A Time To Reflect...OS Mulls November 2012

OldSouth hasn't disappeared, loyal legions of readers. But he has taken some time to reflect. The masthead still holds true--Culture Shapes Economy.

There has been much much much hand-wringing about the election outcome of last week. OS did not hold great hope that Mr. Romney would prevail against Himself and Himself's minions, although he came impressively close.

So the first conclusion OS draws is:

There are some 57 million people out in the voting public who did not totally drink the Obama Kool-Aid. That's a lot of people.

Much of the hand wringing has been about 'how the country has changed, it is a blacker/browner/immigrant/food-stamp culture that sees the government as Santa Claus (as Mr. Limbaugh so succinctly states it), etc, etc.'

Well, yes. This should not be surprising. When even gas-station convenience markets along the interstate highway system proudly post signs that that accept SNAP cards and other forms of government assistance cards for payment, the ground has shifted under our feet.

Second conclusion:

Piles of cash left out on the sidewalk will attract all manner of people, from the Jon Corzine types to drug-addicted street people, seeking their share of the loot. We should not be surprised that people will vote for the folks who deliver the piles of cash to the sidewalk. Mr. Romney's comments about the 47% were unfortunate because they was only descriptive. He did not, sadly, address the bigger issue of the moral hazard that accompanies government largesse, be it to banks or single mothers.

One would think, that given his dismal record, Mr. Obama and company didn't stand a chance. It's only logical.

Third conclusion:

Logic is over-rated. The behavior of most people, whether political, financial, romantic etc is driven by emotion. Obama understands this perhaps better than most of this present age. Just as did Eva Peron in hers. 

We are accustomed to a simpler political model: Candidate gains office via election, governs/serves/legislates for the appointed term, and spends some final months of the term making the case for a return to office. Easy. This model no longer is in use. 

OS has a friend in Ohio now exhausted by it all. Turns out, the Obama campaign of 2008 never departed, never let up a moment, kept all its Ohio offices open. These past four years have not been about governance, they have been a perpetual 2012 campaign.

Fourth conclusion:

At some point, chickens do come home to roost, to quote one famous clergyman of Mr. Obama's acquaintance. At some point, Mr. Obama will actually have to govern, and OS hears the faint sounds of clucking and crowing over the horizon. 

All those happy folks in the crowd in Chicago, the TrueBelievers, were jubilant last Tuesday evening. Good for them, they had worked hard, won, and got to celebrate and cheer. No problem there. But OS found himself thinking 'These folk aren't just celebrating that their guy won. They seem to be cheering for some watershed event, that from this day forward the culture of Protestant Heterosexual Monogamy/Work/Frugality has been dealt a mortal blow, and WE are going to replace it with our own Utopian Vision.'


Fifth conclusion:

Be careful what you ask for; you wishes may come true. Those stories about finding the magical lamp are cautionary tales.

Back to the hand-wringing folks. Either our ideas work on the historical long view or they don't. Math is math or it isn't. Physics is physics or it isn't. God is either mocked or He isn't. Christianity asserts that the Almighty is just that. He is the Potentate of Time, and rulers rule only with His forebearance. He always brings good out of evil, as Bonhoeffer reminds us. 

Sixth conclusion:

If we do a bit less hand-wringing, and go quietly about the business of building our families, churches, communities and states, we'll all do better. Instead of railing about Obama and his friends, make certain your grandchildren know their hymns and Psalms. It's pretty difficult to lord it over  people with hearts and heads full of that poetry. Remember the era of samizdat in the old Soviet Union--pulled the regime down brick by brick in the end.

It ain't over 'til its over. God may be doing us a favor, we're not privy to Divine Intentions.

It ain't over yet.

CBS In The Tank for Obama, Truth Be Damned

If we didn't already suspect it, this is proof positive...

From Breitbart:

In an astonishing display of media malpractice, CBS News quietly released proof--two days before the election, far too late to reach the media and the public--that President Barack Obama lied to the public about the Benghazi attack, as well as about his later claim to have called the attack "terrorism" from the beginning.

CBS unveiled additional footage from its 60 Minutes interview with President Obama, conducted on Sep. 12 immediately after Obama had made his statement about the attacks in the Rose Garden, in which Obama quite clearly refuses to call the Benghazi an act of terror when asked a direct question by reporter Steve Kroft:

KROFT: Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya Attack, do you believe that this was a terrorism attack?

OBAMA: Well it’s too early to tell exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.  And we are going to be working with the Libyan government to make sure that we bring these folks to justice, one way or the other.

Therefore, Obama's later claim to have considered the Benghazi attack to be a deliberate act of terror from the get-go was a bald-faced lie.

CBS knew as much, and sat on the footage that would have blown their home-boy's story out of the water. It was released, quietly, unannounced, on Sunday--far too late to enter the debate, but early enough for arse-covering. In other words, they actively abetted the lie.

Any behavior will do, just so long as it achieves the desired result.

These people have. to. go., before they get us all killed.

Forward! Let's Continue The Progress Of The Last Four Years! Forward!

Only one problem with this plan: The unemployment rate is now higher than when Himself took office.

So says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Hmmm.....

Got Vote?

Romney Running Ads In Pennsylvania...

...which means this traditionally BlueState is up for grabs.

All he need do is tell the truth about Obama, in Obama's own words:



OS finds this ad very cheering and bracing. It's not character assassination...it's just the blunt facts.

Kentucky, on the other hand, is not in play. A prankster put his name on the Democrat primary ballot last spring in the presidential race, and garnered north of 40% of the votes. Obama has been that terrible for the coal industry. He especially hasn't shown his face in Western Kentucky.

Southern Illinois is also coal country. What if everrrrrryyyyybody down there turned out to counterbalance the ballot stuffing in Chicago? Obama may yet win the state, but huge red swaths in the state map could scare those thugs into some semblance of public sobriety. Ditto for Chicago's western suburban counties.

In the process, send fire-breathing conservatives into every town council, county commission, school board, legislative seat, sheriff's office, mayor's office--you name it. Whoever wins the White House will have a sea of red lower office holders to contend with on a daily basis. That will also induce sobriety.

The counties of Ohio and Indiana along the Ohio River all depend upon coal-fired industries. What if they turned out on behalf of their friends who work in those plants?

Send the message, ya'll!! Those thugs count votes. Make 'em sweat, lay awake at night, see their booze bills climb. Let's have us some fun with these clowns, let's use the ballot box to rake them over the proverbial coals.

This blog post brought you by OldSouth, typing on a computer powered by the coal-fired steam plant forty miles west of his desk.

The Benghazi Debacle, Explained In Detail

An interview in the Jerusalem Post with CIA operative Clare Lopez.

She makes a convincing case that the Obama Administration:

1. Hung those poor men out to dry, and deliberately let them die at that embassy, knowing all along it was an organized attack, not a riot gone out of control, because...

2. The Administration has been running guns to Al Qaeda from Libya...which are showing up in Gaza, Mali, and Syria.

3. Is intent on making certain we don't let numbers 1 and 2 sink in before next Tuesday.

Clint Eastwood Says It All In Thirty Seconds: We Can't Survive Four More Years Of Obama

Dorothy Rabinowitz Defines Barack Obama

Great writing distills the essence of a situation, pulling together references and experiences from all points of the compass. This article, by Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal, is great writing.

OS is simultaneously grateful for her work, and profoundly envious. He's never come close to this level of craft. Still, he proudly share this essay with you, because she puts her finger on the pulse of the Obama administration, and unblinkingly relates what she concludes:

In the 1967 film "A Guide for the Married Man," a husband, played by a peerless Walter Matthau, is given lessons in ways to cheat on his wife safely. The most essential rule: "Deny! Deny! Deny!"—no matter what. In an instructive scene, he's shown a wife undone by shock, and screaming, with reason: She has just walked in on her husband making love to a glamorous stranger.
"What are you doing," she wails, "who is that woman?"

"What woman, where?" the husband serenely counters, as he and the tart in question get out of bed and calmly dress.

So the scene proceeds, with the distraught wife pointing to the woman she clearly sees before her, while her husband, unruffled, continues to look blankly at her, asking, "What woman?" Confused by her spouse's unblinking assurance, she gives up. Two minutes later she's asking him what he'd like for dinner.

For much of the past four years, the Obama administration's propensity for asserting views of reality wildly at odds with those evident to most rational citizens has looked increasingly like a page from that film script. 

Ms. Rabinowitz has nailed it. On. The. Head.

Bulls-eye. Full marks. 10 for 10.

God bless her.

Main Things, Plain Things: A Few Simple Ideas To Remember As November Approaches

There is a wonderful Scots preacher who holds forth in Cleveland, Ohio, by the name of Alistair Begg.

Amongst his pithy gems of wisdom, he returns often to this statement:

Let's keep the main thing the plain thing, and the plain thing the main thing. 

In the coming days, it is going to get seriously crazy. There will likely be October Surprises pulled by the Obama Campaign. Past examples include forged documents about George W. Bush seeking to avoid military service--that was a gem! Also, a DUI from when GW was 26 years old, a time of his life he had previously freely admitted was marked by his excesses.

The Obama campaign, as Leftists do, will attempt to sow confusion. Remember Florida in 2000, hanging chads, etc.? After the dust had settled, three separate audits of results were undertaken, one by the YewNorkTimez. All three confirmed Bush won. That news never made the front pages, did it?

So, OS offers a few Plain Things to keep in mind when the excrement begins to contact the air circulation device:

We are 16 TRILLION dollars in debt, a huge part of that created in the past four years. There is NO plan to address this forthcoming from the Democrats. The Senate, controlled by that party, has passed NO budget in three years. The Senate and the current occupant of the White House both must be changed in order to save the Republic.

Food Stamp usage has soared, with no plan to reverse the trajectory.

Women are viewed as convenient idiots by Duh Left, and this woman calls them out on it.

Massive bank fraud continues, there have been no prosecutions, and will never be under Eric Holder.

And if you read nothing else of what OS offers, read this, and pass it along if you are so moved.

We don't have to put up with this nonsense. It will take a long time to undo the damage.

No time like the present to begin.

In the meantime, don't get distracted by the noise emanating from Campaign Obama.

Dear Mr. Romney: When You Discuss Foreign Policy With Himself, You Might Mention That Drug Smugglers Are Driving Across The Arizona Border In Broad Daylight

Just sayin'...

Just ask rancher John Ladd of Arizona.

His San Jose Ranch sits right on the Arizona-Mexico line, ten and a half miles of land stretching from the town of Naco west toward the San Pedro River.  Border Patrol has three camera towers on his property, an eye-in-the-sky Cyclops, and sensors hidden in the desert shrubs that activate when smugglers pass.  A pedestrian fence (pictured below) blocks the entire ten and a half miles.
None of these security measures have worked.

Since the end of February, Ladd has had at least nine drug drive-throughs across his land involving 21 trucks.  The smugglers cut the mesh border fence and pull it down, then ramp over the vehicle barrier just inside it.  In most cases they tack-weld the fence back up and brush out tracks to disguise the incursion.

Eight of these episodes occurred in broad daylight, and in two of them the smugglers passed within 50 feet of a camera tower.

The chaos building south of our border, and increasingly spilling over into the heartland of the US, is most definitely a foreign-policy issue, as well as a domestic issue.

Obama's back-door amnesty by executive order this summer, giving the 'get-out-of-jail-free' card to hundreds of thousands of illegals only worsens the situation. Even in OS's county, two days' drive from the border, illegals have been camped here for years, awaiting the Next Amnesty.

This only creates more chaos, giving incentive to flout the law, breaking down civil society.

Which, after all, is the goal of the present administration.

Chaos creates opportunity.

Man. Bites. Dog. The Nashville Tennessean Endorses Romney For President

Loooosey!!! Wha' happened?!!!!

The Nashville Tennessean has been the lap-dog of the Democrat party since time immemorial. They even hired Al Gore Sr.'s ne'er-do'well son as a staff writer back in the day, keeping the boy supported until the family could find him something respectable-looking to do.

That worked out well...

There was not a spending program, entitlement, progressive social cause, or Democrat candidate too stupid or odious to not merit the endorsement of Nashville's morning paper.

OS, and hundreds of thousands of other Tennessean readers, tired of it, and let subscriptions lapse, never to be renewed. The paper kept getting smaller, saying less and less, not even employing decent grammar many times in the past few years.

Only the die-hard Left stuck with it, as the paper kept printing what they so desperately wished to read.

The Fat Lady has begun to vocalize in earnest about Barack Obama when even the most brain-dead of editorial staffs, e.g. the Tennessean, has decided enough is enough.

After several paragraphs of hand-wringing in earnest, here come the words that matter most:


However, for all [Obama's] efforts, ranging from the stimulus package to green-energy development, to bring us out of recession, he has never found the key. He has generally made poor choices of the people needed to get the job done, such as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. And the number of jobs created during his term simply has not kept up with demand.

Should President Obama, as some suggested, have devoted his early political capital to jobs and debt reduction and pursuing Wall Street criminals, instead of health reform? Time will tell. But it’s clear whatever shaky bridges were burned in the push for health reform only emboldened Republicans to oppose his subsequent economic proposals. That has rendered much of his presidency ineffective.
Barack Obama was elected in 2008 with a call for hope and change. Perhaps the change he spoke of could only come with the help of Mitt Romney.

Enough is enough is enough is enough...not even the Tennessean can afford to pretend that the country will survive four more years of Obama.