Nightly Ramble Monday

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

• POLISH GOVERNMENT:  Arthur Chrenkoff has a good piece up at Pajamas Media; Says he:
  

  The death of the president, together with so many key officials and guests, is not simply a tragedy in itself, but it throws the whole region into a sea of uncertainty of the kind not experienced since the fall of Communism.

  Very true. As Authur  points out, polish Russian relations thawed rather significantly while Kaczynski was President. it as an take a great deal of imagination to wonder if these events were intentionally set into motion. After all, there being people, or groups of people who don’t like the idea of a thawing of relations between Poland and Russia has been something that has been commented on in the past. If somebody wanted to engineer a change in the Polish government, and thereby a change in the region, one could hardly have engineered it better.
  As to the next logical question of who might want that change, the Russian government leaps to mind. We’ve seen in the last several weeks, particularly since the subway bombings in Moscow, a lot of power grabbing going on from the Kremlin… opposition media being shuut down and so on.I don’t know what the story is here but neither does anyone else in the public eye… and it seems odd to me that nobdy’s asking what seems to me the obvious question.

• RON PAUL: DISCONNETCED By way of OTB this morning, (…and Memeorandum frst, actually…) I note that Congress critter Ron Paul is being quoted widely by the leftosphere this morning as saying that Obama isn’t a socialist.  First of all, and perhaps most importantly, Ron Paul is confused under the best of conditions, and this certainly doesn’t qualify as one of those. So, I’m not sure that I would ever take at face value the assessment of Ron Paul on any subject, including the definition of sunlight.  If Mr. Obama as Mr. Paul suggests, is a “corporatist”, then how does one account for SEIU’s Andy Stern having a status in the White House that includes everything but having his own desk?
  On the other hand, there is the question of what exactly is a socialist. For example, it seems to me that his description of Obama as a corporatist, and what that constitutes, put him squarely into the realm of German style National Socialism. Which of course is still socialism, like it or not… (And Godwin law be damned… the comparison is an apt one on this and many other points. and frankly, I’ve always figured most people worshipping on the alter of Godwin’s law are people uncomfortable with the parallels presented.)
• FOREIGN POLICY HASH, OBAMA STYLE: VDH yesterday:
  

  During the 2008 campaign, the Obama group argued that Bush & Co. were insensitive to allies and had acted in clumsy, unilateral fashion, permanently damaging our stature in the world. Given the first 15 months of foreign policy in the new administration, we can see now that Obama’s critique largely meant that we had damaged relations with supposed belligerents like Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela — inasmuch as right now, British, Colombian, Czech, German, Honduran, Indian, Israeli, Japanese, Polish, and South Korean leaders might privately prefer the good “bad” old days of the supposed cowboy Bush.

  Just so… One cannot ignore the combination the American people are seeing… not only does he lean toward socialist dictators and anti-western interests in his foreign policy, but he goes well out of his way to implement domestic policy which echoes the socialistic domestic policy of those countries he embraces with his foreign policy. Are we really supposed to ignore this pattern? Of course the remaining consequences of this mess are fodder for Victor to discuss. Go and read.