An atheist I could vote for

Two Months Late

The Persians have a secret to share:

Iran’s Basij Press is claiming that a version of the Gospel of Barnabas, found in 2000, will prove that Islam is the final and righteous religion and the revelation will cause the collapse worldwide of Christianity...This version of the Barnabas Gospel was written in the 5th or 6th century and it predicted the coming of the Prophet Mohammad and the religion of Islam, the Basij Press claims. 

Surely they would not make anything this important up out of whole cloth...

The funny thing here is not that Muslims made up a 'gospel' that points to their prophet. Hell, even the Mormons are competent enough to do that.  The funny thing that that they apparently believe that Christians have heard of Barnabas.  If the Gospel of Thomas kerfuffle was here and gone in a fortnight, and if Jesus' own tomb, complete with a $6m budget, barely lasted a month, why should an obviously fraudulent document named for a guy 90% of Christians couldn't pick out of a police lineup (even if the only other guy in it was Tim Tebow) make any dent at all? At least be clever enough to name it after Peter or Andrew.  Besides, it's not Easter season. Everybody knows that Christianity needs to be debunked at Christmas and at Easter. The rest of the year, relatively few pay it any mind at all. 

Now obviously it's just propaganda, not for Christians but for Muslims who are being exposed to the claims of Christ, possibly for the first time, a wholly-predictable result of the technology the Imams cannot suppress. But I do wonder if they really think it will be effective or if their game is so weak that this is really the best they can do to keep the Creator of the World in check. If it's the latter, Islam may die in the Middle East faster than Christianity died in the West. Even without the Gospel of Barnabas.

The Source

is Obama:

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation... His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.

Thus reads  Obama's bio as published in 1991 by the literary agent who was hawking his book. That agent, of course, has taken ownership of the error:

"This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me--an agency assistant at the time," Goderich wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News.

But it does beg the question of the origin of the fact she failed to check*.  It is quite unlikely that an agency assistant would insert a birthplace, especially one outside the US, without checking with the author.  In fact, it is highly unlikely that she is the source of any of the facts in the bio. Agency assistants don't generally do independent research on people when the answers are a phone call away, and there is no way one can imagine this went to press without a final draft being presented to the author himself. The most likely person to have supplied those facts is therefore the person probably most responsible for the persistent rumors that the president was born overseas: Barack Obama himself.

But why would he do such a thing?  Because being born overseas makes him sound much more exotic than he actually is, and therefore more likely to sell his book. Sometimes, when all the conspiracies are exploded, the truth is too mundane to have been seen from the beginning.

* an error which persisted for a decade and a half, and is therefore not an error but a purposeful incorrect statement, known in the vernacular as a lie.

Did you know?

Obama lets us in on a little secret:

Did you know? 

In 1973, Richard Nixon created The President’s Export Council, which was expanded and reconstituted under President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Today the PEC continues to work towards reaching President Obama’s goal of doubling the nation’s exports by 2014’s end. 

The man is far too modest. In adding campaign talking points to the biography pages of nearly every president of the 20th century, Obama, in his usual self-deprecating style, skipped over the far move momentous accomplishments of the greatest president* ever to preside over the greatest nation on earth**. Some of Obama's more noteworthy 18th and 19th century accomplishments in the presidential arena surely should have been included:

Did you know?

• In 1776, Obama crossed the Delaware River in less than 1/3 of the time it took George Washington. Walking across the water.
• In 1803, Obama convinced Napoleon to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States for beads, cloth, and trinkets worth 60 Dutch guilders, or just under $24. Only Obama's superhuman modesty kept the transaction from being known forever as the Obamiana Purchase.
• In 1814, it was Obama's idea to use an alligator as a cannon to win the Battle of New Orleans.
• In 1863, Obama wrote Dreams from my Father on the back of an envelope while traveling by train to Hawaii.

These are well-documented historical facts that the next generation will never know because the President is too modest to share his accomplishments with the world. Please, please write President Obama today and tell him we don't want to hear about budgets or wars or the Supreme Court.  I mean, booooooo-ring.  We want to hear him talk more about himself.

 * not to mention the greatest writer since Julius Caesar.
 ** Pretty much be definition.  We are the greatest nation on earth because we have such a great president.

Less than an echo

Boston Daily notes that change repetition is a-coming our way:

That [former Massachusetts Governor Deval] Patrick’s prose was so easily borrowed by the president made sense. They share Chicago roots, have common advisers, and are friends. Now that Patrick has been appointed as cochair of Obama’s reelection campaign, you’ll likely hear more of his words on the trail. Here are a few more Patrick gems that Obama might consider cribbing...

What follows is a bunch of Patrick quotes that BD thinks might help Obama on the campaign trail. They won't. Obama can* speak exactly the same words as Deval Patrick, yet he will still be no Deval Patrick. 

That's one of the funniest things about Obama's minions - they insist that he is this great orator. He's not, and seeing him side-by-side with a great orator, speaking the very same words, just demonstrates how poor a speaker he actually is, even when he has his teleprompter to tell him what to say:



* and often does. Though it's not plagiarism so long as the media ignores it.

Is that an AARP card in your pocket

Or are you just happy to see me?

I am a strong and confident 54-year-old woman who can take care of every aspect of a home. I can fix things, mow the grass, etc. I want a man who is also confident and strong, but I always end up with guys who are very clingy which I don’t like. I want a man who is going to be the man in the bedroom — not someone who wants to cuddle and have me do all the work. I am also very confident in the bedroom and can be very sexy and, yes, I can tell them what I want and need. How come I get these guys who have to have a road map to decide which way to turn or how fast they have to go? In other words I need a man who knows how to drive and how fast or slow to go and can do sharp turns and race up hills. I always end up with these guys who are the exact opposite. I ask them if I intimidate them and they say no. Are they lying?
— Strong and Confident

I'm sure hilarity ensued, though I didn't bother to read Wendy's response which, since it's woman to woman, is probably meant to assuage the writer's hurt feelings rather than to solve her problem. But be that as it may, I'll be happy to answer the questions.

First of all, the strong confident men are either at home with their wives or shagging someone half your age.* Since nearly all women want a strong and confident man, those men have their choice of women. They are not particularly interested in a senior citizen who can mow the grass. That's what we have kids for.

As for reasons why you attract the kinds of guys you do, the answer is two-fold. First of all, it's important to realize that the only thing all of your failed relationships have in common is you. You have that wimp between your legs because you brought him home. The second reason is that this is what feminists have been telling guys that women wanted for years. They want a guy who's sensitive, they want a guy who appreciates their strength. Women created guys who do all that** and now they appear unhappy with the results. Well, tough.

The sad, feminist-myth-busting truth is that strong, confident guys are not intimidated by you or your epic lawn-mowing, storm drain-cleaning abilities. How could they be? They haven't the faintest idea that you exist at all.

* or both.
** Guys who by definition are neither strong nor confident. A strong man is not impressed by your strength, nor a confident one by your confidence. Show me a man attracted by both and I'll show you a man who possesses neither.

Priorities

Liberalism causes stupidity

It's not really a new concept, nor is it one that would surprise even the most casual observer of politics and culture, but in the midst of a howlingly funny piece written for clueless liberals, a liberal accidentally reveals why liberalism is constantly followed by idiocy:

When secular liberals vote, they think about the outcome of a political choice. They think about consequences. Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad outcomes.

It sounds good, right?  Liberals think about consequences.  The problem is that they *don't* think about consequences, or rather, liberals are pool players who think about only where the cue ball goes - they do not consider what will happen when it hits another ball, nor what those balls will do.

Here's what I mean.  When liberals want ordinary behavior "to have fewer bad outcomes," they are talking about a specific kind of behavior without really thinking about it. What kind of behavior has bad outcomes?  Foolish behavior, almost by definition.  Wise behavior is wise because it has good outcomes, and those good outcomes are the reward for acting wisely.  Foolish behavior is foolish because it has bad outcomes, and those bad outcomes often act as a deterrent from acting foolishly. If we are going to learn to do things better as individuals and as a species - if we are going to *cough* progress - then feedback on our behavior is one of the ways the Universe tells us how to do that. That huge lump on your head says, "Don't hit yourself in the head with a hammer." That pink slip tells you, "Don't smoke pot before you go to work."

Liberals purposely break that feedback loop.  I've said before that people don't actually want change.  What they want is to do the same things and get different results.  They want to be able to do the foolish things without suffering the natural consequences of them.  Foolish is fun.  It's a lot more fun to lie around all day than to go to work. It's a lot more fun to buy a new car today than to save for one tomorrow.  It's a lot more fun to screw anything that moves than to be faithful to one's spouse.  But all of those things have negative feedback mechanisms that limit them, from pink slips to bankruptcy to AIDS.  When liberals promote "fewer bad outcomes," they are not promoting the good behavior which would naturally result in that. They are removing the suppressants of bad behavior. And when you remove that which suppresses bad behavior, foolish behavior, mind-bogglingly stupid behavior, you get more of it.

Buh bye

We knew ya too well:

Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana lost his re-election bid in the state's Republican primary Tuesday, ending the 36-year career of a GOP elder statesman and handing the Tea Party movement its biggest upset victory so far in the 2012 elections.

It was a good day.

National Treasure

Dana Milbanks reminds us why Joe Biden is the best vice president ever:

The gaffe-prone vice president had been relatively on message for months. But on Sunday, he referred to the likely Republican presidential nominee as “President Romney” and to his own boss as “President Clinton.” And he inadvertently set off a frenzy on same-sex marriage, not because his position was surprising but because it made Obama’s look all the more absurd. 

Biden is freaking awesome. He's not "gaffe-prone" any more than Michael Phelps is "swimming-prone" or Adrian Peterson is "touchdown-prone." He's a gaffe machine, created especially by God to demonstrate to fallen humanity that perfection of a craft is possible in this world. He is the Bobby Fischer of the verbal miscue, the Alexander the Great of the Freudian slip, the Leonardo Da Vinci of the solecism, and the George Washington of the faux pas rolled into one man.  There will never be another Joe Biden.

That's why we must keep him forever. I am calling on Congress today to do two things that will preserve this national treasure for future generations. The first is to pass a Constitutional amendment that will make Biden the Vice President in perpetuity, while making the Speaker of the House second in the line of Presidential succession.  That way we can keep Biden on Sunday morning TV forever but not worry that he'll ever have any power.

The second is trickier and more troublesome, I'm afraid.  We need to fund a program that will place Biden's jaws, lungs, lips, and voicebox on permanent life support should the man have the poor taste to die in this new, permanent office. That way he will still be able to make pronouncements that will bring laughter and joy to our children's children's children.  But the program need not be overly complex, because the one thing they will not need to keep alive is Biden's brain.  It ought to be clear by now that that particular organ has nothing to do with what he says.