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And I thought we had seen everything:

The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself.

Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.

Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.

Obama hasn’t done anything to deserve it. He hasn’t had time, and the time he’s had hasn’t been very productive.

The only rational explanation for this is that someone has dispatched visitors to the committee with suitcases stuffed with 500 Euro notes.  The 500 Euro note makes major cash transactions easier than the usual US$100 note, and the Euro has been on the rise against the US$ for some time.

My crosstown senator Bob Corker is well advised to use caution here, re the decision whether to expand our troop commitment to Afghanistan:

In Congress, members from both parties are expressing hesitation. Republicans are mostly playing it safe. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee told NEWSWEEK he’s reserving judgment until he hears how troop levels fit with the president’s overall strategy in Afghanistan. Perhaps sensing Obama’s proclivity for choosing a middle path, Republicans like Corker, along with McCain and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who will both likely support a troop surge, are warning against “half measures,” like committing to a modest troop increase. Graham told NEWSWEEK that’s “the worst of all worlds … Either give the general what he needs or get out. There’s no in between for me.” That dichotomy is precisely the “straw man” Obama cautioned against in his meeting with congressional leaders yesterday.

I’d also add that Corker’s home state–Tennessee–furnishes a disproportionate number of those who go over to fight and come home in coffins.  The Blue State government is effectively defended by Red State blood, and how long that state of affairs will go on undisturbed is an open question.

I’m not convinced that there’s a good reason to continue here, either at at high state or at a mediocre state (which would be the worst option of all.)  More to the point, I’m not sure that an Ivy League, secular, process driven elite is prepared to effectively deal with a tribal, nepotistic, and religious country like Afghanistan.  That’s asymmetrical warfare at its highest, and it’s one that those in the driver’s seat in the U.S. can’t quite get their arms around.

While I seem to be on a roll on this subject of Barack Obama, let me take up something I received in one of those circulated emails recently: the whole business about his education in Indonesia, and his school registration record.  I’ll reproduce this below and then make some comments

1. He’s listed as “Barry Sotero,” using the name of his mother Ann Dunham’s second (Indonesian) husband.  That’s probably a bureaucratic artifice to avoid explaining the fact that he was a step-son and not a son.  There’s probably a legal or social reason for this, his obviously un-Indonesian appearance notwithstanding.  Americans find it hard to fathom how people in other places put things down that aren’t square with the facts but which make life easier.
2. Listing his religion as “Islam” probably gets him out of religious instruction.  The school he attended was Roman Catholic (yes, boys and girls, there are Roman Catholics in Indonesia, as you can see here.)  It also is more consistent with declaring that her second husband is Barry’s father.
3. Listing his nationality as Indonesian probably goes along with (1).

I think the main purpose here is to produce a story for the school that, if not true, is at least internally consistent.

But, you say, declaring him as something other than an American is…well, un-American.  It sure is.  That goes back to something that I quoted in the first piece I wrote on the subject of Barack Obama’s relationship with his country:

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

I do think that Obama picked up on his mother’s deep seated anti-American feeling, one cultivated by years of watching American culture steamroll others around the world.  That’s not only significant for what it is; it’s significant because his mother was born and raised in the USA and still ended up with that kind of attitude.  And she’s not alone.

But that’s the point, and it’s one I’ll keep harping on: conservatives are barking up the wrong tree when they go on and on about where he was born (which is a significant legal issue, but in reality a done deal,) his race (some admittedly do,) etc.  What they need to get through their heads is that there are many people who count this country as their native land whose idea is diametrically opposed to what brought this country to be the great place that it is, and who basically don’t like it the way it has been.  It’s not about birth and it’s not about race, it’s about a way of thinking and the premises from which that thinking comes.

Conservatives need to face this and not be shamed by it.  I say “not be shamed” because many of these left-wing people are in high places in our society, even when they’re not in the White House.   Americans in general and conservatives in particular are focused on upward social mobility, and the thought that people who basically hate the country be in positions of influence shames conservatives who can’t (or won’t) get there.  As a Christian, the idea that the people who are of the world already have their reward makes sense, but for those who are Americans first and Christians (maybe) second, it’s indigestible.

Let me turn to one other subject: the idea that Barack Obama is a Muslim.  I went on record (vs. a Church of God minister) that he is not, and have stuck with that.  There’s no question that a) Spengler’s contention that he shares Muslim resentment of American cultural encroachment is true and b) he was influenced by his years in a Muslim country (would one expect differently?) but that doesn’t make a Shehada-declaring Muslim.  Although his attitude towards Israel reflects that fact, it’s not the only place it comes out.  His current uneasy relationship with the LGBT community is doubtless reflective of this background, and that’s something no one wants to talk about.

Getting back to the subject of appearances, frequently trailing the first image is a family portrait from the years in Indonesia.

Some people have noted that Barack Obama is always smiling in childhood pictures.  That’s sometimes noted as a defense mechanism of a kid who bounced around from relative to relative and country to country.  But then again they used to call me “Smiley” in prep school, so there…

The cat’s out of the bag:

Then, unprompted he (Ayers) said–I wrote Dreams From My Father. I said, oh, so you admit it. He said–Michelle asked me to. I looked at him. He seemed eager. He’s about my height, short. He went on to say–and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties. So I said, stop pulling my leg. Horrible thought. But he came again–I really wrote it, the wording was similar. I said I believe you probably heavily edited it. He said–I wrote it. I said–why would I believe you, you’re a liar.

That explains two things I’ve mused on in this blog.

It explains Why William Ayers Matters, which I posted in the latter stages of the campaign last year.  It means that my Option 2 was the correct one:

The second is that he (Obama) has been (influenced by William Ayers,) in which case we’ll have what I’ve been hoping to avoid for a long time: a country run by an elite that basically hates it.  Getting past the obvious problem relative to foreign policy, if those at the top don’t like this place, it’s only a matter of time before those at the bottom get the same idea.  It will be hard to fill our military, and even harder to get our economy going when hopes of improvement are dimmed by a hefty tax take and the realisation that the taxes are going to people who neither like us nor have our best interests at heart.  Such a realisation will make the downward turn in the stock market look minor.

It also explains Why My Family Business Left Chicago (where I quote from the book directly):

However, in a world where the state explicitly enforces the perpetuation of “traditional” society–necessary to prevent the problems that Obama describes in the quote above–corporations will lose the power to make such decisions.  They will be forced to perpetuate operations such as Vulcan’s in Chicago in the manner they’ve been operated until the company is forced to close them without a sequel or face nationalisation, which only stalls the inevitable.

And such “traditional” societies have a strong appeal to Obama’s latté liberal core constituency, not only for purely sentimental reasons (the loss of a way of life, the lamenting of which drove Obama’s mother for so many years) but also because such societies favour the perpetuation of established elites, be those elites hereditary aristocracies or bureaucracy-ensconced mandarins.  And, to be honest, such a scenario has a strong appeal to the end product of multi-generational success like myself.

Chicago was the quintessential “can-do” city.  People like Ayers and Saul Alinsky have eroded that.  That’s why companies like Vulcan had to leave.  That’s why I don’t take promises such as “green jobs” and growth through expanded government seriously.

HT to William Sulik.  BTW, it doesn’t bother me that Dreams From My Father was ghostwritten, just who the ghost is.

It just keeps coming:

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

A fistful of yuan looks better than ever…

But all is not glum for the U.S.:

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari can be well pleased with his recent visit to New York, securing US$1.5 billion annually for five years in non-military aid and gaining unprecedented political support from over two dozen heads of states under the Friends of Democratic Pakistan initiative.

Now it is the turn of the military to deliver following its successful campaign this year in the Swat Valley in North-West Frontier Province: it is poised for a major operation in the heart of Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda territory, the North Waziristan and South Waziristan tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan.

The need for this operation in the two Waziristans, over which the Pakistani armed forces had previously expressed grave concerns, was agreed on in a meeting in New York last week between the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other US security officials and Zardari, who is also the supreme commander of the armed forces.

Pakistan has always been the key player in the whole situation in Afghanistan.  But the Pakistanis have, over the years, hedged their bets on the U.S. vs. the Taliban, in part because the nature of Pakistan has always been to be an Islamic state, and the Taliban (and of course al-Qaeda) have had that as their objective par excellence.

Evidently those who control things in Pakistan have finally settled on the Taliban and their allies to be an existential threat to themselves, which is about a quick of a way to get things moving on this earth as there is.  Success in this would simplify things across the border in Afghanistan as well.

I’ve griped at length on this site—and elsewhere—on how the graduates (at all degree levels) of a few elite schools dominate our corridors of power, be they the White House, the Supreme Court, or in our financial centres. A recent Facebook post by Fox News Radio’s Todd Starnes has finally galvanised me to lay out why I think this is bad for the country, and fundamentally “un-American” as we have traditionally understood these United States.

The idea that the graduates of a few schools should dominate a country is well established in Europe. But until the last few years, it’s been a foreign concept here in every sense of the word. Obviously the graduates of these schools think it’s a great idea, and many conservatives are reluctant to challenge the concept. This is because they don’t want to come across as whining populists (although a few broach this barrier.)

To start with, it’s not good for a country which is diverse as ours—and certainly one that has made diversity such an obsession—to restrict its highest places to those trained at a few places. It’s true that ethnic and socio-economic diversity has come to these places—Sonia Sotomayor reminds us of that—but after four (give or take two) years in these places, the intellectual idea—to say nothing of the connections one makes with the people one goes to school with—has a levelling influence, and ultimately an isolating one.

But the ultimate problem with this kind of centralisation is that it flies in the face of the United States as the country of a second chance.

Except for the Native Americans, we are a land of immigrants. Why did our ancestors come here? We know that some came to do the work, some did not. But all of them came because, for one reason for another, they came to the conclusion that they and their families had come to some kind of dead end where they were at. So they left familiar surroundings and relatives to find a better life of one kind or another. They wanted a second chance for themselves, for those who came with them, and for those who came after them.

We even see this in the internal migration in the U.S. Even after arrival, the movement didn’t stop. Black and white alike left the economic dead-end of the post-bellum South for the factories of the North. The reverse migration took place after the disaster of the 1960’s by those escaping the Rust Belt, a cold climate and high taxes. (Some even made the round trip!) And, of course, the West has beckoned ever since the Midwest was the “Northwest” and the South Central states were the “Southwest.”

Social place has been flexible along with geographical place. Although the phrase “know your place” usually has racial associations, originally it came from a society where upward social mobility was slow or non-existent, and it was the mantra of upper classes who wanted to keep their “inferiors” down. Until recently the phrase was a quick way to make an American of any race angry.

It’s always been a source of embarrassment to our elites at how “uneducated” many Americans are or seem relative to others (especially the Europeans.) That was certainly the case during World War II, and it was one of the driving forces behind the GI Bill. But the fact that our society has worked with so little regard for formal education is another part of the second chance. If formal education came up short, either by early school leaving or by scholastic mediocrity, there was always real life to fix the problem. Although there’s certainly a correlation between education and income, traditionally in American society it’s possible for recipients of the “gentleman’s C” (like my grandfather) to do well in life, if they’re prepared to work at it and exercise the social skills a society with a large civic life rewards.

The transformation of our upward social mobility into the prize for those who get into the “right” schools and meet there the “right” people alters that beyond recognition. Those who are a product of such a system realise early that they cannot make it in the society of a second chance when they put all of their eggs into the first chance. When the society doesn’t automatically alter itself to meet their expectations, the “first chancers” turn first to resentment and second to snobbery to express their bitterness, all the while working to insure that advancement is by their own rules.

In terms of the U.S. Presidency, they’ve succeeded, as I’ve documented before, and as one would expect that has worked its way down the line. Now I’m sure that elitists have raised many a latté to the sidetracking of the likes of Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. But what happens when they cut off people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs at the pass? Gates did start Harvard but didn’t finish, and Jobs neither finished his undergraduate studies nor darkened the door of Old Ivy. These “second chancers” went on to change the world.

That’s a more urgent question as the left pursues its other objective: bringing a progressively larger portion of our economy into state control. The more of this that takes place, the easier it will be to have a society where “first chancers” rule and the rest take what’s left. But will the rest bother with really going out and putting in the hard work and effort necessary to maintain a society with our traditional dynamism? Or volunteer to put their lives on the line for a society which mouths freedom and opportunity but is in reality organised for the benefit of those who control it? To put it another way, who wants to put the extra effort into a society where the fix is in by the time you’re eighteen, the national future is determined by a small group of admissions committees, and you know you’re on the short end of the stick?

There’s an important spiritual aspect to this too. Christianity is a religion of the “second chance,” a place where the shortcomings of the first birth can be rectified by the second, whose founder challenged the “downtown establishment” of his own day and recruited from amongst those who were deemed not quite up to par for rabbinical training. It’s the religion of the great “mulligan,” and consciously or not Americans have made the connection between the two. I don’t think it’s an accident that more and more challenges to Christianity are coming from a society which operates on the principle that “the fix is in” and there are no second chances once one misses the school with an inadequate Ivy League admission rate.

All of this is why I don’t think that either centralising our “best” people in a few schools or having a largely credentialistic/educational advancement system is good for our country, and believe that not only will we have a very different country for it, but also will have a lesser one as well.