Author Archives: Bok
Mickey Mouse VA
VA Secretary Bob McDonald is ok with long lines.
“When you go to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what’s important?” “What’s important is what’s your satisfaction with the experience?”
When it comes to the government Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ, thinks the experience is mostly Mickey Mouse.
Feeling the Bern in Venezuela
Hugo Chavez used to give heating oil to poor Americans through Joe Kennedy’s Citizen’s Energy Corp. Now the mayor of Caracas tweets that Venezuelans are hunting cats and dogs for dinner.
Regular blackouts shut down hospital respirators for hours in Venezuela according to the NYT. Glenn Reyonolds, at USA Today, says socialism doesn’t help poor people. It creates them.
The Bern in Venezuela
Bernie Sanders says he’s for Denmark style socialism. Danes aren’t pleased. T.D. Tuccille, in Reason, quotes Bernie Sanders giving a shoutout to Socialism’s ability to make people equally poor:
“Sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing,” Sanders told interviewers in 1985. “In other countries people don’t line up for food; the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
The Venezuelan elite aren’t eating their pets. Chavez’s daughter is believed to have a net worth in the billions.
Ben Rhodes
Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security advisor, claims to have a mind meld with President Obama. He says, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Barack Obama ends.”
Somewhere after Obama ends and Rhodes begins, he claims to have manipulated the media to advance the administration’s narrative of the Iran deal.
The 38 year old aspiring novelist, with no national security experience, bragged that the White House press corp is young, inexperienced, and easily fooled.
Eli Lake at Bloomberg View say the narrative on the Iran deal began long before Rhodes got into the act.
Not Never Trump
It’s not always Never Trump for Republican elites. Some of the leadership is coming around to The Donald. “It’s a pretty simple calculus: do you want to win or do you want to lose?,” according one operative quoted in Politico.
Superdelegates
The idea for this one crept into my head while I was reading the NYT story by David Samuels about “Obama’s foreign policy guru” Ben Rhodes.
Rhodes bragged about planting a false narrative about the Iran nuclear deal to make the agreement seem more palatable to the American public. He claimed that the election of Iranian moderates is what sparked the deal. In reality President Obama sparked the deal by reaching out to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei long before that.
I was mulling over that little subterfuge when Bernie Sanders popped up on the television screen (I was multitasking), complaining again about the rigged Democratic primary.
The Economist explains here how the Ayatollah picks the candidates in Iran. Law/Street explains here how superdelegates pick candidates in America.
