David Seaton's Blog | Talking Points Memo | January 11, 2009

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Week of January 11, 2009 - January 17, 2009

Assessing George W. Bush

January 17, 2009, 2:52AM

Thinking it over, I have come to the tentative conclusion that Bush's greatest virtue as a two term president of the United States of America was his verbal dyslexia.

Huh?

I ask readers to imagine for a minute what it would have been like if a president with Bush's character, values, instincts and agenda had had the silver tongue and soaring rhetoric of a Barack Obama.

Doesn't really bear thinking about, does it?

Now we have a president with the silver tongue and soaring rhetoric of a Barack Obama: we have Barack Obama.

We still don't have a very clear or precise idea what his character, values, instincts and agenda are yet, because he has only been in public life for a short time and during the campaign he ably triangulated his positions.

But, of course, in time, we will.

Perhaps it is just as well.

In my opinion the USA is presently in "Humpty Dumpty" mode, where "all the King's horses and all the King's men" etc, etc. And with Barack Obama, at least this shattered mishagoss will be packaged with elegance and taste.

For it is one thing to hear Paul Anka sing, "I did it my way" and quite another to hear Frank Sinatra sing it. It's still the same tacky song, but something of the depth and saudade of the world's greatest saloon singer puts it over.

F'yaknowhaddamean.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

What it's all about

January 15, 2009, 3:50PM

Photo AmyPalko

Sometimes it is possible to explain up an entire situation , no matter how complex, with only a few words. This is how Dimitri Orlov has masterfully summed up the present dilemma of the United States:

No matter what your political persuasion might be, there is simply no way that an economically insecure, badly educated, badly treated population can be made to thrive, and this sets the stage for some very bad economic performance. Dimitri Orlov

I think that those words should be hung up on the Washington Monument, in flashing neon lights, in time for Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony.

Behold a dancing Russian bear

January 14, 2009, 2:33PM

A long time reader of my blog, RC of Puerto Rico, kindly sent me a link to a blog I had never heard of: "ClubOrlov", which is the work of a Leningrad born, Russian-American Engineer named Dimitri Orlov.

Thank you RC, because Orlov is very, very good.

Some of what he writes is so good that I found myself muttering, "Gee I wish I'd said that", while the ghost of Oscar Wilde whispered softly in my ear, "You probably will, David".

Without further adoo I'll clip some juicy bits from a post called "That Bastion of American Socialism" which prints out at seven A4 pages of Times Roman 12point in MS Word. However quite a few authors (Zakaria, Friedman, for example) say much less in books that run to hundreds of pages.

The Crisis Rant

January 13, 2009, 3:55PM

Temptation of St Anthony
Hieronymus Bosch
Madrid, Museo del Prado

Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist has written a very fine column called, "Generation L and its fearful future". In Rachman's lexicon "L" stands for "lucky". He writes:

Those of us born in western Europe or the US have never really experienced hard times. Our parents and grandparents lived through world wars and the Great Depression. We have had decades of peace and prosperity.

Could that change? Perhaps Generation L has just had the luxury of an extended "holiday from history", which is now coming to an end.

I think Rachman has hit the zeitgeist nail on the head here. I think my generation is probably the luckiest group of individuals in the history of humanity, even sinister things like the atom bomb worked in our favor.

Israel, the Ponzi state

January 12, 2009, 3:58PM

A Ponzi scheme consists in the perpetrator offering unrealistic returns on the capital invested and then using the assets of the later investors to pay high profits to the earlier ones. It's success depends on the new investors bringing more and more even newer ones into the game. It all falls apart when people start asking awkward questions and demanding their money back. This causes a panic and the entire pyramid collapses.

Bernard L. Madoff has become a household word with his Ponzi-Pyramid scheme that has bilked billions of dollars from the world's wealthy. Many if not most of Madoff's victims are Jewish. They trusted him and he betrayed them.

My thesis is that the state of Israel is a huge Ponzi scheme: a geo-strategic Ponzi, a military-Ponzi and finally, or perhaps first of all, a moral-Ponzi.

Against the genocide of Gaza, in Madrid

January 11, 2009, 3:41PM

There was a big demonstration in Madrid today against Israel's massacre of Gaza, with an estimated crowd of 250,000 people.

The demonstration marched behind a banner that read, "Paremos el genocidio palestino", "Let's end the Palestinian genocide".

It was a cold morning bathed in Madrid's amazingly beautiful January light. My wife and I went and I took a couple of pictures. I hope that it did some good.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/