POTUS Obama begins the year with the historical presumption that he will be re-elected in November.   The GOP begins the year with the expectation that it will hold the House comfortably and will take a certain majority in the Senate.  The EU begins the year in a recession with the expectation of a flat to negative year.  The US economy begins the year sluggish with the expectation of a 1.5% GDP for the year.  The American people begin the year cautious, hopeful, suspicious, watchful.  The political actors in Washington are a non-factor for the economy at best, and a drain on the morale of the investors and operators.  The unknowns for the year are the leadership crisis in China; the suicide cult in Iran that can pull Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut into the conflagration versus Ankara, Amman, Riyadh and Cairo; the face-off between NATO and Russia over Syria; the collapse of Egypt's economy; the disorder in Pakistan that can drag in Delhi.   China sticks out as an immediate threat, because it is non-transparent and false about its debt load and non-performing loans.  Then again, the Obama administration is ill-equipped for any of these fails.  Expectations for rogue states to seek to take advantage of the America reluctance and incoherence.  Will POTUS Obama win re-elect?  Probability is affirmative.  POTUS is out classed by Beijing and Moscow.  NATO is not a support system, it is a talking point.  What do I expect?  Chaos of the rogues.  Iran makes the first move, what will the UN try?

A U.S. naval ship, CVN-74 USS Stennis, is pictured during the Velayat-90 war game on the Sea of Oman, near the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran December 29, 2011

 

If it is to be Mitt Romney who outlasts the GOP circus acts in Iowa, NH, SC and FL, then with the victory comes the long-anticipated match-up with POTUS Obama. An honest concern is that with these two leading the tickets, how can you sustain the dinner party conversation on the election?  You may not be able to.  You may change the subject to dessert, or to baseball season, or to the unusual weather (if it can be found anywhere).  The election could quickly become the topic no one will speak.  The table-killer.  This will alarm the cables, which depend upon alienation and desperation.  The two men are harmless as personalities.  The two men can present themselves as leaders for the Brave New Normal, but no one over 40 is going to believe it for long.  Suppose they held an election and no one listened?  I will have to dig to find something credible to say about either man, because at this time they have labored for decades in order to appear pleasant blanks.  They will be what we say they are for as long as it takes them to get to the next poll.  The plain-dressed pursuit of campaign money to feed their needy ops is their business.   Reading Republic, Lost by the law professor Lawrence Lessig, who despairs that our representative democracy is in tatters because of the dominating demands of the rich and potent lobbies that lease Congress for a pittance and direct the state willy-nilly.  Less a conspiracy than a broken toy for the super-rich and the well-organized (Big Law, Big Labor, Big Air, Big Pharma, etc).  Lessig proposes dramatic turns to banish cash, such as direct financing of amateur primary candidates by voucher system; such as campaigning for 34 states to call for a Constitutional Convention.  Lessig sounds defeated.  Lessig, who identifies with Progressive Democrats of the academic flavor, writes that POTUS Obama pulled a textbook bait-and-switch with his "change" campaign that delivered him to Washington as just another one of the gang.  Is Romney a "change" candidate?  Nah.  Romney doesn't even pretend to be other than routinely competent at managing ineffective or antique systems for profit.  It is a semi-mystery why he wants to be president.  To accomplish what?  To win what?  It will be a challenge to speak of these men as more than stand-ins.  Am trusting the weather will improve for the young just leaving school.  It is their planet more than Romney's or Obama's.  Both major parties have lost their point of view.  It is all either of them can do to villainize the other.  What daring dullards.

The heavy weather of snow and ice is genius stage management. KJI exited the throne at the right time of year to demonstrate why North Korea is not going anywhere quickly. The mourners appear well fed and energetic. There must be a Ministry of Mourning that selects and trains tens of thousands of militia-like mourners. Maximum employment benefits for a certainty no matter your own particular future. The Deep Freeze State.   

Deep State Langley.  

Speaking to the SEAL vet and chronicler Chuck Pfarrer, re his new Seal Target Geronimo, which presents "the inside story of the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden."  The details of the affair are fascinating; to me, mostly in what did not happen and what was not true.  Bin Laden lived as a recluse, a prisoner of his delusions and poor education.  Bin Laden also lived as a caged showpiece in the Pakistani military reservation at Abbottabad.  How much of Bin Laden and Al Q was the malevolence of Deep State actors such as Pakistan's ISI, which was always working with and often for Saudi Arabia's intelligence services?  This points me back to the East Africa Embassy bombings of 1998, the Millenium LAX plot of 1999, the Cole attack in Aden, Yemen, in 2000, the 9/11 itself.  A string of attacks after Bin Laden's fatwa of 1998 against the US.  Who knew where he was?  Who helped him?  Who guided him after POTUS Clinton launched cruise strikes on a jihadist camp in Afghanistan in August 1998?  The ISI?  Saudi Intelligence (which recruited Bin Laden in the 1980s for Afghanistan fantasies)?  Pfarrer's tale also includes a postscript, "What Came After," which illustrates the needy, smarmy, treacherous, goofy business of the CIA maintaining its rep of potency.  It is the Post Office with more expensive human and robotic filters in and out of the building at Langley.  No change.  What it cares about is the usual Washington-based street cred.  Yawn.  The operation that ended Bin Laden's delusional cage in Pakistan (below) was not at first or at last a CIA operation.  It was military, first to last, and it exists in history much the same as do the cannons at the Battle of Trenton, December 1776.  Weapons that worked for the time and won the day, limited mission, generated success, with the single detail of the double-failed Green Units on board the Stealth Hawk "Razor 1" that led to the crash of the element.  The Deep State is a jealous god; the CIA no less than the DPRK demands attention.  The staging of the funeral of KJI is a movie set, just as the CIA's longed-for production by Sony Hollywood (directed by Kathryn Bigelow) of the Abbottabad raid will be a movie set.  Yes, it is said to be true that DCI Leon Panetta, when asked who should play him, said, "Al Pacino."

The expectation in East Asia is that the ragtag murder cult at Pyongyang can be managed now that a puppet's puppet is pushed onto the throne to replace the devil Kim Jong Il. Same song they sang in 1994-95, when the puppet's puppet KJI replaced the old devil Kim Il Sung. The generals with the big hats will provide more of the paranoia that fuels the aggression. What is to be done? It is Beijing's problem now, since the PLA - the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army - has maintained the DPRK for the last 60 years like a pet fox in the chicken coop of North Asia. The North Koreans are part of the proliferation chain that requires breaking. Not this year, as POTUS Obama has his hands full convincing Congress that he has a foreign policy. POTUS Obama gave the order, "It's a go!" on Friday April 29, 2011, that will place him firmly in the history books for the next fifty years or more. No need to elaborate.  The contest to be decided in November 2012 will turn entirely on the exaggerated economic recovery claims by the Democrats versus the ominous economic warnings by the struggling Republicans.  Not even Tehran's poison can interrupt the navel-gazing of the American punditocracy.  This will be the first election to turn on audit and denial since 1992.  All the missed opportunities in the Gulf must await the snows of December 2012.  One year of tomfoolery and evasion to go.

Speaking Ali Soufan, author, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda,  in re the fail of the CIA and FBI from the WTC 1993 onward, and especially af the Cole attack, October 2000.  The warrants support the general finding of the 9/11 Commission that the failure to share specific logical information permitted the ops al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar to enter the US and prepare from July 2001.  Soufan also documents how he was denied an opportunity to knot together the clues that would have led to the so-called courier Abu Ahmed, who was the final connection to bin Laden's hiding hole in Abbottabad.  It is a stunning tale of paper-chasing fools and bullies who withheld information without common sense.  No one has yet explained why al-Mihdhar and al-Hamzi were permitted to enter, leave, re-enter, and use their real names to initiate credit cards, rentals, tickets -- despite the fact that they could be linked to characters who were linked to the Cole attack.  It is maddening to see how the CIA fought hard to keep the FBI ignorant or misdirected.  There is also the ridiculous, such as how, in September 2002, Soufan was permitted only 45 minutes to interrogate major alQ op Binalshibh (below, captured by Pakistanis in 2002), despite the fact that Soufan and his colleagues had critical information that could interpret the alQ twisted infrastructure.  Why did it take so long to solve the bin Laden hideout?  Soufan argues that EIT (torture) and rendition hardened the sources who had the most critical information and let false information cloud the path.  The center of the al Q plans was a group of Yemenis (bin Laden family hails from Yemen).  The cluttered pattern of the CIA paper storm kept the FBI from focusing on the Yemen connections evident since Cole.

    

Ron Paul's iconoclasm and awkward determination get ambushed by CNN video archive. The newsletter Ron Paul makes reference to in August of 1988 is an execrable mish-mash of textbook phobias about Jews, homosexuals, and non-whites, and there are specific slanders against Dr. Martin Luther King and Bill Clinton, a stew of bile and dimwitted obsession about race and sex.  Ron Paul asserts that, "I didn't read them at the time, and I disavow them."  Will this blanket denial stand up to the attack gotcha from CNN and so forth?  Unlikely, since the repetition of the facts of the pamphlet is the damage.  (The pamphlet asserts that the 1993 WTC attack was "a set-up by the Israeli Mossad."  And that is one of the more intellectual delusions.)  These old videos on YouTube remind that the tools of the trade these days include everything politicians have ever said on video anywhere.  What Iowa looks like is the last man standing from the gamut of the usual oppo feeding the usual reporter class. 

I have a clear memory of watching this moment on TV at home in Narberth, Pennsylvania, during Christmas break from college. Nineteen-sixty-eight was a raucous, murderous, transformational year, starting with Tet, then the Paris riots and European turmoil, followed by the Martin Luther King assassination in Memphis, the spring turning into the Czech Spring and then the severe shocks of August in Prague and Chicago, followed by the tight three-way election of Richard Nixon, and lurching to conclusion with the Apollo 8 mission around the Moon.  This is not to skip the mass-murder in the Chinese empire by the Maoist goons calling themselves the cultural revolution; neither the routine mass starvation and sadism of North Korea and the tyranny at the time of South Korea.  All of Asia was afire, especially the American beachfront in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.  We took it all as the way of the world; but, looking back, it was clearly a breakdown in the post-World War II order of the United Nations and the electorates of Europe and America. The Cold War was changing into a battle on all fronts, most especially the domestic front for both the Kremlin and Capitol Hill.  Forty-three years later, the order of battle back then is now clear.  It was the future facing up against the past.  Same as it ever was.  Our future then looked to be, "Space, the final frontier; these are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, its five-year mission to explore new worlds, to boldly go where no man has gone before."  We were literal.  The Hubble and Kepler and SDO robots are fulfilling the five-decade mission to explore new worlds; however, the manned program is in the ditch of Capitol Hill fail.  The way forward is private enterprise building what we need to get to ISS and the Moon and Mars.   As for the Kremlin bit: the Russians are taking steps toward a crony capitalist democracy, not unlike the United States about 1872, when the one-party state handed off to the next in line for the port of New York revenue and so forth, along with the railroad deals.  For Russia, retarded by centuries of feudalism and superstition, this is progress.  The US is not as clear to me.  The King assassination likely contributed to the choice of and fever for the untested, unknown and unaccomplished Senator Obama of Illinois.   How about the cronyism that created the Fannie and Freddie Fed bubble and crash of 2008?  No good answers.  Perhaps not in my lifetime.  Perhaps another forty years until we see the scale of the self-dealing that created banks too big to fail that then failed once they'd been used as plundering tools by an elitist gang of back-stabbers and whiners.  For now, there is Comet Lovejoy in the Southern Hemisphere to ponder the scale of the visible sky, from the ESO Paranal Observatory in the high Chilean desert.   Merry Christmas, each of you colleagues and comrades, and aren't we lucky for the continually updating mystery of it all?

 

Comet Lovejoy was headed for a fiery death with a plunge into the Sun a week ago, and then resurrected itself like Lazarus as it grazed the atmosphere of the Sun at 140,000 km distance and returned to the Earth's night sky. It is entirely a Southern Hemisphere phenomenon at this time, and the images from the summer sky in Tasmania and Australia are enviable. This video provides a surprise glimpse of Lovejoy from the cupola of the ISS. Comets have been harbingers of doom or destiny for thousands of years. The North Korean witch doctors claim that there was a redness in the sky over the peninsula (Northern Hemisphere) on the night of the dictator's death. My choice for portent is the reporting from Iran and Syria that the two regimes are unstable and paranoid. Russia offers to prop up Syria. Turkey challenges Syria. The UN challenges Iran. China offers to prop up Iran. The US is over-stretched and ill-led by a sharpie who enjoys not much respect from the warlords. Europe is fragile. North Africa is headless. Cairo is beggarly. Recipe for comets.

Steve Moore comments on the House GOP fail on the payroll tax extension and pipeline deal that is now on ice for the New Year's festivities, and am speaking to Steve Moore soonest on the day after the day after the deeply comic disorder of the House and Senate at year's end. Also, I wrote a follow-up in the Daily Beast on the self-criticism of House GOP members: 

There is no just-in-time deal for the so-called payroll and pipeline bill, and that means you are likely going to see a 2% cut in your first paycheck of 2012. This is the WMD option for the parties and the White House. The House and Senate have departed the city. The House GOP has appointed conferees, who are waiting to meet with . . . no one . . . to resolve the conflict, because neither Majority Leader Harry Reid nor Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi intends to appoint conferees or to bargain.... more

With the sands running out till the glass reaches 2012, the fate of the so-called payroll tax and pipeline deal on Capitol Hill is a tale of disorder and disunion not only between the warring states of the Republicans and Democrats but also among intramural factions within each party. The next few days till Christmas will reveal the battle plan for all sides; however, as of this morning, there is clear indication that the leadership of both parties is unsure of its membership and without a certain endgame..... more.

POTUS Obama congratulates all the American "work" that contributed to the successful creation of the new Iraqi regime. Odd use, "work," for the eight years of war-fighting that were the predicate for his successul antiwar campaign in place since his 2003 announcement in Chicago against the "dumb idea" of the war.  Obama didn't start it, didn't favor it, but he did decide to close down the option of an Iraqi-based US forward deployment.  The end of the occupation is at the beginning of the long campaign for re-elect.  The region is without significant American presence since 2003, and even the sixty-thousand-plus US troops in Afghanistan do not answer the needs of our allies.  We can guess that Iraq will soon be supporting and voting with the anti-American and anti-Israeli states.  POTUS Obama's three-year-long dance to confront Iran at the table has now led to a quitting of the Iraq table.  Cannot make this stuff up.  John Bolton tells me that POTUS does not care about foreign policy.  Is Obama an isolationist?  Nah.  Obama sees US as one of the league of major nations, and he will not use our military again without wide support from what remains of "Old Europe," that is, France and Gernany with English sniffing looking in.  Mention in passing that am told the European powers have come to disdain POTUS Obama as a lightweight without support from his own party or anyone to be found in the Americas.  The Obama administration is truly without a close-working ally in the Free World; but then, this status is all a relative condition.  We have always been on our own, the savior state, never ever outgunned; confidently solitary, widely followed, the Leatherstocking of states.

 

The scramble for Team Romney is to persuade the Iowa caucu-goers not to desert his lackluster campaign.  The debates are done, and now the leaflets, robo-calls, door-knocking, phone-banking, the usual cash push.  Newt Gingrich seems beyond Romney's reach for votes: Newt Gingrich is a tyro, and little is not known about his record and his temperament.  What Romney can do is drive down the Gingrich surge.  The Paul surge is checked by FNC battering.  Spoke Michael Kranish, Boston Globe, who underlined the Bush family links to Romney dating back to the friendship of President George H. W. Bush with the late Governor George Romney.  They shared favor for voluntarism.  This kink underlines the concerted effort by Karl Rove, acting for the Bush family, to shove Gingrich aside.  The feud dates from 1990, when Gingrich repudiated President George H. W. Bush's compromise on taxes with the Democrats.  The Bush family blames Gingrich for the defeat in the 1992 re-elect.   An entwined feud.  The Bush family conceals its affection as best it can.  Once Romney is free of the challenges in the primaries, both George W. Bush and Jeb Bush will rumble out for Romney.  Can Gingrich outlast this rigged system for the status quo ante?  Improbably but possibly.  Watch for more of the GOP elite weighing in for Romney.  Already they are readying for a long campaign, at least until March and April.  Will Newt stand down?  If he is offered the correct consolation prize.

Gingrich and Romney, above, are both backed into corners with needling on inconsistencies and exaggerations. The Bachmann jab on Freddie Mac is cunning and minor, yet is useful evidence that Bachmann is aiming to pull votes in Iowa from the Gingrich faction as she has no logic in reaching for Paul or Romney support. Bachmann, Santorum, Huntsman and Perry are all trying to avoid the bottom of the bottom tier. On the other hand, Romney is trying to draw from the Paul voters, since there is no logic in hoping for Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Santorum or Huntsman. It seems an insider's game.  The Fox interrogators were uniformly obvious and repetitive.  There was no news; no change; no fresh information; no revelation or turn of the road or useful policy dispute.  It was regurgitation, pomposity, hamhandedness, triumphalism, condescension,  practiced deception.  FNC is dominated by Karl Rove's will to win, and the only route for Rove to stay a GOP powerbroker is to install Romney as the nominee.  Why?  Because the Bush family disdains Gingrich and knows the rest of the field is cupcake icing.  The GOP field will thin into February; however, there is no reason at this point to presume that Romney or Gingrich will leave the contest at least till March and Super Tuesday (529 delegates, proportional distribution).

Twitterverse favors POTUS Obama by a lopsidied fashion, 7 out of 10. This leaves me in a pronounced minority, but then again, as per Groucho Marx, I am uncomforatble in a club that would let me in as a member.  What does it mean?  Since only 9% of the population is on Twitter, as compared to the 55% on Facebook, this tells me that the trend will move the story toward balance.  Twitter is a treat, and I recommend it as a discipline and search mechanism.  I use Tweetdeck exclusively to bundle my messages, until there is a better aggregator.  What does it mean that Newt Gingrich likes Twitter as a medium?  It means that Romney and Paul are well behind with the simplest of mechanisms to connect to voters.  Puzzle: Do social media favor the Democrats, and if so, why?

 

The long game view is that Ron Paul is running for president perpetually the last few years in order to create a space and brand for his son, Rand Paul, to launch a bid in the next cycle, 2016.  This is logical.  Rand Paul is aggressive, curt, not war, brainy, ambitious and cautious; and it is good planning to create a brand.  The puzzle re the father is that his views are so clearly lopsided to a preachy thou shalt not degree that he resembles a cartoon of libertarian dilettantism.  No foreign policy for the world's reigning superpower.  No foreign entanglement no matter the risk to supply lines and markets.  Odd, cranky, facile, provocative, slight, derelict.  Is this a deliberate siren call for attention?  Ron Paul's posture is that of a professor using the Socratic method to disturb and persuade students.  Not a political face, rather a poker face.  Is Ron Paul a factor in the GOP contest after Iowa and New Hampshire?  Likely slight.  A vote for Ron Paul is a way of signifying none of the above.  Is it too late to stop Newt and MItt with a none of the above vote?  Unknown.  My measure now turns to Gingrich.  Is this the New Nixon narrative, 1967?

Spoke John Fund, Mona Charen, Taegan Goddard. Salena Zito, Lara Brown, re the Mitt Romney error of trying to intimidate Rick Perry with the sarcastic, "I'll bet you $10,000..." The opinion is mixed as to whether or not it has legs. The average golfing/jesting plutocrat thinks that $10,000 is a sizable but not consequential price for what he wants. Romney underlines his wealth with this simple rhetoric of jovial authority.  Romney has worked for a year to show he's one of the guys who has a family and job to protect. Now that pretense is gone. The guessing game from my professionals is about who will gain from Romney's error? Lead guess is Perry, then possibly Bachmann or Santorum in Iowa. The unseen part is what this does for the Gingrich lead in the polls. Gingrich helped himself with his rhetoric about the Mideast. How much? The Iowa caucus is so close at hand, and Gingrich has such a sizable national polling lead, that the question now is about Iowa. Can Newt defeat Mitt? And what about NH?  Can Paul pick up strength in NH with the Romney error? Can Perry? All of these are not quite $10,000 questions. Will the bet remark be Romney's epitaph, like the "brainwashed" line by his father, the governor of Michigan, who ended his bid for the nomination 1967-68?  Mention that Rasmussen reports Newt is now seen as most electable by 49%, with Romney at 22%.  

The weak decision by the POTUS administration to alienate (spurn, short-change, ignore, disregard, ice-out, agitate, challenge, provoke, etc.) the Israeli supporters on Capitol Hill and in the electorate now leads to the Progressive punditocracy (Andrew Sullivan is a Green Knight among this cadre of Grub Street) choosing to fault the GOP for remaining loyal to Israel. The pretzel of partisanship in the USA. The case is made that the GOP is too cozy with Netanyahu, who is, significantly, the elected leader of an ally of the US. Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, the clear front-runniers in the IA-NH chase, are both firm in their policy that supports Jerusalem. The logic is that Israel is our democratic, capitalist ally that is integral to our ambitions to project stability and peace into a region without either. This is not a hard case to make.  Why do the Progressives disagree?  Do the Progressives have another road to reach the goal? Not to find.  The Progressive antipathy to Jerusalem does not look to be informed.  Siding with the PA is like siding with gangsters who have long since ceased hiding their villainy.  Am told by a close observer that Jewish support for POTUS has fallen under 60% and perhaps more, far different from the 78% he received in '08.  Am told that the Obama administration is intermittently aware that it is at risk of losing heavily from its Jewish vote count, and is already aware that the checks are not flowing.

The Romney panic is slow-footed and not fresh.  The Romney SuperPAC "Restore Our Future" smears Newt GIngrich video (above) with the most easily found news reports of the last weeks, all of which speak to Newt Gingrich's record once upon a time as a GOP leader and as a lobbyist who does not like to be called a lobbyist.  None of this negative speaks to the future.  Is it okay to ask questions about why Newt Gingrich took a big money contract from Freddie Mac as late as 2008?  Sure.  But then again, if we are to start to line up what pols took what money from Freddie and Fannie, life is short.  This is choosing a politician as a nominee, not reviewing a junior choir leader's resume.  Newt Gingrich takes money from well-wishers who want influence; Newt Gingrich takes money from enterprises who want to back-slap members of Congress and the administration; Newt Gingrich sings for his supper when the tax dollar is paying the freight.  What does a presidential nominee need to do that is different from what Newt Gingrich has already done?  Just win, baby; and just now Newt's surge is like William T. Sherman cutting free from his supply lines at Nashville and heading for Atlanta.  Am told Newt Gingrich is enjoying the marching through Dixie as well as the campaigning Up North.  The Happy Warrior will self-destruct is the assertion by his former colleagues.  Maybe.  But not yet. 

 

There may be a growing historical irony worth working that the collective geniuses of the European Union at Brussels have now worked on the euro crisis long enough so that there is no solution available other than dictating a change in the constitution of the eurozone and the European Union so that democracy and nationalism are out and command and control Teutonism is in.  Berlin  über Alles.   Here in December, 70 years after Pearl brought the German Empire to declare war on the US, I think of the Ardennes, December 1944, when the German Empire gathered its boys, marshalled the remains of its Panzer IVs, and launched a sneak attack on American boys asleep in the snowy Ardennes forest stretching beside the Rhine Valley.  What does it signify to the US?  Mention that the Obama administration is now claiming that the threat to their re-election is the resolution of the euro.  POTUS always looking to blame-shift.  Also, POTUS Obama likes the EU idea of unelected technocrats' supervising economies with social engineering solutions to problems they have created by ignoring the markets and dictating solutions.  Obama longs for Brussels.  Is it useful irony that Brussels was the objective of the German strike force in December 1944?

Newt Gingrich is the insurgent.  It is an upside-down GOP race, far-fetched, unpredictable and, at this point, having three weeks of holiday joviality till the Iowa caucus, Newt Gingrich is the clear leader. Gingrich confounds many observers.  It may be that this is the transformed robo-candidate that the party needs, a Happy Warrior for the 21st Century.  Spoke Taegan Goddard, John Avlon, neither of whom can find obvious weakness in the Gingrich style.  This is not about the general election.  First, you gotta get the nomination. Puzzle, why are Biden and Axelrod pot-shotting Newt?  What do they see in POTUS armory that matches poorly with Newt?  The One vs. The Historian?  It's a hoot to consider three or four presidential debates between Obama and Gingrich.  We will never recover our sense of proportion.  Grand opera.  Demo op tells me that the idea of a Romney-Obama contest is drab to the point of a scream.  If in the event, it is Romney and Obama, then no one at dinner parties will care to discuss the matter, and we will as a nation turn away from the banality of their vanity.  For now, the Democrats have no tools to fend off the Gingrich boom.  Mrs. Pelosi tries to smear him with promises of future chats on his ethics violations in the 1997 hearings, a laughable blast from the past by a deeply compromised partisan.  Each time Mrs. Pelosi speaks against Gingrich, he rises in the GOP.  What is there new to say about the old Newt?  POTUS Obama was effective in 2008 in saying that he is speaking to the future, not to his unanswered past.  Gingrich has the same opportunity in the general election.  Did Richard Nixon satisfy the negatives when he ran in 1968?  Nope.  Is Newt Gingrich weighed down with more past errors and controversies than Richard Nixon's runs for the presidency in 1960 and 1968?  Nope.  The Democrats in Washington started hammering Nixon in 1948 and did not ever let up.  See Herb Block (below 1954).  In comparison, the Democrats and the Washington media have been hammering Gingrich as a threat only since 1992.

Speaking Stanley Weintraub, author, "Pearl Harbor at Christmas," at the 70th anniversary, re the burning tragedy of the Churchill visit to stay in the White House through Christmas 1941.  The episodes are well known, the drama is long since solved; and yet those days are like a battle of the founders with the forces of Hades itself.  How deeply odd that one of the Devils was embraced by FDR and Churchill in order to solve the Hitlerites and the Imperial Japan.  Each day, while FDR and Churchill debated and studied, the Japanese were rolling up Bataan and driving the remains of the Philippine forces to the last ditch of Corregidor.  The White House mood was shockingly grim.  Churchill's exuberance was often ill-advised or bizarre.  Every day started with a sense of retreat.  Am listening again and again to FDR's speech to Joint Congress.  The applause and cheers and huzzahs from the members of Congress (starting :16) are moving and humbling.  Gosh, they were scared, angry, resolved, fretful, shocked, eager.  I can hear the righteous anger in the cheers.  It is good to remind myself, in these grim days of global financial ruin, that such fear at December 1941, or September 2001, or the fall of 2001, is always followed by rallying and purpose. We will do so again.  Am unsure if POTUS Obama understand the lesson of disaster.  Trust the American people and their representatives, and the next steps will be a march to success.  Am told POTUS more isolated than ever before as he starts re-elect march.  POTUS well advised to listen to the remaks we have from December 1941.  That cheering, frustrated, earnest, furious Congress is what is needed.  Who will tale the White House to win Congress to his side?

Spoke Josh Kraushaar, Sean Trende, James Taranto, Reid Wilson, Jim Rutenberg, Robert Draper, re the 2012 contest in various flavors, and not one of them regards Mitt Romney as a weak player in a match with POTUS Obama.  Romney matches up especially well in swing states such as Nevada, Michigan, Ohio and New Hampshire.  Spoke Josh Kraushaar and Jim Rutenberg re Newt Gingrich, and learned that Gingrich carries with him gigantic inconsistencies and plain tomfoolery from his twelve years as a lobbyist who is not a lobbyist in Washington.  Gingrich's candidacy is the ultimate Hill supremacy.  Can the Tea Party embrace such a walrus of arrogance?  No.  Can America embrace a man who promotes himself as various Confederate or Union generals and politicians -- Stonewall Gingrich --, depending upon the occasion?  No.  Does Gingrich save the last month before Iowa with cheek?  Yes.