Hanoi, Vietnam. February 2010
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There’s nothing to say, but I hope I say it first!
In Hanoi of all places, too. Lovely.
In defence of the Vietnamese, these pictures were for sale in a district selling things to foreign tourists, a good portion of which are likely to be leftist basketweaving backpackers. Hanoi as a whole does not appear particularly communist, apart from a few symbols for form’s sake. Hanoi is a nice city. Poorish, but quite vibrant and clearly getting richer at a fair pace.
Ah well, Van Gogh was also somewhat unstable, unrealistic and self defeating.
But I’m glad to hear that sanity has prevailed among people left to their own devices. Very sad that all was. Boat people and all.
Naomi Klein would be appalled to see that images of the bearded murderer in the beret and the Community Organiser were being sold by rampant capitalists in post-communist Vietnam.
True, but at least he had some competence at what he did.
Person: are you saying that the other two have no competence at what they were/are doing?
Che was pretty good at killing unarmed folk, so there is that.
Alisa, in regards to Obama – certainly, he is an incompetent.
Name one thing he is an expert in. One profession/skill/ability he would be hired to do in an open market (sans PC and AA motives of employers)
Tanya, both you and PFP may be missing the point that the aims and goals of these people are different from the ones they may have been proclaiming. Remember the weavers in The Emperor’s New Clothes? They sure may have been incompetent weavers for all we know, just as they may have been incompetent blacksmiths.
Alisa makes a good point – it’s a very dangerous assumption to write Mr. Soetero off as an utter nincompoop. It’s my opinion he’s a committed Alinskyite, and that he’s committed to damaging the larger capitalist meta-structure as much as possible, even if it means complete economic collapse – which, from his probable world view, isn’t necessarily a bad thing – as it creates a bigger ‘crisis’ for him to manipulate and exercise power.
It’s a good bet that he’s a complete top-down, command and control statist, and the majority of the ‘blunders’ he’s made work towards that goal. From a free market, individual liberty perspective, it’s astounding to hear him claim a B+ grade for his presidency to that point; from the Alinskyite perspective, he was probably being quite honest, as he considered the significant progress he’d achieved towards his aims. Inculcated government into (not just overseeing) the nation’s financial powerhouses, partial nationalization of two of the three large automakers; serious regulatory inroads via the EPA using ‘climate change’ as an excuse to pre-empt the energy markets, and he’s come pretty close to nationalizing health care.
Notable accomplishments – that a true moron couldn’t have pulled off.
Exactly, Wind. Never underestimate the enemy.
In the category of “More intriguing things in Hanoi”, I might offer this (quite old) memorial, which celebrates the shooting down and subsequent capture and imprisonment of John McCain, after he parachuted into the adjacent lake.
Alisa and Wind Rider: true – if you assume Obama is an active player in this game. I consider him a puppet. An incompetent puppet : he lets the mask slip too often.
Yes. Absolutely.
The true goals are being achieved with great competence.
I sometimes wonder if ‘they’ realise that when freedom is shut down, the goose that lays the golden egg will be shut down too.
Or is the future to be the Soviet Union on speed and soma?
But that wouldn’t work either. A human race of aerobics dancing zombies would create little of true value.
So who’s the puppeteer then?
Rahm.
Obama has made substantial money from some private-sector activity: his book deals. I would guess, though I don’t know, that his publishers have made money on his books.
Though there is the odd question of why, after he failed to deliver on his first book contract, he got a second contract with a fat advance. He was then still a nobody… (The second contracted book was completed and published: Dreams From My Father.)
Rahm is just another cog in the machine. Not a nice cog either.
I’m no Che expert but my impression is that he didn’t overthrow any governments on his own and got killed pretty quickly when he tried. I don’t know what Obama’s trying to do, but unless it’s saving the Republican party from itself he’s doing it incompetently.
In his book Cultural Revolution; Culture War, Sean Gabb sees the puppeteers as being a loose consensus of interests (academe, MSM, finance, statists) which he calls the “establishment”.
Perhaps they, too, are just lackeys, and the puppet master is yet further removed.
Garet Garrett notes that the New Deal revolution and gold seizure in America was achieved by apparent incompetents. But only incompetent in what they professed they were trying to achieve.
If one follows the money it does seem to go back to ?
But whatever. I guess one can be fairly certain that there will be some quality camouflage. Effective. Possibly simple, using things like meta-context to tweak reality. Putting out silly conspiracy theories.
Perhaps the prince of this world?
John, re Gabb’s theory, he’s talking culture, we are talking politics. It could well be that there are people who pushed O to where he is now, but they would have to be very specific people, with money and political power, not just some abstract ‘establishment’.
Michael, it’s your photo and even if you didn’t add any copyright remarks in the post I thought it most polite to ask first: Can I post it on my own blog?
Alisa, the book is about politics in that it is about power. It is about how it achieved through cultural manipulation.
It is downloadable free at: http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3
US: Sure.
Sorry. Link broken. This works:
http://www.seangabb.talktalk.net/hampdenpress/culturewar2.pdf
Apologies to Michael also for going away from your pic. It does indeed tell a story! Interesting how visionary they look.
The problem with the “Obama as puppet” theory, or even the “Obama as puppeter” theory, is that he got lots of votes from the kind of people who smile nicely at you in the supermarkets.
Don’t pay any attention to the votes Obama got in the Presidential election, when he was the official Democrat candidate. The trends of votes cast since Watergate show that voting Democrat is as much a genetic trait as the color of one’s eyes. Democrat voters can’t help themselves.
But Obama got lots of votes in the primaries. Millions of apparently decent ordinary people chose to go out and vote for him, instead of that nice Hillary! lady or any of the other Democrat candidates.
Complex systems sometimes throw up improbable results. One such result was George Washington and the Framers of the US Constitution — just look how badly the French screwed up their version of Revolution. Another such improbable result is Barrack Hussein Soetero Obama.
Life is a bitch; and then you die.
I still want to know who Tatyana thinks the puppeteer is.
Laird, do you expect from me адреÑа и Ñвки? [sorry, names and addresses?] On a plate with gold rim?
I partially agree with John B above: limousine-liberal establishment is general area my finger point to. Particular names +money connection research is a job for investigative journalist – and I’m not one.
I can only conclude indirectly, watching the Obama’s activities and judging from the crumbs of information his handlers allowed into public domain, that he is a 1) puppet figure 2) incompetent in any officially-known activity he ever endeavored 3) as soon as he will crumble under pressure, those who propped him are prepared to throw him under the bus, exactly the way he himself did with his own “useful” flunkies when they outlived their usefulness. It’s a race, to that proverbial bus!
Alice: “that nice Hillary! lady”???
Penn Jillette had a great story from the 2008 primary. He had a new joke in his (and Teller’s) magic show in Vegas.
It ran like this: “Hillary thinks it is unfair that Obama gets to run for President during Black History Month. Sorry, Hillary, but there’s no White Bitch History Month.” Penn said that they were kinda nervous about this: was it over the line? But when Penn delivered it – the audience roared with delight. Penn said that was when he knew Obama was the next President.
There were a lot of reasons why Obama outdrew Hilary! in the primaries. Younger and hipper. Hilary was a crest baby-boomer – but to the later cohorts, that crowd seemed old and stale; their associations with young/hip/etc now felt a bit creepy. And she had Bill. People are tired of Bill. And she couldn’t call on the far left any more. The Clinton administration was too centrist, and she had supported the war in Iraq (for a while).
She had the “shoulder-pad” feminists – the older women who fought the job-access battles of the 70s-90s and deeply resent competition from smartass younger men (like Obama).
But Obama had all the blacks, and the hard left, and the young. Remember, he didn’t win exactly big: Clinton won 22 of 44 primaries, including NY, CA, TX, FL, OH, and PA (all of the large states except IL).
Tatyana: I don’t see Obama as a puppet. For one thing, he’s way too in love with himself to take dictation from anyone. And there is no mechanism for an Inner Circle or Grey Eminence to enforce control on him. Blackmail wouldn’t work. Suppose I could prove that he was not a citizen. I still can’t make him obey; all I can do is throw him out, and then I have no leverage on his successor.
Rich,
of course he is in love with himself – he had been told he had a “golden touch”, he had been fawned upon since he was in undergraduate school – and why wouldn’t he believe it, if his smile and demagogy worked for him every way he turned?
But I’m sure he knows the bottom line: he is mama’s golden boy as long as he does not disobey mama. His record of under the table deals, the way he got the Senator’ seat, the story with acquisition of his Chicago townhouse, his wife’s magically doubled salary (up to 300 grand) when he was handed the Senate seat, the way every single obstacle on his way was removed, even back in Harvard days (what was that, about him being the only Head of Law Review never contributed an article to that publication?) _ all of these separately could be just a bit of luck, but together – tells me there is someone, a group of someones, who were working on making a candy out of a turd, blowing up that empty suit, polishing rhetoric of this community organizer (and a failed one in that, too!)until it resembled an intelligent, young, hip, “black JFK”. So far it has been a marketing/advertising campaign, delivered by world’ media, either paid or not (that’s another question for an investigating journalist).
And about leverage – media, being the major Obama’s image creator, IS the leverage tool. He’s very sensitive to criticism – what, do you think, will happen, when journos will smell the change of wind and start seeing things they glossed over in the past? Obama is too disciplined not to obey. He knows what happened to Blagoevich, or Edwards, or miriad others: at some point they stop being useful and nobody covers up anymore.
Forgive me if what I say seems to you a conspiracy theory; but I know historic lessons people tend to forget: Lenin and his party existed, among other means, on the money they gotten from wealthiest Russian capitalists of their time. Look up names Savva Morozov, for instance, and Parvus, and Andreeva, and Gorky.
Somebody is paying, somebody is behind the scenes. I’m sure of it.
I tend to agree that this is a possibility, but at the same time I am not willing to concede on O’s incompetence. Even if there are people behind him, he is not a puppet in the ‘dummy’ sense: the supposed fact that he is doing the bidding of some people with money and power is no reason to conclude that he is dumb or incompetent for the purposes these people are supposedly supporting him. The point is that this bidding is not just theirs, it is his too, and it is not necessarily personal either: you have to remember that real collectivists actually believe that they are working for the ‘greater good’.
Alisa, if he ever was an idealist, it was a loooong time ago.
He’s a member of nomenklatura. He changes the course constantly; people who accuse him of lying don’t understand his psychological composition. I’m sure he is sincere when he’s appalled at these accusations. Nomenklatura doesn’t “lie”, they move with the party Line! The minute the course is changed, they absolutely don’t remember what they were saying yesterday – it’s a matter of principle, it’s their qualification for the job.
Being incompetent and being dumb is not the same. I never said he’s dumb. But in his job, as a President of USA he is an incompetent. And as an agent of “progressives” in the White House, he is an incompetent, too. He made tremendous amount of errors – he is only able to get away with it, because of massive blatant propaganda campaign. As soon as the quantity transforms into quality, he’ll be abandoned and made a spectacle of.
It’s a scenario played time and again.
I don’t really disagree with any of this, Tanya. I think you and I are thinking along the same lines, but only expressing it differently. I have said it here at least once that I can remember: the big O is by far not the worse that we may be about to see in the White House, competence in its conventional sense being beside the point. The times are coming as interesting as they can get:-/
Yeah, I’d prefer the times to be boring.
On the other hand, as Karol @AlarmingNews said somewhere, “no Jew would ever temp the fate by proclaiming ” the worst times are behind us”…
Too easy perhaps – but accurate.
Remember the various campaign bases of the Obama people – which had “Che” posters and shirts (till they were exposed).
“They did not know who Che really was Paul”.
Perhaps (although why does not that defence work with a Hitler shirt – “I was just expressing support for his road building activities – I do not dislike Jews at all”) and Barack did not know his father (who was pro Soviet).
But Barack Obama did know his mother (another pro Soviet) – indeed she gave him three hour indoctrination sessions each day.
After her death there was still Frank Marshall Davis – another Communist.
Then there were all those Marxist conferences whilst a post grad at Columbia (I am far more interested in seeing Barack’s thesis on “Soviet Disarmament Policy” then in seeing any freaking diversion tactic “birth certificate”).
And the DECADES of work with Marxist front organizations in Chicago.
“Oh you are just paranoid Paul”.
In exactly the same way as believeing that 1 + 1 = 2 is “paranoid”.
There are a lot of interesting comments here. A few with which I have trouble agreeing (for starters, anything that smacks of a conspiracy – a well-planned one especially), but generally a lot of good comments.
I think, however, it is worth remembering that a lot of people, like my parents, their friends, some of my friends and lots of otherwise good, decent people voted for The One because they saw the election as way to buy lots of Virtue on the cheap. A simple vote. It was a religious experience.
In fact, I think that a significant portion of the Tea Party movement is made up of these very same people. The anger is the anger of the “mark” who finally gets what happened: they’ve been defrauded, screwed, sold a bill of goods (oh, yes, a very big bill).
My parents, their friends, and those some of my friends who completely bought the whole “hate Bush” meme and would throw out anti-Bush non-sequitors into any and all sorts of conversations, who looked oh-so forward to the new wonderful Obama administration, now never talk politics.
I’m smart enough not to tell ’em, I told you so, but, well, I did.
Knuckleheads.
Not a “conspiracy” jdm – because a conspiracy is something secret.
The Obama stuff is easy to find out.
The real question is “why did not the mainstream media make a big thing of Obama’s political background and belief system”.
And that is not a “conspiracy” either – the msm were partly just in love with the idea of a black President (so they did not look for anything that might have got in the way of such an “historic” thing), but also the msm is dominated by people who have a lot of sympathy for far left politics anyway (again this is no secret – if one just checks out the people concerned).
Tea party people – good point jdm. Some of them DID vote for Obama.
This is one of the things the msm either does not know – or does not want to know.
Installanche on the way, by the way…
How the Amerikkan REICH-WING MIND WORKS …
– Nuking 250,000 Japanese civilians = Good
– Che overseeing the execution of former Dictator Batista’s torturers = Bad
– Slave Owners on US currency = Good
– T-shirt with Cuba’s National Hero Che’s face on it = Bad
In a rotunda off the main entrance to Hanoi’s “Museum of the (Vietcong) Revolution” [sic] stands a full-size statue of Massachusetts Senator John (Heinz) Kerry. “Aid and comfort” is entirely too mild: This treasonous dolt sold out his country in time of war, slandered America’s armed forces while in uniform, treacherously negotiated with the North Vietnamese/Maoist enemy on foreign soil.
No mention of this whatever, over decades, by mass media as collectivist Statists, extreme-left Commissar enablers to a man. For a quarter century, Massachusetts’ junior senator has done everything possible to subvert the free-market entrepreneurial, innovative system envisioned by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay in context of Jefferson’s “inalienable rights”. Aristotle’s sovereign contempt for “demos” rule –that is, democracy as America’s Founders understood it– is justifiable to the extent that a something-for-nothing majority is empowered to plunder and ruin productive private sectors, taking the entire polity down with it.
Displaying Obama Banana chockablock with the sadistic murderer El Che may be a commercial accident, but “tourists” to Hanoi (read Maoist sycophants) do not wend thither seeking portraits of Washington, Lincoln, or for that matter anyone other than psychopathic jacks-in-office such as Lenin, Stalin, perhaps Castro or Chavez, many another power-hungry monomaniac of their wretched ilk.
Prevention is the only cure. “The tree of Liberty is watered with the blood of tyrants,” as Jefferson would say.
“The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.” — Che Guevara
No wonder the right-wing tards who were born on 3rd base and think they hit a triple hate the great el Che. He gave up his lavish life to fight for the poor in jungles, meanwhile – capitalist pigs make a living financially raping the downtrodden.
CLAIM: “Che was a murderer of innocents”
FACT: Jon Lee Anderson, author of the 800 + page ‘Che Guevara: A Revolutionary life’, who spent 5 years researching the man …
“I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che executed an innocent. Those persons executed by Guevara or on his orders were condemned for the usual crimes punishable by death at times of war or in its aftermath: desertion, treason or crimes such as rape, torture or murder.”
If George Soros and Andy Stern got together and started building their vision of the perfect politician from spare parts they had lying around, they couldn’t have created anything better (in their respective views) than Teh Won.
Not asserting that they did, just sayin’, ‘sall . . .
Oh, and Carlos = delusional idiot. The military ruling class of Imperial Japan (as in, Japan’s acting head of state in 1945 was a real, honest–to–G-d Emperor and everything) was prepared to sacrifice every single Japanese citizen, military and civilian, in defense of the home islands, and to inflict (by our own estimates) 1 million K.I.A. and millions more casualties on Allied forces in the process. The proof of the assertion? The U.S. had to drop a second bomb and broadly hint that we had more — we didn’t — to get ’em to surrender. Hope that’s not too difficult a concept for you.
The calculus of all-out war, terrible as it might be; we weren’t the only player in that game.
‘Berg
“I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che executed an innocent.”
That’s because, Sara, Mr. Anderson wasn’t looking for one, and if he’d found it he’d have run away shrieking in horror at the very thought. It’s his schtick.
‘Berg
Alisa,
It’s ok to tell everyone.
I am the puppeteer
The death of Che Guevara is a wilderness of mirrors, for example: Did the Castro Brothers fear him enough to send him out on a fool’s errand in Bolivia and then feed the CIA enough leaked data to cause his death?
As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was not Emporor Hirohito who was delusional, but rather Prime Minister Tojo who was reality challenged. The Battle of Okinawa killed a third of the civilian population, would the Battle for Japan proper have killed less, no I think the toll would have been a half or even two thirds of the civilians. In the end Hirohito said that the war was a mistake. Tojo wanted to fight to the last Japanese.
Communist is what communist does.
In regards to Alisa, name one good thing Obama is good at. I can name a couple. He was good at financing Acorn. He was good at playing lawyer and suieng Citibank for discriminating loans. Oh and he’s real good at reading the teleprompter and fooling all his clones into believing he’s the One.
Not even Jesus could win the Liberal Peace Prize and he feed 5000 people out of a basket. MohamObama pulls out a serving of Kool-aide from his turbin and he’s crowned King of the world. One thing is clear, terrorist are not the threat, Liberals are!
I harbor the suspicion that someday we’ll all find out that obama hussein bin laden is actually an islamic terrorist sent under deep cover to destroy the US and all its people, conservatives and liberals.
In such a case, conservatives will grieve the loss of the republic; liberals will blame conservatives for making them vote for him.
What a perfect place for The Chosen One’s photo, other than where it currently rests beneath the perch where my cockatoo sleeps.
I harbor the suspicion that someday we’ll all find out that obama hussein bin laden is actually an islamic terrorist sent under deep cover to destroy the US and its people, conservatives and liberals alike.
In such a case, conservatives will grieve the loss of the republic; liberals will blame conservatives for making them vote for him.
Right-wing teabagging rednecks are RETARDED !
Viva Che :o)
Since Obama is a (I hesitate to say the word)… D.m.cr.t, he should be in prison for more than life! Obviously, your message got cut off- your real name is Obama4life@jail.
Where’s Jane’s photo?…Must have been replaced by BO.
If you act like a Marxist; if your friends are mostly Marxists; and if you are adored by the Marxists…you might be a Marxist.