They Don't Want Another Hero.
It is a surprising measure of the day that the younger fellows who make up the audience for Hollywood epics are turning away from meaty, working-class protagonists such as Robin Hood and toward digital charmers such as the Iron Man 2 contraption. It is another puzzle to solve in this dreary age of European flim-flam, Asian pretension, and American retreat. Everything about Robin Hood is useful -- his manliness, his loyalty, his passion, his gritty refusal to bend to tyranny. Nothing about Iron Man is useful -- his snarkiness, his misdirection, his gimmicks, his indifference to history (the cheerful and cozy Iron Man is post reality). What could this all mean? We don't need another human hero? We prefer faux irony?
Tehran Wins.
My quick interpretation is that the Obama administration wants nothing to do with confrontation in the nasty old storm-the-castle mode of the Plantagenets vs the French Devils (see Robin Hood opening act). POTUS chooses the camouflage of diplomacy via Lula of Brazil and Erdogan of Turkey (below) concocting a silly and sly deal with Tehran re some part of its enriching uranium. All cheery. POTUS can kick the can down the road past November elections. Tehran can boast and prance and finagle. The best twist so far is that the Obama team is said to be worried about the empty promises. This is too naive to be concocted, and in any event POTUS does not think ironically. Tehran is the Iron Man to the Obama King John. Game over. Robin Hood's theatrical heroism is futile and unloved. Tehran wins, Obama administration wins, Iron Man wins, Robin is retired.
North Korean Torpedo.
The Iron Man of the Kim regime is equally the winner, as the South Korean Lee confers with POTUS over the March 26 sinking of the South Korean warship by a North Korean torpedo. Nothing will come of this but noise in English. Hu of China signed on to this mischief. POTUS regards Hu as a rich uncle with difficult pals. Again, Robin is asked to leave the building. North Korea is the Bank of America of rogues, too sinister to fail.
Merry Men.
Spoke John Bolton, AEI, re his column on William Hague's visit to Mrs. Clinton over Afghanistan. There is fresh energy in Europe. Hague channels Pitt the Younger of the 18th century, the man who presided over the end of the American Revolution and into the Bonaparte wars. Hague has wit. He aims to treat foreign policy as critical to the mission statement of nations. POTUS treats foreign policy as a distraction with no risk, just talk; community organizing on continental scale. There will be trash talk. King John is all POTUS can manage or afford. The Democrats prefer an oligarchy of poseurs and do-gooders. To Sherwood, lads, work to be done.
I wanted to see Robin Hood - I enjoyed Costner's so much - but then I saw it was by Ridley Scott. He and Jerry Bruckheimer always seem to shoot 150 W stories with with a 40 W bulb. Here they have all this marvelous outdoor scenery, which should be another character in the film just as they were in westerns, and they shoot as though it were always a dark and stormy morning followed by a grim and gloomy day. You can't even get them to shoot indoor scenes with lighting of any reasonable kind.
Sheriff of Nottingham, Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal admits he did not serve in Vietnam, asked for multiple deferments, but told audiences he served. News breaks just days before the primary. He will win the primary.
Superheroine (capes and tights) Linda McMahon is racing ahead in the GOP primaries. Her superpowers being resistance to Steroids and steely determination.
This morning the front pages of newspapers are all decked out with men hugging, clasping hands, and smiling broadly. The men were Tehran’s Ahmadinejad, Brasilia’s lame duck Lula, and the rising star of the Islamic world, Ankara’s Erdogan. I would think that Harare’s Mugabe, Caracas’ Chavez and Pyongyang’s Kim Jong-Il were smiling as well, only they likely couldn’t scrape enough money together to make the trip. It’s always good to see the world’s leaders smiling. It says that the rest of us will yet get to see another sunrise or two.
The occasion, of course, was to celebrate the successful diplomatic effort that allows Iran to proceed with its nuclear ambitions while at the same time satisfying UN demands to do so with outside participation. Notably absent from the merry-making was our own illustrious president, Barack Hussein Obama, who had proposed a similar roadmap only last October which Tehran promptly rejected outright and which was then left to languish in the ‘open’ file.
So much for Obama’s outreach to America’s enemies. He does not appear to understand that these have now recognized America as a toothless tiger, and that it remains in their best interest to maintain the fiction of casting us as a worthy opponent despite our having offered our unclenched fist, and made known in no uncertain terms our endless willingness to grovel.
Netanyahu will now be forced to act as he sees himself cornered. We have already fully exposed our bias against him. He knows Israel is being set up as the next domino to fall in Tehran’s bid to establish its hegemony over the entire Middle East and East Asia.
The larger lesson to be learned from this is that the dollar is no longer the dominant currency governing geo-political adventurism; that it has now been replaced by brutality. It is now clear that all those whose primary concerns are centered on tolerance, freedom, ecological purity, democratic participation, human rights, racial and gender equality, etc. have drawn the short straw. From now on we can expect the crane hooks to be wheeled back out into the market square - the knives sharpened, the holes dug, the stones at the ready - to signal the perhaps less-than-optimistic start of oppression, enslavement, feudalism, arbitrary law enforcement, threats and coercion. The death of the dollar means that economic laws have failed; that sharia – which in itself is a throwback to Hammurabi’s Code – is now back in style.
How much Obama had wanted to be a part of this deal! Instead he’s been left on the outside, looking in. What else can a poor man do? He’s already driven a wooden stake through our economy. He’s already succeeded in perverting the functioning of our constitutional republic. He’s already managed to beggar his constituents. What more indeed!
We can be certain that he’ll think of something. His only real enemy is the American people themselves. It is they who will bear the brunt of his frustrated flailing. Obama has been described as a racialist. It’s not a good time to be born white in America – or black for that matter. Zimbabwe is the model for what can happen. Once it was the bread basket of Africa. But that wasn’t good enough. Now its people are starving.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
No Robin Hood, No Charles Martel, and No John Wayne. It's post-testosterone America. Only Metro-sexuals need apply. When Palin is the gutsiest of all, there has to be a problem...
Jim -
When Hillary Clinton is the only one in the administration with any balls, we are indeed in big trouble.