Obama’s Wars ( and Not-Wars)

This is kind of a dry blog season for me. First. I live in Santa Cruz, California where other people go on vacation. The sun sets late. The sea is beautiful, the wind warm most evenings. Second, I am suffering from a fairly severe case of Obama fatigue. The spirit ends up rebelling against bad news and commentaries on bad news. Here is a summary, for what it’s worth. I begin with the positive. Won’t take long.

President Obama has had the good sense to do nothing about the Iraq withdrawal plan inherited from President Bush. We are leaving soon, gradually, in orderly fashion. We are leaving behind an imperfect but determinedly democratic form of government. It’s a little chaotic by Swiss standards, pretty good by middle-eastern ones. Ordinary Iraqis are still dying at the hands of terrorists, their enemies and ours. The Iraqi freely elected government seems to be able to deal with the continued atrocities and determined to do so. The US is very popular in Iraqi Kurdistan, at least. We could have an air force base there for the asking. Obama won’t ask. All the same, it’s good to have the good will. We might need it soon, against Iran, possible supported by a newly “Islamist” Turkey.

The fact of Iraqi democracy is not lost on the subjects of various middle-eastern tyrannies, including the ones we have been supporting for a long time. “If the Iraqis can have one, after 25 years of Saddam Hussein’s gangster fascism, why not us?” the subjects tell themselves. It ‘ s not only bad examples that are contagious.

Bush bet on this “war of choice.” The fact is: he won. President Obama did not stand in the way after being elected.

In Afghanistan, Pres. Obama is staying true to the letter of his campaign announcements if not not their spirit. After yielding to the temptation to do the wrong thing: Firing General McChrystal, he did the right thing: Appointing General Petraeus. It must have been exceedingly distasteful and painful to appoint the man his avid Leftists supporters at “MoveOn” were still recently calling, “General Betray US.” Yet, the President took his medicine like a man.

I am reading between the lines of Petraeus’ appointment. The general himself says he supports the planned 1012 withdrawal. But the date was always conditional. This leaves me to believe that Mr Obama is not closing the option to stay as long as necessary.

Full disclosure: Personally, I think we should prosecute that war until both of two things happen: We know for sure that Bin Laden and his seconds are dead, and the Taliban surrender. It’s intolerable to let the world know that you can kill Americans at home without paying the price for doing so. Other Muslim terrorist groups are watching; the Russians are watching; the now-peaceful but increasingly powerful Chinese are watching; the desperate North Korean Stalinist-fascist regime is watching; above all the Iranian Islamist-fascist regime is watching with its tens of thousands of guard dogs dreaming of copulating with seventy-two virgins. None of these dangerous entities shares our interest in peaceful co-existence. None shares our belief in the belief that individual human lives matter.

Of course, my seeming willingness to go on sacrificing young American military lives seems paradoxical in view of the last sentence. It’s only superficially so. Our military men and women are all volunteers. They are more intelligent, better educated, and healthier than the average of the rest of the population. If we had to rely on  a draft, I would be more conflicted. And, of course, I don’t begin to take seriously the liberals who pretend to shed tears about the deaths and maiming of American military personnel. You never hear them complain about the loss of American lives where they would be comparatively easy to avoid. Here is a comparison: About 1,100 American military have died in Afghanistan in 9 years, most, but not all combat-related deaths. That’s about 30 times fewer than die on American roads each year. Many people assume road casualties are unavoidable. Nothing could be less true. Alcohol is involved in a least half of them. We could avoid 15,000 deaths each year by enacting and enforcing a zero-alcohol tolerance at the wheel policy. It’s all a matter of how far we are willing to go. If the obligatory penalty for the first offense where six months in jail with no suspension of sentence and if the second penalty were one year in jail and permanent withdrawal of license, you would see drinking and driving plummet to near zero. Liberal pacifists who deplore loudly 1,000 American combat deaths don’t even ever mention the vastly more murderous conflict on our roads. Hypocrites!

With Iran’s nuclear armament race, President Obama has failed to draw the lessons from the previous administration’s military inaction. The danger is growing greater and nearer by the day. Because we are militarily unprepared in that area, we might end up being forced to use the nuclear option. If we do, we will probably for be killing tens of thousands of Iranians who, we have known since last summer at least, would love to be free from the mad-dog mullahs. The so-called “Islamic Republic” is unlikely to attack us directly, it’s true. The danger is the it will threaten, seriously once, to annihilate Israel. The Israelis will then launch a preemptive attack and dare us to do nothing to help.

President Obama is a wimp, like most liberals. He does not like to contemplate bad dreams like this one.

The passive fiasco with North Korea continues. Here again, the current administration failed to draw the lessons from the past. If we are lucky, the fascist regime there will collapse spectacularly under the weight of its own mistakes and of its risible succession problems (the latter, comparable to those of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century). If we are unlucky, the regime will launch a suicide war against the prosperous Republic of Korea to its south. Then, our paltry 30,000 “trip-wire” troops there will be threatened with extermination. If this happens, we will surely nuke tens of thousands of North Koreans whose sole crime is to have suffered terribly for two life-times at the hands of their monstrous ruler-puppets.

Way to go for peace, Mr President!

Next time: The triumphs of President Obama’s domestic policies.  I will be brief!

American Courage and Perseverance (Updated)

I watch the Animal Planet channel on television. I have told you before, I watch a lot of television. I don’t have to make excuses for it, like the guys who read Playboy for the stories. Besides, I think some of the HBO productions are on a level with Shakespeare. But I also take in the low-brow stuff. I even think television is good for children’s intellectual development. Of course, you have to make them split logs in the backyard several hours a week to make up for the lack of physical exercise.

Anyway, my favorite story from Animal Planet concerns a bunch of young male elephants transplanted a long way from the preserve of their birth. Soon after the transplants, rare rhinoceroses began turning up dead. It seems the young bulls were killing them for fun. The managers of the preserve of transplant imported some old, physically imposing males to whip the young bulls into shape. That was the end of the rhinoceros murders.

I don’t pay much attention to professional sport because I can’t remember which are the rapists, which the drunks, which the drug addicts, among the spoilt young athletes left without adult supervision. Young male mobs are despicable, the epitome of savagery. Young men playing at collective game with self-discipline are an icon of civilization.

I sometimes follow Rugby – which I used to play. It’s not a professional sport but a game for self-disciplined hoodlums. Soccer is another game I follow, intermittently and only during World Cup events. I regret that this sport, popular in most of the rest of the world remains largely ignored by the greater American public. It requires personal agility, strength and intuition. It seems to me world-class soccer players are the best all-around athletes of all. There is more. Soccer is a player’s game (like basket-ball, unlike football). It rewards group initiative and much self-abnegation on the field. You see it all the time: A collection of individually superb athletes who can’t score because their search for stardom prevents them from jelling. Generally, I hold in scorn fan patriotism but I make an exception for soccer. I suspect international soccer fates say something about nations but only for a short time. And, of course, since scores rarely exceed two or three on each side, soccer encourages not tedious statistics like some other sports I could name.

The US victory over Algeria yesterday ( 623/10) told a rare tale of gallantry. The American team played deftly and valiantly for ninety minutes without being able to break through the Algerian defense. The Americans dominated the game throughout. They missed many goals that “should” have gone through. A referee disavowed a goal that looked perfectly legitimate in the replay ( not allowed in soccer). Much of it looked like sheer bad luck. I don’t think it was. Though it was obvious to all and to themselves, that they were outclassed from the get-go, the Algerians resisted fiercely and with great personal courage. The US players never gave up. Their perseverance was rewarded in the last three minutes with a goal insuring they would move up to the next level.

The Algerian display of grits contains another story worth telling. About half of them are actually Frenchmen, born in France of Algerian immigrants and who enjoy dual nationality as a result of agreements between France and its former colonial dependency. They play for French clubs. The fact is that the French national team was sent packing before the Algerian team with its French-trained players. This tells you something about the relative importance of individual skills in the game of soccer: They matter, but they are not enough, morale matters more and, I am tempted to say, collective morality. Members of the French team often behave like mean little teenagers. Members of the Algerian team played like adults. The ones went home with their silly little tails between their legs, like young bull elephants chastised by adults. The others went home (wherever home is) with their heads held high.

After the game, pretty Algerian girls were crying openly in the bleachers. Like many Arab women, they were black kohl eyeliners. It makes their despair astonishingly dramatic. I loved it!

Yesterday also, Slovakia sent Italy packing. Italy is a four-time World Cup winner, always a runner-up, a soccer superpower, historically second only to Brazil, or maybe not. I said “Slovakia,” not “Slovenia” It’s another small, obscure country in Eastern Europe that did not even exist independently a few years ago ( 17). The rout of European soccer continues as I announced previously. Believe it or not, I suspect this has to do with the debilitating effects of the nanny-state on courage and self-discipline.

UPdate 6/25/10 Finally, the US team lost to Ghana in a perfectly respectable game for both sides. The American team has nothing to be ashamed of. In many or most sports, the likelihood to producing world-class players depends on the number playing, total. (There is a pyramid effect.) Losing to a small country like Ghana is not embarrassing because there may be more boys playing soccer in Ghana than in the whole US. I don’t know this for a fact, just speculating plausibly!

President Obama Appoints Republican Presidential Candidate.

The Republican Party has had wind in its sails since the signing of the health care destruction bill of 90 days ago. What was missing was an attractive leader. I hate that word, I mean someone who would carry the flag of smaller, limited and fair government. The Republican National Committee under Michael Steele has been lackluster at best. Senator McCain is used up, everyone knows. The losers of the past Presidential election were uninspiring then. Losing did not make them more inspiring. The Tea Party Movement has no produced a Presidential candidate. It’s in the nature of grass-roots movement, right and left, to not generate viable candidates. When they do; it’s worse (Remember McCarthy, McGovern?) Sarah Palin, well, let’s face it: We love her spunk. ( I forked out gladly the full 28 dollars for her book.) Yet, she still does not have enough substance to do better as the nation’s executive than the present occupant of the post..

Now, comes Barack Obama to the rescue of the Republican Party. He may just have created with one decision the one candidate ordinary people in this country have been praying for. I am speaking of the decision to fire General McChrystal. General McChrystal asked for it and the President obliged him. The Republican Party could not have invented a better presidential candidate for the next presidential election: A good general, someone with a solid executive record, who told Obama and his leftist clique to stuff it. A large fraction of the American electorates loves his kind. His engineered firing gives him instant recognition plus the sense of drama we may need in order to extricate ourselves from the descent into sticky mud that the current presidency has been.

I refer to an “engineered” firing because I can’t believe the general did not do it on purpose. I cannot imagine that a high-ranking general with a large staff wouldn’t know that whatever he said to very publicly left-wing Rolling Stones would go unreported. In fact, the general apparently never asked to go off the record. He wanted his disparaging views of the President and of his team to be publicized. Otherwise, he would have been interviewed by, say, the Wall Street Journal, or even by the Washington Post. His comments, spread over a long period, were calculated to create a crisis. He created it, I think with the results he wanted. This is not a conspiracy theory but a speculative scenario about an otherwise incomprehensible event. (Surely, every American officer knows that military deference to the civilian authorities is one of our strongest democratic traditions.)

Now, the White House demoted General Petraeus to put him in McChrystal’s position to lead the war effort in Afghanistan. Yes, that’s the same general Democrats had dubbed “General Betray Us” when he was leading the surge against the terrorists in Iraq under the Bush administration. The fact that the surge worked has not caused any one of them to say “Oops!” (If I am wrong, please, let me correct my mistake in big letters on this blog.) Instead, they have to eat s— by giving this reviled general the greatest current military responsibility. What a fiasco this presidency is, in every respect.

The World Cup ( Philosophy and Sociology of)

Even those who don’t appreciate the finesses and power of soccer should enjoy the current World Soccer (“Football Association”) Cup. It’s an event portent with philosophical implications. It’s the stage where, in full view of much of the world, the prideful and the powerful get their butts kicked by nobodies. England, the country that invented the noble game, seldom even gets close to a goblet, much less to the Cup itself. Right now, some of the European super-powers have trouble keeping their own against former dwarves. France got its ass handed out to it in one of its first games by recently non-existent Mexico. Then, the country went on to lose it to charity-case South Africa. Then, the French team melted down on the playing field. The French team is going home where some of its members, or at least its general manager, will probably be guillotined after a brief show trial. And why not? Marie-Antoinette was guilty of less. Super-champ Italy has to keep fighting for its very survival. Spain held its own with difficulty against tiny former minor colony Honduras. Even among the Europeans, it’s the unknown that keep looking good, Switzerland for one, Slovenia, a country the size of San Jose, California, for another.

In a cruel twist of historical fate, even the few sub-Saharan African countries (that means “black”), who had reasonable aspirations are getting rid of themselves. Their apparent mistake: Putting their fates in the hands of European coaches who were world stars yesteryear. Nigeria barely survived its encounter with South Korea. No one had heard of South Korean soccer until four or five years ago. The south Korean players look like they are fifteen or so. And the annoying music of plastic trumpets goes on in South Africa.

For the observant, there are also amusing sociological features to the World Cup. Here is one: Every national team who can includes black players. I mean players with some ancestry in sub-Saharan Africa (see above). That England and France should do so is no surprise. Both are former colonial powers with significant black populations. But what about Switzerland and Chiles, both of whom had prominently displayed black players when they fought? Switzerland never became involved in any colonial adventure. Any black person with Swiss citizenship must have acquired it within one generation, or within two years. Chile is one of those former Spanish colonies where black slavery never took much root. (In large part it was because African slave-work was associated with plantation-type agriculture, as with cotton, and sugar, and indigo, rather than with small peasant proprietorship and cattle ranches as prevailed in Chile.) And Chile is not prosperous enough to attract immigrants from Africa and from the West Indies, unlike the US, for example. A long time ago, when France won the World Cup, a German commentator actually complained that it was not fair because the French had many blacks while Germany had none!

Why the disproportionate representation of people of black African descent in soccer at the world level, as in so many other sports, in the US and elsewhere? I am reasonably sure it’s not due to active programs of affirmative action. There must be some other reason. Don’t expect to find any exploration of this interesting topic produced in America, and certainly not by American academics. It’s a forbidden topic, one of many. We have learned to live daily with hypocrisy because political correctness is largely victorious.

Is the Obama Administration Lying About Ban on Deep Drilling?

I think it is. The link below gives evidence.

PS I don’t use the word “lying” lightly. A lie has to involve wilfull alteration of the truth.
JUNE 17, 2010 Crude Politics
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704198004575311033371466938.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories

–

The French national soccer team in South Africa went on strike Sunday!

Would I be making this up?

Do you think this has anything to do with the culture of the French welfare state?

President Obama Is Not a Criminal

The President always reminded me a little of a small boy who has put on his father suit to play grown-up. My impression was right on the dot. He proved it in his press conference on the Gulf oil spillage yesterday (6/15/10). Barack Obama keeps pretending he is President but he is hardly fooling anyone anymore, not even himself. I am not referring to the manner of his accession to power. I have no doubt it was fair and square. Thus, I disapprove of Rush Limbaugh’s practice of referring to the “Obama regime.” The word “regime” implies a lack of legitimacy, from an administration’s origins, and a ruling clique. I wish it were so (and more on this below).

The President has ordered BP to place a large amount of money in an escrow account to compensate the victims of the spillage. Sounds manly as hell, an explosion of decisiveness, on the 57^th day of the environmental crisis!

Mind you, the President of the United States does not have any such power and for good reasons. I am not even sure Hugo Chavez would have the power to do it. The reasons why Mr Obama does not have that kind of authority is simple: We are a nation of laws. The laws decide who gets compensated and in what order if there is not enough to go around. If the laws are not sufficiently clear, which I doubt, we have powerful courts able to make fair decisions and to implement them.

This is a moot point anyway and the President’s show was just that, a show for the innocent and for the gullible. First, as I have pointed out before, BP has declared unambiguously from the beginning that it’s civilly responsible. It’s not playing any games. It has said repeatedly, that it will pay. Second, and give me your attention, this is subtle:BP immediately jumped on the President’s offer. If I were advising BP, I would have told its CEO: Go along, dress in sackcloth and walk barefoot to the President with your ash-smeared head bowed and carrying a strong noosed rope in both hands. Let him mock-force you to establish an escrow account for the victims. First, right now, BP’s rep is so low, public repentance sounds like a public relations coup. Second, this may be the best strategy to avoid the full financial consequences of your technical incompetence. The escrow account will take the responsibility of compensation out of our hands. It will enable us to state truthfully: The job of paying up the victims fairly and promptly was taken from us. This short administration already has a long history of helping the guilty and punishing the innocent. Counting on its doing it again on our behalf is not a wild bet.

Absent from the speech were a small number of questions the President and his entourage must have judged non-essential, politically, environmentally, and economically:

Why refused help from a foreign experts when you have a clear majority in Congress able to change laws that might constitute obstacles nearly overnight?

Why wait 57 days to do the unpleasant but obviously effective: Parts of petroleum are volatile and can be ignited fairly easily? (Saddam Hussein demonstrated that.)

Why not rush the permission and the funds requested by the Governor of Louisiana weeks ago to construct artificial barriers to protect the wetlands? The monies involved are pennies to your grand spending schemes. For once, you would have received broad bi-partisan support for a government expenditure.

In this connection also, either the National Guard can be useful in containment and cleaning up or it cannot. If it is useful, it would already have been useful a long time ago. The President has the power to nationalize the Guard almost overnight. What happened?

As I have said before, I am saddened by the plight of the Gulf fishermen and of the many businesses that are being destroyed by the reality of he crisis (and even more so by associated impressions of unprecedented tragedy). Why not use the Small Business Administration, a federal agency, to begin making zero-interest loans from day one? Could be done for both businesses and individuals. It’s commonly done in situations of natural disasters with consequences similar to those of this non-natural disaster. This practice often stems the disappearance of small employers that are unlikely to return, the crisis once past. It’s not just about income loss, Mr President, it’s about job loss. Didn’t anyone tell you the difference? Second, SBA easy loans would have the legal merit of positioning the Federal Government as a real civil plaintiff against BP, independent of its bullying power.

Also not mentioned is the question of why anyone is drilling down several thousands of feet near our shores rather than a couple of hundreds in Alaska and yes, in California, near where I live. It seems less difficult and if accidents happen at shallow depth, I am pretty sure they are easier to remedy.

Present in the President’s virile speech: the ever-present frivolous, futile call for reliance on solar energy instead of petroleum.

No one has done more to discredit this otherwise attractive technology than Barack Obama.

None of the President’s erring logic, none of this tin ear amounts to a crime. We must resist the temptation to discern criminality where only gross incompetence is present: If I found myself somehow at the commands of a 747 and I crashed the plane on landing, would it make me a criminal, I ask?

I also wonder if I, a retired university professor with a good scholarly record, would have done better than that former university professor with no record at all. The response I give is mixed: I would probably have done a little better because I am more inclined to seek and take advice than Prof. Obama seems to be. Also, I am a much better judge of other people’s competence than Mr Obama is. But then, most adults are, I suspect. The other part of the answer is that I, unlike Barack Obama, have had the wisdom never to run for an important office, never confused playing at being President with actually being President. Even as a little kid playing doctor with my female cousins, I knew I wasn’t a doctor.

Someone with some executive experience would have addressed some of the questions I raised above and acted accordingly. I mean, someone like John McCain, or better, like Governor Sarah Palin.

I know this level of incompetence may tempt one into elaborating conspiracy perspectives: If the President’s clique were preparing to try again and impose its silly environmental agenda, the President would not act all so differently maybe. It’s not a conspiracy; this is too clumsy, too absurd (although the administration may try later to recycle the present crisis for this purpose). None of this is surprising. The President is a man who has never accomplished anything in his life. He is acting the President as he acted the US Senator before, and the state legislator before that, and before that, the “community organizer.” His last best part may well have been that of a law review “Editor” without a single publication to his name. Earlier in life, he acted well the part of the bright-eyed, intelligent-looking minority student that stopped questions about affirmative action dead in their tracks. To this, day is college grades are under lock and key. That’s probably the reason.

And remember, this is not an illegitimate “regime” coming to power God knows how. America deserves President Obama as the Gaza strip deserves Hamas. (See my: “Israel Attack,…,” posted 6/2/10) We chose him carefully, from a large field of candidates. We did so over a long period giving us plenty of opportunities to come to our senses. We did it because we are a great people that often suffers from temporary blindness.

And where is Al Gore now that his buddy and ally is allowing an evil oil company to burn thousands of gallons of crude oil daily? He and Tipper had described their divorce as amiable, almost a tea party. It can’t be what’s keeping him from making stentorian declarations about the end of the Planet, just around the corner. Fate gave him the Gulf oil disaster on a silver platter. Why the deafening silence?Does his cult have even more to hide than we thought? Is the Nobel Peace Prize winner simply ashamed of his profitable traffic in pollution credits? I wish I understood better the religiously inclined.

Tell me what you think.

Patriotism, the Last Refuge of Scoundrels

I have Obama ennui and petroleum fatigue so, here is a story.

In spite of its title, this story is largely about feces so, if you have a weak stomach, stop right here. It’s also about my war, stretching over several years, against raccoons.

I live close to downtown on a parcel that includes four bearing fruit trees. This ought to make me gloriously happy because I was reared in a big city where I always longed for the countryside. Now, for me, on a small scale, the old wish that cities ought to be built in the countryside has come true. The problem is that a tribe of impudent raccoons lives nearby on an untended cliff. For half the year, one or another of my trees is bearing fruits and the raccoons make nightly visits, singly or in groups. Generally, that would be OK with me: Share and share alike, I say. However, raccoons apparently feel the need to defecate soon after they eat, nearly always on my property, in this case. In fact, they are so regular (so to speak), that they always do it on the roof of a low shed adjacent to a lovely small sun-deck. I spent significant money two years ago to build a grape arbor above the sun-deck. I had visions of myself writing outdoors and lazily reaching up for my own dangling grapes.

In the past, I have won indecisive victories with a b.b. gun used at close range. I say indecisive because, one particularly ornery old mama I had shot in the ass several time retaliated by leaving a turd right plum in the middle of my bathroom’s skylight.

(With admirable à propos, one might say.) Incredible but true, she or one of her close relatives also crapped on the hood of my car. The car was parked on the street. How the perpetrator selected my vehicle rather than a neighbor’s left me perplexed and also vaguely spooked for weeks.

Recently, my fig tree fruited again because of a warm October, which renewed the invasion. The invaders resumed shitting on the low shed three steps from my window, as they had done in the past. In the morning, I cleaned up and spread noxious chemicals on the spot. Nothing helped. I became angry and decided, “No more Mister Nice Guy!” I spent a good half hour creating nail boards, with thin nails protruding outside and upward. I placed them right on the raccoons’ comfort spot, business side up. Next morning, I woke up to find my nail boards covered with shit!

I was about to call an expensive pest control company when my wife reasoned with me, “Those raccoons show admirable tenaciousness – she said. Their persistence against you is a sort of moral victory. In effect, they show better American spirit than most liberals.”

I find the argument absurdly compelling. I was momentarily paralyzed into inaction. Then, my wife offered a humane if cowardly solution. She said that if I placed a newspaper on top of the shed every night, she would pick up the raccoon turds every morning. I agreed. Of course, I use the New York Times.

PS I hear that there are no raccoons outside of North America except in some parts of Germany and Japan, both close to US Air Force bases. It’s one of those stories too good to check.

© Jacques Delacroix 2006

More On Sex; the President and Helen Thomas (Unrelated Items, Obviously.)

One of the many evils of feminism is that it has stopped nearly all rational discussion of sex differences not about women being eternal victims. (See my May 25 other posting on sex: “Dr D. On Sex, Homosexuality….”) The infantilization of women inherent in their victim status pretty well excludes the treatment of women as adult, responsible actors on the social scene whose actions determine much or most of what the world is like. Women still rear small children, on the main. That’s a good enough reason to discuss their general propensities if any. And if you think there are no such general propensities, you must have known only two or three women in your life and not paid attention.

My daughter has been visiting with her daughter, age 18 months.

My grand-daughter is a vivacious, alert, endlessly curious child. I can brag without reserve because grand-daughter has no more genes in common with me than she has, with say, a zebra since my daughter is adopted. I feel a strong affinity with the child nevertheless because she is very loud, like me and because she likes to talk, like me. Like me again, she does not let the fact that she does not know how to talk stop her.

It did not take long for this observant child to figure out that with Grandpa – as with most men, probably – one enjoys an extra three feet of physical autonomy, and one is only occasionally told what to do. She realized early also that Grandpa is the one most likely to put interesting machines in motion, the television, of course, the computer and, yesterday, the printer.

For all this practically instantaneous accord, I have to fight my way to her through thick ranks of womenfolk. They operate according to the unexamined assumption that small children belong to women. At the bottom of this, I think, is not some sort of maternal instinct but the fact that almost all women are naturally controlling to very controlling, in everything. When a young woman calls Dr Laura to complain that her mother is “very controlling,” Dr Laura, that wise woman, just laughs. What’s new? (Yes, I listen to Dr Laura. All men should.)

I said that “almost” all women are controlling, not because I am wimp unable to say what I mean but because there was one woman in my life that was not. When I was a child, I had a loving godmother who never once told me what to do or what not to do. She was kind and observant and she knew who I was before I did. I owe her most of my better traits of personality. This is not a speculation but a certitude. (I wrote extensively about her in my memoirs: “I Used to Be French:….” There are excerpts on this blog.)

I could make a u-turn on this with proper evidence, but I suspect most women can’t help being controlling, that they can’t control their controllingness. It does not mean they have to be indulged. Men in their lives should say “No” to them frequently, preferably calmly, preferably for no good reason. I think it’s healthy for the women’s mental balance and happiness to bump into walls, loving walls.

Changing the subject completely to finish a thought: The doyenne of the White House press corps Helen Thomas was fired recently for saying that Israelis should return to Germany and to Poland (where some of their grandparents where lately put to death in ovens like so much vermin). The fact is that Thomas did not say anything anti-Semitic although I, and you, and everyone else, can read the thick print between the thin lines. The fact is that she has a perfect political right to make anti-Semitic statements. That’s protected by the First Amendment. The fact is further that her employer has every right to fire her, for any reason whatsoever. I am pleased she is gone for the simple reason that for forty years she was the astonishingly ugly face of liberalism in the nation’s capital.

I am perplexed however by the White House’s reaction to that little fracas. The silly Mr Gibbs, the White House “spokesperson” went out of his way to declare how much he deplored Ms Thomas mean and bitchy words. He told the world the President also was sorry. Is this the world ass-backward or what?

Mr President get it straight: Political journalists are supposed to form and speak opinions about office holders such as presidents. Office-holders are not supposed to express opinions about those who task it is to express opinions about them.

Another simple concept President Obama does not get. I keep telling you the man is not evil. He is inconceivably incompetent.

Break

The weather is great; Monterey Bay is blue; the sardines are jumping, and I am not writing much. So, shoot me!