YOU’RE IN, PHIL
Re: Philip Klein’s You’re
Out, Tom:
Hi there good people —
I love — make that LOVE — The American Spectator and
the opinions you publish. I read most but rarely follow the
visitor comment threads that follow. Today, I ran through all the
comments attached to the “You’re Out, Tom” piece by Philip Klein.
Actually, I was looking to see if anyone else picked up on the
delicious, but unstated, look back to the role of Michael
Corleone in the original Godfather. The juxtaposition in
concept with Mr. Obama is wonderful.
— Mark Merritt
Fiddletown, California
Editor’s note: Alan Brooks got it, at 5:55 p.m.
yesterday: “‘You’re out, Tom.’ Mikey to Tom Hagen, right?”
I dearly hope someone in the Republican Party is collecting
the plethora of precious lines pouring out from Democrats
making excuses for their paragons of tax-evading purity.
Pah!
If, that is, they can keep from choking and gagging every time
they read them.
— A. C. Santore
IT PAYS TO HAVE A FRIEND NAMED OBAMA
Re: George Neumayr’s Class
Carfare:
Thank you Mr. Neumayr for pointing out that the Emperor has yet
to get dressed, and that his court is also sporting clothes from
the same haberdashery!
However, the spin that the MSM is putting on all of this is that
they failed to pay some taxes, when in reality the miscreants
have failed to report income. Had you or I failed to report a
paltry quarter million in income, we would surely be in tax court
facing penalties that include incarceration. Mr. Obama took pains
to explain yesterday that he did not want to even hint that there
are 2 sets of rules, you know, the pesky old double standard.
Except that there ARE 2 sets of rules, and Mr. Geithner proved it
last week.
— Greg Mercurio
Vacaville, California
Watching the unfolding debacle between the Great One’s minions
and a stumbling, tripping, drunken Congress, I see the great
ocean liner has hit the iceberg. Folks are still in the
control room assuring passengers the jolt they felt was a small
bump in the night, while sharks from Al Qaeda start gathering
around the vessel. Tax issues? I am more concerned with a
statement yesterday from the Great One’s staff, after a shaken
Gen. Petraeus left the White House. The statement read, and I
quote:
“In their report, the Chiefs concluded that the existing American
goals in Afghanistan, established by the Bush administration, are
overly broad and ambitious. The report does not call for
abandoning U.S. hopes of turning Afghanistan into a moderate
Western-style democracy, or for halting counter-narcotics
efforts, but it does suggest making those steps part of a
long-term vision, rather than a goal.”
I see talk show hosts fixed on jabbering wildly about the
cheating crooks in Congress, when what should be spoken aloud is
the military’s abandonment. With a son on his 9th tour (yes,
ninth), I am on my knees imploring my Heavenly Father to just
bring him home safely to his family, his wife and lovely little
girl, “Liberty.” Our men and women fight for precious liberty and
freedom, not for a vague “vision.”
Someone needs to focus on the fact (both on radio and in your
management) about where all this is heading when we suffer a
catastrophic loss, militarily speaking. Yesterday it was also
announced that if any generals reproached the Great Ones desire
to leave Iraq in under 16 months, they could pack their bags and
find a job elsewhere. No one talks about these things but we
military families are watching unfold the final assurance, which
some of us knew, that Obama is worse than a Chicago politician.
He plans to dismantle the United States as we know it.
— Beverly Gunn
Texas
TAKE IT TO THE BANK
Re: Lawrence A. Hunter’s
Killing the Big, Bad Banks:
While the article makes sense, its details leave us in the same
mess where we are — i.e. more government management of economic
assets in order to insulate us from poor and criminal management
by both private and public officials. If we proceed along this
path we owe Mussolini a huge apology and Eisenhower a huge slap
in the face concerning the dangers of the military-industrial
complex.
What expertise does the government have in banking? If it has so
much talent that it can cure the banking insolvencies, then all
banks should be nationalized today.
The solution to the banking crisis is not to play shell games
with corrosive assets but to let the orderly and perhaps not so
orderly liquidation of them occur in the private market with as
much alacrity as possible. The government’s role would be to
provide incentives and support for those who need to deliver food
and shelter to those on the losing end.
Such an approach would introduce a great deal of instability to
the banking system for the rest of the year but it would recover
its balance. The large incompetent money center banks would
dissolve into vapors with second tier banks to step into the
void. If the government wants a role it can begin investigations
into root cause analysis of the crisis but with a Senate which
confirmed a tax cheating liar like Timothy Geithner I suspect
that more cellars than roots would be found.
Government and bankster led solutions are the same as letting the
fox guard the hen house. Ultimately resolution trust type
solutions are akin to bloodletting in an age of modern medicine.
There are too many differences between now and the late 1980s to
cover here but I assert that the efforts to bail out the savings
and loan institutions removed the moral hazard needed to avert
our present crisis.
The discipline of moral hazard is very powerful. Bankers did not
become irresponsible for 65 years until a new generation with no
conception of the banking holiday of 1933 took over. Until the
new generation of bankers is taught the indelible lesson that the
mismanagement of banks — even if mandated by government — is
fraught with dangers and devastation, then we ensure a quick
repeat. All of this talk of saving the banks and banksters from
themselves is the talk of a corrupt, gasping, collapsing regime.
I look forward to articles addressing causation of the banking
insolvencies as most mainstream analysis has completely ignored
the issue of capital destruction.
— David Bonn
AXIS OF EVIL, TV EDITION
Re: Jeffrey Lord’s
The Limbaugh-Hannity Administration:
When I was twelve, one of my chores was to watch the evening news
on television and note down the stock market report for my
dad. We lived in the Midwest and there was no way to get the
report back then except to wait for the morning newspaper if
you did not get the report from the television news. Old
Uncle Walter one evening during the Tet Offensive showed the
execution of a war criminal who was the commander of an attack on
school children in Saigon. But Walter did not say that this was a
war criminal and that the Geneva Convention calls for summary
execution of the illegal combatant on the field of battle. I
would not learn that until I was seventeen. I had never seen
anyone executed before then and to see that without context was
certainly more shocking than when I first saw people having sex.
Walter and the other liberals did not openly call for the
execution of the three and half million Indo-Chinese who were
killed but were certainly aware that they would be killed. It had
been discussed by Howard K Smith on ABC in his commentaries.
There should be some way to fine CBS for allowing the network to
become party to one of the three greatest crimes of the twentieth
century. Maybe a fine of $1000 per person killed. CBS was after
all a government-licensed broadcasting agent with government
troops at the ready to put down any pirate broadcaster who dared
to speak up with a dissenting view.
— Gregory Franke
