“That’ll teach him to send back my bust!”

Hat tip to Mark Kirsnis.

It is, I think, impossible to identify any historical figure who can equal Barack Obama’s unique and astonishing record of undeserved accomplishment. From the Nobel Peace Prize awarded on no actual basis whatsoever to the Presidency itself, achieved on the record essentially of a presidential campaign piled on top of a totally undistinguished record of non-accomplishment and underachievement as a state senator, Barack Obama has successfully gathered every laurel, won every blue ribbon, been crowned with every honor, without ever actually doing anything to merit any of them.

The latest distinction headed for Barack Obama’s personal trophy case seems particularly incongruous, but who can quarrel with the fates when they are determined on further comedy?

Duffelblog:

The White House Press Office announced today that President Obama will soon be inducted into the Special Forces Association and receive an honorary Green Beret.

Officials have said the honor will be bestowed in an upcoming September 11th ceremony at Fort Bragg.

The honorary beret comes in recognition of the President’s decisive role in covert operations throughout the world during his term — including the killing of Osama bin Laden last year in Pakistan, and his combat action in Afghanistan months ago.

Army Public Affairs has confirmed that Lieutenant General Charles Cleveland will personally present Obama with his beret and a specially engraved Fairbairn-Sykes combat knife.

The knife, traditionally used by elite soldiers world-wide since the beginning of the 20th century, will have the President’s name stamped on the blade, along with the names of deceased Special Forces Medal of Honor recipients Randall Shugart and Gary Gordon, immortalized in the novel and film Black Hawk Down.

The presentation will be in a small but highly anticipated ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center.

Read the whole thing.

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The best reaction came from commenter Tim at American Digest, quoting Bob Dylan’s Tombstone Blues:

John the Baptist, after torturing a thief,
Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief,
Saying, “Tell me great hero, but please make it brief,
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?”

Breitbart:

[W]ord spread rapidly over the weekend among conservative new media outlets that an impromptu “National Empty Chair Day” is being planned for Monday.

It was Bill Jacobson who first proposed that everyone run a picture of an empty chair, and promised that he would run examples forwarded to him. The volume of the response seems to have crashed the Legal Insurrection site, so I can’t forward this to Bill, but here goes anyway.

The picture comes from Clarice Feldman.

Janet Daily, in the British Telegraph, recognizes that America is having the kind of election that European countries are incapable of having: an election in which one party is proposing to face economic reality.

Whatever the outcome of the American presidential election, one thing is certain: the fighting of it will be the most significant political event of the decade. Last week’s Republican national convention sharpened what had been until then only a vague, inchoate theme: this campaign is going to consist of the debate that all Western democratic countries should be engaging in, but which only the United States has the nerve to undertake. The question that will demand an answer lies at the heart of the economic crisis from which the West seems unable to recover. It is so profoundly threatening to the governing consensus of Britain and Europe as to be virtually unutterable here, so we shall have to rely on the robustness of the US political class to make the running.

What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect. The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union.

Or else democratically elected governments can be replaced by puppet austerity regimes which are free to ignore the protests of the populace when they are deprived of their promised entitlements. You can, in other words, decide to debauch the currency which underwrites the market economy, or you can dispense with democracy. Both of these possible solutions are currently being tried in the European Union, whose leaders are reduced to talking sinister gibberish in order to evade the obvious conclusion: the myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished. This is the defining political problem of the early 21st century.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Hat tip to Jose Guardia.

Chaucer’s monk did not subscribe to the work ethic. He preferred hunting:

What sholde he studie and make hymselven wood,
Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure,
Or swynken with his handes, and laboure,
As austyn bit? how shal the world be served?
Lat austyn have his swynk to hym reserved!

–Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 184-188.

William Deresiewicz, in the American Scholar, contemplates the meritocratic cult of work… before downing tools and knocking off for Labor Day.

Go to a dinner party—especially, say, of young professionals—and you’re apt to find yourself in a game of competitive sleep deprivation. “I can barely get six hours a night.” “Six hours! I’m lucky if I can manage five!” Sleeplessness, of course, is a proxy here for work. This one’s in the office until 10. That one “complains” that he never gets a weekend off. Sixty, 70, 80 hours a week. Doctors duel with architects; lawyers square off against bankers; academics aren’t to be denied; businessmen insist they have it worst of all. Each is secretly proud of her predicament.

To every age its virtue. For the Greeks, courage; the Romans, duty; the Middle Ages, piety. Our virtue is industriousness, in the industrial age. (It is one that would have been incomprehensible to other times. The Greeks had a word for people who worked harder than anyone else: slaves.) It is the Protestant ethic, in other words, made general by the Victorians as the factories rose. That it is a virtue, not merely a value, is proved by the aura of righteousness that surrounds it. A virtue is not just a personal excellence, it is something that is felt to call down blessings upon the community, that wins the gods’ approval, that possesses not just practical but metaphysical worth. We’re in a panic, as a nation, that we don’t work hard enough, and blame this iniquity for our “decline.” God—the one who blesses America—is withdrawing his favor. Hence the sanctimoniousness with which the topic of work is approached. If you don’t work as hard as people think you should, you’re not just morally inferior, you’re committing a kind of spiritual treason. And if you deny the value of work as a matter of principle, you’re treated like a heretic.

Hat tip to Daily Beast.

A moving and nostalgic video which adds a musical background to 19th century hand-colored sketches of palaces and manor-houses in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (today’s Lithuania and Belarus) by the artist Napoleon Orda. Orda’s drawings record the romantic architecture of an aristocratic world swept out of existence by Revolutionary violence and totalitarianism.

The “Eastern Borderlands” is a translation of the Polish word kresy.

More interesting than any mere ordinary presidential campaign is Geoff Micks‘s theoretical question:

In a mass knife fight to the death between every American President, who would win and why?

Micks gives each president a lousy mass-produced, tactical-styled Gerber LRH. I think it would be more considerate to give them something a little better. My choice is the Randall Number 1 — All Purpose Fighting Knife. Each president can select his preferred blade length from 5 to 8″.

I don’t think Micks is far off on his analysis of the odds.

I think, though, that George Washington may have a better chance than Micks supposes. Washington was a large, powerful, and physically graceful man, and he was notoriously aggressive by temperament. After all, as a young lieutenant, George Washington essentially singlehandedly started the French and Indian War.

Teddy Roosevelt was game, and I think he would have made a spirited effort, hurrying into the fight, but let’s face it, Teddy was a four-eyed rich boy who went to Harvard. He was fine at shooting lions and bears, but it’s not certain that TR ever actually killed anybody.

The obvious truth is, in the history of the American presidency, only one stone cold killer has ever occupied the Oval Office. The number of duels fought by Andrew “By God” Jackson varies in different accounts. Some authorities claim he fought 13 times. There is no doubt at all, though, that Andrew Jackson, after first taking a bullet, shot Charles Dickinson dead in 1806, observing afterwards that “If he had shot me through the brain, I would still have killed him.”

Andrew Jackson survived the first assassination attempt on an American president, and actually subdued and arrested his own assailant. Some accounts say that Jackson produced a pair of pistols out of his pockets. Others claim that Jackson beat the would-be assassin into unconsciousness with his cane.

On his death bed, Jackson reportedly remarked: “I have only two regrets: I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.”

It seems to me that with respect to readiness to fight, competence, and iron resolution, not even Washington could hope to compete with Old Hickory.

Andrew Jackson

Hat tip to Troy Senik.