revelations of, and about, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on the south side of Chicago.

By now, everyone who doesn’t live in a cave has heard a sampling of some of Rev. Wright’s Sunday morning fireworks and it’s none too pretty. Not that it isn’t anything we haven’t heard before from many of our depraved enemies around the world and from our own homegrown far-left malcontents. But who thought this kind of stuff was being preached in American churches that call themselves Christian? Imagine someone shouting the following at the top of his lungs in a house of worship:

“God damn America, that’s in the bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

Whew! That’s the kind of language and message that would normally make your average parishioner — not to mention your average messianic presidential candidate who has promised to unify all Americans — cringe, but at the Trinity United Church of Christ it frequently has members of the flock dancing in the aisles, bobbing their heads in agreement and shouting amen to the rafters.

And it’s not like anybody was ashamed of it or trying to keep the lid on it. This all came out because, lo and behold, the mainstream media finally decided to take a look at some of Rev. Wright’s sermons which are actually available for sale by the church. I’ve heard of church bake sales, but church hate sales?

If nothing else, this prized collection of Rev. Wright’s greatest hits sounds like the perfect gift for that finicky, churchgoing and America-hating family member who is always so gosh darn hard to shop for. Here’s another sample of the spiritual riches to be mined from its contents:

“Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people. The Romans were rich. The Romans were Italians, which means they were European, which means they were white–and the Romans ran everything in Jesus’ country. It just came to me . . . why so many folk are hatin’ on Barack Obama. He doesn’t fit the model!”

Well, sure, it all makes sense now. Thanks for clearing that up for us, Reverend.

By the way, did you know that Jesus was black? Gee, that’s funny. I thought Jesus was a Jew, which means a person of Hebrew descent, which means a person who falls under the broad classification of the Caucasoid race, which means not a sub-Saharan Negroid, which definitely means not black. But it’s all right there in the good reverend’s sermon, so apparently we’ve all been misled for a couple of millennia.

Other spiritual morsels imparted by Rev. Wright include referring to America as the US of KKK A, claiming that the U.S. created the AIDS virus to kill blacks and saying that the U.S. has supported state-sponsored terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans. I could go on, but you get the idea.

So, the implications for the Obama candidacy are rather obvious. As the old maxim goes, if you lie down with dogs you’re bound to come up with fleas. The question for Obama, then, is, how much of the hate speech of his “spiritual inspiration,” “mentor,” and “moral compass” does he agree with while incongruously running for office of unifier-in-chief?

In a post on the left-wing website, Huffington Post — appropriately enough and which, by the way, is absolutely crawling with people who would agree with every foul thing Rev. Wright has said about America — Obama assured everyone that in all his 20 years of church membership, he has never been in the pews at any of those particular times when such “inflammatory and appalling remarks” were made about “our great country.”

Even if you could believe that an amazing string of coincidences could occur throughout the course of 20 years such that Obama’s patriotic ears were never once exposed to Wright’s hateful preaching, can you also believe he was utterly clueless as to what his pastor was all about? That strains credulity beyond all reason. The guy married him, baptized his children and inspired the title of his book “The Audacity Of Hope.”

And what about Mrs. Obama? Did she miss all those hate-filled sermons as well? I have my doubts because they sure would go a long way towards explaining that lousy attitude of hers that kept her from being proud of her country right up until the time her husband became the Democratic frontrunner.

Obama has said that Rev. Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with.” It’s the old “crazy uncle” excuse, but the problem with that is, while you can’t pick your relatives, you do pick your pastor. And if I had an uncle who, in my presence, said the things Rev. Wright has said about America, one of us would be leaving the premises.

What voters have to ask themselves is, do they want a couple occupying the White House, either one of whom see everything through a prism of racial victimhood and contempt for America’s past imperfections? No doubt, there is a not insignificant number of voters who have absolutely no problem with that. We can only hope it isn’t the majority because that would signal a decline in the American spirit too awful to contemplate.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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Remember her? She was the first serious female vice presidential candidate in our nation’s history, stuck on a doomed ticket with Walter Mondale as he went up against a monolithic Ronald Reagan. Before the ticket was annihilated in the general election, you may recall there was a vice presidential debate between Ferraro and George H.W. Bush, after which an open microphone caught Bush saying that he had “kicked a little ass.”

Funny, the things some Republicans will say about their female Democrat debating opponents.

But returning to the current campaign season and my original point, take a wide-eyed gander at what Ferraro said in a recent interview with the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Ca.:

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

Wow! It kinda, sorta sounds like Ferraro is saying that Obama is basically an affirmative action kind of candidate, which is to say he isn’t particularly qualified and probably doesn’t have the necessary skills to be president, but it’s all being handed to him because he’s black.

Now, does this make Ferraro a racist? No, of course not. She’s a Democrat and, as everybody knows, the Democrat Party is the party of diversity and inclusion. What Ferraro is, however, is a Hillary Clinton supporter and no uppity black guy can be allowed to stand in the way of Hillary’s blind ambition for ultimate power.

We’ll get back to the race thing in a moment, but take a look at what else Ferraro said in her now infamous interview:

“I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he’s going to be able to put an end to partisanship. Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship — that’s the way our country is.”

In other words, Obama is not some kind of messiah and all the “young Republicans,” and everyone else for that matter, who have fallen under his bewitching spell and think that the nation led by him can progress to some utopian post-politics plane of existence, are, politically speaking, a bunch of guileless patsies who just fell off the turnip truck.

She has a point. What do they think politics is, anyway? It doesn’t exist because everyone agrees on most things. It exists precisely because they don’t.

Maybe all the euphoric Obama supporters haven’t heard, but in terms of politics, America is a 50-50 nation. That means that half the population despises everything Obama espouses, not because he’s black and not because he’s a Democrat and not for some other superficial reason, but because they think his policies would be bad for the country. Ferraro wouldn’t agree with that conclusion, but she’s spot on in pointing out the naivete of head-in-the-clouds Obama supporters

Unfortunately for her, that won’t get her out of hot water and she has since magnanimously stepped down from her role on the finance committee of Hillary’s campaign. Here’s how she described the situation in her resignation letter:

“Dear Hillary, I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what’s at stake in this campaign. The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you. I won’t let that happen. Thank you for everything you’ve done and continue to do to make this a better world for my children and grandchildren. You have my deep admiration and respect, Gerry.”

As usual, it’s all about the children.

Ferraro has so far declined to apologize for what she said, which, in an interview with Diane Sawyer, she described as meaning that “the black community came out with . . . pride in [Obama's] candidacy. You would think he would say ‘thank you’ for doing that. Instead, I’m charged with being a racist.”

Huh? I don’t even begin to follow that logic. Actually, though, Obama probably is thanking her, just for a different reason, which is that the Hillary campaign has once again shot itself in the foot since it will stop at nothing and say anything to get her nominated.

It’s a wondrous and not altogether unpleasant thing to watch the Party of Inclusion enmesh itself in one racial imbroglio after the other over the country’s first serious African-American presidential candidate. Ordinarily, they’re all about affirmative action, but when a black guy gets in Hillary’s way, all bets are off.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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So, do you know what they did? Okay, you may want to be sitting when you hear this so you won’t fall down. Are you ready? Here goes.

Fred Armisen, a non-African-American, played Obama.

Oh my god! This is outrageous and blatantly racist! A white man in blackface. “Saturday Night Live” is now a gaudy minstrel show. It’s a return to Jim Crow. All the gains of the civil rights movement wiped out in one fell swoop thanks to the white supremacists at SNL. Where’s Jesse Jackson? Al Sharpton? Why no demonstrations? Why no boycotts? Where’s the justice? No justice, no peace!

Wait a minute. You mean you haven’t actually heard about this? Well, the Internet is absolutely abuzz with debate, we are told, over this perceived outrage. Chicago Tribune columnist, Maureen Ryan, has written a piece entitled “‘SNL’ can do better than Armisen’s Obama.” The column begins: “Call me crazy, but shouldn’t ‘Saturday Night Live’s’ fictional Sen. Barack Obama be played by an African-American?”

I won’t call her crazy, I’ll just call her dumb. If we examine this a bit more rationally we may be able to come to a different conclusion than that the country has just lost 50 years of progress. Follow me on this.

Barack Obama is half white and half black. Therefore, why isn’t it just as legitimate for a white man to portray him as a black man? Is the black part the only part that matters?

If you want to get completely ridiculous about racial proportionality and take it to the only purely logical conclusion, it could be insisted that only a tall, lanky man of mixed race should portray Obama in a comedy sketch.

But the country should be grown-up enough at this point not to get in a lather over something so utterly trivial. So a white guy portrayed a guy who’s half white. So what? Get over it already.

Actually, most of us are over it because we never got our drawers in a wad to begin with. The only ones who are upset, thankfully, are minimal in number and are people like the aforementioned Maureen Ryan, who ended her column thusly: “Obama’s candidacy gives us solid proof of the progress that African-Americans have made in this country. I guess ‘SNL’ still has further to go on that front.”

We also have ample proof of the columnist’s moronic racial nitpicking, which is something we could all do without.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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Oh well, as somebody once said, you’ll never go broke overestimating the gullibility of the American public. Or at least that portion of it which now wants government to nursemaid it from cradle to grave, precipitously pull out of Iraq regardless of the consequences and meet with the world’s most despicable dictators in the hopes of finding common ground with them (the Obama program in a nutshell).

Which is to say, that portion of the American public which wouldn’t recognize a sensible political thought if it came up and bit them on the rear end. But Obama-mania isn’t about sensibleness, it’s about a cult of personality, though admittedly, a very genial and appealing personality.

You could even call it intoxicating. So intoxicating, in fact, that women are fainting at Obama rallies at a rate that is, if not quite epidemic, then at least medically curious.

So far, though, they’ve all come out of it okay as Obama calmly falls into the routine of calling for a medic, advising the crowds to give the fainters some space and requesting water for the victims, sometimes himself tossing a bottle into the adoring crowds. All in a day’s work for this enthralling agent of change and bringer of hope who boldly seeks to bring all Americans together with his message of ___* (*See extreme left-wing program described three paragraphs above.)

Okay, enough tutti frutti, time for some straight talk. As painful as it is to point out to those who think Americans of every race, gender and political affiliation are going to unite in support of His Messianicness, it’s not going to happen. Why? Because Obama is to the left of Teddy Kennedy and Americans simply don’t unite behind politicians who are that extreme, no matter how pleasant the packaging (though admittedly, the packaging has never been particularly pleasant before).

But wait just a minute, some of you are saying. How can that be? Nobody’s to the left of Ted Kennedy. This is a right-wing smear job. Stop trying to disunite the people.

Sorry, but that’s according to the nonpartisan National Journal which in 2007 rated Obama the most liberal member of the Senate. In other words, the guy makes Ted Kennedy look like Attila the Hun and Americans simply don’t elect off-the-chart leftists to be their president. Look at McGovern in ‘72. The liberal antiwar candidate was trounced by the nefarious Richard Nixon, of all people, despite the unpopular and interminable Vietnam War.

Yes, there was that matter of Jimmy Carter being elected four years later, but that was a Watergate-induced aberration for which the country paid dearly, and knew it, and wouldn’t likely repeat the mistake. Unless . . .

Unless, after all the decades of liberal indoctrination at every level of education, the country has finally reached a tipping point where the people who would vote for an empty suit with a far left agenda and a good speaking voice now outnumbers the people who know better. Given that, I guess it can’t be ruled out this time.

Now, they say that behind every successful man like Barack is a good woman. (Er, excuse me, they used to say such things back when women were quashed beneath the boot heel of a fascist, male-dominated power hierarchy and long before Cornell University changed the name of its Women Studies department to “Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.”)

The point is, if you vote in Barack, you’re going to get Michelle as well, and to put it mildly, this potential First Lady is no Laura Bush. This Princeton and Harvard educated elitist who has led a charmed life has been making plenty of stump speeches on behalf of her husband and hasn’t been shy in telling the crowds how bad things are in the country these days. In fact, in a recent revelatory campaign moment, she revealed to the world that she had never in her adult life been really proud of her country until just lately when legions of its citizens swooned for her husband as they passionately clamored for change.

Such a surprising statement from one of the country’s most fortunate persons begs the question: How do you live the kind of blessed life that 95 percent of the world’s population can only dream about without ever having felt any real pride — or, presumably, any particular appreciation — for the country that made it all possible?

One might think that such a question would need to be tackled by a team of world-class mental health professionals, but I’ll go out on a limb and guess that it has something to do with extreme leftist ideology. After all, who are the people — other than our sworn enemies — who typically have little or nothing good to say about America?

Another recent revelation from Mrs. Obama is that we Americans “have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.” Really? What the heck does that mean? But guess who’s the only guy that can remedy the problem? Here’s a clue: it ain’t James Brown or Otis Redding.

My soul feels just fine, thanks very much, Mrs. Obama, but if it was ailing I’d look for relief from Motown rather than a socialist-leaning, dictator-coddling presidential candidate and his profoundly unappreciative wife.

Amazingly enough, Little Richard had yet another, though lesser known, silly song that works as a simile for the Obama phenomenon: “Bama Lama Bama Loo.” Fiddling with the lyrics just a little, we come up with . . .

Got a candidate named Obama, he’s greater than the Dalai Lama,
And when he talks, he says Obama lama Obama loo.

Now liberals dig his style, he’s like a drivin’ ‘em wild with
Obama lama Obama loo.

What a shame that the country’s first serious African-American (literally) presidential candidate is a platitude-spewing empty suit with a pleasant disposition and a standard-issue far left agenda. Oh, well. Obama bop-a-loo-mop a-lop-bam-boom.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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WASHINGTON — Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

You get the idea. The NYT got the Republican candidate it hoped for, now it’s time to tear him down, paving the way for Obama’s coronation. Yes, the Times endorsed Hillary back in January, but that’s ancient history and umpteen Obama primary victories ago, the country having since gone ga-ga over the charismatic Illinois senator’s mesmerizing “change” mantra.

But is there anything to this alleged scandal story, shot through with innuendo and thinly sourced? Not according to attorney Bob Bennett, the registered Democrat who is representing McCain. You may also remember that he represented President Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal, so he’s not exactly a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy. See the video of him debunking the NYT allegations.

Also check out ALLAHPUNDIT’s complete coverage of the “sex scandal that may not be a scandal tucked inside an ethics scandal that was a genuine scandal 20 years ago, and for which McCain has begged forgiveness ever since.”

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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In case the name Mughniyeh isn’t ringing any bells, he was a one-time Hezbollah “security chief” who was suspected of masterminding attacks that, among other things, killed hundreds of Americans. Those attacks include, but are not limited to, the following:

The 1983 car bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut (63 dead, including 17 Americans); the 1983 suicide truck bombing of the barracks of U.S. and French peacekeeping forces in Beirut (241 Marines and 59 French paratroopers killed); the hijacking of TWA flight 847, during which U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem was shot and dumped on the tarmac of the Beirut (where else?) airport; kidnappings galore, including AP Mideast correspondent Terry Anderson, who was released in 1991 after six years in captivity and CIA station chief William Buckley, who was tortured and killed by his captors in 1985.

As happy as we all should be over the richly deserved death of this monster, there is a bit of mystery surrounding it in that no one has claimed responsibility. Was it Israel? Was it the United States? Was it some rival terrorist faction? We may never know.

But Hezbollah knows where to lay the blame regardless of any possible conflicting reality and vowed to retaliate against Israeli targets anywhere in the world. Hey, isn’t that what they work at doing anyway, seven days a week, 365 days a year? So what’s changed?

Anyway, all decent people should be thrilled that Mughniyeh is gone. But not all people are decent, or, to be more kind, some people are, shall we say, morally confused, as I found out while listening to conservative radio talk show host Michael Medved yesterday, who was in a celebratory mood over the news of Mughniyeh’s richly gratifying extirpation.

Medved specializes in taking calls from people who disagree with him, presumably because it makes for rousing debate rather than just a bunch of preaching to the choir. But it gets a bit frustrating when he takes a call from someone who is a complete moral idiot incapable of distinguishing between good and evil and keeps her on the line for ten minutes, causing me to scream at the radio till I’m hoarse.

The female caller, in an infuriatingly condescending tone of voice, chastised Medved for celebrating the death of a “human being” and then went on with a typical leftist litany of the crimes of the United States, which were presumably the reason for the existence of terrorism in the first place. When asked what should have been done about Mughniyeh, her response was, “Leave him alone.”

The next caller, another moral moron, basically reiterated what the woman had said and I had to change the station before I ran off the road in a state of enraged exasperation.

Almost as disturbing as the terrorists and their despicable actions are the legions of Americans who, since the 1960s, have been rendered incapable of rational thought and bereft of moral clarity. It’s a lead pipe cinch they’re all voting for Obama who wants to meet face-to-face with the world’s premier dictators, as well as have a summit with Muslim countries in order to improve the United States’ image, as if it’s our image that needs improving and not the other way around.

It’s almost enough to make a person give up listening to talk radio, but then if you follow what’s going on at all, there’s simply no escape from the crazies. One has to be fearful for the country and extremely apprehensive about who becomes the next president. But for today, anyway, savor the news of Mughniyeh’s timely annihilation and look forward to the next such act of justice and moral clarity.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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“Terrorists kill people. Weapons of mass destruction have the potential to kill an enormous amount of people. . . [but] global warming in the long term has the potential to kill everybody.”

Holy cow! Think of the enormity of this statement! No, think of the enormity of the idiocy of this statement because it is truly gargantuan. If the temperature of the earth heats up a few degrees as predicted by the worst case global warming scenarios, then according to hizzoner, the human race doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving. We’re all dead, kaput, turn out the lights, the party’s over.

To say that the mayor doesn’t believe in the adaptability of man is the understatement of this young century, and maybe any other. Global warming has the potential to kill every last person? Really? Let’s examine this a bit.

Let’s say you live in North Dakota and the temperature rises by several degrees. Why would you die? Let me repeat that. Why would you die?

Why wouldn’t you instead be jumping for joy? In fact, I’d hazard to say that just about anybody living north or south of, say, 40 degrees latitude north or south, respectively, would welcome a warmer climate. Ever spent a winter in Pittsburgh? Or Des Moines? Or Schenectady? It’s nothing to write home about–unless you’re from an even more miserably cold place.

There’s a reason why people leave such places in droves and move to Florida and it’s not because a warm climate will kill you.

Okay, I know what all you global warming fanatics are thinking right now. Mr. Strange, how can you be so flippant about the impending planetary catastrophe? Don’t you understand that all the world’s coastal cities are going to be under water by the end of the century due to melting ice?

No, I don’t know that for a fact, but even if it happens, it doesn’t “kill everybody,” to use Bloomberg’s vernacular. It’s not like the waters will all come rushing in one day without warning. If it happens at all it will be by fractions of an inch per year. Tens of millions won’t be suddenly wiped out in one fell swoop.

Remember, Al Gore’s psychotic prediction of a possible 20-foot rise in sea level is greater by a factor of ten than that of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s one of the many reasons why nobody should be losing sleep over the prospect of mankind’s demise.

See, that’s really what this is all about, the hyperbolic nonsense of the climate change doomsayers. Even if the absolute worst case global warming scenario actually occurs, humanity isn’t finished. People will simply adapt. Or at least they will if they don’t allow themselves to become functional idiots by believing whole hog what people like Michael Bloomberg and Al Gore say.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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Now hold on just a minute. I’ll have everyone know I’m not suffering from McCain Derangement Syndrome. Not like the desperate caller I heard just moments ago on C-Span who wondered if maybe McCain could be disqualified as a presidential candidate because he wasn’t born in the United States. (He was actually born in the Panama Canal Zone.)

Nice try, buddy. But don’t you think that might have come up a while ago if it was a legitimate disqualifier? I’d say it was all tongue-in-cheek on the part of the caller, but he sounded as serious as a heart attack.

Granted, it is a bizarre thing that the candidate who disagrees with the Republican base on more major issues than any other is, barring some disaster (or miracle, depending on how you look at it), apparently going to be the Republican nominee. How does such a thing happen?

By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I was a Giuliani guy from the very beginning. Admittedly, he had his own problems with the base, but for months he was the national frontrunner. And then a funny thing happened on the way to his master plan for victory. He basically sat out all the early primaries and by the time Florida rolled around, voters from the retiree state put him into retirement himself.

I’ll bet no serious candidate ever does that again.

In the meantime, McCain, who had been written off for dead back in the summer when his approval ratings languished around six percent, went to the early primaries, pulled off a victory in quirky New Hampshire, and came roaring back to become the party’s frontrunner.

How did he do that? Was it Bhutto’s assassination, which put foreign policy back in the spotlight, a subject on which McCain generally shines? Was it the media’s well-known love affair with him? Was it an inexplicable surge of independent voters who have also been known to have a peculiar penchant for the maverick senator? Was it the Huckabee factor, which had the no-chance-for-nomination governor robbing votes from Romney? Was it Romney’s own problems with flip-flopping, pandering and negative campaigning?

I don’t know, but conservative talk radio has hammered the guy for weeks on end, all to no avail. Rush Limbaugh has said he might not vote in the general election if McCain is nominated. Ann Coulter has said she would vote for Hillary instead of McCain because she’s not as liberal as him. A writer in the New York Post has actually coined a phrase for people who would do what Coulter is suggesting: “suicide voters.”

Come off it, people! Stop the insanity. Ann, I love you and your bombastic humor, but if you’re serious, it’s time for a psychiatric exam. McCain’s not the best we could have done, but he’s not a bug-eyed socialist who wants to make every last American a dependent of the state. And he’s not willing to lose the war in Iraq. He understands that would be a disaster, which apparently is beyond the comprehension of either Hillary or Obama.

If you are a Republican, hold your nose while voting if you must, but for the sake of the country, don’t be a suicide voter. It would be a decidedly nihilistic and unpatriotic thing to do.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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A while back, one of their more inventive methods of instilling fear in local populations involved ripping people’s faces off, literally, with a piano wire. But in any given block of time, you can only rip off so many faces. In other words, it’s slow and tedious work, far less efficient than bombings that take out scores at a time.

But since the surge, bombings have decreased dramatically and al-Qaida has been on the run. So it had to find a way to infiltrate the vastly improved security in order to continue the mayhem that would in turn create political fallout and hopefully prevent stability in the country.

Obviously inspired by Allah, creator of the infinite universe, someone in the organization must have had a eureka moment. If we’re going to step up the bombings again, someone reasoned, we need people who will arouse less suspicion than the usual martyr types. So how’s about we go out and find mentally defective people — those with Down syndrome, for instance — and preferably women, and strap bombs on them and send them into crowded marketplaces. No one will suspect a thing and we can quickly slaughter a slew of innocent Iraqi citizens and show the world we’re still a force to be reckoned with.

So that’s what they did the other day in Baghdad, sending two explosive-laden, mentally retarded women into two separate bazaars and detonating them via remote control. Whether the two women knew they were about to become liberated martyrs for the Islamist cause, or whether they could even begin to comprehend the concept, we may never know.

It was a brilliant plan, except for one thing. It will probably only work once because now that it’s been done, mentally defective people will come under the same scrutiny as everyone else. But with divine inspiration from above, they may well think of new depravities to forward their goals.

In the meantime, perusing Barack Obama’s official campaign homepage, one sees his position on Iraq:

“Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq with 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.”

“If al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq?” You mean, they actually might not do that when all U.S. troops get yanked out of the country? In what alternate universe does Mr. Obama reside?

The only thing that has put a significant dent in al-Qaida’s campaign of carnage has been a surge of more troops, not less. From where do the thought processes of the leftist antiwar brain come? Why would you cease doing what has obviously been working and then do the opposite, which would result in an ironclad guaranteed failure, leaving Iraqis to the tender mercies of the world’s most despicable creatures and the security of the entire region far worse off?

If there is a war worth fighting in this world, it’s one to defeat the fiendish fanatics who will stoop to anything, including blowing up the mentally retarded and ripping people’s faces off, in their twisted quest for power. How can any American presidential candidate not understand that?

Al-Qaida’s not much on that whole “election” concept, but they have to be wishing they could get into some booths and pull some levers for the American with the funny sounding name.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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Hmm, this sounds vaguely familiar. Oh yeah, now I remember. A few months ago he said if he was elected he would have face-to-face meetings with every deranged, enemy dictator on the planet, presumably to show how open-minded an Obama-led America would be and presumably to show that if you just sit down and talk to your enemies, everything can easily be straightened out to everyone’s liking.

He got hammered by Hillary and others in his own party for that display of childlike naiveté, after which, in order to show his toughness, he promised to invade Pakistan should the need arise.

Can’t reasonable people of all stripes and political persuasions come together and agree that this guy would be a disaster as commander-in-chief? Actually, no, of course not. That would be naiveté on my part. The fact is that millions of misguided Americans agree with Obama that the United States is the reason for most of the friction that exists between it and the Middle East, as well as other troublesome areas of the world.

Well, I’ve got a question for those millions and for Mr. Obama himself: Given that the Middle East and most of the Islamic world is a poverty-ridden basket case of ignorance, fanaticism, squalor, terror fomentation and tribal violence from one end to the other, why is it America’s image that needs repairing? Why isn’t it their image that needs the fix-it job instead, or rather, their way of life, which creates so many nettlesome problems for the rest of the world?

But Obama can’t be bothered by such technicalities. He just wants to find “ways to bridge the gap that grows every day between Muslims and the West. . . . We must also listen to their concerns.”

We already know what their primary concerns are (destroying the Zionist regime and eventually making the entire world Islamic) and they don’t deserve a serious hearing. Just yesterday, Iran’s madcap President Ahmadinejad called on the West to acknowledge Israel’s “imminent collapse” as he bragged about Iran’s nuclear program going into its final stage. It shouldn’t be too hard to connect those dots.

He’s already on record as saying that “the basic problem in the Islamic world is the existence of the Zionist regime, and the Islamic world and the region must mobilize to remove this problem.” The guy is the equivalent of a rock star all over the Islamic world. Why would you want to have a summit with such psychotics?

But that’s what Obama wants and if he’s elected that’s probably what we’ll get. It would all be in the spirit of tolerance, of course, but the problem is, the other side has no tradition of tolerance and only sees anyone else’s tolerance as weakness.

In an age of apocalypse-minded Islamic terrorists itching to get their paws on weapons of mass destruction, tolerance, which equates to perceived weakness, is not the course to take.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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There are plenty of politicians out there with whom I can cheerfully disagree without rancor, but when it comes to Edwards, I have to admit to one of the most visceral dislikes I’ve ever had for a public figure. If I had to listen to one more of his “two Americas” sob stories about how the deck is permanently stacked against the poor, I think I would have–

Well, I’ll spare you the unpleasant regurgitative details. Suffice it to say the guy is a sleazy, slimy shyster who pushed a negative economic view of this country that is so utterly and demonstrably false that it is infuriating in its mendacity.

For complete details, see my column “John Edwards, You’re No Bobby Kennedy.” In a nutshell, though, his own personal story, which is that he is the son of a poor ol’ mill worker who goes on to become rich and run for president, belies all the class warfare claptrap on which his campaign has been based. The fact is, if you are of reasonably sound mind and body and you can’t make it in this country which is the greatest engine of prosperity in the history of civilization, then there’s something wrong with you, not with the country itself.

But even in his bowing out of the presidential race, Edwards will sicken us one last time by officially ending his campaign in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans where he can go out with a bang, railing against, as one article put it, a “Washington that didn’t hear the cries of the downtrodden.”

Yeah, well, the local and state government didn’t much “hear the cries of the downtrodden” either, having failed miserably in their own and more pressing responsibilities to the local population.

Of course, one of the fundamental and inherent problems with the “Chocolate City,” as Mayor Ray Nagin famously fancied it, is its large welfare population, which is a population wholly dependent upon government to take care of it, which tends to create an environment where normal human initiative is replaced by lassitude. Combine that with certain geographical realities such as a city below sea level and the proximity of the mighty Mississippi River, Lake Ponchartrain and a hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico, and you’ve got a disaster waiting to happen.

So hurry up and get it over with, Mr. Edwards, and then please go back to your 28,000-square-foot mansion which was built with the money you made suing doctors and driving up the cost of healthcare for all of us.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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Well, lo and behold, and as if to officially confirm my thesis, JFK’s daughter, Caroline, has now come out with an endorsement of Obama in an op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled “A President Like My Father.”

Okay, I’m not going to crow too much about my incisive analysis since I was hardly the first to compare the appeal of Obama to the appeal of JFK. I did point out, however, that those comparisons were fully emotional and without substance. Caroline’s op-ed piece endorsing Obama provides no exception. It’s all touchy-feely, warm and fuzzy, impressionistic nonsense that can’t pass for substantive argument.

I don’t question the sincerity of the poor girl (er, excuse me, the 50-year-old woman; the image of her as the six-year-old child who lost her martyred father is immutably frozen in my mind), but it’s all just emotional longing for someone to come along and replace her father. Here are some excerpts from her piece:

“OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.”

“My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.”

“There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.”

“I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.”

“I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.”

See what I mean? Call me a killjoy or even a dasher of dreams, but there’s just no “there” there, either in Caroline’s piece or in Obama himself. Yes, I’ve left many of the parts out, but it’s just more of the same: wishful thinking on the part of a very nice woman who lost her president father a long time ago.

I’ll even throw in one more bit of psychological analysis of Caroline’s endorsement. The fact that Obama is black makes him all the more appealing to her. Why? Because one of the things her father has been criticized for was not doing enough to help the cause of civil rights. It took his successor, LBJ, to stir the country, get the legislation passed and finally get the ramparts of segregation dismantled once and for all. I’m guessing it has always rankled Caroline that this gruff, slow-talking, fatally flawed Texan was able to accomplish something so significant that escaped her obviously superior father.

By the way, Senator Edward Kennedy, Caroline’s uncle, has jumped on the Obama bandwagon as well with his own endorsement of the charismatic, JFKesque candidate.

The absurd thing about these Kennedy endorsements is that by today’s standards JFK would almost certainly be a Republican, would likely be appalled at the politics of his brother and daughter, and would never personally cast a vote for someone as left-wing as Obama.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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And anyway, global warming is the kind of thing that only cockamamie infidels obsess over because what could be more uncontrollable than the weather? That is the province of God and, as they say in Arabic, when it comes to the weather or anything else, insh’allah (“if God wills it”).

But wait just a minute, says Al-Arabiya, the Dubai-based satellite TV channel set up in 2003 to directly compete with al-Jazeera TV. Maybe there’s something to this global warming after all. Or at least, maybe it can be used to make a point that is conducive to the Arab point of view, which is to say, maybe it can be used, even if in a convoluted and downright goofy way, to justify desperate people resorting to terrorism.

What follows is the transcript of a brief spot, presumably a kind of public service message, that appeared on Al-Arabiya on January 18, 2008. See if you can follow the logic.

Man in a restaurant: I’ll have the grilled chicken, please.

Voice-over: The preferred food for millions of chickens around the world is green soy beans. It is mainly imported from Brazil by ships like this one, which release tons of carbon dioxide, causing the ice at the poles to melt, and the sea level rises, and as a result, the water floods some of these beautiful islands, whose inhabitants flee to refugee camps, where some of them might undergo terrorist training, and from time to time demonstrate their “fine arts” to the world.

Suicide bomber detonates a phone-bomb.

These regular people are then compelled to change their clothes into military uniforms, ready to fight one of the new wars of the world – a war might jeopardize the world’s energy supply, forcing the ships that carry green soy beans to cancel their journeys. Thus, it is impossible to ship soy to feed the world’s chickens.

The outcome is:

Waiter: There is no chicken today.

“Al-Arabiya — So you know more.”

And there you have it. Who knew that global warming was being caused primarily by ships hauling chickenfeed from Brazil? But that’s really beside the point. The main point seems to be that when “regular people” get screwed in some way, they might then feel the need to “from time to time demonstrate their ‘fine arts’ to the world.”

We’re not told in the spot where those hypothetical “beautiful islands” that got flooded by global warming are, which seems to infer that they could be anywhere on Planet Earth, which would suggest that any of the world’s “regular people,” if faced with such circumstances, might naturally resort to terrorism as a perfectly understandable means of redressing their thoroughly justifiable grievances.

All of which goes toward pushing the idea that if innumerable, seemingly crazy Muslims are now infiltrating every corner of the globe and self-detonating and taking out as many innocent people as they can find glommed together in one place, well, then, maybe that’s what any “regular” person would do if they were in the same grievanced circumstances.

It’s a stretch, to say the least. In fact, it’s demented, unhinged and bereft of reason. But that’s what passes for a public service message in the Arab world.

“Al-Arabiya — So you know more.”

It’s a catchy slogan, but it needs to be a bit more honest: “Al-Arabiya — so you don’t know squat and continue to fall further and further behind the rest of the civilized world.”

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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King Day celebrates the life of a man who spurred a national movement to grant oppressed and disenfranchised citizens the same rights that other Americans took for granted. That’s certainly something to celebrate as it made America a better place, not just for blacks, but for everyone. As King once said, “many of our white brothers . . . have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.”

Roe v. Wade, on the other hand . . . Well, exactly why, or how, do you celebrate a woman’s right to destroy her unborn child? Even if the mother was a victim of rape or incest, rubbing out the innocent child is not exactly cause for jubilation. Of course, the overwhelming majority of abortions are gotten because somebody was too irresponsible to use birth control or because, hey, my life is just way too hectic right now to, like, deal with the inconvenience of becoming a mother.

But celebrating is what the National Organization for Women (NOW) is doing, though, as can be seen on their website, cautionary notes about vigilance and maintaining abortion rights abound:

“Though we are celebrating 35 years of Constitutional protection of a woman’s right to abortion, we cannot let our guard down. With so many limitations and roadblocks, the promise of Roe is already denied to many women, and access to birth control is under increasing attack.”

Access to birth control under attack? Well, yeah, for 11-year-olds. Is that so unreasonable?

Nonetheless, to hear NOW and other hardcore abortion proponents tell it, Roe v. Wade has provided the most important and sacred right a woman has and as any halfwit can see, while nowhere specifically mentioned in the Constitution, leaps up off the pages from between the lines.

You know, as obviously intended by the Founding Fathers who wrote the thing, even though we are also told they were all misogynistic genocidal racists who viciously destroyed the way of life of the native peoples of an entire continent. All the more reason, then, to marvel at their singular wisdom of writing a document from which abortion rights would be unearthed two hundred years later.

Happy Roe v. Wade anniversary day, everyone!

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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“Bin Laden son wants to be peace activist.”
“Bin Laden’s son in horse ride for peace.”
“Osama’s son wants British visa to live with granny bride.”

What the heck is up with all that? Well, let’s just say it appears that the apple doesn’t necessarily fall near the tree after all. One of Osama bin Laden’s 19 children (that he knows of, anyway), Omar bin Laden has decided not to follow in his father’s footsteps as the ultimate holy warrior for radical Islam.

In a recent interview in Cairo, the 26-year-old, who bears a striking resemblance to his dad, was sporting a black leather biker jacket and dreadlocks that dangled halfway down his back. This dude is obviously way too cool to get hung up on his old man’s bad trips and has opted out of a lifestyle of fomenting apocalyptic Islamic terrorism against Western civilization.

Omar once lived with his father in Sudan and then moved with him to Afghanistan where he trained at an al-Qaida camp. In 2000, he says he basically decided the whole Islamic terror thing was a total drag and he walked away from it all.

“I don’t want to be in that situation to just fight,” he said. “I like to find another way and this other way may be like we do now, talking.”

Omar suggested that his father didn’t oppose his leaving, but it had to be a pretty gutsy move nonetheless. The words “honor killing” had to have crossed his mind before he split. But apparently, at least in terms of their personal relationship, the old guy wasn’t a total bummer.

On the other hand, the father can’t exactly be thrilled that his son wants to be an “ambassador for peace” between Muslims and the West. If the boy doesn’t want to fight, okay, so he’s a little more sensitive than some. Waging jihad from primitive backwater locales and living in caves isn’t for everyone. But hobnob with infidels? Despite the best intentions and child-rearing techniques, one can never know how a child will turn out.

This whole peacenik thing is not the first time this son of the world’s most wanted terrorist has made a splash in the news. The tabloids went bonkers last year when he married a 52-year-old, well-seasoned British grandmother named Jane Felix-Browne whose coupling with bin Laden is her fifth matrimonial undertaking. They couldn’t resist a slew of mockingly sensational headlines like “the granny who married bin Laden’s son” and more recently “Osama’s son wants British visa to live with granny bride.”

I say leave the doting couple alone because they’ve got some pretty grand ideas when it comes to advocating peace, one of which is to stage a 3,000-mile horse race across North Africa. Still in the planning stages, they’re seeking approval of governments along the route and looking for sponsors to help pay for the event and raise money for child victims of war.

They see it as an equine version of the cancelled Paris-Dakar auto rally. “I heard the rally was stopped because of al-Qaida,” Omar said. “I don’t think they are going to stop me.”

Let’s hope not. “It’s about changing the ideas of the Western mind,” Omar continued. “A lot of people think Arabs . . . are all terrorists. This is not the truth.”

Actually, nobody’s saying all Arabs are terrorists, but it’s a sad fact that most terrorists happen to be Arabs. As for “changing the ideas of the Western mind,” Omar’s got it backwards. It’s his old man and all his followers, admirers and apologists who need a serious talking to. They’re the ones either waging or making excuses for jihad while the West, on the other hand, has elevated multiculturalism to something akin to a religion and continues to practice a nearly insane degree of tolerance even in the face of the obvious threat from radical Islam.

Still, we should all wish the best for Omar bin Laden and his been-around-the-block bride with their peaceful endeavors. Anything’s better than another bin Laden following in his daddy’s footsteps.

Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/.

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