Politickles

British subject BHO Sr

Whether or not Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen may be an interesting question, but it’s not the question at hand. Whether or not he qualifies as a “natural-born citizen” is the subject of dispute. A strict constructionist relying on the original intent of the drafters of the Constitution and the meaning of the term “natural-born” prevailing at the time could not confirm his eligibility to be president.

If Obama is soundly defeated in November, the question of his citizenship status may then seem academic. Resolving it, however, is crucial to the prevention of similar travesties in the future. Surrounding the Obama administration with an aura of illegitimacy also has appeal, as does exposing his witting and unwitting enablers as participants in a massive fraud.

Why not Bean & Teddy?

A new morality is being created and fobbed off on the American people, complete with “enforcers” to “stigmatize” good people who disagree. – National Organization for Marriage

Roughly 3 percent of the population is homosexual, only a small fraction of which has any interest in marriage. Clearly, something else is driving the “gay marriage” movement.

Events of the past dozen years clearly show that America’s adversaries have gained ground in non-military ways. Could the 9/11 terror attacks, high gas prices, market volatility, and the U.S. credit rating downgrade all be linked to the same strategy? –Kevin D. Freeman

Feel free to publish, post, or pass on Your Weekly Politickle by F.R. Duplantier:

CHINESE BANDITS
We are told that our nation’s in debt
And our balance of trade is upset,
But our deficit’s swollen
Because China has stolen
All American goods it could get.

From the archive:

CHINA PATTERN
“We will tar fossil fuels as ‘unclean,’
Promote other resources as ‘green.’
There’s a catch, which, of course, is
That those greener resources
Are controlled by our red war machine.”
(2011)

Last week’s limerick:

GRAVE RESPONSIBILITY
Though his body will surely decay,
A dead Democrat’s ballot may stay:
He moves in with the moles,
But remains on the rolls
And continues to vote anyway.

Mass times and readings

Presidential speechwriters?

Our lesson for today comes from George and Ira Gershwin:

“They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony…”

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang it in the film Shall We Dance? (1937) Seventy-five years on, the president revived it to tap-dance around his rising gas prices and falling approval numbers. – Mark Steyn

Funny Steyn should mention Astaire & Rogers. They — and the Tin Pan Alley lyricists who put words in their mouths — must be Obama’s favorite source for quotes. In his inaugural address, our putative President talked about how the American people must “pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off” and start all over again — lyrics from Swing Time, with Astaire & Rogers! Or could it be that his speech writers are just having fun making a fool of him, knowing how, and why, he suffers from a certain cultural illiteracy?

As Americans, our most precious civil right is our right to vote and to have our vote count. All of our other constitutional rights depend on this.

But today, that right is under siege by forces out to weaken and destroy our ability to hold free and fair elections. If we lose confidence in our electoral process, it will spell the end of America’s 236-year experiment as a self-governing republic. – American Civil Rights Union

See how easy it is!

[C]reativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. – Jonah Lehrer

“Creative Writing.” The term itself is nonsensical — redundant in theory, oxymoronic in practice. Redundant, because in theory any type of writing — from the school essay to the love letter to the crime report to the office memo — can be creative writing, if the writer formulates an original thought and demonstrates some mastery of his native tongue in expressing it. Oxymoronic, because in practice that writing which styles itself creative is, more often than not, hackneyed and poorly constructed. –F.R. Duplantier

Harold Bloom doesn’t get off so easy. The renowned Yale Shakespearean comes in for extended criticism for his pomposity and censoriousness. His book How to Read and Why really ought to have been titled What to Read and What to Think About It, Mr. Jacobs quips, for “the advice of the book as a whole is simply ‘Do as I say and do as I do.’” – Washington Times

One can’t help but suspect that many readers knew what Allan Bloom was going to say before they read his book, The Closing of the American Mind, and that this predictability in fact accounts for its tremendous popularity. – F.R. Duplantier

A search for svdpusa.org on Alexa takes you to an analytics page for growthclimate.com, which is apparently owned by the Arab Bankers of North America. Does this mean that the website for the U.S. national office of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul resides on a domain controlled by ABANA?

The Society has accepted donations from Aramco in the past, but this website connection seems awfully peculiar.