Is the Age of Obama the beginning of the end of America, the last best hope of earth?

President Obama’s curtsy to the Saudi king and his reverential bow before the Japanese Emperor was one of those “right-wing” criticisms that I thought, at the time, was mostly much ado about very little of substance. I now take that back. It was emblematic of what is taking place now.

While all hands on deck have been focused on the healthcare “debate” and Christmas family matters, President Obama last week quietly signed an amendment to Executive Order 12425 (signed by Reagan in 1983, but with restrictions in place to protect the Constitutional rights of our citizens), effectively eroding American sovereignty by immunizing INTERPOL activities within the U.S.

Andrew McCarthy:

for no apparent reason, President Obama issued an executive order removing the Reagan limitations. That is, Interpol’s property and assets are no longer subject to search and confiscation, and its archives are now considered inviolable. This international police force (whose U.S. headquarters is in the Justice Department in Washington) will be unrestrained by the U.S. Constitution and American law while it operates in the United States and affects both Americans and American interests outside the United States.

Interpol works closely with international tribunals (such as the International Criminal Court — which the United States has refused to join because of its sovereignty surrendering provisions, though top Obama officials want us in it). It also works closely with foreign courts and law-enforcement authorities (such as those in Europe that are investigating former Bush administration officials for purported war crimes — i.e., for actions taken in America’s defense).

Steve Schippert:

By removing language from President Reagan’s 1983 Executive Order 12425, this international law enforcement body now operates – now operates – on American soil beyond the reach of our own top law enforcement arm, the FBI, and is immune from Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Much more at Threat Watch

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Dennis Prager wrote a very good article on how President Obama regards “American exceptionalism”. Basically, he doesn’t put much regard into the concept, at all:

As the passage of the bill that will start the process of nationalizing health care in America becomes almost inevitable, so, too, the process of undoing America’s standing as The Last Best Hope of Earth will have begun.

That description of America was not, as more than a few Americans on the left believe, made by some right-wing chauvinist. It was made by President Abraham Lincoln in an address to Congress on Dec. 1, 1862.

The bigger the American government becomes, the more like other countries America becomes. Even a Democrat has to acknowledge the simple logic: America cannot at the same time be the last best hope of earth and increasingly similar to more and more countries.

Either America is unique, in which case it at least has the possibility of uniquely embodying hopes for mankind — or it is not unique, in which case it is by definition not capable of being the last best hope for humanity — certainly no more so than, let us say, Sweden or the Netherlands.

Indeed, President Obama acknowledged this in April, when asked by a European reporter if he believes in American exceptionalism. The president’s response: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

The president was honest. In his view, as in the view of today’s Democratic party, America is special only in the same way we parents regard our children as “special.” We all say it and we all believe it, but we know that it is meaningless except as an emotional expression of our love for our children. If every is child is equally special, none can be special, in fact. If every country is exceptional, then no country is exceptional, or at least no more so than any other.

With the largest expansion of the American government and state since the New Deal, the Democratic party — alone — is ending a key factor in America’s uniqueness and greatness: individualism, which is made possible only when there is limited government.

Read the rest.

Mohamed ElBaradei caps his contentious and ultimately failed 12-year stint as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency today, having spent many years enabling Iran’s nuclear bids only to condemn them in his final days in office. Mr. ElBaradei combined his rebuke of Iran with his familiar calls for more negotiation, but we’ll take his belated realism about Iran as his tacit admission that Dick Cheney and John Bolton have been right all along. Let’s hope the education of the Obama Administration doesn’t take as long.

As if to underscore the point, yesterday the Iranian government ordered up 10 additional uranium enrichment plants on the scale of its already operational facility in Natanz, which has a planned capacity of 54,000 centrifuges. That could mean an eventual total of more than 500,000 centrifuges, or enough to enrich about 160 bombs worth of uranium each year. Whether it can ever do that is an open question, but it does give a sense of the scale of the regime’s ambitions.

The decision is also a reminder of how unchastened Iran has been by President Obama’s revelation in September that Iran had been building a secret 3,000 centrifuge facility near the city of Qom.

SO, if diplomacy has failed, and has no reasonable chance (hell, there’s NO chance) of stopping the Iranian nuke problem…what’s next? The answer is simple: Israel attacks Iran or the US attacks Iran, and Obama lacks the political courage to even think about the latter option.

There are currently 192 countries making up the United Nations members list. The vast majority of the member nations are dictatorships by any other name. You can dress their leaders in fancy robes and toss an occasional crown on a head, but from Saudi Arabia to Libya and Gambia, their leaders oppress their populations. They loot as much as they can from their economies, while enjoying a comforting credibility rubbing shoulders with other narcissistic misanthropes under the opulent umbrella of the UN General Assembly.

The UN has never been an effective vehicle for achieving real peace and security, although it was intended to achieve exactly that when it replaced the impotent League of Nations. The overwhelming power of the United States has been the major underlying force that has prevented major international wars since WWII. The UN has been an inept bystander to international affairs. America’s power and influence has generated kick-back that has been fomented within the UN where jealousy found broad fertile ground amongst a majority of member nations, including Europeans such as Norway, and Denmark. No need here to extend the list of envious pretenders that easily includes the likes of Russia.

The reaction against the U.S. found new energy when the world found itself in an economic recession, and fingers could be pointed at America for having been too self serving. In slide the opportunists. Beating the newfound drums of climate change fear and catastrophe, they will mutate the upcoming Copenhagen meeting on climate change into a perfect vehicle through which begrudging usurpers will once again attempt elevating the UN to status of world power, “over” the U.S.

We can rest confident that the contemplated Copenhagen Treaty emanating from this meeting will find elements to mirror in the cap-and-trade bill now being promoted by Obama and Congress. This, along with the December 10 Nobel Peace Prize presentation, will lock-in support from Washington for the agreement. Obama and Congress will have unwittingly signed on for the formation of Two disasters. The first will be a UN managed onerous extraction of cash from the United States and Canada for what can only be described as payment of a “climate debt.” The second will be the unprecedented endowment of the UN with sweeping powers over the economies of all nations. The text currently contemplated for signing by the membership will provide this body with incisive absolutism over the economic engines that have fuelled both America’s hegemony, as well as its population’s independence of thought and freedoms.

Keep in mind that many, if not most, of the enlightened leaders of UN member countries are the same ones responsible for crimes against humanity, … their own humanities within their own home borders. This is also a membership heavily populated by misogynistic individuals who believe in the subjugation of women and criminalization of homosexuality, all the while pretending to promote the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

The time has long passed for the UN’s charter to be changed. The UN has no ability or capacity to act as a world peace maker. It could remain as an organization directed toward humanitarian efforts, and provide a meeting place for resolving broad international challenges pertaining to education, population, or agriculture. It cannot, however, be allowed to morph into a world power. The United States, which funds almost one quarter of the UN’s budget, should not allow it. Obama and Congress should refuse signing America on to the Copenhagen agreement, or any version of it. Copenhagen has nothing to do with cleaning up our refuse or CO2.

I should add a Third ensuing disaster if Copenhagen materializes: A weaker America would not be positive for long term prospects of world peace.

Another celebrity romance falls to pieces:

By Guy Adams

Wednesday, 28 October 2009

He’s crossed swords, over the years, with all the usual right-wing suspects, from car-makers to gun owners to Wall Street executives, health companies, and George W Bush. Now Michael Moore has picked a fight with a hero of the international left.

The documentary-maker has caused outrage among Hugo Chavez’s supporters by using a late-night chat show to tell a humorous anecdote about meeting Venezuela’s socialist President in a luxury hotel suite during the recent Venice Film Festival.

His two-minute yarn, told to ABC host Jimmy Kimmel earlier this month, seemed harmless enough. Moore alleged that he and his wife had been woken at 2am by a racket coming from Mr Chavez’s room and ventured upstairs to ask him to quieten down.

“A bottle and a half of tequila later,” Moore claimed, he had helped the President to write the speech he recently delivered to the UN. “At the very least, the guy owes me a year’s worth of free gasoline!” he joked.

But there was a problem with the story. A big one. The meeting that Moore so confidently described never happened. And tequila certainly wasn’t consumed: Mr Chavez is teetotal.

The duo did meet in Venice, but only in the daytime. Moore, in town to launch his new film, Capitalism, sat with Mr Chavez, who was there to promote Oliver Stone’s documentary South of the Border, for three hours. The US press were excluded from the meeting.

Supporters of Mr Chavez now suspect that Moore fabricated his anecdote to gloss over the chummy nature of that encounter. They have taken to the airwaves in a Monty Python-style PR offensive, to accuse Moore of betraying a supposed comrade.

“Michael Moore is a most unfortunate coward,” declared blogger Eva Golinger. She dubbed him “the worst of yellow journalists, a liar and storyteller on the big screen”, and said his yarn was “offensive and insulting” and a clear sign of his “hypocrisy and lack of ethics”. Franz JT Lee, a Marxist academic and blogger, claimed that the film-maker’s comments were “part of the United States’ ‘war of ideas’” against Venezuela, and said similar “propaganda” led to the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany.

They didn’t just spark outrage on the left, though. Critics of Mr Chavez have called the level of invective against Moore – some of which was aired on Venezuelan state television – disproportionate. They believe his anecdote was intended to be a harmless, tongue-in-cheek joke. The socialist movement failed to grasp the nuances of his intended irony, they claim, because they lack a sense of humour.

Quite what the affair says about the integrity of Moore and his documentaries remains to be seen. The film-maker has declined to comment or apologise for misleading TV viewers, save for a brief message posted on his Twitter feed on Monday: “For the record, the President of Venezuela doesn’t drink.”

To go along with this break up, Moore’s office responded to Guy Adams’ article. Below is the following exchange of emails, according to Mr. Adams (to be updated, I’m sure):

Less than hour after that article had appeared on our internet site, I got an email from Mr Moore’s office. It is printed below (with email addresses and phone numbers redacted). My reply to that email is also carried in full.

“Hamdan, Basel” *****@michaelmoore.com 28/10/2009 00:49
To: “g.adams@independent.co.uk”
cc: “Weinrib, Eric”
Subject: Michael Moore

Hi Guy,

I’m Basel Hamdan, a producer in Michael Moore’s office. There is something inaccurate in the below piece:

The long meeting did, in fact, occur extremely late in the evening. I’m not sure who told you otherwise (daytime), but they are wrong. I was present, as was my colleague Eric Weinrib (cc’d).

Could you please correct the piece, if not retract it, as you use the time of day to question the veracity of the story. Please get back to me soon – we don’t want this falsehood to spread…

Thanks,
Basel Hamdan

———————
Basel Hamdan
Dog Eat Dog Films
Producer
231-922-**** X240

Guy Adams/Editorial/Independent News and Media 28/10/2009 02:02
To: “Hamdan, Basel”
cc: “Weinrib, Eric”
Subject: Re: Michael Moore

Hi Basel

It feels a little rich to be castigated for a very minor inaccuracy, given the extent of the whopper that Mr Moore has apparently told!

I will, however, happily clarify that element of the piece – on one condition.

In the interest of giving our readers a full and accurate picture of what actually went on, I would like either Mr Moore, or someone in his office, to offer an on-the-record explanation as to why he went on the Jimmy Kimmel show and claimed to have both drunk tequila with Mr Chavez and written a significant portion of his speech to the UN.

Provided you’re able to do this (and it would surely represent staggering hypocrisy if you were not) then I will of course make the correction you desire.

Yours
Guy

Guy Adams
Los Angeles Correspondent
The Independent

+1 310 396 ****

So, what happened? Well it may not surprise you to hear that I am still waiting for Mr Moore to agree to my request.

He is, we must therefore assume, happy to broadcast what appear to be substantive lies about someone, without ever explaining, apologizing or issuing proper clarification.

However journalists who write about him are expected to immediately correct any slight – and, I might add, alleged – inaccuracy in their piece, however minor. They are even invited to retract the entire article.

Mr Moore expects, therefore, to apply one rule for himself, and another for everyone else. This is surely the essence of hypocrisy. I can’t speak for what this tells us about his journalistic technique, or the reliability of his very moving documentaries. But (at risk of sounding like a tosser) I fear that it speaks volumes about his sense of entitlement.

UPDATE – Wednesday, 2pm GMT

Mr Moore’s office have emailed with what journalists among you will recognise as the “Alastair Campbell” response…

“Hamdan, Basel” *****@michaelmoor
Subject RE: Michael Moore

You are clearly not a journalist, so we will take the matter up with your editors.

Oh, that is just sooo rich!

Gunmen from Hizbul Islam head for Somalia’s southern port of Kismayu October 1, 2009. Rival Islamist rebels battled in southern Somalia’s Kismayu port on Thursday, killing at least 20 people and the fighting threatened to spread to other parts of the failed Horn of Africa state.
REUTERS/Feisal Omar

NYTimes:

United Nations officials say Somalia has not been in such perilous shape since the central government collapsed in 1991 and is in desperate need of help.

But right now that help is being delayed, they say, at least partly because the American government is worried that its aid is going to feed terrorists.

American officials are concerned that United Nations contractors may be funneling American donations to the Shabab, a Somali terrorist group with growing ties to Al Qaeda.

~~~

American officials are increasingly concerned that the Shabab and their allies are working with Al Qaeda to turn Somalia into a factory for global jihad.

Some Somali-Americans have already joined the Shabab as suicide bombers, raising the prospects that one day men like these could exploit their American citizenship and return to the United States to wreak havoc.

The Shabab have been waging a vicious guerrilla war against Somalia’s transitional government, which has grass-roots support and foreign backing, but is hobbled by a weak and untrustworthy military.

While the transitional government struggles to establish itself, United Nations officials say they have no choice but to work with local Shabab commanders to distribute critically needed aid, like 110-pound bags of sorghum, tins of vegetable oil, plastic sheeting and medical supplies, in Shabab-controlled areas.

But are United Nations contractors actually helping the Shabab fight their war? Preliminary information from a continuing United Nations investigation indicates that some of the biggest Somali contractors hired by the United Nations World Food Program may be sharing their proceeds with the Shabab or their allies, or, at a minimum, turning a blind eye when militants steal sacks of American-donated grain and sell them on the open market to get money for guns.

“We know W.F.P. contractors have been diverting food to the Shabab,” said one official close to the investigation, who was not allowed to speak publicly. “And we’re talking about millions of dollars of food.”

World Food Program officials have been tight-lipped about the allegations. Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the agency in Kenya, said the World Food Program was conducting its own separate investigation and “taking immediate actions to increase security at W.F.P. warehouses and other distribution points.”

Because Somalia is so dangerous, especially for foreigners, it is extremely difficult for international aid agencies to closely monitor operations inside the country, especially since most of the agencies are based hundreds of miles away in Kenya.

Somali businessmen, with thin résumés and fat contracts, are given enormous leeway in how they carry out their multimillion-dollar aid duties. On top of that, there is no national banking system, so the United Nations is left with an informal money transfer network to move hundreds of millions of dollars of cash.

“It’s not about me“, says the cardboard president? How does the Mmm mmm mm president say this with a straight face anymore?

President Obama’s underwhelming speech at the UN General Assembly and his charm offensive III media blitz perpetuates his growing image of a president who is trying to sell us style over substance; personality to drive policy; a junior senator elected to the highest office in the land to lead the free world who is woefully under-prepared to do any such thing. So he finds himself selling…

….himself.

Riding on the mantra of “hope” and “change” and “I’m not Bush.”

Michael Gerson writing for WaPo, nails it (hat tip: Melissa Clouthier):

Obama’s rhetorical method in international contexts — given supreme expression at the United Nations this week — is a moral dialectic. The thesis: pre-Obama America is a nation of many flaws and failures. The antithesis: The world responds with understandable but misguided prejudice. The synthesis: Me. Me, at all costs; me, in spite of all terrors; me, however long and hard the road may be. How great a world we all should see, if only all were more like…me.

On several occasions, Obama attacked American conduct in simplistic caricatures a European diplomat might employ or applaud. He accused America of acing “unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others” — a slander against every American ally who has made sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan. He argued that, “America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy” — which is hardly a challenge for the Obama administration, which has yet to make a priority of promoting democracy or human rights anywhere in the world.

Hugh Hewitt adds:

The second worst part of the speech was the studied refusal bluntly to name Iran as an oppressor of its own people and an exporter of terror and breaker of international rules. Part of the essence of appeasement is the refusal by free states to speak bluntly about their fascist counterparts. The president’s meaningless rhetoric about “certain truths which are self-evident” must be a very bitter pill for the dissidents of iran in prison, and their families and friends, who were looking for a statement of solidarity, not an invitation for the fanatics to continue their repression under the guise of each country pursuing “a path rooted in the culture of its people and its past traditions.”

Back to Gerson:

The world, of course, has its problems, too. It has accepted “misperceptions and misinformation.” It can be guilty of a “reflexive anti-Americanism.” “Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone.” Translation: I know you adore me because I am better than America’s flawed past. But don’t just stand there loving me, do something.

I can recall no other major American speech in which the narcissism of a leader has been quite so pronounced. It might be compared to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s “I shall return” — which made it sound like MacArthur intended to reconquer the Philippines single-handedly. But MacArthur, at least, imagined himself as embodying his country, not transcending it. He did not assert that while the Japanese invasion was certainly excessive, America had been guilty of provocations of its own — and now, in the MacArthur era, things would be finally different.

Twice in his United Nations speech, Obama dares to quote Franklin Roosevelt. I have read quite a bit of Roosevelt’s rhetoric. It is impossible to imagine him, under any circumstances, unfairly criticizing his own country in an international forum in order to make himself look better in comparison. He would have considered such a rhetorical strategy shameful — as indeed it is.

At the United Nations, Obama set out to denigrate American goodness so he can become our rescuer. The speech had nothing to do with the confident style of Democratic rhetoric found in Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy. It insulted that tradition. And no one is likely ever to quote the speech — except to deride it.

More here.

Niles Gardiner writing for the Telegraph (contrast this to the opening paragraph of this editorial in the Guardian), nails it, describing Obama’s UN speech today as a display of soft power in the face of brutal enemies, thereby failing to advance American interests onto the world stage.

It’s always a bad sign when a US president gets several rounds of heavy applause at the UN General Assembly, as Barack Obama did this morning in New York. Needless to say, the loudest cheers from the gathering of world leaders came when he condemned the actions of a close US ally, Israel, in continuing to build settlements in the West Bank. You can always rely on attacks on the Israelis to generate the biggest roars of approval at any meeting of the United Nations, and Obama dutifully obliged.

The Assembly also mightily cheered Obama’s boast that the United States no longer condones “torture” (as if it ever did), a blatantly political swipe at the interrogation techniques of the previous government, which most Americans happen to back. The president’s decision to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council, a basket case of an organization that includes some of the world’s worst tyrannies, was also greeted warmly.

Needless to say, when the president briefly brought up the need for greater international cooperation over Afghanistan, or spoke about the threat posed by al-Qaeda – or “violent extremists” as he calls them – there was stony silence.

Overall this was a staggeringly naïve speech by President Obama, with Woodstock-style utterances like “I will not waver in my pursuit of peace” or “the interests of peoples and nations are shared.” All that was missing was a conga of hippies dancing through the aisles with a rousing rendition of “Kumbaya”.

Will president Obama be known, not so much for the disaster of his domestic policies, but for the disaster that is his foreign policy?

From President Obama’s UN speech today:

I took office at a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust. A part of this was due to misperceptions and misinformation about my country. Part of this was due to opposition to specific policies and a belief on, on certain critical issues, America had acted unilaterally without regard for the interests of others.

And this is has fed an almost reflexive anti-Americanism which, too often, has served as an excuse for collective inaction.

~~~

After all, it is easy to walk up to this podium and point fingers and stoke divisions. Nothing is easier than blaming others for our troubles and absolving ourselves of responsibility for our choices and our actions. Anybody can do that.

Like blaming the previous Administration for the state of affairs today and giving validity to misperceptions? Good grief!

John Bolton:

WaPo:

He drew applause when he talked about how his administration had banned torture of terror suspects,

Applause from countries who engage in torture themselves? Countries like Iran who sponsor terrorism? And what did President Obama actually change?

and was engaging with the United Nations in a more complete way than the U.S. did during the Bush administration.

How exactly is he “more engaged”? It’s a myth that the Bush Administration engaged in “unilateralism” or was a serial offender of “international law”. What it did do was (quoting President Obama in his speech) lead:

“Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone.”

As the French intellectual, Jean Francois-Revel might put it,

As far as America’s “unilateralism” is concerned, Revel asserts that the United States is forced to act alone because Europe has repeatedly failed to act in the cause of collective security.

WaPo:

But the new U.S. president also acknowledged that the United States and its world partners over time have failed to confront some of the world’s problems seriously.

“If we are honest with ourselves, we need to admit that we are not living up to that responsibility,” Obama said.

“We can be remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of the 20th century into the 21st; that put off hard choices, refused to look ahead, and failed to keep pace because we defined ourselves by what we were against instead of what we were for. Or, we can be a generation that chooses to see the shoreline beyond the rough waters ahead; that comes together to serve the common interests of human beings, and finally gives meaning to the promise embedded in the name given to this institution: the United Nations.”

Kristen Silverberg writing for Shadow Government regarding a NYTimes piece on the U.N. General Assembly and the concept of Responsibility to Protect, endorsed unanimously by heads of state in 2005:

There was one line in the Times piece that, I think, bears correcting. The author says that the Bush administration “disliked the doctrine on the ground that it might tie American hands in foreign policy decisions.” In fact, the Bush administration endorsed R2P in 2005 and worked throughout the administration to see the principle put into practice. Secretary Rice, for example, cited R2P in calling on the Security Council to act in Darfur, and has many times cited her disappointment that we were not more successful in ensuring effective R2P action. We worked with other Security Council members to reaffirm R2P in U.N. Security Council resolution 1674, and as an assistant secretary of state, I endorsed the concept publicly many times.

If anything, I think the Bush team was more aggressive than most U.S. administrations in pressing both the responsibility of states to protect their citizens from human rights abuses and the responsibility of the Security Council to act when governments fail. For most of U.S. history, the human rights abuses in Burma, for example, would not have fit within the U.S. government’s definition of a “threat to international peace and security” sufficient to trigger U.N. Security Council jurisdiction. President Bush believed that human rights abuses may meet this standard, and so we led the effort to place Burma on the Security Council’s agenda for the first time in history and even pressed a Security Council Resolution on the subject to the point of provoking a double Russian-Chinese veto.

I see this as another slam at the Bush Administration:

Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside. Each society must search for its own path, and no path is perfect. Each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its people and in its past traditions, and I admit that America has, too often, been selective in its promotion of democracy.

But that does not weaken our commitment. It only reinforces it. There are basic principles that are universal. There are certain truths which are self-evident, and the United States of America will never waiver in our efforts to stand up for the right of people everywhere to determine their own destiny.

There is a certain belief that the Bush Administration was trying to impose western-style democracy. But I don’t know of a single speech where President Bush made the case for creating a democracy that would look like ours.

Well, as Mike wrote about earlier we can see how well that “good” judgment has worked out so far:

North Korea announced Monday that it successfully carried out a second underground nuclear test, less than two months after launching a rocket widely believed to be a test of its long-range missile technology.

John Bolton predicted this a few days ago:

The curtain is about to rise again on the long-running nuclear tragicomedy, “North Korea Outwits the United States.” Despite Kim Jong Il’s explicit threats of another nuclear test, U.S. Special Envoy Stephen Bosworth said last week that the Obama administration is “relatively relaxed” and that “there is not a sense of crisis.” They’re certainly smiling in Pyongyang.

And what does Obama do?

Today, North Korea said that it has conducted a nuclear test in violation of international law. It appears to also have attempted a short range missile launch. These actions, while not a surprise given its statements and actions to date, are a matter of grave concern to all nations. North Korea’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons, as well as its ballistic missile program, constitute a threat to international peace and security.

By acting in blatant defiance of the United Nations Security Council, North Korea is directly and recklessly challenging the international community. North Korea’s behavior increases tensions and undermines stability in Northeast Asia. Such provocations will only serve to deepen North Korea’s isolation. It will not find international acceptance unless it abandons its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.

The danger posed by North Korea’s threatening activities warrants action by the international community. We have been and will continue working with our allies and partners in the Six-Party Talks as well as other members of the U.N. Security Council in the days ahead.

Warrants action huh? Judging by your “good” judgment so far I’m guessing that’s going to be a stern lecture via the UN. I’m sure Russia and China will go along with that.

Nope….the days of using the UN to accomplish anything has been over for sometime but we know Obama’s history, what little there is of it, and that is the only tool he will use….unsuccessfully. He has no backbone, and no stomach to be ill thought of by the world, the days of the paper tiger have come back, and our allies know it:

TOKYO (Reuters) – A Japanese ruling party panel is to propose that pre-emptive strikes against enemy bases be allowed despite the country’s pacifist constitution, Kyodo news agency said on Monday, weeks after a North Korean missile launch.

North Korea fired a ballistic missile in April that flew over northern Japan after warning that it planned to launch a satellite, prompting the government to deploy missile interceptors to the area .

” Japan should have the ability to strike enemy bases within the scope of its defence-oriented policy, in order not to sit and wait for death,” Kyodo quoted the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) committee as saying in its proposal.

Thanks lefties……you helped to elect a totally inexperience community organizer as our President during the 2nd inning of a war on terror. But what do they do when the heat starts getting turned up? Why they make excuses.

Bolton:

…Iran and other aspiring nuclear proliferators will draw precisely the same conclusion: Negotiations like the six-party talks are a charade and reflect a continuing collapse of American resolve. U.S. acquiescence in a second North Korean nuclear test will likely mean that Tehran will adopt Pyongyang’s successful strategy.

It’s time for the Obama administration to finally put down Kim Jong Il’s script. If not, we better get ready for Iran — and others — to go nuclear.

What a laugh….Obama put down the script of Kim Jong Il! Face it, with this man at the helm there is no more getting ready for a nuclear armed Iran, it WILL happen.

Iran
-President Obama campaigned on the promise to “talk” to Iran, and made the world expect that simply talking to the Iranians would make the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism (which is actively attacking Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan as you read this) stop making their nuclear bomb factories. He tried backdoor communications. He tried writing a letter. He sent a video to the Iranian people. He tried UN communications. He’s even trying direct communications in the UN negotiations. None of this has worked one bit. Iran now boasts it has 7000 centrifuges up and running, and the Israelis are saying that if Obama doesn’t get some sort of result soon….they’ll attack Iran on their own. Such an attack would no doubt bring a retaliation from Iran, and US forces are literally, physically under caught in the crossfire of ballistic missiles, airstrikes, and commando operations. Talk might work, but it’s time to start talking fast.

Afghanistan
-President Obama has sent a few more troops there, but only half as many as were originally going to go. Sec Defense Gates says that making Afghanistan a secure & stable ally in the war on terror is an objective the US cannot meet. SO, Obama has sent more diplomats instead. He also went to Europe (as promised during his campaign) to get NATO to send more troops, but he failed.

Pakistan
-Obama’s stepped up covert operations inside Pakistan, killed hundreds of civilians with Predator drone missile attacks, and put the nuclear armed nation of 170million people on the verge of collapse.

Thailand
-President Obama has done nothing to stave off the collapse of that Southeast Asian nation, and it is in the midst of collapsing.

Somalia
-Somalia effectively collapsed years and years ago. Since then piracy has become its biggest source of GDP. Recently, the long-ignored problem of Somali piracy hit home when an American-flagged cargo ship was seized. The crew-not confident that they’d be saved by the US Navy, Obama Admin diplomatic talks, or the UN forces in the area-rescued themselves. The Captain was taken hostage, and President Obama chose to vote PRESENT rather than give an order to rescue the hostage from the 4 teenage tribesman/pirates. Instead, his vague order was to take action only if the hostage was in imminent danger (this after the Captain had tried to escape and been shot at, but apparently being shot at isn’t imminent danger). Thankfully, 4 US Navy SEAL Team snipers fired in unison and made truly remarkable shots. The issues was closed, and now the dazed and confused Obama Admin policy regarding Somali pirates has shifted to chest-thumping bragging, credit stealing, and impotent threats to attack pirate bases on shore.

North Korea
-North Korea was kind enough to give a full 6 weeks of daily warnings that it was going to launch an ICBM in direct violation of multiple UN resolutions. President Obama said that words have to mean something. He said that a rogue regime cannot be allowed to flaunt, dismiss, and ignore the will of the United Nations. Sadly, his words meant nothing to the North Koreans, so they launched their missile while the Obama Admin in effect did nothing and failed to stop or even dissuade the illegal act.

Mexico
-Like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand, and other emerging crisis’, Mexico is also on the verge of collapse. Again, the Obama Administration has in effect done nothing to curb this. However, there was talk of immigration reform in the United States which would allow Mexican refugees from a collapse to come here to the United States where jobs are plentiful, and the economy can support the influx of millions of poverty stricken, jobless, homeless people.

Poor Obama. He was told that other nations were just soooo excited he was elected and they couldn’t wait to work with him after so many years of the “arrogant” and “dismissive” George Bush (video here).

So when North Korea defied the world and launched it’s missile on Sunday, Obama decided to get tough. In a big test of his leadership abilities he gave a speech in Prague where he declared:

“North Korea broke the rules once again by testing a rocket that could be used for a long range missiles. This provocation underscores the need for action — not just this afternoon at the UN Security Council, but in our determination to prevent the spread of these weapons. Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response. And North Korea must know that the path to security and respect will never come through threats and illegal weapons. All nations must come together to build a stronger, global regime. That’s why we must stand shoulder to shoulder to pressure the North Koreans to change course.” –President Obama, Prague April 5,, 2009

The response from the U.N. was immediate. The following is a short audio clip from UN headquarters with the statements of diplomats clamoring to follow Obama’s lead:

Headlines tell the story:

• U.N. Security Council fails to agree on North Korea reaction. L.A. Times
• UN Security Council at impasse over North Korean rocket launch CBC News

A reporter on the scene described it this way:

KIM LANDERS: Well, after meeting for three hours in New York, the 15-member UN Security Council has finished those consultations without taking any action whatsoever.

They don’t seem to have been able to agree on either a statement from the president of the UN Security Council, nor have they been able to agree on any new resolutions against North Korea.

So, Obama’s big moment to show world leadership fizzled like a North Korean rocket! Let’s just say I am not surprised. Whoever voted for Obama thinking he would change the way the world perceives us must be feeling pretty foolish right about now. Just remember: WE TOLD YOU SO!

Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.

Persaud, chairman of consultants Intelligence Capital and a former currency chief at JPMorgan, said the recommendation would be one of a number delivered to the United Nations on March 25 by the U.N. Commission of Experts on International Financial Reform.

“It is a good moment to move to a shared reserve currency,” he said.

Central banks hold their reserves in a variety of currencies and gold, but the dollar has dominated as the most convincing store of value — though its rate has wavered in recent years as the United States ran up huge twin budget and external deficits.

Some analysts said news of the U.N. panel’s recommendation extended dollar losses because it fed into concerns about the future of the greenback as the main global reserve currency, raising the chances of central bank sales of dollar holdings.

Financial Times Gwen Robinson also reports on this today, speculating that the Fed’s move to purchase $300 billion in long term Treasuries. and the world’s disenchantment with the US’s economic policies being implemented, was among the reasons for the overnight sell off of the dollar.

All eyes have been on the Fed in the past 24 hours – and all currency gyrations, particularly the dollar’s sharp depreciation – have been attributed to the Fed’s move to spend $300bn on buying long-term Treasuries, among other measures. As some currency analysts observed on Thursday, however, the dollar’s steep decline suggests there may have been some over-reaction to the Fed’s move.

But there are other factors at work behind the dollar’s downward trajectory – not least, growing disenchantment in some parts of the world with US economic policies (or lack thereof), and rumbles about dumping the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and adopting a shared basket of currencies.

~~~

The bottom line was summed up by Chalongphob Sussangkarn, a former Thai finance minister and now president of Thailand Development Research Institute, who said:

The US deficit is so huge. This is why all countries, particularly East Asia, are concerned because we hold a lot of these assets. What happens if the US dollar falls 40 percent? Many central bankers will be losing huge amounts of money.”

Such fears, now spreading among governments about their relatively large holdings of dollar reserves, have been fuelling moves at the United Nations and there is now growing speculation among analysts and forex markets that the UN is preparing a recommendation to member countries to move away from using the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and instead, adopt a shared basket of currencies. No matter that the UN often appears bureaucratic and ineffectual – it sometimes does make an impact – and almost certainly will if it goes ahead with such a push.

Growing speculation about such an announcement was “as large a reason for the overnight sell-off in the dollar, as was the Fed’s announcement to buy US Treasuries as part of their quantitative easing policy”, noted Richard Grace, CBA’s chief currency strategist in a Thursday note.

Grace appears to hold out hope that dollar continues it’s prestigious position, saying the UN doesn’t have the clout of the G7 or IMF; and that the US has the largest economy and most sophisticated bond market in the world.

But the move away from the dollar has been a steady one. Even in the past years, the Euro had been rising as a replacement currency… strong in liquidity in a short time, and a push by the European and Middle East nations to become the trading currency of favor. That is until it faced it’s own economic and financial crises. Another option may have been China, who was eyeing taking on that prominent currency role with the yuan. However any rapid crash of the US dollar takes the Chinese economy – as well as any others holding vast amounts in US dollars – down as well. China hopes for a gentle fall of the dollar.

Thus the UN reasoning of splitting the risk among many currencies. No matter what they choose to recommend, a demotion of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency has severe repercussions on Americans and their future lifestyles.

The dollar has been experiencing a slide since since the early 1900s, but the lion’s share of the decline has been over the past three to four decades, when it unhinged the relationship between gold and the dollar in 1970.

The below video put out in 2007 by Mcalvany ICA – a gold share investment company – has an excellent historical recap of the US dollar.

The nation’s currency who holds the position of the reserve currency benefits from both political and economic clout. But most important, the US trade deficent can only be supporte if the foreigner banks continue to hold U.S. debt in dollars as their reserve currency.

As the Obama admin drives up spending on his agenda, without shoring up the heart of the credit/financial problem, we become ever more dependent upon loans from foreign nations – most notably, China.

Yet China sent a shot over the US financial bow when, in February, Luo Ping, a director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission, gave a speech in New York expressing that nation’s skepticism over the future of the dollar. as it relates to the exploding debt.

Mr Luo, speaking at the Global Association of Risk Management’s 10th Annual Risk Management Convention, said: “Except for US Treasuries, what can you hold?” he asked. “Gold? You don’t hold Japanese government bonds or UK bonds. US Treasuries are the safe haven. For everyone, including China, it is the only option.”

Mr Luo, whose English tends toward the colloquial, added: “We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion [$1,000bn-$2,000bn] . . .we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do.”

However, Mr Luo said Chinese officials would encourage its banks to finance domestic mergers and acquisitions rather than provide rescue finance to distressed financial companies in other countries: “There will be no bottom-fishing of financial institutions, particularly in the US, because there is a lot of uncertainty about the quality of the books.”

China has made note of the economic repercussions that piled onto the CRA rewrite of regulations and increased enforcement on banks when the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the Glass-Stegall Act in 1999, and signed into law by President Clinton. Both original 1930’s bills were sponsored by Democrats: Senator Carter Glass of Lynchburg, Virginia and a former Secretary of the Treasury: and Congressman Henry B. Steagall of Alabama, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency.

Scott posted a Shepard Smith segment that ties the relationship between CRA and repeat of Glass-Steagall together for those that can’t seem to follow the snowball-to-avalanch chain of events that led to the current US economic woes. CRA begat the toxic assets and abnormally drove up the housing prices. Gramm-Leach-Bliley allowed the toxicity of overvalued assets to spread even more wildly.

Luo’s opines that the repeal of the act fueled the economic crisis, ignoring the massive influx of new buyers and the beginning of toxic assets under CRA. But being the socialist at heart, supports government nationalization as the ultimate prevention.

Ron Paul, whom I tend to agree with on his economic principles (if not other arenas) warned us about this back in 2007.

Remember, America can maintain a large trade deficit only if foreign banks continue to hold large numbers of dollars as their reserve currency. Our entire consumption economy is based on the willingness of foreigners to hold U.S. debt. We face a reordering of the entire world economy if the federal government cannot print, borrow, and spend money at a rate that satisfies its endless appetite for deficit spending.

At some point Americans must realize that Congress, and the Federal Reserve system that permits the creation of new money by fiat, are the real culprits in the erosion of your personal savings and buying power. Congress relentlessly spends more than the Treasury collects in taxes each year, which means the U.S. government must either borrow or print money to operate – both of which cause the value of the dollar to drop. When we borrow a billion dollars every day simply to run the government, and when the Federal Reserve increases the money supply by trillions of dollars in just 15 years, we hardly can expect our dollars to increase in value.

Just as a caveat, Ron Paul is also a proponent that the Iraq war was actually waged as a dollar defense mission… to counter Saddam’s increased trade in Euros instead of dollars.

So what happens to the US when the world no longer revolves around the dollar? Contrarian Investor’s Journal had an interesting – and somewhat prescient – observation in a post from spring 2008.

Now, what happens if one day, the US dollar no longer becomes the reserve currency? When that day arrives, future generations of Americans will live far much worse their fathers and grandfathers. Why?

The never-ending ballooning Current Account Deficit (CAD) of the US is a reflection of the nation’s spending beyond its means (see Understanding the Balance of Payments for what Current Account Deficit means). The only reason why they can get away with it for so long is because of their reserve currency. As we said before in How does the US export inflation?

~~~

Once the US dollar loses this special status, the nation loses its power to expropriate resources from foreign countries. Since the US has been doing this for decades, their economy’s capacity to cater to the nation’s needs has largely being eroded. In the jargon of the Austrian School of economic thought, the US had been eroding its economy’s capital structure and engaging in capital consumption. An analogy for this situation would be this: Let’s say a king had been spoon-fed with a silver spoon since a child. He was reliant on this servants to take care of his everyday needs as well as to cater to his every whims and fancy. One day, a revolution broke out and the king was overthrown. All of a sudden the king was reduced to a commoner. It is unlikely that he can fend for himself because he does not have any essential life skills every commoner has to learn from young.

Not sobering enough? If you really want to depress yourself, read FinancialSense’s David Andrews particularly morbid op-ed from May 2006, “ROAD KILL ON MAIN STREET”.

It was just a few weeks ago that Obama made an attempt at “Thelma and Louise” cliff humor INRE his healthcare reform proposals:

Inflation, or hyperinflation is the future of the US. When that happens, Obama may lament how economic reality thwarted his dream of “remaking America”…. perhaps never recognizing that it was his own overreach that pounded the last nail into the US economic coffin.

In the wake of his Thelma and Louise humor, it’s a bitter irony that he may well go down in the history books as the lemming who led the rest of the nation’s lemmings off the cliff by trying to do it all… too much, too soon.

Iran offered to stop attacking British troops in Iraq to try to get the West to drop objections to Tehran’s uranium enrichment project, a UK official says.

The disclosure by UN ambassador Sir John Sawers in a BBC documentary throws new light on backroom discussions between Iran and the West.

“The Iranians wanted to be able to strike a deal whereby they stopped killing our forces in Iraq in return for them being allowed to carry on with their nuclear programme: ‘We stop killing you in Iraq, stop undermining the political process there, you allow us to carry on with our nuclear programme without let or hindrance.’”

The deal was dismissed by the British government and Iran’s nuclear enrichment restarted shortly after.

(wow, and that’s from the BBC-hardly a neocon mouthpiece. Odd they didn’t report this when GWB was President).

And in other news re Iran today. Not only does the leftist BBC confirm that Iran is a nuclear blackmailer and has been for years, not only does Iran pretty much admit to being part of the insurgency in Iraq, but…now the UN says they’ve got enough matl for a bomb.

In a development that comes as the Obama administration is drawing up its policy on negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programme, UN officials said Iran had produced more nuclear material than previously thought. They said Iran had accumulated more than one tonne of low enriched uranium hexafluoride at a facility in Natanz.

If such a quantity were further enriched it could produce more than 20kg of fissile material – enough for a bomb.

Well, if President Obama doesn’t release his Iran plan (he’s had a plan for Iran for 2yrs now, right), then someone else might take action before he does.

One of the best qualities in the man that I will sorely miss is that he never backed down on something he felt was right due to public opinion. He knew we had to finish the Iraqi mess once and for all after 9/11. There was no way we could allow Saddam to thumb his nose at the world, supporting terror, and obtaining WMD, in a post-9/11 world. He knew 13 years of conjoling, begging and pleading was enough. But even then he gave Saddam a chance to stop it. He didn’t just give him a chance to stop the war from happening he went to the UN for help in getting him to comply with a strong resolution. A resolution that any sane leader would have recognized was his last chance:

…in 2002 President Bush bucked the advice of his more hawkish advisers and agreed to take Tony Blair’s advice and seek another U.N. Resolution — was it the 16th or 17th? — against Saddam Hussein. Resolution 1441 passed 15-0. True, the Administration failed to obtain a second resolution, not least because the French reneged on private assurances that it would agree to a second resolution if America obtained the first.

He has done everything in his power to insure that we would not be attacked again. Again, making unpopular decisions, but he never backed down in the face of public opinion because he knew it was the right thing to do. We do not find many politicians like that. It’s a rare quality and the one I will miss sorely.  

He put two great justices onto the Supreme Court in Samuel Alito and John Roberts. Something that will pay dividends for many years to come.

He is leaving a strong alliance with Europe:

This American president will bequeath his successor an alliance with Europe as robust and healthy as at any time in the post-Cold War period.

Pro-American governments are in charge in Paris, a first since 1945, as well as every other major European capital (London, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome) except Madrid. On Russia and China, on terrorism, rogue states and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, Europe and America share the strategic diagnosis, if not wholly the cure. A revived NATO leads missions in Afghanistan and the Balkans.

To be sure, Europe hasn’t fallen in love with hard power, and Washington didn’t sign up for unfettered multilateralism. The improved outlook in Iraq, and the Bush administration’s decision to lay off Iran, defused two potential flashpoints late in its term. Even so, recent years have seen a Euro-American rapprochement take hold that silenced shrill predictions of “divorce” or worse in the wake of the Iraq war.

“Trans-Atlantic relations are rather good at the moment,” says a senior European Union foreign policy adviser who requests anonymity and is not inclined to Panglossian views of the alliance. “Better than ever,” adds another, Alar Olljum, who runs the in-house think tank for the European Commission.

Europeans tend to find explanations in altered American behavior. Here “Bush One” is pitted against “Bush Two”: the first term of unilateralism and Iraq and the second of kinder, gentler diplomacy. Condoleezza Rice kicked off the charm offensive with a speech in Paris in early 2005 calling for a fresh start. Europe and America, she said, must together seize “a historic opportunity to shape a global balance of power that favors freedom.” Robert Gates replaced the European bête noire Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

Yet the Bush policy on NATO, the Mideast or other big issues didn’t change significantly from the first to second terms. Europe itself did.

And finally I will leave off with The Anchoress from a post she did in 2007 in response to the Bush bashing from the right, of all places, due to the immigration issue.  One issue I never agreed with the man about. 

Betrayal is such a strong word; did he betray you, really?

• Did he protect us from the reach & province of the International Criminal Court? Yes.
• Did he keep us from the Kyoto mess that is currently tying up Europe? Yes.
• Did he create a workable alternative to Kyoto that other countries have embraced? Yes. Bet you didn’t know that!
• Have US Carbon Emissions decreased on his watch, without Kyoto? Yes.
• Did he submit a comprehensive energy plan that got killed by a weak congress? Yes.
• Has he lowered the deficit ahead of schedule in time of war? Yes. Even the NYTimes admits it!
• Did he cut taxes? Twice? Yes. And yes.
• Did he try to get the cuts made permanent? Yes. Congress dropped that ball.
• Did he stop government funding of EMBRYONIC stem cell research? Yes.
• Has he kept the promises he made as he held a dead cop’s shield before the Joint Houses? Yes.
• Did he go after the Taliban and AlQaeda in Afghanistan barely a month after 9/11? Yes.
• Has he been unflagging in his efforts to subdue terrorism, worldwide? Yes.
• Has be been the consistent voice for human liberty around the globe? Yes.
• After some serious missteps, is the surge working? Yes.
• Has he been a staunch friend to Israel, the only stable democracy in a frantic region? Yes.
• Did he end the farce of world-wide Arafat admiration? Yes
• Did he remove Saddam Hussein, whose state supported terrorists, from power? Yes.
• Did he invade Iraq at a time when the whole world believed Saddam had and “would use” WMD? Yes.
• Did he bring a much-maligned coalition with him? Yes. Some are still there.
• Did he liberate 50,000 people in keeping with the ideals of the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act? Yes.
• Has he inspired the Iraqi people to finally believe enough in freedom to fight AlQaeda with us? YES!
• Has he figured out that a free and engaged Middle East makes America safer? Yes.
• Has he kept you safe since 9/11? So safe that you’ve almost forgotten to fear? Yes.
• Did he remove “the wall” between the CIA and the FBI? Yes.
• Did he go to the UN before invading Iraq? Yes.
• Did he tell the UN that the US would never ask permission to defend herself? Yes.
• Did he inspire Libya to surrender it’s WMD without firing a shot? Yes.
• Did he appoint excellent SCOTUS and Federal Judges to the bench? Yes.
• Did he implement the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program? Yes.
• Did he immediately move to freeze assets and make terror funding more difficult? Yes.
• Did he reform Medicare? Yes.
• Did he reform Social Security to give you more power over your money? He tried. See Congress.
• Did he manage an economy thru recession, terror attack & war w/ consistent gains for over ten quarters? Yes.
• Has he kept unemployment between 5.5% and 4.4% for an impressive period? Yes.
• Does he say what he means and mean what he says? Yes.
• Did he try to address immigration last year, when the houses in his party? Yes.
• Does he support the second amendment? Yes.
• Does he support school vouchers and school choice? Yes.
• Did he sign the ban on Partial Birth Abortion? Yes. It went to court, but he signed it.
• Did he reverse Clinton’s intent to kill Reagan’s pro-life Mexico policy? Yes.
• Did he support the Defense of Marriage Act? Yes. That used to be vitally important to you.
• Did he expand the roles of faith-based organizations in social programs? Yes.
• Did he prosecute the white-collar criminals like Ken Lay who ran riot through the ‘90’s? Yes.
• Has he handled himself with enormous courage, dignity and grace in the face of world/media/hate?
• Is he a man with a creed before he’s anything else? Yes.
• Did he establish Health Savings accounts? Yes.
• Did he have the Border Patrol installing monitoring devices along the borders? Yes.
• Has he made mistakes? Yes. Some undeniable beauts.
• Has he been an imperfect president? Yes.
• Has he spent too much? Probably.
• Has he given you most of what you’ve wanted? Actually, looking at the list…yes!
• Has he dared to disagree with anyone to keep his principles, even you? Yes.

Has he really been your Judas? Has he really betrayed you?

What she said.

He leaves us with a safer country.  A strong country.  A proud country.

Thank you President Bush.  You will be sorely missed.

Job well done!

Andrew Glass was a quiet man. He had a couple of friends, but they all lived blocks away, and his best friend lived on the other side of town. His neighbors though, didn’t like him at all.

Andy lived in a house that used to belong to his great grandparents, but the Basher family had been staying there for a long time before he moved back into it. Now the Bashers were angry. They hadn’t wanted to leave the house, and in the end, Andy had to call the police and force them out.

Because of the animosity, Andy had all kinds of arguments with the Bashers. The Bashers, who owned the houses on either side of Andy’s, would stand in their yards yelling, “We want our house back,” as they threw rocks at him over the fence.

“It’s not your house,” Andy would say to them, ducking to avoid the rocks, “It’s mine. You were just staying here while my family was gone.”

Andy often had to sleep under his bed because of the constant barrage of rocks that broke the windows in his house, and clattered to the floor all over his room. One time, the Bashers got so violent that the police even kicked them out of their houses next door, and some of Andy’s family members moved into them to keep the Bashers from moving back.

This angered the Bashers even more, and the constant barrage of rocks got worse. Every day, members of Andy’s family got hit by the rocks. Whenever Andy went to work, or shopping, or to the park, he had to be very careful because the Bashers would hide around corners and behind cars, just waiting to jump out and attack him.

Andy wasn’t an easy target though. Even though he was quiet by nature, he was very strong. In a face to face fight with any of the Bashers, Andy would probably win. The Bashers knew it, so they usually attacked from afar, hurling their rocks, and running away. Sometimes Andy would call the town council and report them, but nothing ever happened. The attacks kept coming, one after the other.

The Bashers also called the town council, but they told them that Andy was a bully. They accused him of being the one that attacked them, and accused him of stealing their house, and the houses next door, even though Andy’s family had owned their home for generations, and his family members were only staying in the houses next door so they could protect themselves from the constant attacks. The town council felt sorry for now homeless Bashers, and talked Andy into letting the Bashers move back into one of the next door houses. Andy cautiously agreed, hoping that by giving them back the house, his family would get a little peace.

The peace didn’t last for long though, and soon the Bashers started using the house next door to launch their attacks anew. Andy called the town council and said, “I told you that I shouldn’t have given them the house back, now they’re throwing rocks at us from right next door again.”

Some members of the town council, who were also friends with the Bashers, were less than supportive. “Maybe you should give them the other house back,” one of them suggested. “If you do, I promise they will quit throwing rocks at you.”

“Fine,” Andy said. “I’ll give them back the other house, but if they keep throwing rocks at me, I’m going to get angry.” He gave the other house back to the Bashers, hoping that the town council was right and that the Bashers would be happy enough to leave him alone, but, once again, the Bashers wanted more. Soon, the rocks were flying. Again.

“We want our house back,” they screamed at Andy from next door. “We won’t rest until every last Glass has been run out of town!”

One of the town councilors advised, “You know, they lived in your house for a long time. If you gave them the West wing of the house, I promise that they would be so happy that they would never want to fight with you again.”

“I don’t think so,” Andy replied. “They will just bring a whole bunch of rocks into the house and throw them at me.”

“Oh, just give it a shot,” cooed the councilors, “what could it hurt?”

“Fine,” Andy said once again. “They can have the West wing of the house, but they better stop throwing rocks.”

Soon, the Bashers had moved into the West wing of the house and for a while, they were quiet. Then a few of them started yelling at Andy down the hall, “Get out of our house Andy. We live here!” Not long after, the rocks started flying again. A few of the Bashers even snuck into Andy’s part of the house and threw rocks at his kids.

Andy barricaded the hallway that lead to the West wing, and then called a the town council and asked, “What should I do now? I gave them back the house next door, and it wasn’t enough. I gave them back the other house, and it wasn’t enough. Now I’ve given them a whole wing of my house and they are throwing rocks at me again. What should I do?”

“Just be patient, Andy,” said the councilors. “They aren’t very good at throwing rocks anyway. Just ignore them and they’ll quit throwing rocks…eventually. We promise.”

“Alright,” Andy answered, “but I can’t put up with this for long.”

For days, rocks flew over the barricade from the West wing, and clattered through the house. For days Andy and his family ignored them. One time a rock that had been thrown by a Basher man fell short of the barricade and hit a Basher child. “Damn you, Andy! That was your fault,” the Basher man yelled. “You’ll pay for that!” Even more rocks followed, and Andy feared the worst.

Then, late one night, it happened. One of the rocks that was thrown over the barricade hit Andy’s dad in the head and knocked him out. It pushed Andy over the edge. “Enough,” he yelled! He gathered up all the rocks he could find, tore through the barricade and started throwing them at every armed Basher he could find. He went room to room, and every time he found armed Bashers, he pelted them with rocks, beaning each one in the head and laying them flat.

Andy yelled for his family to join him as he marched through the West wing of the house, bashing one Basher after another with rocks, and chasing them out into the yard. “No more,” he yelled! “If you want to throw rocks at me, fine! I’ll throw them back!”

“Wait! Wait!” The town councilors, who had rushed over to Andy’s house, were frantic. “You can’t do that! You can’t go into their part of the house! You can’t throw rocks at the Bashers! They didn’t mean anyone any harm! You’re being a bully! You’re trespassing! We demand that you stop this right now!”

Andy paused for a moment, considering. “You know,” Andy said, “you told me to give them back one house, and I did. You told me to give them back the other house and I did. You told me to give them part of my house, and I did. I’ve done everything you’ve asked trying to appease them. Despite all of your promises, the Bashers never stopped throwing rocks. If you want the Bashers to live in your house, you’re welcome to them, but I’ve had enough. One of us is leaving the neighborhood tonight, and I don’t think it’s going to be me.”

Andy turned his back on the town council, picked up some more rocks, and marched out into the yard, scattering Bashers as he went. If the town council wasn’t going to help him, he was damn sure going to help himself.