Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Obama the Space Invader
Mar7
By John Feehery
When I was a teenager, Space Invaders was one of most popular video games. The premise, for those who have recently arrived from space, was pretty simple: Shoot down incoming missiles that descended from the sky before they landed on your missile silos.
We seem to live increasingly in a space invader world.
Things keep coming down from the sky and it is getting harder and harder to shoot them down.
Last month, a meteor barreled down from space and made a huge crash landing somewhere near the Ural Mountains in Russia. The footage from a Russian version of the iPhone was pretty spectacular and pretty scary at the same time. It looked like came straight from a Hollywood movie gone awry. Except this meteor was all too real, and 400 people were seriously injured from the crash’s impact.
Apparently, another meteor just narrowly missed Planet Earth and another one is due to almost hit us any day now.
It was a big meteor that wiped out the Dinosaurs, but the Dinosaurs weren’t smart enough to invent the iPhone, so let’s hope we can survive a similar attack.
In a similar vein, according to the London’s “The Telegraph”, we are not alone in the universe: “UFO sightings on the rise in South Africa: Sightings of unidentified flying objects off the coast of Cape Town have increased dramatically and may indicate that the inhabitants of the Mother City are under surveillance by life from another planet, according to the founder of a website set up to log such incidents.”
More troubling is Hollywood actor Russell Crowe’s involvement in the UFO world: According to an Australian newspaper: Crowe, the co-owner of South Sydney Rabbitohs and a Twitter fan, said he captured what appears to be several flying objects whizzing over Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens earlier this week.Hours after griping on Twitter that his new flick was being under-promoted, Russell Crowe seemed to create his own publicity stunt. Posting a video on YouTube (see video below) of what appeared to be flying objects whizzing over the gardens, Crowe wrote: “A friend and I set camera to capture fruit bats rising from Botanic Gardens. This was a big surprise.”
All of this occurs just as Barack Obama allowed the sequester to take place, a sequester that takes a big chunk out of NASA funding.
Coincidence? Maybe.
Or maybe Mr. Obama doesn’t want NASA to really find out what is happening out there. Maybe the reason that the President manufactured a fake birth certificate is that he was born not in Kenya or Indonesia or Hawaii.
Maybe he is not from this world at all. That would explain why his ears are so big, and why he kind of reminds most people of a black version of Mr. Spock.
He was able to manipulate the political process so that his career would consist of running against people like Alan Keyes and Blair Hull and John McCain and Mitt Romney, people who were carefully selected by an alien to make it appear that Obama had a real campaign, but in fact, he really didn’t.
I wonder if that came up during his dinner with Republican Senators at the White House last night.
I wonder if those drones that Rand Paul is so worried about are not drones at all, but instead part of the Obama space invasion.
We live in a space invader world. You might as well get used to it.
The Woodward Fracas
Mar1
By John Feehery
Bob Woodward doesn’t think much of the Obama White House. You can tell that he doesn’t believe that the President is much of a President. And now the White House is making it pretty clear that it doesn’t think much of Bob Woodward.
This has all come to light in recent days in a bizarre he-said he-said tussle between the veteran Post reporter and Gene Sperling, Obama’s diminutive economic whiz. Politico did a story that said that Sperling threatened Woodward during the course of the argument. The White House pushed back hard and then released the entire email that seemed, in isolation, to be cordial enough.
What it didn’t release was the transcript of the thirty minute screaming match that apparently precipitated the email exchange.
Does this matter much, in the scheme of things?
Not really, but it does offer insight into the changing world of journalism in Washington DC.
The Washington Post is going downhill, fast.
It’s sky-high stock price is tumbling, its circulation is dwindling, its profits have long disappeared. About the only reason people buy the Post these days is to read Bob Woodward.
He is kind of a big deal to the Post. He has always been kind of a big deal to the Post. His investigation of Richard Nixon put the Washington Post on the map, and since that time, the newspaper has basically skated on the reputation first established by the downfall of Nixon, precipitated by the Woodward and Bernstein investigation.
(On a side note, I found it fascinating that Carl Bernstein is now one of MSNBC’s top commentators on the selection of the new Pope. I didn’t realize he was such a big expert on the Catholic Church).
The fact that the biggest figure at the Washington Post is no fan of Barack Obama is a real shock to the system. The media elite should have been forced to file campaign disclosures they were such in the tank for Team Obama.
Politico wrote a story last month where is detailed how the White House had changed the rules of the journalism game by effectively manipulating, intimidating, massaging, and going around the Washington media corps. That may have been true, but the media has been an active accomplice in this game. They have loved this President, because he shares their values on things like spending (more please), taxes (higher on everybody that makes more than the average journalist), abortion (freely available), gay stuff (marriage, military, etc). Obama, like the media, is a left-wing ideologue wrapped up in a patina of pragmatism. He talks a good game when it comes to governing, but if things don’t go his way, he will take his ball and go on the campaign trail.
A few journalists have the courage to counter this media mindset. Ron Fournier is one of them. Ron is willing to call out the President for not governing. Bob Woodward is another one.
And that doesn’t sit well with the President and his team. When guys like Fournier and Woodward have the balls to stand up for themselves, that could set a bad precedent.
That’s why David Plouffe compared Woodward to an aging former superstar who can barely swing the bat, let alone catch up to a fastball.
But Woodward will get the last laugh. A journalist is not like baseball player, although many journalists are huge baseball fans. A journalist is more like an umpire.
Woodward has been no fan of Republicans in the past (although, on another side-note, I think he kind of likes John Boehner, chiefly because Boehner and his team have been open, accessible and completely honest with him), which gives him a reputation of fairness that any umpire would envy.
He has been calling a lot of strikes lately against Team Obama. The President and his men would rather yell at the umpire than actually swing the bat.
