This and That.
In English history kings would often receive names denoting some personal attribute or else commemorative of an action taken, Richard Lionheart, Alfred the Great, [though some say because of the story of how he allowed the griddle cakes to burn it's a corruption of Alfred the Grate {Gee, those old schoolboy jokes never die}], William the Conqueror, so it seems to me that were Obama king, he would come to be known as Obama the Banal. [Or maybe Obama the Banana since you never see a straight one]. Anyway, the banal because in contra-distinction to his portrayal as an honest, above the fray of politics as normal guy, he is now being seen as groveling in the lowest levels of politics and electioneering thuggery. Charles Lipton at Real Clear Politics writes about Four Stumps in the Water for Obama.
Hillary is being written off by many but I’d be most surprised if Obama gets the nod, the gurus of the Dhimmis must know by now he is pretty much un-electable. Well so is Hillary actually, but it wouldn’t be quite the debacle an Obama candidacy would be. Read what Thomas Lipton has to say and see how far you think Obama would go in a general election.
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The addle brained adolescents, aka The Democratic Party, have brought their sophomoric antics to Wikipedia. The supporters of Hill and Barak [sounds like a firm of funeral directors] have been changing each other’s entries.
There was the day in February when an editor replaced a photo of Hillary on her Wikipedia page with a picture of a walrus. Then there was the day this month when a Hillary supporter changed Obama’s bio so that it referred to him as “a Kenyan-American politician.” But such sweepingly hostile edits are usually fixed quickly by other Wikipedia users. Often, it’s the most arcane distinctions on the candidates’ pages that provoke the bitterest tugs-of-war. Recently, an angry battle broke out on Hillary’s page over whether to describe Clinton as “a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination” or just “a candidate,” since each phrase implies a different shade of judgment on her chances. Five minutes after an Obama supporter deleted “leading” just after 11 p.m. on March 8, another editor put it back. Seven minutes after that, the word was deleted again. Some thirty minutes after that, it was put back. On it went, with different Wikipedia editors debating the significance of Hillary’s delegate deficit on her talk page and accusing each other of introducing the dreaded “POV”– or “point of view,” a violation of Wikipedia’s most fundamental principle–into the article. At around six in the morning, completing the atmosphere of pandemonium, somebody replaced Hillary’s whole page with “It has been reported that Hillary Rodham Clinton has contracted genital herpes due to sexual intercourse with an orangutan.”
This is pathetic and also a little scary if they are actual adults doing this.
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Here is the beginning of an article from a few years back that is worth re-visiting, it is Politics Without God? by George Weigel.
At the far western end of the axis that traverses Paris from the Louvre down the Champs Elysées and through the Arc de Triomphe is the Great Arch of La Défense. Designed by a sternly modernist Danish architect, the Great Arch is a colossal open cube: almost 40 stories tall, faced in glass and 2.47 acres of white Carrara marble. Its rooftop terrace offers an unparalleled view of the French capital, past the Tuilleries to the Ile de la Cité, Sante Chapelle, and Notre-Dame.
The arch’s three-story high roof also houses the International Foundation for Human Rights. For President François Mitterrand planned the Great Arch as a human rights monument, something suitably gigantic to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Thus, in one guidebook, the Great Arch was dubbed “Fraternity Arch.” That same guidebook, like every other one I consulted, emphasized that the entire Cathedral of Notre-Dame would fit comfortably inside the Great Arch.
All of which raised some questions, as I walked along that terrace in 1997. Which culture would better protect human rights and secure the moral foundations of democracy? The culture that built this rational, geometrically precise, but essentially featureless cube? Or the culture that produced the gargoyles and flying buttresses, the asymmetries and holy “unsameness” of Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals of Europe?
Those questions have come back to me, if in different forms, as I’ve tried to understand Europe in recent years. How, for example, should one understand the fierce argument in Europe over whether a new constitutional treaty for the European Union should include a reference to the Christian sources of European civilization? Why did so many European intellectuals and political leaders deem any reference to the Christian sources of contemporary Europe civilization a threat to human rights and democracy?
Was there some connection between this internal European debate over Europe’s constitution-making and the portrait in the European press of Americans (and especially an American president) as religious fanatics intent on shooting up the world? Was there a further connection between this debate and the fate of Rocco Buttiglione’s candidacy for the post of Commissioner of Justice on the European Commission?
Understanding these phenomena requires something more than a conventional political analysis. Nor can political answers explain the reasons behind perhaps the most urgent issue confronting Europe today — the fact that Western Europe is committing demographic suicide, its far-below-replacement-level birthrates creating enormous pressures on the European welfare state and a demographic vacuum into which Islamic immigrants are flowing in increasing numbers, often becoming radicalized in the process.
My proposal is that Europe is experiencing a crisis of cultural and civilizational morale whose roots are also taking hold in some parts quarters of American society and culture. Understanding and addressing this crisis means confronting the question posed sharply, if unintentionally, by those guidebooks that boast about the alleged superiority of the Great Arch to Notre-Dame: the question of the cube and the cathedral, and their relationship to both the meaning of freedom and the future of democracy.
The lefties can argue all they want on the superiority of their culture but they can’t argue with demographics, the proof of the pudding and all that.
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This is bleak January’s pic of the tree.
In February already things are looking better, still damn cold though.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Lig Pics, Obama-debacle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
"Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom, and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate. It's the sand of the Coliseum. He'll bring them death... and they will love him for it."
Just Another Richard March 30th, 2008 at 12:57 am
Hi ligneus1
I second Dan’s comment, the shading at the bottom of the second photo really does set the stage nicely, and the contrast between between the two photographs sets them off superbly.
Yes, it does appear that we missing the most essential part of our being, and as a natural consequence, dying a slow death; though I don’t expect many on the left to see it, not until the knife blade is at their throats. The funniest aspect of this argument, is that those of us who do believe, willingly concede, that that belief is just that a belief, a belief one is free to follow or not; but the average leftist atheist, is convinced of his absolute right in his own belief, and consequently, the right to destroy everyone else’s belief. Funnily enough, the very action he accuses religious people of, though all I have seen of most religious people is a desire to spread their message, nothing more, take it or leave it; Never had some religious nutter come banging on my door, demanding I go attend church…NOW. No the strident, intolerant voices all come from the the church of social justice, the most holy idol of our age.