Libertyblog

So Proud

Michael Phelps chose South Carolina as the place to blow up his endorsement career and perhaps his swimming career:

In our exclusive photo Michael Phelps, who won a record EIGHT gold medals for swimming at the Beijing games last summer, draws from a bong.

The glass pipes are generally used to smoke cannabis.

And after sporting chiefs announced laws which mean four-year bans for drug-taking, Phelps’ dreams of adding to his overall 14 gold medal tally at the 2012 games in London could already be OVER.

[...]

It was on November 6, weeks after his Beijing triumph, that 23-year-old Phelps surprised students at the University Of South Carolina in Columbia by showing up unannounced at a house party.

He was visiting Jordan Matthews, a girl he was secretly seeing who was a student there.

Our source revealed: "Michael came to visit Jordan but ended up just getting wasted every night.

Looks like this will have to be amended:

He once described his life, saying: "All you do is eat, sleep, swim; eat, sleep, swim; eat, sleep, swim."

Dude, don’t bogart that adulation. (Via Drudge.)

A Loser at Last

Charles Krauthammer got it exactly right when he pointed out that Obambi really screwed himself this week. By letting his far-left friends write his stimulus bill, Obambi got stuck with a stinker. What the Wall Street Journal called the Dems’ 40-year wish list was exactly what the American people were not looking for. It presumes that government can invest better than taxpayers and that money can magically stimulate economic growth even before it is spent and no matter what it is spent on. This is clearly a rathole which will only make things worse. All of Obambi’s claims to bipartisanship and seriousness have been vaporized.

I find two things especially amusing about this turn of events. First, Obambi is repeating more or less precisely Bush’s biggest domestic error. Bush couldn’t bring himself to veto his party’s spending bills and lopped off a substantial part of his support. Obambi is now doing the same, alienating moderates who thought they were supporting a kindred spirit.

Second, I see a parallel between Obambi’s role in domestic politics and Obambi’s recommended role for America in the world. Obambi could have used his political capital to demand the stimulus bill he wanted. Instead he sat back and let events unfold. The result was not all sunshine and butterflies. If America assumes a passive or reactive role in world affairs, others will exercise their wills and we will flail about trying to counteract them.

To Be Or Not To Be

My brother-in-law writes wondering if who is Commander-in-Chief has a role in the increased suicide rate among Army personnel. Probably not, these are generally people beset by personal problems not entirely related to their service.

Two of the suicides, and two more attempts, were at West Point, which highlights how easy it is to twist statistics on this topic. Is the suicide rate high in the military? Well, compared to what? Men in their late teens and twenties have a high suicide rate. Lots of military folks fit that description. Throw in separation from family and the stress of high performance requirements and it’s surprising there aren’t even more suicides. (Extra points for originality to this Army cadet: "Alfred D. Fox, a junior, took his life at a motel near campus by allowing a helium tank to empty in the room while he slept." Any change-of-heart cry for help must have sounded hilarious.)

One thing is for sure, though, if military people are killing anyone they ought not—themselves, family members, civilians in war zones—you’ll hear about it 24/7 from the left-wing media. Katie Couric had the obligatory "veterans come home as crazed murderers" story, a staple since Vietnam, as part of her first-ever primetime news show this week. (The ratings were such that it may her last-ever as well.) There was another story (CBS managed to find it too) a few years backed focused on a few Special Forces guys who went postal on their wives. All of these indidents raise a serious question: Which makes you crazier, joining the military or getting married?

The military takes this seriously. We need these people killing the enemy. They’re no good to us dead, in jail, or discharged as loons. 

Statement Now Inoperative

The only man qualified to run our economy is either (a) wrong about something important or (b) being told to cover it up by his boss:

The Obama administration backed off Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s statement last week that China is "manipulating" its currency.

In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, Vice President Joe Biden said the administration has made "no judgment" on whether the Chinese have manipulated their currency, an accusation that would have international legal ramifications. …

Geithner said in a written statement as part of his Senate hearing that the Obama administration "believes that China is manipulating its currency."

As Ed Morrissey points out, a formal accusation would require sanctions, and this is no time for a trade war.

The intriguing question: "How did a screw-up like this make it into a written statement?" So much for cross-checks.

The Rest of the Story

The woman who had octuplets? Already has six other kids. Haven’t read anything about her being a multi-millionaire. She may see a payday out of this baby explosion, but what if she’d only had triplets? Who would have paid then?

A Smear Exposed

Krauthammer on Obambi and Muslims:

Every new president flatters himself that he, kinder and gentler, is beginning the world anew. Yet, when Barack Obama in his inaugural address reached out to Muslims by saying "to the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," his formulation was needlessly defensive and apologetic.

Is it "new" to acknowledge Muslim interests and show respect to the Muslim world? Obama doesn’t just think so, he said so again to millions in his al-Arabiya interview, insisting on the need to "restore" the "same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."

Astonishing. In these most recent 20 years -- the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world -- America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved -- and resulted in -- the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The two Balkan interventions -- as well as the failed 1992-93 Somalia intervention to feed starving African Muslims (43 Americans were killed) -- were humanitarian exercises of the highest order, there being no significant U.S. strategic interest at stake. In these 20 years, this nation has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any nation, Muslim or non-Muslim, anywhere on Earth. Why are we apologizing?

Talkin’ ’Bout His Generation

And mine and maybe yours. Victor Davis Hanson discusses the reaction of Baby Boomers to hard times:

If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results. After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn't create were a government take-over of the economy in the manner we currently witness in Spain, Italy, and Greece—or the high-tax, high-spend ethos of a bankrupt California.

The reaction to the economic panic was sort of analogous to the call to 'charge it!' after 9/11 (cf. Ike's fights about the surtax to pay for Korea), or to the Iraq 2006 upsurge in violence, when suddenly our leaders declared the war lost, blamed the nebulous "they" for tricking them into voting for the war, and calling for immediate withdrawals and retreats. Ditto the Stalag-Gulag Guantanamo that, by January 19, had ruined the Constitution, shredded the Bill of Rights, and forever tarnished our reputation. Yet, on the 20th, it was suddenly complex and problematic, and required a "task force" to do a year-long inquiry into the bad and worse choices confronting us. At some point in all this serial hysteria, we are beginning to see the problem is not in the stars of the economy or of the war, but in ourselves—a weird generation that, when it finally came of age, proved to be just about what we could expect of it from what we saw in its youth.

Indulged by others, indulging ourselves. Well, you people are.

Selective Disinformation

The White House plans to publish state-by-state unemployment numbers to attack Republicans who are opposing their "stimulus" plan. Gee, I wonder if they plan state-by-state numbers on tax "refunds" to non-taxpayers, payments to friends of corrupt pols, waste, or inflation.

We Means You Commoners

Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush wore suitcoats in the Oval Office out of respect. Carter wore a sweater there while trying to set an example on energy conservation. Obambi is in shirtsleeves out of a profound sense of Do You Know Who I Am?

The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

"He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?" said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. "He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there."

Recall his campaign rhetoric:

"We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

That was then, this is now. And remember who pays his heating bill.

History Unlearned

Pointless spending followed by trade protectionism. Obambi is wrong about our circumstances being as bad as the Great Depression, but he may get us there yet.