My complaint about President Obama's vacations

Dear Readers,

There is currently a lot of controversy about President Obama's vacations's philippics, and I know that any letter on the subject will almost certainly cause someone to impose ideology, control thought, and punish virtually any behavior President Obama's vacations disapproves of. Still, it is an actuarial certainty that President Obama's vacations will rot our minds with the hallucinatory drug of scapegoatism sometime soon. 

You may be disappointed to hear that my concrete suggestions on how to condemn—without hesitation, without remorse—all those who pit race against race, religion against religion, and country against country are sprinkled throughout this letter like raisins in a pudding, not grouped together in a single block of text at the end. This was a conscious decision I made based on the observation that President Obama's vacations sometimes has trouble convincing people that bad things "just happen" (i.e., they're not caused by President Obama's vacations itself). When President Obama's vacations has such trouble, it usually trots out a few stingy, subversive know-it-alls to constate authoritatively that it can make all of our problems go away merely by sprinkling some sort of magic, pink, pixie dust over everything that it considers out-of-touch or incorrigible. Whether or not that trick of its works, it's still the case that the pen is a powerful tool. Why don't we use that tool to transform our culture of war and violence into a culture of peace and nonviolence?

 So long as the devastating inequities that characterize our society persist, President Obama's vacations's trained seals will be unable to deny that the spectrum of views between hooliganism and interdenominationalism is not a line but a circle at which treasonous, longiloquent weirdos and the most brusque profiteers I've ever seen meet. To properly place President Obama's vacations somewhere in that spectrum one needs to realize that we must restore the traditions that President Obama's vacations has abandoned. If we don't, future generations will not know freedom. Instead, they will know fear; they will know sadness; they will know injustice, poverty, and grinding despair. Most of all, they will realize, albeit far too late, that President Obama's vacations once tried to convince a bunch of us that it is a refined organization with the soundest ethics and morals you can imagine. Fortunately, calmer heads prevailed and a number of people informed the rest of the gang that I wouldn't want to make my worst nightmares come true. I would, on the other hand, love to reveal the truth about President Obama's vacations's précis. But, hey, I'm already doing that with this letter.

If we let President Obama's vacations produce culturally degenerate films and tapes, who's going to protect us? The government? Our parents? Superman? Probably none of the above. That's why it's important to prescribe a course of action.

To President Obama's vacations's mind, it can spoil the whole Zen Buddhist New Age mystical rock-worshipping aura of our body chakras and get away with it. So that means that the rigors that its victims have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement, right? No, not right. The truth is that difficult times lie ahead. Fortunately, we have the capacity to circumvent much of the impending misery by working together to cast a ray of light on President Obama's vacations's vengeful scare tactics. We can all have daydreams about Happy Fuzzy Purple Bunny Land, where everyone is caring, loving, and nice. Not only will those daydreams not come true, but President Obama's vacations is a psychologically defective organization. It's what the psychiatrists call a constitutional psychopath or a sociopath. There is one final irony to my story. I am quite certain that it ruffles my feathers that President Obama's vacations wants to destroy everything beautiful and good.

Scott Pakin's automatic complaint-letter generator

NOTE:

Governor Christie's comment the other day prompted me to use Pakin to generate this Letter of Complaint, when the Governor asked Obama:

"What the hell are we paying you for?"

Chris Christie to Obama: What the Hell Are We 

paying you for?

The Obama Presidential Library

By Bernie on 29 Nov 2011
 Planck's Constant

In this short Youtube video, Virginia S. Hinshaw, Chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, gives her reasons why Barack Obama's Presidential Library and Museum should be located in Honolulu. Actually she only gives two reasons: he is the only President to have been born in Hawaii (which of course is debatable) and he embodies the global multicultural perspective which is the hallmark of that state.

But what would such a library contain? Sodahead.com has a few ideas:

What will you find in the Obama Presidential Library?

Considering all of his Accomplishments like:

First President to spend more money on vacations than any other in History
First President to get a AA Rating in History
Highest Food Stamp percentage in History
Highest debt in history spending 4 Trillion in 3 years
Highest unemployment in 20 years
First President to hold a Beer Summit
First president to bow to the World
Cash for Clunkers

This is truly a Historical President....

What would you put in his Presidential Library?

Let me start it out....

1. Cash for clunkers car
2. Presidential set of Golf Clubs
3. Moosechelle's Walmart Dresses

I have read that funds are already being raised to help build the Obama Library. But I believe very little monies will be needed, as explained by Dr. Jack Wheeler at his blog To The Point News:

Presidential Libraries contain all the pertinent information about the respective presidents. This is all of their history before their nominations, the campaign papers, memorabilia, all of the papers from their presidency, and so on; a wealth of information about the man and his life both private and public.

What would Barack Hussein Obama Jr.'s presidential library look like and what would they archive in it? Just exactly what would the design parameters be?

1.) It wouldn't need to be very big because there are no records to archive from before he was president and everything he does as president is either done in secret, no one will admit to it, or a lie.

2.) It would have to be very mobile because by the time he is done as president, no city or state will acknowledge that he ever even visited let alone originally came from there. Plus if the general public ever caught up with it...

3.) Construction material would need to be easily maintained by minimal staff. Preferably something that could be hosed out occasionally and left to air dry.

4.) It would be a good idea if it was a dual use facility so that it could at least get some sort of appropriate use.

Here, then, is the perfect answer to all of the above. Shouldn't cost much more than a trillion or so to build it.

 

Satelite Photos: Iran's nuclear site explosion

BEFORE EXPLOSION

AFTER EXPLOSION

‘Mysterious Explosion Damaged Iranian Nuclear Site’

A blast that Iran said was at a uranium enrichment site actually damaged a nuclear site. It was not accidental, The London Times reports.

By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

First Publish: 11/30/2011, 12:41 PM

ISRAEL NATIONAL NEWS

Iranian nuclear site after explosion

Institute for Science and International Security

The explosion earlier this week that Iran said was at a uranium enrichment site actually damaged a nuclear plant and was far from accidental, The London Times reported Wednesday.

The newspaper quoted Israeli intelligence officials as saying that satellite photos revealed extensive damage from the explosion at Isfahan, near Tehran. The Israeli sources, so far unconfirmed, added that smoke was seen pouring out from a conversion plant and that it was clear that the blast was not accidental.

The government-controlled Fars News Agency had claimed that the explosion was caused by a military exercise, after having initially denied any incident took place.

Two week ago, an explosion at a military base that killed a top general and 16 others also resulted in extensive damage, according to published satellite images.

The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security told The New York Times, “It was pretty amazing to see that the entire facility was destroyed. There were only a few buildings left standing.”

The institute’s report author Paul Brannan added that his sources indicated the explosion occurred during work that was supposed to be “a major milestone in the development of a new missile.”

One of the casualties was Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, founder of Iran’s missile program, and the explosion appeared to take place at a missile base.

America - Let's play a "guessing" game - What is this?

WHAT IS THIS ??

Not Leaving Easily?: Obama Building Bunker Under White House Lawn

November 29th, 2011 (28) Posted By Pat Dollard

Business Insider:

For over two years, crews have torn up the North Lawn of the White House just outside the West Wing for what the General Services Administration calls a “utility upgrade.”

But it seems everyone — including people who work at the White House — think something else is going on.

One West Wing official told The New York Times last month that “It is security-related construction,” adding “Even we don’t know exactly what.”

There are two other bunkers on the White House grounds — the hardened Situation Room, and the nuclear shelter under the East Wing. Is this a third? Is this some other secret underground project?

Bee's Note (and guess):

This report of construction on the White House front lawn has been flying with wings across the Internet for the past two days.  It is anyone's guess as to what they are doing, but since this administration has been less than honest with the American citizens, here's my guess:

After Obama gave away the farm; made deals with the Russians; gives military assistance and big hugs to Turkey; praises the Arab Palestinians and allows their flag to fly in Washington (counting chickens before they hatch); removes the American flag and replaces it with his big fat zero logo; aids with the assistance of NATO the removal of Libya's former president, and hands it over to Islamic terrorists; slaps our ally Israel in the face at every opportunity; waits too long before making a move on Iran, the devil ambassador on earth; disbands NASA's space program; shares USA's military missile information with Russia; turns America's economy into slaves of China; ... Obama fears retribution from the very enemies he has been playing with and is using taxpayer dollars to build himself a Bunker. His life is worth more than the entire country's - and that is his opinion, to be sure.

My second guess is that he actually thinks he will be a second term president and is building the largest underground golf course in the world, along with a mosque for all his new friends and buddies.

Shh!  

Arabs never intended an independent "Palestinian" state

Tuesday, November 29, 2011 | Ryan Jones

The birth of Israel - November 29, 1947 

Israel on Tuesday marked the 64th anniversary of the November 29, 1947 UN decision to partition the British Mandate for Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, a motion that led to the immediate birth of the State of Israel.

The Palestinians also marked the day, but with mourning, decrying the UN decision as a “sin,” though they simultaneously demand that Israel return to the partition borders that the Arabs originally rejected.

A telling, though ultimately unsurprising, revelation during this year’s anniversary is that the Arab world never intended for there to be an independent Palestinian Arab state.

On the eve of the UN partition vote, a reporter for the Palestine Post spoke to a prominent Arab official in Cairo who noted that King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan, great-grandfather of today’s King Abdullah II, was planning to invade the areas west of the Jordan River in order to expand his kingdom, regardless of whether or not the partition plan passed. (h/t Elder of Ziyon)

Like everyone else at the time, King Abdullah recognized that the Arabs in Syria, Jordan and what would become Israel and the Palestinian Authority areas were all of the same stock, and therefore should live under one flag, his.

Abdullah’s “Greater Syria” scheme was opposed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon, which formed their own bloc with the intention of invading “Palestine” first and placing it under the rule of a protectorate regime.

As it turns out, Abdullah did invade and did seize control of part of the Mandate territory. He later annexed what came to be known as the “West Bank.”

What is clear from these pre-partition rumblings and from Abdullah subsequent actions is that the Arab world never had any interest in an independent Palestinian Arab state, since the so-called “Palestinian” Arabs were no different than Jordanian Arabs - both nationalities that had only recently been invented. And while Egypt and its allies had an interest in containing Abdullah’s expansionism, their agenda was not independence for the Arabs of “Palestine.”

Oddly enough, today the world has accepted the lie that all of the region’s troubles (and most of the world’s troubles) are the result of the Palestinian Arabs not having their own sovereign state.

 http://www.israeltoday.co.il/News/tabid/73/Default.aspx

Note:

The "miracle" of Israel is her ability to survive among nations - nations that continue to threaten her existence.  The Land of Israel is the only safe haven for Jews throughout the world.  Today, the Arab Muslims flock to and are allowed entrance to every country throughout Europe and the West - by the boatloads, by open door policies of these same countries, or by countries such as the United States, listing them as "refugees". 

Sadly, this was not the case for the Jewish people fleeing the claws of a madman who manged to slaughter 6 MILLION Jews in less than six years.  And had these same nations not shut the doors and opened their hearts to the Jews fleeing for their lives, had they been given the status of "refugee", perhaps there would have been a few more survivors during WW2 than there are today.  When I think about the term "refugee" and look back to history, I am amazed at the countries who actually shot thousands of Jews at their borders while the Jewish people sought "refuge"in order to escape the Nazis and the death camps.  It is heart-wrenching to hear about one boat filled with Jewish refugees that was turned back - back into the arms of the awaiting Nazis who were all to eager to murder these few Jewish refugees during the heat of WW2.  

And so I wonder today exactly what or how a nation determines who are "refugees".  What exactly are these Muslims "fleeing"?  Certainly not the clutches of a madman, like Hitler.  There are no death camps today; civil wars among Arab nations, but certainly that would not define half the Arab world as "refugees".   If Muslim nations are murdering Muslims, is the world expected to take in the entire population of a Muslim country? For what purpose?  Isn't this exactly what is happening throughout Europe?  Aren't these same Muslim "refugees" now attempting to promote their own Sharia laws within the borders of the United States and Europe?  If entire groups of Muslims are claiming refugee status, why aren't one of the 21 Arab nations inviting them to enter their own borders?  Could it be that the Arabs have a method to their madness, by infiltrating non-Muslim nations in order to conquer the very nations that have freely welcomed them, only to have these Islamic peoples use the laws of our land against us, attempting to make the United States and other nations predominately "Islamic" in nature - removing our very freedoms under our Constitution in the process?  The Muslim "refugee" status given to Muslims is a fallacy and the world has been duped and believes this lie, just as it believes the lie that the Arabs seek an "independent" Palestinian state.  

I would suggest that to the Muslim world, the "Palestinian" state they seek is the WORLD - NOT just the State of Israel.  

And I conclude with the fact that as the world blames the tiny State of Israel for all the problems in the Middle East, the Jews today would be hunted down and slaughtered just as they were during WW2, if it were not for the fact that Israel survives, prosperous, and remains the one safe haven for Jews throughout this world.  A living, breathing Jew is what makes the Arabs as hostile today as the hostility that predominated an upside down world during WW2.

FOOTNOTE:
Please take a moment to visit the following link, for amazing historical information:


http://historyscoper.com/tlwjerusalem.html

Muslim Anti-Semitism and the Arab Spring - by Sultan Knish

Tuesday, November 29, 2011


Western columnists eager to bestow their blessing on the democratic impulses of the Arab Spring are troubled by its darker side, the bigotry, the sexual violence and religious fanaticism. Rather than admit that they may have gotten the Arab Spring wrong, they look at its dark side as an external factor, rather than an internal one.

Case in point, Jeffrey Goldberg's recitation of Anti-Semitism in the Arab Spring leads to the same baffled attempts to understand. "On the surface this makes no sense: Arabs are rising up against Arabs, so what does this have to do with the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”?" he asks.

The question isn't all that baffling if you look back at the historical context of the Protocols which emerged from the poison pens of two secret police agents of two different countries seeking ways to stifle reform by associating their opponents with a vast Jewish conspiracy. It took place in a century where the left and the right spent a good deal of time accusing each other of working for the Jews. That century gave way to the next one where they stopped writing essays and began running death camps.

The Muslim world is still backward enough to be besotted with the worst lunacy of the period, the Masonic conspiracy is an article of faith for most Islamists, right up there with the Koran, Mein Kampf is a bestseller and Fascism and Communism are admired in a way that horrifies the Eurocrats who visit from time to time. Grand conspiracy theories explain everything and everyone is assumed to have a complex secret agenda.

But those aren't the sources of the Anti-Semitism in the Arab Spring. Nor is Israel. The fundamental error that is made over and over again is to assume that Muslim attitudes toward the Jews emerge out of politics rather than theology. While Israel certainly looms large in the Muslim imagination, the image of the Jews as the nemesis of Islam is of ancient theological provenance dating back to Mohammed's efforts to ethnically cleanse the region of non-Muslim minorities.

When Arab Spring mobs paint the Star of David on pictures of dictators or call them Jews, they are using an old insult. To call someone a "Jew" in the Arab world is the equivalent of calling him a dog. There is no special racial slur needed, "Jew" is already enough.  

The reason for this isn't Israel or Gaza or Lebanon-- it's that Jews were a minority in the Muslim world. While the Islamists and the Arab Nationalists, along with their Western useful idiots, insist on spreading their revisionist history of a golden age of tolerance and brotherhood that ended abruptly in 1948, the truth is that being a minority in the Arab Muslim world was dangerous and degrading. And long after the Muslim world has been emptied of Jews, "Yahood" still remains an insult. 

When Thomas Friedman heard that a nickname for many American soldiers in Iraq was "The Jews", in his usual clueless fashion he wrote up an extended column about Sharon, Israel and the peace process. But Friedman missed the point. Arab Muslims have been calling people they don't like "Jews" long before the modern State of Israel.

But in a conspiracy rich environment, "Yahood" is also often meant a literal accusation that someone actually is a Jew. Forcible and the occasional voluntary conversion of Jews to Islam created its own paranoid obsession with "Secret Jews" in the Muslim world. And some forcibly converted Jewish communities such as the "Jedid Al-Islam" did remain secretly Jewish while pretending outwardly to be Muslim. This is a special obsession in Turkey where the conversion of cult members known as the Donmeh led to accusations that the Young Turk movement was a Jewish conspiracy.  

The prototype for the accusations that the dictators are Jewish was the light-skinned and blue-eyed Kemal Ataturk. His supposed Jewishness remains a special obsession for Turkish Islamists, albeit one that is still illegal for them to articulate. That obsession also spells out the difference between the United States and the Muslim world. If it were to be discovered that George Washington had a Jewish father, it wouldn't delegitimize the United States. But Muslim states are still based on ethnic or religious grounds. And the best way to undermine Ataturk's attempt to drag Turkey into the modern age is to not merely claim that Ataturk wasn't a Turk and an enemy of  Islam (both true)... but that he was a Jew.

The utility of accusing Ataturk of being a Jew is obvious. It's a charge that bypasses the need to attack his ideas or debate their legitimacy. Once he is a Jew then it is a given that he was part of a vast conspiracy and that everything he did was wrong. "Jew" is not only shorthand for dog, it's also shorthand for enemy.

If accusing Ataturk of being Jewish doesn't seem that crazy, try the Saudi royal family whom the Lebanese Minister of the Environment accused of secretly being the Jewish tribe that had been ethnically cleansed by Mohammed. From the standpoint of Islamic theology this makes perfect sense. It recycles the ancient Jewish enemy into a current foe.

Hate the Wahhabis? Then just go ahead and claim that Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab's grandfather wasn't really Suleyman but Shullman. What about Mubarak? He must have had a Jewish mother. Gaddafi's mother being a Jew isnow a common belief in Libya. Those wonderful democratic Syrian protesters are shouting, "Alawi Jews" referring to the Alawi quasi-Shiite minority sect that rules the country. Even Ahmadinejad got hammered with accusations that he was a Jew.

No matter how rabidly Anti-Semitic a Muslim leader may be, he cannot escape the possibility that sooner or later someone will accuse him of being a secret Jew. If the Saudis and Ahmadinejad aren't safe, then no one is.

Goldberg and Friedman both mistake a preexisting situation for a new phenomenon. Conspiracy theories to explain everything have been widespread for a long time, not just as a tool of dictators. Blaming outsiders for whatever goes wrong and then connecting those outsiders to a political faction you hate is as common as sand.

But the larger mistake is that they fail to grasp what the Arab Spring is. It's a series of populist movements based around theocratic and nationalistic ideology. Such movements naturally position ethnic and religious minorities as outsiders and enemies. Which is why churches in Egypt began burning and friendly mobs showed up outside a synagogue in Tunis to recount what happened back when Mohammed began his campaign against the Jews.

Tyranny is a vague idea. The Jews are a very specific idea. Tyranny means illegitimate rule, but what makes it illegitimate? The Arab Spring activists will answer that it is undemocratic. Why is it undemocratic, because it fails to represent the majority. And how do they prove that the tyrant fails to represent the majority? By claiming that he really works for the Jews.

It's a fairly simple formula that isn't limited to the Muslim world. The left leaned heavily on it to charge that the Iraq War was illegitimate because it was a project of the Jews. Tomes on the Israel lobby attack foreign policy not on its merits, but on "Jewishness". And it's no coincidence that of all the Democratic senators who voted for the war, the one ruthlessly targeted for destruction by the left was Joe Lieberman.

Goldberg suggests that, "The Arab Spring should liberate people not only from oppressive rulers, but also from self-destructive and delusional patterns of belief." Having conceded that the Arab Spring is rotten with Anti-Semitism, his proposal is that the Arab Spring should liberate the Arab Spring from being the Arab Spring. And perhaps Goldberg should try to lift himself up by his own belt. That will work just as well.

All Arab and Muslim movements are founded on "self-destructive and delusional patterns of belief". Take those away and you're left with some spicy food and curious architecture. All of them also pretend to unify the people around a common identity and in opposition to outside forces that seek to undermine that identity.

From the time of Mohammed onward, the Jews have played the role of the "outside force" that is out to undermine Arab and Muslim unity. When Arab leaders tell Western diplomats that Israel is the source of regional instability, that is what they mean. In Islamic terms they are charging the Jews with "Fitna" and Western diplomats and journalists strip away the theology from the accusation and pretend that it's a serious policy statement.

The Sunni Muslim world still believes that it can form a secure common identity if only it could get rid of Israel, and then the Christians, Shiites, Alawis and all the other "outside forces" who are a barrier to the harmonious brotherhood of the Ummah. That combination of theology and politics is what drives the Anti-Semitism of the Muslim world and of its theological and nationalist movements including its latest one. 

There is no reason to be surprised by Anti-Semitism in the Arab Spring. The Muslim Middle East has failed to break with the poisonous religious and ethnic politics of the past. The Arab Spring is a continuation of those same toxic politics under the banner of democracy. The fragility of Arab and Muslim identity, its insecurity and instability, the unworkability of its structure, always requires enemies to serve as a focus and shoulder the blame. And in every season, spring, summer, winter or fall, that group has been the Jews.

From NY to Jerusalem,
Daniel Greenfield
Covers the Stories
Behind the News

White House Praises Turkey’s Islamist Government…

WEASEL ZIPPERS

No surprise.

(Daily Caller) — White House officials are applauding Turkey’s Islamist government, which is gradually removing the country’s secularist political rules, suppressing free-speech, promoting Shariah Islamic laws and supporting the Islamist Hamas terror group’s effort to eliminate Israel.

Turkey’s “own example can be very powerful to countries now going through transition,” said Anthony Blinken, who is the national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden in a Monday press conference called to describe Biden’s December visit to Turkey and Greece. “So it’s very encouraging to see Turkey play a strong leadership role [in the Middle East]. . . and that’s something that is in the interest of the United States.”

Turkey’s Islamist government, led by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, has pushed hard to remove longstanding secular laws that bar female students or government workers from wearing head scarves, which are promoted by Islamists to separate men and women. Erdogan and his political allies have sued hundreds of their critics for slander, some of whom were sent to jail, and free speech advocates have also accused the administration of using what it calls the “Ergenekon Conspiracy” to jail journalists, lawyers and political critics.

Keep reading…

Posted by ZIP on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, at 9:33 pm 

Note:
Is there any Islamist group or country, no matter how bad or threatening to the United States, that this administration does not support wholeheartedly and prop up as some kind of "beacon of light"?  Talk about "sleeping with the enemy" ....  !!  What is very sad is the fact that as the WH is allowed this to continue, without Congress checking these outrageous policies, the less America's light shines as an example of standing up for the freedoms the Islamic countries refuse to allow for its own citizens.  

Gallup Poll: Obama’s Approval Rating Among Independent Voters Plummets To 30%…

WEASEL ZIPPERS

Well deserved.

Via Gallup:

2011 Decline in Approval Steepest Among Core Independents
Obama’s approval rating has decreased among all six partisan/ideology groups Gallup tracks on a regular basis since January, but it has dropped the most — 10 percentage points, from 40% to 30% — among pure independents. These are the roughly 14% of national adults who neither identify with one of the two major parties nor indicate a leaning. Obama’s approval rating has declined by nearly as much — eight points — among moderate/liberal Republicans, from 29% to 21%.
Keep reading…

Posted by ZIP on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, at 9:41 am

Yes Obama wants to Win - by Sultan Knish

Monday, November 28, 2011
It's downright strange that at a time when the field of Republican candidates has narrowed down to a few bad choices and the left has finally fielded its own answer to the Tea Party movement, that some pundits on the right are still cheerfully pushing the meme that Obama is all but done.

Sure it would be great if Obama were lying on the floor in a pool of spilled beer while humming songs from Sesame Street, but that is not what's going on. And adding false self-confidence to the mix is about the worst possible thing to do.

Yes Obama wants to win and worse still he's on track to win. It doesn't matter how low his ratings are, so long as his opponent's ratings are even worse. This is not a campaign that he has to win by being the better man, he just has to sit there and let the press destroy his opponent.

Obama does have one thing in common with some of the pundits predicting his imminent demise, they're both sure that they can't lose. But Obama has grounds for thinking that. Far better grounds than the cheerleaders who insist that anyone the Republicans run will win in a landslide in every state.

The lack of a traditional campaign on the D side of the line means nothing. 2008 wasn't a traditional campaign either. Is Obama tossing away the white working class vote? He won without them in 2008. The unions have no choice and the rest can go to hell. Obama is saying mean things about Americans? He did that in 2008 too and it didn't slow him down.

All that arrogance can easily lead to a fall, but so can the arrogance on our side. No one should believe that this will be an easy or simple election. It will be long, hard, ugly and at times seem unwinnable. There will be fraud, personal attacks that we have yet to even imagine and press involvement that will dwarf anything in 2008. And most of all it will be unexpected.

Using leftist occupations of public spaces in major cities as the kickoff to a campaign. How many people saw that coming and how many expected it to work? But it worked well enough to engage the younger voters who helped boost him last time around. And it's not the end of the show.

It's tempting to see Obama as another Carter or Dukakis, a malaise ridden liberal, but while he has a good deal in common philosophically with them, his image and his campaign have little in common with theirs. And it's also worth remembering that Reagan's defeat of Carter was not nearly as easy as some would make it out to be.  

Reagan's victory might not have been nearly so decisive without the involvement of an independent candidate who drew votes from Carter. And even that victory was not always inevitable. Before the debate, Reagan was polling behind Carter. Had Carter avoided debating Reagan and avoided challenges from the left, it's not inconceivable that he might have pulled off a second term.

No we aren't doomed to a second term of O. But as always the election is ours to lose. And the best way to lose a game is to assume that you're going to win before you even play. It's possible that we might win this on an "Anyone But Obama" vote by independents, but it's more likely that we will have to work hard for it.

Out of the starting gate that means we are likely to be saddled with a candidate that much of the party isn't happy with. Our challenge will be to revive a grass roots campaign even while the grass roots may not be particularly enthusiastic about the ABO candidate. It will be to cope with daily media attacks without getting beaten down or losing our spirit. And the best way to begin is to understand that this will be a tough fight.

So I'll say it again, yes he wants to win. It may not look like he's working for it, but that is because he doesn't have to work for it.
Obama does not have to work hard to win this election. He just has to make his campaign stops, read his speeches off the teleprompter and bask in the glow of the media's praise. We are the ones who have to work hard because we are the insurgents. No matter how dissatisfied the public is with this term, and no matter how willing they seem to be to vote for a generic Republican, they are not going to be nearly as eager to do so after a month of media attacks.

The media is going to make this a campaign of personalities, contrasting the personalities of their guy and our guy. We are going to have to fight to bring the issues to the forefront and that means renewed activism, not just for the big chair, but for the smaller chairs in the House and the Senate. We are going to have to pick a core economic issue and hammer it home over and over again until it can no longer be ignored. 

Whoever the Republican nominee will be is not likely to be another Reagan, and he will likely not be reliable on many core issues, and it will fall to us to take up the fight on those issues. And that will not be an easy fight. The campaign won't want anyone disrupting the likability of their candidate by touching of any divisive issues, a plan that will work as well as the shiny and likable McCain did.

Most of all though this election will not be fair. Politics is already civil war by other means, but it will get much worse. Expectations don't matter. Looking to see how badly Obama is doing is a waste of time.

Obama has lost the insurgent's advantage, but he has gained the incumbent's advantage. If his team manages to make his opponent seem unpalatable enough, then he becomes the default choice. If he's at 35 percent, then his team's goal is to push Romney, Gingrich or Perry down to 34 percent. And after what we've seen so far, do you think that will be impossibly hard to do?

The goal here is to make voters uncomfortable with voting Republican by portraying him as personally reckless and politically extreme. And it's a little too easy to see how that will play out. The template for this was already written in election after election and there will be new wrinkles here, unexpected surprises and unprecedented attacks.

The idea that Obama doesn't want to win ignores the simple fact that this is all he is. What he wants most is attention and being where he is puts him at the center of it. Not only that it's financially lucrative and gives him powers well beyond those he ever expected to have. And it's doubtful that he has gotten tired of wielding them.

At times he may appear sullen, not because he doesn't want to be where he is, but because like a petulant child he doesn't want to do the work that will take him there. Obama has always gotten by on the externals with other people to do the hard work for him. We can't count on having anyone to do the hard work for us. Not our candidate, not the party and certainly not public dissatisfaction.

The people around Obama know that the public mood can be turned around in an instant, and that no likes to look foolish. If they can introduce wedges then they can split their opposition and collect the winnings. They also know that overconfidence can quickly lead to despondency and despair. The best way to prepare yourself for a tough job is to know the size of the task you mean to tackle and expect strong opposition and difficult obstacles along the way. 

And no amount of irresponsibility, petulance and obnoxious behavior should give us the impression that our opponent doesn't want to win. His contempt for us is a weakness, but it's also a sign of how fortified his position is. We are the ones with the uphill battle and we cannot afford to rest at the bottom of the hill before we have taken the high ground.