The Great Wait Has Begun

The Wait

America’s friends and enemies alike are waiting for the results of the 2012 election as much as Americans themselves.  Perhaps more.  Much is at stake, but for many reasons, the most valuable tactic of delay is the least-mentioned.  The clock is running out on Obama, and those who can wait are holding out in civil fashion for better days.  Those who cannot are scrambling to survive.  But if Obama wins in 2012, all bets are off.

Abroad

The American right is not much given to complaining about its government overseas, so that the perennial threats made by famous but inconsequential people to move abroad are not a feature of unpopular democrat administrations.  Neither are tens of thousands of YouTube videos and online still photos with perky but empty-headed liberals holding up little signs apologizing to the world for an American president who stands up to bad guys.  On purpose.  No, the right tends to keep its overt messaging within the borders, while admitting of course that the internet age features a remarkable amount of slippage.  This blog post, while intended for a domestic audience, may well be read by people overseas, but that is a factor of the times, not of dog-whistles or chicanery.

[pullquote]Obama’s back-handed reduction of the Dalai Lama was beneath contempt, and his betrayal of Israel is personal and bitter[/pullquote]

Besides which, those overseas like Lech Walesa do not need American blogs to know the score.  Ahmadinejad and Assad can probably wait out the Obama administration.  They certainly have little to fear in the meanwhile.  People like Qaddafi and Mubarak have played their hands badly.  If not so ham-fisted, they would likely have been alright, “Arab Spring” or no.  We are sending aid to the known devil in China and the unknown in Egypt, while serially betraying allies like Britain and Poland.   Obama’s back-handed reduction of the Dalai Lama was beneath contempt, and his betrayal of Israel is personal and bitter.  The president has not only chosen the wrong side in the increasingly likely 2011 3rd Intifada — he has made it all but inevitable.

At Home

The American right also frowns upon domestic expressions of hostility against a sitting president, or any duly elected official.  I won’t claim that the right is squeaky clean on this score, especially as our political discourse, like our society, becomes more debased.  Cite some examples of the right behaving poorly, and I’ll probably agree.  But few would argue that the right can even begin to match the amount of truly hateful, reckless speech and imagery generated by the left, continuously, interminably, while a Republican is in office.

[pullquote]We have seen who will listen and who will not, and it has become perilously clear that the GOP leadership is not listening.[/pullquote]

The left talks a big game, both in their complaints and their Gore-spattered fantasies, but there’s nothing behind their papier-mache heads (ask Solzhenitsyn).  Their constitutional understanding is as narrow as their threats are shallow.  If George W. Bush and his administration had committed a tenth of the egregious, repeated, and gleeful abuses of the Constitution that this administration has in two years, the parades, demonstrations, isolated violence, organized mob scenes, and chanting throngs of spittle-flecked Marxists would all have been, well, more so.  One thing the left does not understand is that the American right, especially the Tea Party, is just as angry as the left ever was in their frothing and immature rages against the machine.  The difference is that the right knows when to shut up, for the most part, and the time for talking is past.  We have seen who will listen and who will not, and it has become perilously clear that the GOP leadership is not listening.  The Tea Party is widely rumored to have dissolved, splintered, tired of the fight, become irrelevant… don’t believe a word of it.  That’s CNN’s take, and it is incorrect, oddly enough.

[pullquote]This is NASCAR politics, and what matters is American Steel, not Republichrome[/pullquote]

Just by way of example, there is a reason that Newt Gingrich and Ed Rollins were savaged for their transgressions, while Tim Pawlenty will not be punished for his sharp critique of “ObamneyCare”.  Ryan and Palin are Tea Party favorites, whereas Mitt Romney sank his shot at the nomination when he failed to disavow that awful RomneyCare.  This is not the showroom floor.  This is NASCAR politics, and what matters is American Steel, not Republichrome.  If you’re waiting for the Tea Party to smack down Pawlenty, you’ve confused them with CNN.

At Work

American labor is in a bind.  Typically business is more on the American right than left, increasingly so as the left becomes ever more closely wedded to Marxism not only by logical extension, but now by name, word, and deed.  American labor is not stupid and knows that businesses create jobs, and that a healthy business environment is how they will get their jobs back.  At the same time, they feel that they are championed by labor organizations like Richard Trumka’s AFL-CIO, because it kicks business ass and extorts dollars to spread around its favored unions.  In the end, however, American labor knows that real businesses create real jobs, and that the fanfare surrounding the Child-King must end.  The American worker more than any other figure is liable to feel isolated and helpless before the Marxist tide, and would feel the least to lose by fellow-travelling for a bit.  They will be forgiven.

American business is in a bind as well, with a more clear-cut but rather more difficult prognosis: wait him out.  Only a fool would risk what’s left while this man is in office.  Four years seemed like an eternity from November 2008, and from November 2009 it seemed even longer.  By now, however, they have figured out how to ration the biscuits and water to make it past the next line, and steeled themselves for the duration.  Between the President’s Marxist speech to the US Chamber of Commerce and his NLRB proxy war against Boeing on behalf of the AFL-CIO, American business has been slapped hard with more than enough evidence to make the call.  2012 can’t come fast enough to save American capital, unless the unthinkable happens, and this president is re-elected.

[pullquote]it may be irrational exuberance to hang on quietly in the grim hopes that you are not killed before daybreak[/pullquote]

Markets which have not collapsed can thank a series of nonsense maneuvers by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and the Congressional Budget Office’s frankly defunct accounting rules.  These idiots have bought time at a steep price, when the only real asset the markets possess is patience, if they can hold out for November 2012.  That is when the world financial system will know if the cavalry is coming or not.  At this stage, it may be irrational exuberance to hang on quietly in the grim hopes that you are not killed before daybreak in this zombie movie of an economy, but it’s all that there is.

At Last

Only the threat of re-election prevents this thoroughly Marxist man from going full-out Communist.  He flirts and frolics with it in his speeches, imagery, and policies to such an extent that I no longer wonder whether I should use the C-word.  His US Chamber speech cured me of that.  If you have not read it, please do. It is most informative.  If he should be re-elected, America’s enemies will have a clear window of opportunity.  Sure, he’ll be a bit more savvy by then, but he’ll be no more intelligent, and no more motivated to put the economy above his ideological obsession with converting America from a successful, productive, powerful beacon of freedom to just another temperate landmass with lots of farmers and no intellectuals.

[pullquote]You don’t see conservatives begging foreign powers to wait out a Communist president.  We know that everybody must do what they must do[/pullquote]

You don’t see conservatives begging foreign powers to wait out a Communist president.  We know that everybody must do what they must do, and that those who have faith in America will factor that into their necessary calculations.  Our allies will still be our allies, if they survive, and our enemies will still be our enemies.  The fact is that there is no reset button for the butchers running Russia, and talking doesn’t help with Iran when we understood each other perfectly well for the past thirty years.

The best thing we have going for us is not the meaningless debt ceiling.  We can blow past that for two years running, and nobody will care.  After all, we have several times operated with no budget and no deal, with no lasting effects, and heaven knows, this administration needs no puny laws to do its bidding.

America’s credit rating is perhaps the best indicator of global acceptance of American Exceptionalism.  The world accepts it not only a valid concept, but an ongoing and legitimate fact on the ground.  The thing that keeps our credit good and our dollar from cratering completely is some level of global confidence that the Republicans will take control in 2012.  We may even take a downgrade next year, which would be unprecedented, but survivable.  It would leave a mark, but would also serve as a well-timed rebuke, and a reminder not to put the Communists in charge ever again.   The world believes that Obama will be defeated in 2012.  That is what the entire world is waiting to see.  Everything depends upon it.