Barack the Liar

Back in the day, by which I mean hundreds and thousands of years ago, major figures in history often were identified by epithets attached to their first names. Thus we had Alexander the Great. From the standpoint of the Persians, “great” might not have been what they had in mind, but that is the way western civilization remembers him.
“Great” is a nickname that was attached to many rulers. We’ve had Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, Charles the Great (Charlemagne), Alfred the Great and so on until the sobriquet actually begins to grate on one’s nerves.
Fortunately, history has more imagination than that. We’ve also had Selim the Sot, a sultan of the Ottoman Empire who apparently ignored the Muslim dictate to abjure alcohol. That empire also produced Selim the Grim. Russia gave us Ivan the Terrible, England gave us William the Conqueror, and Scandinavia gave us King Gorm the Old.
My two favorite epithets were Ethelred the Unready, who gained the English crown at the age of ten (well, of course he was unready), and my all-time favorite, Vlad the Impaler.
Vlad discouraged his enemies in Transylvania by impaling them on spears stuck in the ground, and if you want to know more about the operation, look it up. I’m trying to run a family-friendly blog. Vlad is the character who served as the model for the vampire legends.
So what sobriquet will history give to Barack Obama? I’d suggest Barack the Liar. I’m 65 years old at this writing, and I don’t recall an American president who has lied quite so boldly and quite so often.
I define a lie as a statement one makes to another while knowing that statement to be untrue. Most of us know by now that the statements Obama made in 2013 about the Affordable Care Act were lies. He said over and over again in various iterations, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period.”
He also said if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period, and that family insurance premiums under Obamacare would drop by an average of $2,500 per year, which was not true.  He also said that Obamacare would not contribute “one dime” to the deficit, which already is not true. The CBO now estimates that Obamacare will cost the U.S. taxpayer $1.8 trillion over the next ten years.
All that wouldn’t be so bad. We all know most politicians are going to lie at some point, and maybe we Americans could allow our presidents one big whopper, such as, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
But Obama lies about issues that run the length and breadth of the story of his presidency and even lies about what he himself has said. On the health insurance issue, Obama said on Aug. 11, 2009,  “I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter.” But he has said exactly that on several occasions, including in 2003 when he was an Illinois state senator. “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program,” Obama said then.
Often, Obama seems to be in a time warp. “We have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas,” he said. We haven’t. The goal is to do that by 2025, but we’re hardly there yet.
Obama said in a speech in May of 2011 that the U.S, had “doubled its exports” under his administration (along with several more dubious claims). It’s not true. Exports had gone up since 2009, but have not come even close to doubling.
And in 2008, candidate Barack Obama said, “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” The Obama administration since then has proposed 442 tax increases. Some of those that went through are tax increases on capital gains, tanning booths, medical devices, 20 tax increases connected with ObamaCare, tobacco and is now backing a tax increase on gasoline.
My own selection as the worst lie was, “This is the most transparent administration in history.” I had a couple of occasions to test that. One of Hillary Clinton’s first “accomplishments” as secretary of state was to upgrade the furniture in U.S. embassies across the world. There were three contractors hired to do that, and I sent an enquiry asking who those contractors were. I never received a reply.
A couple years ago, I filed a Freedom of Information request with Bureau of Land Management. It wasn’t a big deal. I wanted to know what the BLM’s recommendations were for nominees to some state advisory panels. You’d have thought I asked for a parts list for the hellfire missile. The documents I received were redacted to such an extent that every, and I emphasize “every,” piece of information was blacked out.
And it’s not just me. “This is the most secretive White House that, at least as a journalist, I have ever dealt with,” said Jill Abramson of The New York Times, usually a frequent and fervent apologist for the president.
But don’t take my word for it. Google any source using “Obama’s lies” and see what you get. PolitiFacts, the Pulitzer Prize winning website, has four pages of examples.
But this doesn’t seem to deter the president. Just before the Super Bowl this year (2014), Obama flatly stated to Bill O’Reilly in an interview, “I didn’t raise taxes once.” Technically, that’s true. He has raised taxes more than once. It’s as if some people – Nancy Pelosi comes to mind – are unaware that mankind has invented recording devices.
But it doesn’t matter. I estimate that 50 percent of the nation’s population is so uninformed that they have no business voting. Only a catastrophe is going to change things, so we are all riding this train to the crash site.
But for those of us who follow the news and use our heads, isn’t it peculiar that not only will politicians such as Barack Obama tell blatant lies, but they tell them knowing they must eventually be found out. It’s as if a reporter in the 15th Century went to interview King Vlad, who is looking out over a field of lifeless enemies held upright only by the stakes driven through their bodies. Vlad looks the reporter in the eye and says, “I’ve never impaled anybody.”

 

Climate Change (nee Global Warming)

I don’t pretend to know everything, so I keep a group of experts on retainer. So now that the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has come out with its latest dire predictions, I called on one of those experts for some advice – Dr. Luke Warm.
DustinBooks: Dr. Warm, good to see you again. Hope you didn’t have any trouble on the roads.
LW: Well, I didn’t expect snow, wind and 27º on April 7, but it has been that kind of a year. I heard you had the lowest temperature in the nation last winter.
DB: We did. Town Hall recorded -42º on Dec. 5.
LW: So what’s your position on global warming?
DB: I’m in favor of it. But I asked you here to comment on the latest report from the Climate Change Panel. The panel’s chairman seemed deeply worried.
LW: That’s Rajendra Pachauri. He said, and I quote, “If you don’t stabilize the climate of his planet, the impacts are going to be progressively more serious.”
DB: And you say?
LW: I think it takes monumental hubris to think we can tailor the planet’s weather to make it what we like and keep it there forever. In the 4 billion years of planet Earth, that has never happened, with or without human intervention.
DB: Pachauri also said this, “If you don’t do anything, then by the end of this century, you get to see the sea level rise come up to 0.98 meter.”
LW: The full quote is, “If you don’t do anything, then by the end of this century, you get to see the sea level rise come up to 0.98 meter, and that’s almost a meter.” I think a lot of people on this panel think they’re talking to a bunch of cretins out here who can’t comprehend that 98 percent of a meter is almost a whole meter. So they think we don’t know history either.
DB: How’s that?
LW: I’d rather see the oceans rise one meter than rise 20 meters as they did 5 million years ago. The globe has warmed before without our help. It warmed during the Medieval Warm Period that lasted from about 950 to 1250 A.D., which, for the benefit of all of us cretins out here, was before cars and coal-fired power plants.
DB: What caused the Medieval Warm Period?
LW: We’re not sure. Lots of things can change the weather – solar flares, earthquakes that could change ocean currents, meteor strikes, a sudden release of trapped methane from under the sea, volcanism, the Three Gorges Dam in China.
DB: Explain that last one.
LW: Some think that the sheer weight of the volume of water being stored by that dam will unbalance the Earth a little, change the axial tilt and affect the severity of seasons.
DB: This last winter season must have been a little disappointing the global warming crowd.
LW: You haven’t seen Al Gore spouting off anywhere, have you? 75,000 airline flights canceled – the most ever. They weren’t canceled ‘cause of warm weather! Snow where snow has never fallen before in the U.S. And your record low. It was a rough one.
DB: So there have been cold periods also in human history.
LW: Yes. We call them ice ages.
DB: I meant climate change is really a constant, not climate stability.
LW: Of course. You have to understand that the global warming crowd’s agenda runs parallel to the radical environmental agenda. Part of that agenda is to end the use of fossil fuels. If you did that in the U.S., 80 percent of your electrical power would be gone.
DB: There are renewables.
LW: Someday. Maybe. But look at how those radical environmentalists rarely mention atomic power, and in a couple of states don’t list hydroelectric as a renewable. That’s about the cleanest renewable there is, but the radical environmentalists don’t like dams. And they don’t seem to like killing people either.
DB: I don’t like killing people.
LW: Ah, but people are huge contributors to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. You breathe in oxygen; you breathe out carbon dioxide.
DB: Okay, but it couldn’t be that much.
LW: With 6 billion people on the planet, that amounts to 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide humans put into the air every year, and that doesn’t factor in their pets and livestock.
DB: So you’re saying that we could spend vast amounts of money to try and stabilize the weather, and a single solar flare could undo it all in hours, or a meteor shower, or a volcano. And I don’t think we’re going to shoot half the population to cut down on carbon dioxide. So what do we do?
LW: We adapt. We’re good at it. Global warming isn’t all bad. The amount of arable land should increase. Sea lanes will open in the north. Natural resources near the poles will be more accessible. But maybe we’ll take this as a hint to get off the planet, spread out, colonize the Solar System and maybe the stars.
DB: Well, if you like climate stability, the inside of a Dyson sphere is the place to be!

 

Herding Ants

I have fairly vivid dreams. I’ve never shared these dreams with a psychologist because I don’t want to be institutionalized. But most of these dreams are fairly benign, and I believe, an effort by my subconscious to tell me something.
Many of my dreams are intertwined with reality to such an extent that I wake up thinking I have just exited reality and entered dreamland when exactly the reverse is true. And when I figure out where I am, I also try to figure out what my subconscious was trying to tell me.
Some of those messages are simple. My dreams are populated by numerous characters from my past, friends and former friends, former acquaintances and former lovers. At my age, I only have former lovers. Two characters in particular have visited me often in dreamland. One is Dave Bross, who died too young, and one is Wrecks, a dog who died at the time dogs usually die.
Dave shows up in my dreams but never talks. In his life, he had this silly grin that appeared when he’d successfully pulled off some prank. He’ll be sitting at a table with the rest of us, and I’d look at him as if to say, “Dave, you’re not supposed to be here. You died last summer.”
He’d crack that smile and look at me as if to say, “I know. Don’t worry about it.” Nobody else seemed to notice Dave was there, but it didn’t matter. To me, he was there for as long as he was there, and that was okay.
Wrecks is a little different kind of visitor. Wrecks usually shows up when I’m in trouble, like about to get into a fight with two or three impossibly large and formidable thugs. Wrecks doesn’t rush into the room snarling or biting or anything like that. He shows up, and the thugs diminish and disappear, and then the mutt looks at me with a kind of Dave grin on his mug.
We treat our dogs better than we treat ourselves, you know. Wrecks was astoundingly healthy all his life until he wasn’t. He let me know his time had come, and I released him from his pain. I was right there with him as a dog owner ought to be when he went to sleep.
So what message do Dave and Wrecks and others carry to me in my dreams? I miss them, is all. It’s not that complicated.
I had a tougher dream to inertpret last night. I used to have some property in Missouri that was kind of my perfect lifelong wish for a piece of land. It was 324 acres of forest and bottom land along an Ozark stream. It had a spring on it that ran down to the Meramec River, and I always thought if the world went to hell and I needed a refuge, this land was it. It had water, fertile ground and lots of game. I lost the land when my best friends turned out not to be my friends at all, but I dream about that land regularly.
In my dream last night I was wandering over that land and came across this fellow who appeared to be herding ants. He was sitting on a log with a little twig in his hand that he used to interrupt a column of ants moving across the ground.
He was dressed like a lot of these nature researchers working on grants. He was wearing half-hiking boots that used to be popular from L.L. Bean, wool socks up to his knees, green shorts and a khaki hunting shirt with all kinds of loops and big pockets. I could tell this fellow didn’t go into the woods a lot because all his stuff was clean and pressed.
I didn’t talk to the man in my dream. I went back to the house where they were fixing breakfast and told the others about him. They laughed. “Herding ants! That’s rich,” they said.
I know where the caricature of the ant herder came from. I once interviewed some researchers up in the mountains who studied high-altitude snow patterns, or something like that. They’ve been doing this off and on for ten years. I asked them to send me a copy of their paper when it was done, but either they forgot or they haven’t finished that paper yet. Maybe they never will. Maybe they were just studying snow because they liked studying snow and someone else – probably we taxpayers – was paying for it.
On waking, I wondered why I was having that particular dream. I had a little more purpose in life when I was writing a newspaper column and had an audience of about 2,000 or 3,000 readers. Now I’m writing on this blog which, for all I know, nobody reads.
I didn’t talk to that fellow in my dream herding ants because he looked absolutely content doing what he was doing. I’m a writer. I have to write, even if nobody reads it. I believe I’m content doing that. This must be so because it’s 4 a.m., and I got up to write this before I lost these thoughts as I lose so many notions that come in the dark of the night.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m living my dream up here in the mountains. Maybe I’m just herding ants.

I Have Concerns

Senate Majority Leader Harry Mason Reid recently said he would not attend a Washington Redskins home game until the team changes its name to something more appropriate, like the Washington Reiders.
My first question in response to that would have been when was the last time Harry Reid attended an NFL game anywhere? Reid, the consummate politician who not too long ago called every person who expressed frustration with ObamaCare a liar, is apparently reflecting the concerns of many who object to the Redskins team name.
Which to me shows us how much time Americans have on their hands. We don’t really have to work for a living anymore, so a lot of us are wandering around expressing concern about various issues to the point that no one raises an eyebrow when a person describes his profession as an “activist.”
Well, I have concerns. One of my concerns is that we don’t have to work anymore. There are enough welfare programs out there that we don’t have to work to survive, or to own a car, cell phone, and a flat-screen TV.
I’m concerned that perhaps half the population doesn’t understand the implications of the previous paragraph. I’m concerned that products of the American educational system can’t answer questions such as:
• “Who was the most famous American general to emerge from World War II? Answer: George Washington.
• “When was the Civil War fought?” Answer: 1960.
• “What foreign country shares a border with California?” Answer: Oregon.
• “Who is the vice-president of the United States?” Answer: blank stare.
I’m concerned that these people can vote. I’m concerned that this historical illiteracy is not confined to those who care little about politics. Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from New York, recently stated that the three branches of the U.S. government are the House, the Senate, and the President.
I am concerned that Iran, a religious theocracy and chief financier of terrorism around the world, is building an atomic weapon. I’m concerned that North Korea, led by a megalomaniacal dwarf with a strange hairdo who a year ago had his ex-girlfriend shot, possesses six atomic bombs.
I’m concerned that my country is more than $17 trillion in debt. I’m concerned that my country has $65 trillion (at least) in unfunded liabilities in connection with Social Security and Medicare alone. I’m concerned that the U.S. will become bankrupt and in ten years one dollar will be worth one cent.
I’m concerned that teenagers automatically get, or expect to get cars on their 16^th birthday. I’m concerned that they then go out and drive those cars on roads I travel.
I’m concerned that the world hasn’t joined together to hunt down the members of Boko Haram in Africa, or any other group of savages operating anywhere that can go and kidnap schoolgirls and sell them into slavery. I’m concerned that slavery still exists on the planet.
I’m concerned about the extent of marginal literacy in the U.S. If you doubt me, read any letter written by common, low-ranking Civil War soldiers and compare them with what passes for writing on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media.
I’m concerned that most national armies in the world exist solely to subdue their own populations. I’m concerned that governments of Mexico and many countries in Central and South America are so inept and corrupt that their people will risk their lives and the lives of their children to escape to the U.S.
I’m concerned that our President doesn’t enforce laws he took an oath to enforce. I’m concerned that 36,000 illegal aliens who have also committed additional crimes in the U.S. – including felonies – were simply released onto our streets.
I’m concerned that there is hardly a Cabinet-level department in the U.S. that isn’t involved in some sort of serious, scary scandal right now. I’m concerned that Congress spends an inordinate amount of time and money investigating these scandals. I’m concerned that we can be harassed and intimidated by our own government for our political beliefs.
I’m concerned that we’ll kill a shark just for its fin, kill whales for “scientific purposes” and eat them later, and kill fish to the point of species extinction.
I’m concerned that even with all the wealth waiting for us in outer space, the U.S. space program is dead in the sand. I’m concerned we have to pay Russia $30 million to send one of our own astronauts to the International Space Station.
I’m concerned that ferries keep capsizing in Asia, in Africa and even Italy. Haven’t we learned by now how to build and operate boats?
I’m concerned that Russia wants to reconquer Ukraine. I’m concerned that China wants to claim soverignity the South China Sea and Taiwan. I’m concerned that Shi’ites and Sunnis have hated each other for over a 1,000 years and still do. I’m concerned that the Koran directs Muslims to kill Jews. I’m concerned that Pakistanis hate Indians and the reverse is also true, and both nations have nuclear weapons.
And speaking of Indians, the Redskins issue is pretty far down on my list of concerns. It’s just above global warming, which is last on my list. But here’s a solution on that issue that will please all. Daniel Snyder can simply say that it will cost $50 million to rebrand the team. If any group, excepting the American taxpayer, can come up with that amount, he’ll change the name.
Dealing with my other concerns is going to be somewhat more difficult.