R. Emmett Tyrell warns that, like the first Robin, the first crocus shoots announcing that Spring has arrived, the first corrupt and ludicrously leftwing appointments, the first foreign policy gaffes already herald the arrival of a classic democrat fiasco presidency.

Egads, it is going to be a long four years! It is only two weeks since the Prophet Obama’s inauguration, and already he has revived memories of Boy Clinton’s first 100 days. Political observers with a sense of history might well ask whether the Obama Administration will approximate the adolescent incompetence of Clinton Administration or the Pecksniffian pratfalls of the Carter Administration. Presidential historian that I am, allow me to caution my fellow citizens that here in the vestibule of the Obama Administration it is probably too early to say. Yet with the economy in crisis and American national security in the hands of a starry-eyed novice, one can argue that we are in for a reprise of the Carter years complete with the self-righteous pout.

I had wanted to suspend criticism of our incoming president for a few months until his bungling became obvious. As I wrote during the campaign, it is inconceivable that a modern-day president with only four years in the Senate (and but three terms in a state legislature) could be equal to the demands of this high office. Still, I thought it would take a few months for President Obama to reveal his ineptitude. Well, it only took two weeks.

Poor New York Times! Neocon Bill Kristol was, well, simply too darned con. He actually defended the Bush Administration and openly sided with conservatives. A respectable NYT token conservative columnist is suppose to confine his conservatism to occasional dyspeptic grumbling about changing times, fashions, and morals, but avoid flagrant heresy on the big questions that matter: George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, and the outrageous insult to everything that’s proper and good that is Sarah Palin.

Jennifer Senior, in New York Magazine, describes the fraught quest for the Upper West Side conservative.

[N]ot to say that Times readers don’t like conservatives. They just like conservatives they can take home and introduce to their families (or maybe Paul Krugman’s family [or Michael Meeropol’s family – DZ]). David Brooks is the sort of Republican whose column a self-respecting liberal can read without wanting to hurl things in the aftermath—an Obama enthusiast, a Palin critic, a careful questioner of GOP shibboleths. He’s a vocal supporter of gay marriage and abortion rights. And he’s just as apt to be writing about culture as politics.

The Times may even have thought it’d be getting the same cuddly conservative intellectual when it hired Kristol. Like Brooks, he was a known quantity: a quotable source during the Bush I era (he was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff), the scion of New York intellectuals. But it didn’t, and the Republican party line that Kristol was peddling was an embarrassment.

Senior recommends comedian Stephen Colbert.

I won’t name names, but I can think of more than one prominent passenger on the conservative movement’s bus, who could be relied upon to broaden and grow into just such a role, becoming worthy of “strange new respect,” given the right inducements.

Varifrank, on Twitter:

Pass it now or we may never recover’ – is he talking about the Dems or the American people?

Jane Fonda has started blogging and, sure enough, it took her only 4 entries to get down to business: opposing US military efforts overseas and lending aid and comfort to the enemy.

Her topic was one Marlissa Grogan, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and one of the so-called Hempstead 15, a group arrested by Nassau County Police for disorderly conduct during a protest outside of the final presidential debate at Hofstra University on October 15, 2008.

I left rehearsal tonight in a temp wig and costume to go downtown to the screenings of The FTA Show. David Zeiger and I came in after the first showing was over and answered questions. Joining us was Marlisa Grogan, Captain in the US Marine Corp (29 UES). I had never met her before and was very impressed. She has such a deep understanding of why it is important for us to support active duty members of the military who are anti war or, at least, anti a war they feel is wrong and ill-conceived. She herself has been involved in an anti war show that has performed for active duty personnel. She said that it is the soldiers who have seen active duty who tend to be anti war more than the ones who have stayed stateside. “They just don’t know,” she said.

She talked about the similarities that exist between today’s military and those of the Vietnam era but also pointed out the profound differences, citing in particular, the fact that so many recruits are confronted with the choice between jail or military. For many it’s a much needed job. Look how young she is, yet so wise and committed. “We can’t just rely on the hope that Obama has brought us,” she told the audience. “We have to get off our asses and make sure we organize and speak out for what we feel is right.”

Time to update Fonda’s soubriquet to “Jihad Jane.”

Taliban militants have concentrated their efforts for months on interdicting US supply routes to Afghanistan from the port of Karachi, Pakistan.

75 percent of the supplies for the Afghan war pass through Pakistan, including 40 percent of the fuel used by US military forces.

The Khyber Pass, described by Kipling as “a sword cut through the mountains,” features a winding road 30 miles/48 km long through the mountains of the Hindu Kush a crucial part of the trade route between Peshawar and Jallabad.

LA Times:

Reporting from Istanbul, Turkey, and Peshawar, Pakistan — A day after blowing up a crucial land bridge, Taliban militants torched 10 supply trucks returning from Afghanistan to Pakistan on Wednesday, underscoring the insurgents’ dominance of the main route used to transport supplies to Afghan-based U.S. and NATO troops.

Months of disruptions on the route from the Pakistani port of Karachi through the historic Khyber Pass have forced NATO and American military authorities to look for other transit options. About three-quarters of the supplies for Western forces in Afghanistan — mainly food and fuel — are ferried through Pakistan by contractors, usually poorly paid, semiliterate truckers. Many now refuse to drive the route because of the danger.

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, said last month during a visit to the region that routes outside Pakistan had been found, but he provided no details and gave no timetable for their use. The supply question has taken on added urgency with the planned deployment of up to 30,000 more U.S. troops in the Afghan theater in the next 18 months.

The complications of moving supplies through Central Asia were also highlighted Tuesday when the government of Kyrgyzstan said it would close a U.S. air base important to the Afghan war effort. U.S. officials said talks were underway to keep the base open.

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That closure results from our Russian friends’ latest move in playing the great game.

Investors Business Daily:

The Russia of Vladimir Putin and his puppet, President Dmitry Medvedev, threw some sand in our gears by getting the Kyrgyz government to close a vital NATO air base in that country in exchange for more than $2 billion in aid for that country’s struggling economy.

Russia has long resisted and resented U.S. interference in former Soviet republics as well as the expansion of NATO and democracy to the Russian border. It has put economic pressure on Ukraine, invaded Georgia and threatened Poland with missile attack. Now it wants to sabotage our efforts in Afghanistan, a country it failed to swallow up.

Two weeks ago, Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, met with senior Kyrgyz officials during a tour of the region, and they assured him there were no discussions with Moscow about closing the base in exchange for aid.

Petraeus announced on inauguration day that Russia and neighboring Central Asian nations had agreed to let supplies pass through their territory to U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, lessening our dependence on dangerous routes through Pakistan.

That need was shown Tuesday, when insurgents in Pakistan blew up a bridge in the Khyber Pass, disrupting one of two truck routes from the port of Karachi by which the 60,000 U.S.-led NATO troops in Afghanistan receive about 80% of their supplies.

“We have sought additional logistical routes into Afghanistan from the north. There have been agreements reached,” Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said.

But as Moscow was offering new supply lines, it was also bribing the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to close the base at Manas by agreeing to provide Kyrgyzstan with $150 million in aid, to extend $2 billion in loans and to write off debt worth $180 million. Bakiyev made the announcement in Moscow.

The Russian business daily Kommersant, citing a “source close to the negotiations” with Bakiyev, said Moscow had made the U.S. base closure a strict condition for Kyrgyzstan getting aid.

Honoré Daumier. Les Joueurs d’échecs, c. 1863-1867. Oil on panel. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

According to the latest Rasmussen Poll, public support for the democrat party’s so-called Stimulus Package is now in the minority, having declined to 37%.

Like the Daschle nomination, the Stimulus Package is visibly in serious trouble, and it appears very likely that the Obama Administration will soon demonstrate all over again the hasty retreat which is already becoming recognizable as this administration’s favorite, and most relied upon, political strategy.

Barack Obama made his way upwards to the Senate, his party’s nomination, and the Presidency by a combining an attractive image with studious avoidance of commitment to any controversial position which might expose him to attack.

It was easy to carry water for the democrat party’s ultra-liberal base and special interests, as well as for the Daley machine, while keeping one’s head down, and voting “Present!” on the hottest issues back in the Illinois State Senate. It was even easier to vote with the democrat majority some of the time, and be away campaigning, in the US Senate, when decisions which might cost something needed to be made.

Barack Obama is, as time goes by, going to find it harder to hide in the White House.

He won’t always be able to backtrack quickly, and issue a mildly rueful “I screwed up” press statement to dodge the bullet and get off the hook. In the end, he is going to wind up forced to commit himself one way or another on the big decisions that matter to America and the world. And, when he produces a national or international disaster, humiliation, or defeat, he is not simply going to be able to take it back or smile apologetically to an indulgent press corps, say: “I screwed up,” and get a free pass.

Character counts in leadership, and Barack Obama has made himself a political career by substituting charm for character. The Obama magic mirror, in which admirers can see whatever they want to project upon it, was a great way to get elected, but it is never going to protect its owner for four years.

Fark readers explore the dire possibilities.

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Hat tip to Conservative Grapevine via RightWingNews.

If you wanted to buy a pre-1921 edition of the Royal Geographic Society’s Hints to Travellers Scientific and General, I’m afraid you’d be completely out of luck today. Only a single copy of the 1921 10th edition is on offer at the present time at all. though you can buy it at three different prices, depending on the book search venue chosen: $57.66 (Bibliophile) or $63.70 (Choose) or $72.94 (Amazon UK).

Or you can read it on your PC, right here, for free.

The Archive.org stream isn’t as fast over satellite modem as one would like, but it is surprisingly readable and the user interface is simple and intuitive.

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Hat tip to John Murrell via Karen L. Myers.

Andrew Stuttaford comments on Michael Phelps’s apology for pot smoking.

In the meantime, I merely note that this broken wreck of a man’s failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone’s health—and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko, at Reason Online, offers his own alternative version of Phelps’s letter of apology.

Jonah Goldberg admires the gaping chasm between democrats’ expressed enthusiam for paying taxes and their actual personal behavior in some recent examples in the news.

During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden insisted that paying your taxes is a patriotic duty. No, scratch that. He said that supporting a tax hike was the American thing to do. “It’s time to be patriotic,” he told America’s putative tax slackers. When asked whether he might be questioning the patriotism of people who don’t want higher taxes, Biden, as is his wont, took things to the next rhetorical level. Forget patriotism, insisted Joe, paying higher taxes is a religious obligation.

The man who gave an average of $369 a year to charity over the previous decade fulfills his religious obligations by cutting a tax check — a check he’s required to cut by law.

Now it’s always perilous to take Biden’s statements too seriously, but it does seem eminently fair to say that his comments reflect a common, if not universal, attitude among Democrats. Taxes aren’t a “necessary evil” so much as a joyous affirmation of the possibilities of government and the lifeblood of a more hopeful society. “Taxes are what you pay to be an American” — like “membership fees,” says Democratic language guru George Lakoff.

Victor Davis Hanson observes that, only two weeks into the new Obama Administration, the trainwreck is already well underway.

Some of us have been warning that it was not healthy for the U.S. media to have deified rather than questioned Obama, especially given that they tore apart Bush, ridiculed Palin, and caricatured Hillary. And now we can see the results of their two years of advocacy rather than scrutiny.

We are quite literally after two weeks teetering on an Obama implosion—and with no Dick Morris to bail him out—brought on by messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete that soaring rhetoric and a multiracial profile can add requisite cover to good old-fashioned Chicago politicking.

First, there were the sermons on ethics, belied by the appointments of tax dodgers, crass lobbyists, and wheeler-dealers like Richardson—with the relish of the Blago tapes still to come. (And why does Richardson/Daschle go, but not Geithner?).

Second, was the “stimulus” (the euphemism for “borrow/print money”) that was simply a way to go into debt for a generation to shower Democratic constinuencies with cash.

Then third, there were the inflated lectures on historic foreign policy to be made by the clumsy political novice who trashed his own country and his predecessor in the most ungracious manner overseas to a censured Saudi-run press organ. …

At home, Obama is becoming laughable and laying the groundwork for the greatest conservative populist reaction since the Reagan Revolution.

Abroad, some really creepy people are lining up to test Obama’s world view of “Bush did it/but I am the world”: The North Koreans are readying their missiles; the Iranians are calling us passive, bragging on nukes and satellites; Russia is declaring missile defense is over and the Euros in real need of iffy Russian gas; Pakistanis say no more drone attacks (and then our friends the Indians say “shut up” about Kashmir and the Euros order no more ‘buy American”).

This is quite serious. I can’t recall a similarly disastrous start in a half-century.

Just a bit ironic.

0:31 video

Hat tip to Daniel Lowenstein.