“From Lincoln to Obama,” CNN headlined one of its stories during the early days of euphoria over the new president. Obama encouraged the comparison, tossing out such modest asides as Lincoln made “my story possible.” For others, Obama loomed even larger than Lincoln. He was a “Lightworker,” as San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford put it in 2008, “that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet , of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.”
You might have to try hard to suppress the laughter that will surely begin to bubble over as you read the latest about 58 year old Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin. Putin is allegedly trying to show off his physical prowess by partaking in a strongman competition at a pro-Kremlin youth camp where he attempted to scale an alpinist climbing wall without safety gear, partake in an arm-wrestling match with a fellow nearly twice his size and bend a frying pan with his bare hands. He was reportedly unsuccessful with the latter. What’s more, the chino-clad Russian PM tried to sound tough too, reportedly calling the U.S. a parasite on the global economy. The Telegraph gives us more into the ludicrous: The 58-year-old Russian prime minister put in his latest display of physical prowess at a Kremlin youth camp 230 miles northwest of Moscow in front of thousands of patriotic young Russians who are encouraged by organisers each year to put the strongman politician on a pedestal. Dressed in chinos and a light-coloured striped shirt, Mr Putin talked tough too, calling the United States a parasite on the global economy. But it was his physical feats that seemed to wow his young audience more than anything. Photographs of the event, which took place on Monday, showed Mr Putin trying to crush a frying pan with his bare hands as young admirers looked on. It is not clear whether he succeeded. Another image of a man many Russians regard as the father of the nation showed him shimmying up an artificial climbing wall spider man-style without a safety harness or helmet. Mr Putin leapt off the wall before reaching the top, jokingly muttering something about cowardice. Other images showed he had adjudicated an arm wrestling contest between two young men, taken part in a contest himself, and looked on as a weight lifter balanced a barbell loaded with heavy weight plates on his back. But Putin’s attention-seeking antics might be an omen of what’s in store for the PM as many speculate he will contest a presidential election next March. And if a campaign video released by the ruling United Russia party this week called “We are building a new Russia. V. Putin” is any indication, Putin may very well be considering it. The campaign video, by the way, reportedly casts Putin as the architect of a most awe-inspiring post-Soviet renaissance. But the Telegraph tell us more: He has also emerged as the key figure in a new political movement called the All-Russian People’s Front whose stated aim is to revitalise the flagging fortunes of the ruling party. Young female supporters have done their bit for his publicity campaign too with bikini-clad young girls organising a free car wash in Moscow in his honour. Meanwhile, an affiliated young female fan group, calling itself “the Army of Putin,” has released a raunchy video challenging girls to rip off their tops or lay into his critics in a show of support. It is a story filled with narcissism and perhaps a touch of the bizarre. Watch the video below: Read the rest here: Why is Vladimir Putin Arm Wrestling and Trying to Bend a Frying Pan?
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Why is Vladimir Putin Arm Wrestling and Trying to Bend a Frying Pan?
The Justice Department’s effort to contain the Operation Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal is crumbling. Members of Congress are demanding full disclosure regarding the bizarre scheme to funnel guns to Mexican drug cartels, supposedly to help sniff out the higher-level bad guys. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. isn’t helping …
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EDITORIAL: Too fast, too furious
As our esteemed editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., has recently pointed out, in the course of announcing the death of liberalism, “the condition of our political discourse” today is not just “rancorous” or “toxic” — as so many are wont to complain it is and as, more or less, it always has been — but “worse than that. It is nonexistent.” His prime example is the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, one of three men to have won Nobel Prizes, the other two being Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, for not being George W. Bush — which would seem to be a greater distinction for President Bush than it is for any of them. Lately, Professor Krugman has been training his sights on Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, whose proposals for eliminating the alarmingly large and seemingly perpetual deficit between federal outgoings and federal incomings the Professor regards with Olympian contempt. The congressman is not just wrong, in his view, but so wrong that he must be either knave or fool to persist in such wrongness. So wrong that he (and those of us who think like him) are not worth the Professor’s arguing or engaging with, or even speaking to over a friendly luncheon repast. So wrong that, having made a spectacle of himself only three months previously by falsely blaming Republican incivility for the mayhem wrought in Tucson, Arizona, by a clearly deranged young man, the Professor was now himself crying “let’s not be civil” to Republicans. Yet I think it would be a mistake to laugh at this Nobel Prize-winning economist as much as he deserves to be laughed at, since he stands for the broader trend that Mr. Tyrrell was indicating and that shows up more and more frequently not only on the op-ed pages of our major newspapers but wherever political dialogue would once have been expected to be carried on in a seemly and rational fashion: the trend, that is, to treat those with whom we disagree not just as intellectually but as morally befuddled. Thus, to cite just a few random examples, one columnist tells us that “the only possible humane response” to the terrorist prison at Guantanamo is the left-wing obsession with closing it down. Another insists that Robert E. Lee, a man who for more than a century has been much admired by friend and foe alike, “cannot be admired.” A prominent law firm with no scruples about defending terrorists withdraws from the defense of the Defense of Marriage Act for fear of being stigmatized and boycotted by the Puritans of the New Decency who consider marriage as it has been, minimally, understood since pre-historic times as “un-American” and, forsooth, “indefensible.” Where do these strange and frightening certainties come from? Why do we emulate such rhetorical totalitarians today rather than those who are merely blessed with facility in reasoning or felicity in phrasing? In a handsome tribute to his friend Christopher Hitchens in the Guardian , Martin Amis recently wrote that he “is one of the most terrifying rhetoricians that the world has yet seen. Lenin used to boast that his objective, in debate, was not rebuttal and then refutation: it was the ‘destruction’ of his interlocutor. This isn’t Christopher’s policy — but it is his practice.” Fortunately, the rest of the article does not bear out this bizarre and characteristically hyperbolical compliment. Mr. Hitchens, at least on Mr. Amis’s own showing, turns out only to be a wit — which ought to be plenty enough for anyone engaged as a public controversialist — and not a Lenin after all. Yet Mr. Amis has put his finger on the sort of rhetorical style that is now most prized among our rhetoricians, who may not reduce their opponents to nullity but often act as if they have done so. In their own mind they are triumphant because, in a sense, the debate (such as it is) has taken place only in their own mind in the first place. What they have answered is not their opponents’ actual beliefs but what they have, by paraphrase and analogy, pretended they believe. In short, reality itself has become multiple and proprietary. It’s now “my reality” or “your reality.” Instead of meaning “what we can agree on” the word has now come to mean “what I think” — since there is presumptively no longer anything, or anything important, that we can agree on. Nowadays, our critics, columnists, and pundits can no longer be content merely to offer us their opinions. They insist on laying down the law. What they think is now what we — at least if we are decent and reasonably intelligent people — must think as well, and not to think as they think is therefore tantamount to classing ourselves with the venal or the idiotic. In effect, they become propagandists for their version of reality, which is like the reality that we all used to share but with the characteristic distortions and distensions of ideology. IN
In a recent interview, Donald Trump gave a crass reason why voters should go for him rather than Mitt Romney — “the Donald” has “a much, much bigger net worth” than the mogul from Massachusetts.
