The Aged P

President Obama’s birth certificate, made public as a result of Donald Trump’s brief “campaign”, is a forgery.

This is an astonishing claim.

Note that nobody has said that Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen of the USA – just that the document purporting to prove his natural born citizenship is not an honest piece of evidence.

With the results of Maricopa County, AZ sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse,” an incredible claim has become an incredible situation: a team of professional investigators, commissioned by a major law-enforcement agency, has determined that the alleged birth certificate produced by the president of the United States is a probable forgery.

One would have expected a veritable tsunami of claim and counter claim as a result of the Mariscopa County investigation with Obama’s supporters and opponents slugging it toe to toe in print and on screen. I expected to see in the Obama friendly BBC and Guardian a line by line dissection of the Cold Posse’s case with a host of experts drafted in via the NYT and the US networks to pour scorn on it’s conclusions. CBS in particular might well have been rather sensitive to the issue of forged documents after its own Dan Rather debacle.

But instead there has been a deafening silence. Not a syllable from the White House. Zilch from the DNC official newsletters at NYT and WaPo. Nothing from Sandra Fluke, the Democrats Presidential candidate for 2028………….and also nothing from any of the scuffed retreads sleepwalking to the 2012 GOP nomination.

I wonder why?

Good news – Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey is making a four part television drama about the Titanic. It will not be able to match the magnificent special effects of James Cameron’s Hollywood blockbuster but he does hope to avoid Camerons simplistic and hackneyed symbolism of the ship as a microcosm of the class struggle where plucky but poor steerage passengers were left to drown while the rich seized all the lifeboats.

He points out that third class women and children were rescued ahead of first class men, that all the evidence appears to indicate a fairly orderly evacuation and that, above all, there is no guarantee that a similar accident happening today would be handled more effectively.

Indeed he believes that our modern assumption that previous generations were less adept at organising a bold and efficient response to the unexpected merely demonstrates a baseless arrogance and a shallow understanding of the past. We have convinced ourselves that the contemporary tendency to “emote” and sustain the continuous mantra of “caring and sharing” somehow endows us with a higher purpose in life.

The mistake is to imagine the sort of Channel 4 thing that everything was ghastly until 1968 and Woodstock and then it all took a tremendous turn for the better. That’s essentially bogus. Every period has some things to offer that worked well and others that were unjust and wrong and repressive.

Whoops – take care, Julian…in some quarters going public with the view that maybe previous generations made a better fist of things than team 21st century might well be characterised as a “Hate Crime”….

Since the secretive Barclay Brothers took over the UK Telegraph the once highly respected broadsheet has been transformed into a lifestyle paper on a par with those glossy magazines you find in front of you on a long haul flight.

All the experienced hacks were despatched into the ether because they were far too expensive and you couldn’t easily link their output to advertising fashion or furniture, food or flydrives. They were then replaced with cheap gap year students highly skilled in cutting and pasting stuff from other media outlets – in other words the Telegraph became a slightly upmarket version of the Daily Mail.

In yet another brilliant cost cutting wheeze they realised they didn’t really need specialists in reporting politics. Instead they could get one of their lifestyle drones to double up.

Enter Matthew Norman, restaurant critic, wine expert – and ace commentator on UK and US politics.

He writes a Bryony Gordon style “filler” column every Saturday (just to plug up what would be a rather white patch of paper) and this week he gives the US Republican Party some advice culled from his vast experience of eating freebie meals in expensive restaurants….go for the middle.

You see failed lawyer Matthew knows that the GOP needs to copy the Democrats and get a “centrist” candidate like Obama. Forget the wingnut Tea Party, listen to the wise men from New York and Washington and choose an MSM selected safe pair of hands who won’t rock the boat, won’t worry about the deficit and certainly won’t do anything to irritate Iran or North Korea.
Hey and forget about Sarah Palin

Obama’s one serious electoral fear is the imposition of a more dangerous candidate at an open or brokered GOP convention in August. That worry has now receded. The only Republican to show an interest in that, and then only for a tease, is the high priestess of folksy narcissism from Alaska – and even the Republican party isn’t bonkers enough to hand the keys to the asylum to Sarah Palin.

After all, of what use was she or the Tea Party in the 2010 midterms…

Besides if you want to find an expert on narcissism look no further than restaurant critic….

The Stalinists are here, says Dan Riehl, referring to Think Progress and their latest antics in the left’s Tucsonesque Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke blitzkrieg.

There is no real difference between today’s un-American U.S.-based left and regimes such as Stalin’s – only they don’t quite yet have enough power. But they are busy aquiring it. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise. These are very dangerous people that need to be defeated for an America anything like how Conservatives view her to survive.

Sandra Fluke, a professional agitator, has become the poster girl of the left and the left supported President Obama and his administration. She appears to be a humourless, single-minded apparatchik, ruthless and intolerant of those with opposing views. Nevertheless it would be unwise to underestimate this woman. She is intelligent and has a superb feel for any political opportunity. She will no longer operate in the political shadows. She, and many like her, is the future of the Stalinist left.

You see the thing about Stalinists (or Marxists, as they should be called since the key element of Marx’s Communist version of socialism was the need for a dictatorship of the revolutionary elite) is that they are quite content to use the arena of freedom provided by parliamentary democracy to further their cause and impugn their political rivals. But once they have power that arena of free debate and discussion is dismantled and we enter the dark world of Orwell’s 1984 where it is no longer sufficient to withdraw from political activity and remain silent. Stalinists require that everyone publicly celebrates and praises the regime however degraded their circumstances.

As is often the case art can encapsulate the essence of this essential truth (largely ignored/forgotten by a complicit media that constantly revisits Hitler, Franco, Pinochet and other non Marxist authoritarian regimes)….so maybe this 1938 French political cartoon could give us a glimpse of the USA in 2037 at the beginning of President Fluke’s second term….

French anti stalinist cartoon 1938

BTW….The sign reads “We are very happy”

Quote of the year (from Hot Air re this)

Yes, she’s irrelevant, because after that impromptu interview last night with CNN, Wasilla and Sarah Palin were trending on twitter. The buzz of the political world was that Sarah Palin voted in her hometown. The CNN pundits in the studio were giddying like school girls at a Justin Bieber concert. On a Super Tuesday night, Sarah Palin generated more enthusiasm and energy just by casting her vote than the lame ass GOP frontrunner, Mitt Romney and the entire GOP field combined.

Yes, she’s so so so so so…..OVER!/

HerneTheHunter on March 7, 2012 at 9:15 AM

Mr Cameron told last year’s Tory conference in Manchester: “I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative.” Last week his spokesman said he was “passionate” about the issue.

So passionate that this proposal was never mentioned in the 2010 conservative Manifesto – nor, indeed, in the manifestos of the Labour Party or Cameron’s Coalition colleagues the Liberal Democrats.

Yet suddenly we have been told by no less a government figure than Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone (an obscure liberal/left chattering class busybody who is now something called “Equalities Minister”) that she will soon be asking for a public debate about how gay marriage can be introduced.

Excuse me? I must have missed the previous debate about whether gay marriage should be introduced.

No I didn’t – because there never has been a debate about whether….instead Ms Featherstone trills rather meaninglessly about “the people”

Mrs Featherstone, however, has argued that marriage is “owned by the people” and that governments have a duty to change laws to bolster the “underlying principles of family, society and personal freedoms”.

Total drivel.

I have no issue with the current situation. Same sex couples already now have the same legal rights as married heterosexual couples via the civil partnerships introduced by Labour in 2004. They can even have their partnerships blessed by a priest to give their relationship a religious dimension.
However I can detect no massive groundswell of opinion throughout the land demanding a such a fundamental change to the concept of marriage that has been established in these islands for well over a thousand years. But what does exist is a well orchestrated campaign by a tiny group of activists with a hotline into our media/political elite and Cameron the former PR man is deeply embedded into that elite.

Over the last half century changes of direction in several key social and ethical policy areas such as abortion, penal policy and immigration policy have been driven by the liberal/left against the wishes of the majority. Yet, partly through fear of being branded as ignorant and intolerant and partly by sheer inertia these deep seated changes to the social fabric have been absorbed by the public with little overt resistance. The result? The emergence of a dysfunctional society and an accompanying breakdown in social cohesion.

But perhaps at last the silent majority will no longer remain so acquiescent. Voices are being heard in opposition to the Cameron/Featherstone diktat and some of those voices are being raised in anger.

The government has sown a wind – they might find themselves facing a whirlwind…..

On the other hand the whirlwind might prove yet another storm in a teacup and the silent majority will just once again give way to the relentless march of those who wish to transform our society into something more malleable – and easier to manage and control…

Anyone remember those TV Westerns that dominated the screens in both the USA and UK during the 50s and 60s? They were evicted wholesale after Fred Silverman of CBS instigated his “rural purge” in 1970.

Why did CBS and the other networks close them down? Who knows, because ratings were certainly not low. The Western on page or screen always had an appeal both inside and outside the USA.

Maybe the 1960s urban media elite were not too keen on that rather individualistic ethic….

The TV westerns might be long gone from the networks (although still around on specialist channels) but I guarantee that the opening themes will stir up some memories amongst the more mature…

Started in 1955 Wyatt Earp

Also in 1955 Cheyenne

1957 Maverick

1957 Wagon Train (notice a very famous guest star in this clip?)

1959 Rawhide

1959 Laramie

1959 Bonanza

….and, in 1962, The Virginian

The price of evil….police officer blinded by criminal in shotgun attack gives up hope “I lost my sight, my job, my wife and my marriage”

Hey – why shouldn’t mothers ask doctors to kill their new born babies if they don’t happen to fit in with their lifestyle……

Billions of pounds later civil servants think it might be time to think about thinking about ways to stop fraudsters, lowlifes from stealing taxpayers’ money…..oh and some of those thieves might be CIVIL SERVANTS so perhaps before we employ them we should check to see if they have previous convictions for fraud….

“You know maybe Hitler was right, perhaps those Jews need to be taught a lesson”…..funny how liberal leftists seem to be able to peddle this stuff without courting the wrath of the BBC/Guardian North London dinner party circuit…

Here’s an idea – why not recruit people who are kind and caring into nursing…..

Stone Age Europeans were first humans to settle in North America – so Chicago politicians truly are the real native Americans…

…and FINALLY meet the UK’s new elite at play…..and they don’t seem to care about using mirrors……

You can’t mistake that soft, silky baritone voice….Nat King Cole was so big during the 40s/50s that the iconic Capitol Records building in Los Angeles was often described as “the house that Nat built”

Yet it is often forgotten that he was regarded as one of the top jazz pianists of his time, on a par with Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum and credited with being one of the first jazzmen to organise the piano/guitar/bass trio set up that became so familiar in the 40s…

Nat plays…

Nat sings….

Over the last months there have been regular marches and demonstrations against the massive cuts in state spending being forced by the EU in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. Indeed in Greece these protests have frequently escalated into full scale riots.

The BBC has, of course, reported on these protests but in a strangely disconnected manner. The levels of anger and frustration are made obvious and the fact that the austerity programmes are the result of pressure from the EU (aka Merkel/Sarkozy) is clearly noted.

But that’s where it ends. There is little background or follow up – the journalism is very two dimensional. Now this is odd because there is nothing more that the BBC likes to do than to dig deep into any protest/riot. G20, Tottenham/Croydon August 2011, Occupy and Syria…..the agitation is lovingly filmed and often carefully choreographed for the cameras, just in time for the evening news. Individual protesters (usually young and photogenic) are interviewed with a hushed and reverential air and over the days there springs from out of nowhere a veritable tsunami of in depth analysis which is usually skewed against the powers that be. Within a fortnight or so there appears the Panorama documentary and six to twelve months later the play/film/opera dramatising the whole event with a cast of heroes…and villains.

The villains – they are always central to the whole performance. Bankers, Oil companies, government ministers – all wheeled out and deconstructed in the name of truth and journalistic rigour. Yet the script has been changed for these Mediterranean protests. There are no villains in this epic – no shadowy figures to abuse, excoriate or condemn. No implication of a deep laid conspiracy to suppress freedom.

Nobody to blame.

Of course you and I know only too well who to blame. They are the cartel of bureaucratic bunglers and con artists who cobbled together the gigantic scam that is the Euro a decade or so back. They are the guilty men and women. In any other situation the BBC would be hunting them down with mike and camera, confronting them in their glittering taxpayer funded offices in Brussels, metaphorically tarring and feathering them in the name of justice and revenge.

But the BBC could never perform that function against the EU, not in a million years. For it is essentially the PR arm of the EU. It has shamelessly pimped this raddled harlot across our airwaves for decades. It would be like the pope flourishing a condom. To admit this monumental failure on the part of the EU elite would demand a degree of honesty and conscience that is simply beyond the pale for any BBC chattering class apparatchik.

Sorry, people…move along there, nothing to see here. Why not look over there at Tesco or that travellers site or the anti capital protest – we’ve already got scores of reporters and the whole team of Today and Newsnight presenters covering those much more important stories…
You see all that criticism of the EU is simply not…helpful….it undermines the narrative and we at the BBC always appreciate the big picture….