Showing posts with label FISA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FISA. Show all posts

Sunday, June 22, 2008

In the words of our beloved leader, "fool me once..."


"He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood."
David Brooks - NYT

David Seaton's News Links
In what seems to me by now another lifetime, I used to be a painter.

I took it very seriously and worked hard at it during what most people (not I) would consider the "best years" of my life.

Was bleibt? What is left of all of that?

It gave me some interesting ways of attacking problems that most other people in my line of work don't share.

I think one of the most important is a superstitious respect for intuitive flashes that come while staring fixedly at something.

Quoting from memory, I seem to recall the great documentary film maker Robert Flaherty telling of an Eskimo ivory carver caressing a walrus tusk, testing its weight, staring fixedly at it and muttering over and over, "Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?" until he saw within the virgin tusk the figure that was "begging" to come out... and then and only then, would the carver begin to cut the ivory.

George Soro's son says that his father knows when to make one of his legendary speculations, where he risks millions of dollars, when his back begins to ache horribly (boys and girls, don't try this at home).

When you paint, you learn to respect what your subconscious regurgitates when you focus on something with total intensity.

In the end the intuition of the intense observer is his or her best guide through information as thick and swarming and noisy as houseflies in a cow barn.

As my readers surely are aware of by now, I have been decrying Barack Obama for months now, ever since my "bullshit meter" started to go off the dial. Since then I have often felt a bit of a voice crying out in the wilderness.

Even when Obama, in violation of all the UN resolutions and international law, sold the Palestinian people down the river on Jerusalem, nobody, except the rest of the whole world seemed to notice.

But, I am finally beginning to see the wisdom of the endless American presidential campaigns as my "who are you? who are you?" intuitions are beginning to be confirmed by hard facts... domestic hard facts.
Democratic Senator Barack Obama's decision not to accept public funds for his presidential campaign puts the financing system at risk, said Senator Joe Biden, an Obama supporter.

``In terms of undermining the public financing idea for everyone'' the decision ``doesn't help,'' Biden, a Delaware Democrat, said today on NBC's ``Meet the Press'' program. ``It's going to be harder to make the case'' for public financing, he said. (...)Senator Lindsey Graham, a McCain supporter appearing on the same program with Biden, said Obama ``is reinforcing everything that's wrong with politics.''
And of course
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) today announced his support for a sweeping intelligence surveillance law that has been heavily denounced by the liberal activists who have fueled the financial engines of his presidential campaign.

In his most substantive break with the Democratic Party's base since becoming the presumptive nominee, Obama declared he will support the bill when it comes to a Senate vote, likely next week, despite misgivings about legal provisions for telecommunications corporations that cooperated with the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program of suspected terrorists.(...)This marks something of a reversal of Obama's position from an earlier version of the bill, which was approved by the Senate Feb. 12, when Obama was locked in a fight for the Democratic nomination with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Obama missed the February vote on that FISA bill as he campaigned in the "Potomac Primaries," but issued a statement that day declaring "I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty." Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) continue to oppose the new legislation, as does Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). All Obama backers in the primary
All this time, while I am doing my "who are you? who are you? routine, something was at the back of brain, something that if I could just get hold of it, that would explain my entire, intuitive take on Barack Obama. I couldn't get to it... a film... a scene from a film, but I couldn't remember the film. It would come to the front of my mind and disappear...

... and then suddenly it came to me this morning.

It is a scene from Terry Gilliam's little 1981 masterpiece, "The Time Bandits".

The "Robin Hood" scene.


Watch it. DS
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