The Innermost Doll of Failure (Palin, Boehner, Obama, Merkel, al-Qaeda and Putin)

PJ Media's Belmont Club ^ | July 10, 2014 | Richard Fernandez

[2ndDivisionVet]

A farmer in Boise, Idaho once compared the attack methods of a pack of wolves and a mountain lion.

Mountain lions or cougars have the reputation of killing with efficiency and, if there are such things in the high desert food chain, some mercy and grace. The big cats keep bloodshed to a minimum and they kill quickly.

Wolves employ far sloppier methods in their hunts. A cow might take her last breath of air amid a scene of flattened brush, trampled ground, drag marks and smears of blood–lots of blood. Nadeau calls such scenes “struggle sites.” These sites can stretch hundreds of yards–a seasoned crime scene investigator might call the scene “gruesome” and the cause of death “brutal….

“They’re not trying to kill it, they’re trying to eat it,” Deb Lord says of the wolves’ attack methods, which often leave their victims partially consumed before they finally die of blood loss or violent injuries.

One thing wolves do is circle the victim. “Wolves would usually approach from downwind. Both to scent the animal and probably to prevent their scent from being carried to their prey. Suspicious and cautious by nature, this will usually entail some circling and observation, but at a distance.”

Where the animal is unable to flee, is either tied grazing, in a fenced area or in the case of the deer floundering in deep snow … I have seen them circle quite close to the animal (within a few meters).

I believe they just do this to assess the risk. Is the animal really helpless, does whatever has caused the animal to be unable to flee pose a risk to the hunter.

Just a basic cautious assessment, because they are able to do so, whereas with a fleeing animal they cannot take the time. The animal would be out of reach by the time they assessed the risk.

This comparison suggests itself in politics after Sarah Palin was reported as advocating the impeachment of president Obama while John Boehner chose to lead his pack of wolves in filing a lawsuit. The Voice of America reports:

And you thought you’d heard the last from Sarah Palin? Not so fast! The former Alaska governor is back on the national stage, leading a new conservative charge to impeach President Barack Obama. …

In a recent column, Palin cited the immigration crisis on the southern border as the “last straw” in what she described as the president’s “purposeful dereliction of duty.” Palin wrote on the conservative website Breitbart.com that the president’s “rewarding of lawlessness, including his own, is the foundational problem here.” She went on: “It’s time to impeach, and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.”

Boehner is warier. As the Washington Post reports, the speaker has decided to sue the president, as if he believed his political quarry to be still dangerous. The lawsuit is less confrontational. Boehner aims to do some circling.

Former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Tuesday joined a growing chorus of Republicans calling for the impeachment of Obama, writing in an op-ed that the influx of young illegal immigrants over the southern border “is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, ‘no mas.’”

“I disagree,” Boehner said when asked by reporters Wednesday morning. When a reporter pointed out that some House Republicans also are calling for impeachment, Boehner said again: “I disagree.”

Boehner’s comments came after Palin said Tuesday night on Fox News that the speaker’s planned lawsuit against Obama over his use of executive power is a weak maneuver. “You don’t bring a lawsuit to a gunfight,” she said. “There’s no place for lawyers on the front lines.”

Even so the speaker has begun the slow stalk. MSNBC reports that “Speaker John Boehner has released a bill that would authorize him to sue the White House over its implementation of the Affordable Care Act.”

“The current president believes he has the power to make his own laws – at times even boasting about it,” Boehner said in a statement Thursday. “He has said that if Congress won’t make the laws he wants, he’ll go ahead and make them himself, and in the case of the employer mandate in his health care law, that’s exactly what he did.”…

“In 2013, the president changed the health care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it,” Boehner said. “That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own.”

There: he’s done it. No mention of immigration though, the speaker is saving that for a separate context. For now though he’s chimed in in a roundabout kind of way about the situation on the border.

Earlier Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner erupted in anger over what he called Obama’s lack of leadership on the issue, telling reporters that “this is a problem of the President’s own making.” “He’s been President for five and a half years,” the Ohio Republican thundered. “When is he going to take responsibility for something?”

However slow the circling, the Daily Beast is thunderstruck that it’s begun at all.

Well, this is really happening. Speaker of the House John Boehner asked his chamber to authorize taking President Obama to court. The draft resolution alleges that Obama changed the Affordable Care Act, a law, without Congress voting. “No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own,” Boehner said in a statement. (Obama delayed the employer mandate for insurance one year.) Next Wednesday, the House Rules Committee will hold its first hearing on the resolution, deciding whether or not to authorize a lawsuit. Earlier on Thursday, Obama addressed the GOP members calling for the suit at an event in Texas: “Really? Really? For what? You’re going to sue me for doing my job?”

Yes it’s started. After the wolves come the vultures. Just now CNN, citing Reuters, reports that Germany has just expelled the CIA chief of station. “Germany told the CIA station chief in Berlin to leave the country on Thursday in a dramatic display of anger from Chancellor Angela Merkel at the behaviour of a close ally after officials unearthed two suspected U.S. spies.” This happens only days after Bahrain expelled an assistant secretary of state, Tom Malinowski. The BBC reports:

A US diplomat has been ordered to leave Bahrain after meeting members of a leading Shia opposition group, say Bahrain officials.

Tom Malinowski, US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, went to Bahrain on Sunday.

While there, he met members of al-Wefaq, a move which the foreign ministry of Bahrain says intervened in the country’s domestic affairs.

Germany’s action reflect the fact that Obama’s been silently impeached as Leader of the Free World. Obama wanted America to be treated like “normal country” — well he got it. Earth to Obama: this also means you are just a normal man: the Lightworker Halo has been turned off. Recently Merkel has been acting like she’s the new leader of the West. But then Germany is a greater power and her ambitions are understandable. When Bahrain starts reading Obama the riot act, you wonder if it’s buzzard time.

So far, as Bryan Preston notes, Obama has been laughing it off. Laughing off the IRS, NSA, Benghazi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Obamacare and border scandals. Ha-ha-ha. Ho-ho-ho. Preston has a remarkable series of photographs showing the president just cracking up before a grim faced governor Rick Perry.

Out in the dark the howling starts. Awoooo.

But the real news isn’t the proposal of Palin, but Boehner. Boehner would never go in the water unless he was reasonably sure it was safe. If he and his merry lupine band are circling, it’s only because they smell weakness. They can taste the fear. Wolves have a developed temporal sense. They know that the prey’s status changes from hour to hour; it may still be strong now, but is it weakening. Awooooo.

The unfortunate truth is that, like a set of Matryoshka dolls, the scenario is repeated recursively. In the outermost doll level al-Qaeda, Isis, Putin and China are stalking America. Further on in unemployment is haunting the average man. And so on. Obama is merely the innermost doll of failure. The only question is which level of doll the wolves get first. The president’s blunders have endangered not just his political life, but perhaps the actual lives of individual people throughout the world.

If he could stop laughing for a moment maybe he’d see that.

[Fungi]

One worthless article. Don't waste your time. He goes around in circles and never bothered checking grammar and syntax. Hey, my responses are not perfect, but if I wrote for PJ Media, I would at least have the grammar right.

[Jim from C-Town]

He also never had a conclusion as to which strategy would be better. Beside his analogies where crappy.

Boehner is hardly a wolf. More like a whelp puppy.

What he really is, is an unconscionable drunken lush in way over his head.

[Hootowl99]

Richard Fernandez has a unique way to him. Much respect do I give to his opinions.

[Fungi]

Agreed. Bonehead Boehner needs a course in public speaking, as well as a lead spinal implant. René Lévesque of Canada was known for that. He had a spine of lead and never gave an inch.

[Biggirl]

Remember, wolves are in the dog family that is why.

[Biggirl]

“Recently Merkel has been acting like she’s the new leader of the West. But then Germany is a greater power and her ambitions are understandable.”

Maybe the writer senses that Germany will take the “World Cup” chamipionship also this weekend.

[Biggirl]

More or less it will be the conservatives including the Tea Party that will have the spine.

[VerySadAmerican]

If Boner believes Obama can’t make his own laws, yet made his own laws, then why doesn’t Boner point out that those laws made by Obama aren’t valid and don’t have to be followed.

If just one large corporation would say “That part of the law was made up by Obama and is not valid. We will not follow it.” Then let the government take them to court. I’d bet they’d back down.

[CharlesOConnell]

When Chesterton's brother Cecil wrote The Party System with Hilaire Belloc, the skullduggery of the Roundtable, (based on the Cecil Rhodes fortune) was at high pitch, having its way with the whore of British government high in the rarified precincts of the plutocratic penthouse. Chesterton himself wrote about it, using the character of Horne Fisher, in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922).

This was only a decade before the beginning of the overthrow of the House of Morgan by the House of Rockefeller, with Glass Steagall (1933).

The problem with our Whore of State now is that her old masters have passed on, without passing on the inheritance necessary to maintain control. She doesn't know who her new Daddy Warbucks is, or even if she's so had out that no one will have her.

Power is being transferred on a new scale to as yet incompletely coalesced forces, the gutting American industry is nearly complete, the military larger than the next 10 militaries is just waiting to fall over in its final death agony, then the new coalition can take over.

It's in this context that you have the Palace Eunuchs, the Clintons and Obamas, strapping on the dildos of power, as if they were real forces in themselves.

Democrat Clinton-Impeachment Prosecutor David Schippers told the truth, that it was the Senate GOP Leadership who forbade going after Clinton for the majority of high crimes and misdemeanors on which he certainly could have been prosecuted and imprisoned, sealing 90% of the charges for 50 years (probably beyond).

The Grand Eunuchs of the Senate GOP Leadership can only whine and hold themselves where their manhood used to be, while they wink and blink at Obama's fire sale, at the end stage of what was the greatest political experiment ever dreamed of by mankind.

[Cap Huff]

I have tremendous respect for Richard Fernandez. He turns out two or three well thought out essays every week. Some are better than others, but I never find him to be a waste of time.

Generally his essays are more than stand alone pieces of prose. Not only are there links to further articles of interest, much of the real value of his site is the debate and commentary in the comments section. There are some very articulate and knowledgable people posting comments over there. His posts are in most regards a starting point and vehicle for informed comment and debate.

In this case, I have noted that a fair number of commenters disagree with Wretchard’s analysis. He is not a fool, and fortunately his correspondents do not comment as though he were without value. I think Wretchard’s use of analogies is brilliant, but like any analogy, there are limits -— and many of the comments there are pointing out those limits.

[Jack Hammer]

Ten paragraphs to come to the point.

Is the writer penning an article or a novel?

[miss marmelstein]

You can't use wolves, lions AND Russian dolls in the same metaphor.

[yldstrk]

Sorry, you didn’t read the article thoughtfully, this is a great article.

Bama doesn’t understand that holding the office of president is apparent authority, but actual authority is when the people support you; he has none of this. His support has dwindled to peanuts, Merkel and Bahrain have fired him. Boehner smells weakness (takes one to know one).

This elegant article explains it with two allegories, matroishka dolls and wolves circling. Read it again.

[Jabba the Nutt]

Buuwaahahahah! Yup, Boehner’s a wolf just circling before the kill. Of course, he has to get off the tanning bed and bar first.

[Cringing Negativism Network]

I agree.

Good article.