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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. That was a great week for administration presentations, wasn't it? Monday we had the President explaining why it was so important to dump another trillion dollars of debt on our posterity, Tuesday our new Secretary of the Treasury took a break from not paying his taxes to tell us about the plans he has for developing plans to fix the banking system. Thanks to the Bristol-Myers Squibb Company and their wonderful product No-Doz, I was able to monitor both presentations, and shall be bringing you full reports. Lots of other stuff has been happening too, so over to the Radio Derb newsroom for all the latest, beginning with the outrage of the week. |
02 — Geert Wilders (1): background. Thursday, February 12 was a day that should live in infamy. This was the latest, most shameful and horrifying, episode in the saga of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, which Radio Derb brought to your attention two weeks ago. Let me use this segment to give you a recap, before I talk about Thursday's events. Geert Wilders is leader of a party that holds nine seats in the 150-seat Dutch lower house. That ranks Wilders' party fifth of the ten parties with representatives in the lower house. Wilders' party got one in every seven of votes cast in the 2006 elections — a total of nearly a million and a half votes out of nearly ten million cast. I'm telling you this is not some bizarre figure from the lunatic fringe of Dutch politics. This is a mainstream politician leading an important and popular party. However, last year Mr Wilders lent his name to a short movie titled Fitna, F-I-T-N-A. That's the Arabic word for something like "discord." You can watch Fitna on the internet — I just did. Go to the Wikipedia entry for "Fitna the movie" and there are a couple of links right there. The film is only sixteen minutes long. It intersperses readings from the Koran with scenes of inflammatory Muslim preachers and acts of violence committed by radical Muslims. The film is well produced and makes its case with force — the case being, that Islam is inherently violent, aggressive, and intolerant. Whether that's actually true or not, as a free, reasoning citizen you can decide for yourself. There are plenty of links to counter-Fitna commentary on that same Wikipedia page. Weigh the evidence and make up your mind. That's what free citizens of free nations should do. Peoples who have no tradition of liberty don't understand this. We now know that some of them go on not understanding it even after years of living in civilized countries. Muslims in the Netherlands called for Mr Wilders to be prosecuted for insulting their religion, even though his movie merely quotes from its holy book. The public prosecutor of the Netherlands turned them down; but the Muslims persisted. At last the great universal rule of a multiculturalist society triumphed. That is the rule that legal proceedings aren't over until the minority plaintiff wins. Now Mr Wilders has been indicted on charges of, quote, "inciting hatred and discrimination." Whether the one and a half million Dutchmen who voted for him are also to be indicted, as co-conspirators, I can't tell you. Wilders has been under 24-hour protection by the Dutch police for the last five years because of countless death threats against him from outraged Muslims. |
03 — Geert Wilders (2): barred from Britain. This latest kerfuffle started three weeks ago when Geert Wilders was invited to a showing of his movie at Britain's Houses of Parliament on January 29. That got British Muslims fired up. Most especially fired up was Nazir Ahmed, a Pakistan-born professional agitator who was appointed to a seat in the House of Lords ten years ago by Tony Blair, for his services to multiculturalism and, you know, "community organizing." Nazir Ahmed threatened to mobilize 10,000 Muslims to prevent Mr Wilders from entering the Houses of Parliament. Wilders' visit was postponed, and Ahmed boasted to the Pakistani newspapers that the postponement was, quote, "a victory for the Muslim community." Well, that got Malcolm Pearson's dander up. Pearson is a conservative member of the House of Lords, and he got Mr Wilders' invitation re-instated, with a new date of February 12 for the visit and movie showing. That was too much for Britain's socialist government. The Home Secretary — that's roughly the equivalent of Attorney General — wrote a letter to Mr Wilders telling him he wasn't welcome in Britain, and would be arrested if he tried to enter the country. Well, on Thursday Wilders did try to enter Britain, flying to London Heathrow. He was refused entry to Britain and put on a plane back to the Netherlands. The parliamentary showing of Fitna went ahead anyway, with about thirty British parliamentarians attending. The BBC correspondent present said they gave a round of applause when the movie finished. The culprits here are the weasels of Britain's governing Labour Party, multicultural socialists who detest and despise their own nation, culture, and ancestors, and want as many foreigners as possible in Britain so that Britishness can be stamped out once and for all, sparing the world any recurrence of British imperialism and colonialism, the most evil developments ever to occur in the entire history of the human race. Please note what the issue is here. It's not the right of a country to exclude undesirable people. No-one can have any argument with that. In the past, for example, Britain has excluded Louis Farrakhan, in my opinion justifiably. Nor is it even really an issue of free speech. Britain's never had any constitutional guarantee of free speech. When I was growing up there, a stage play couldn't be performed until it had been approved by the Lord Chancellor. The issue is a British government of British people with British ancestors yielding cravenly to foreign agitators — people who hate Britain and whose religious beliefs can't be squared with British values, yet whom Britain, for reasons unfathomable to me, has permitted to settle in huge numbers. The lesson of the Geert Wilders affair is not that a nation should admit anyone who wants to enter. It's more like the opposite. Nor is it even that civilized standards are impossible unless everyone can say what he likes in public. The lesson is, that in a multicultural society, the most ruthless and violent culture will end up getting its way every time. Shame on Britain! Shame on the cowards and weasels of Britain's Labour Party for not standing up to the Muslim bullies! Shame on the British people for letting things reach this sorry pass, when they have been warned for forty years and more what would happen if they opened their country to unlimited settlement by people from cultures that have nothing in common with their own. Shame on us, if we are such cowards and fools as to give away our country, the way the British have given away theirs. |
04 — BHO presser (1): form and content. Our new President gave his first news conference. As always with Obama, it helps to separate out the form and the content. Form-wise, the President was eloquent, persuasive, charming, and witty. If the Community Organizing thing hadn't worked out, Obama would have had a great career in sales. We all know, however, that when confronted with a truly superb and gifted salesman, you want to take a really, really careful look at the product. So let's take a look. What did the President have to tell us about the product — that is, about the stimulus package he's pushing through Congress? Well, he told us the plan will create or save four million jobs. What kind of jobs? Quote: Jobs doing the work that America desperately needs done, jobs rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, repairing our dangerously deficient dams and levees, so that we don't face another Katrina. They'll be jobs building the wind turbines and solar panels and fuel-efficient cars that will lower our dependence on foreign oil and modernizing our costly health care system that will save us billions of dollars and countless lives. They'll be jobs creating the 21st-century classrooms, libraries and labs for millions of children across America. And they'll be the jobs of firefighters and teachers and police officers that would otherwise be eliminated, if we do not provide states with some relief. End quote. So we're talking about laying asphalt and pouring concrete, and then some factory-type jobs assembling turbines and cars. Then some jobs writing computer systems, for which no doubt Bill Gates will be allowed to import a couple million foreigners on H-1B visas, which is how most of that kind of work is done. Then a lot of jobs in school construction — boy, construction workers are making out like gang-busters here! And then we're going to save the jobs of municipal workers like cops and teachers — the very workers whose gold-plated retirement, disability, and pension schemes are already crippling our public-sector finances at state and municipal levels. That's terrific, Mr President. Now, here's a 45-year-old guy who just got laid off from his job as a middle manager in one of our retail chains. You got a new job for him? He's a bit past the age when he'd be much use on a construction site; and he's actually past the retirement age for a lot of those gold-plated municipal jobs you want to save. You got a job for him, Mr President? Mr President? |
05 — BHO presser (2): no more Bush policies! Obama is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the George W. Bush administration, at any rate. Quote: What I won't do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place, because those theories have been tested and they have failed. End quote. Well, that's good news. No more Bush-type policies, eh? So there'll be no more reckless spending? No more bloating of the deficit? No more failure to veto obnoxious legislation — what was Bush's final score? Twelve vetoes in eight years, was it? No more vast new entitlement programs? No more allowing uneducated foreigners to flood into the country in millions to displace American workers and burden our health and welfare systems and schools? No more stationing of American troops by the tens of thousands in places like Germany and Korea, which ought to be able to defend themselves? No more urging banks to relax lending standards to increase minority home-ownership? No more ten-year wars in no-account dustbowl countries with goat'n'donkey economies? No more loading our children and grandchildren up with debt obligations to China and Japan, to maintain an illusion of prosperity? This is really great news! I'm starting to like this Obama fellow! If that's the way he's going, we may have a conservative President again, after twenty years! [Note: In the following clip we got the murder rates verpfuscht — to be precise, we got the decimal points in the wrong place. The U.S. rate is 4.3; Japan's, 0.5, according to NationMaster. The responsible researchers have been fired, and will never work in broadcast journalism again.] |
06 — BHO presser (3): Japan's statistics and ours. The President warned us that if we delay our actions now, we'll enter a "negative spiral." Quote: We saw this happen in Japan in the 1990s, where they did not act boldly and swiftly enough, and as a consequence they suffered what was called the "lost decade," where essentially for the entire '90s, they did not see any significant economic growth. End quote. Hmmm. Actually, Japan averaged between one and two percent growth through the '90s. If the U.S.A. manages that across the next decade, Americans will be dancing in the streets and putting up 20-foot statues to Obama in public places. But of course, nobody in this country wants to live like the wretched Japanese. I mean, just look at their appalling statistics, compared with ours. Life expectancy 82 years, compared with our 78. Hmm. Er, let's try infant mortality: Theirs is 2.8 per thousand, ours is 6.3. Uh-huh. Murder rate, perhaps? Ours is 43 per hundred thousand; theirs is … five. Drat! Unemployment? Theirs is 4.2 percent, ours is 7.2 percent. This is getting embarrassing. Oh, here you go: GDP per capita $35,300 for them, $48,000 for us. See, we're richer than they are! Well, some of us are: the GINI coefficient, the standard measure of wealth inequality, is 45 for us, which is high, but 38 for them. Ah, the heck with it. I bet life in Japan is really boring. |
07 — BHO presser (4): diversity v. banking. The President took on some of the objections raised to his plan. Quote: The suggestion is, why should the federal government be involved in school construction? Well, I visited a school down in South Carolina that was built in the 1850s. Is that supposed to be some kind of scandal? Where I come from, that would be a pretty new school. The toniest and most expensive English schools are the oldest ones, often with some of their original buildings intact. Eton goes back to the 15th century; Winchester, to the 14th. King's School, Canterbury goes all the way back to St Augustine of Canterbury in the sixth century. 1850? Pah! — I bet the paint isn't even dry. All right, what about the mortgage finance disaster? Quote from the President: What got us into this mess initially were banks taking exorbitant, wild risks with other people's monies, based on shaky assets. End quote. That is certainly true: but bankers are proverbially cautious types. What made them behave so recklessly? One big factor was, that a bank that didn't behave recklessly — lending money to people who had little prospect of paying it back — was the threat of lawsuits against them if they didn't. There was, for example, the 1994 lawsuit brought by Roberson, Roberson, and Brooks "on behalf of themselves and others similarly situated" against Citibank, claiming the bank had denied mortgages to minority applicants. Roberson was an ACORN activist. One of the plaintiff attorneys was a young chap named Barack Obama. |
08 — BHO presser (5): the spirit of St Augustine. Speaking of St Augustine — but the other one now, the African one — wasn't he the chap that prayed to God to give him continence and chastity, but not yet? It sure was — trust me. What's that you say? You want it in Latin? Glad to oblige: Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo. Well, it seems that our new President is offering up some similar prayer. Quote: Once the economy stabilizes and people are less fearful, then I do think that we're going to have to start thinking about how do we operate more prudently. End quote. Translation: We're going to have fun with a total spend-o-rama in my first term; but in my second term, we'll practice fiscal restraint, I promise. See, the President wants to be a good fiscal-restraint sort of guy, but not yet, sed noli modo. Now, are we going to get any details on short-term fiscal policy? Oh yeah. Quote: Tomorrow my Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, will be announcing some very clear and specific plans for how we are going to start loosening up credit once again. That would be Tim "Tax Evader" Geithner, I guess. So after the President's presser, we were all on tenterhooks to hear what Mr Geithner had to say, other than apologies for not having paid his taxes. (What are tenterhooks, anyway?) |
09 — Geithner fails to reassure. So along came Tuesday, and up stepped Tim Geithner, the guy who got a job running the IRS to squeeze taxes out of the rest of us after not paying his own. The speech by tax-non-payer Geithner was, by wellnigh unanimous consent, a total floperoo. Those very clear and specific plans he was going to announce? Quote: The President has asked his economic team to come together with a comprehensive plan to address the housing crisis. We will announce the details of this plan in the next few weeks. Eh? That wasn't very "clear and specific," was it? Perhaps this is more of the St Augustine strategy: "Lord, make me clear and specific, but not yet." No, I'm not going to do that in Latin. Here's another gem from 1040-cooker Geithner's speech, quote: We are consulting closely with Chairman Chris Dodd in the Senate, Chairman Barney Frank in the House, and their colleagues on both sides of the aisle on the broad outline of a comprehensive program of reforms. [Laughter.] Are you reassured now, listeners? It didn't help a bit that, in addition to being a guy who skips paying his income taxes, Geithner is only fourteen years old and suffers badly from stage fright. As he stared glassily into the cameras and mumbled his lines from the government teleprompter paid for by the taxes of citizens who filled out their returns honestly, the markets nose-dived, traders screamed sell orders into their telephones, and fund managers on four continents leapt from high windows. "Investors and banks took risks they did not understand," said tax scofflaw Geithner, explaining to us how we got where we are. Yes, they did; and I have a sinking feeling that Barack Obama took on a risk he did not understand when he hired you, pal … even after you admitted to not having paid your income taxes. |
10 — Miscellany. Well, those were the big-ticket items, listeners. Here's a quick round-up of the rest of the news. Item: Octomom. Come on, sing along with Derb. All you Married With Children fans know the tune. Who's the gal who pushed out eight? Item: Britain's Prince Harry is in hot water again. You may recall that last month a London newspaper got hold of a two-year-old video of Harry joshing around with army colleagues, calling one of them a Paki — that's British for a Pakistani — and telling another one, with camouflage net on his helmet, that he looked like a rag-head, presumably meaning a camel jockey. Well, now a black British comedian has told the world that Harry once said to him, quote: "You don't sound like a black chap." [Scream.] The British nation was so shocked by this outrageous hate speech, they all lost consciousness for a while. Now they have been revived, and Prince Harry is being hustled off to a re-education camp — actually an army "equality and diversity course," before he comes out in favor of restoring the slave trade. Item: In fact, there's been quite a rash of hate speech in Britain recently. Carol Thatcher, daughter of Margaret Thatcher, whom God preserve!, was sitting around in the green room chatting informally with colleagues after recording a TV program she worked on, offered the opinion that the French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who has a white French mother and a black African father, reminded her of a golliwog. One of the colleagues snitched on Carol to management. Management asked Carol to apologize; Carol, in the true Thatcher spirit, refused; and the BBC fired her. A golliwog, perhaps I should explain to you benighted colonials, is a little black doll with black fuzzy hair, very popular when I was a child, which was about the same time Carol Thatcher was. Obviously the socialists who run Britain are not going to tolerate this kind of speech. They will do everything they can to stamp it out, to keep the country safe for people who want to set off bombs in subway cars. Item: They had an election in Israel. Israel has one of those dumb proportional representation electoral systems, so you can never tell who's won an election. The two big conservative parties did well, but neither got a clear victory. Now the kingmaker looks like being Avi Lieberman, who leads an even more conservative party. He wants to make Israeli Arabs swear a loyalty oath, or face expulsion. Lieberman's party is rising, though, like Geert Wilders' party, and ethnonationalist parties everywhere in the democratic world: they went from eleven seats in the Israeli parliament to fifteen. Now, after a bit of horse-trading, Israel will have a government of some kind, probably not one the Obama administration will like. Item: Seguing off from that, here's another Israeli item, sort of. My morning paper is the New York Post, and I've gotta say, I love my New York Post. It's a real class newspaper, that can always be depended on to keep things in proportion. Here we all are, fretting and arguing and bickering about the President's stimulus plan, and there was I at breakfast on Wednesday, taking my New York Post out of the red plastic bag it arrives in and looking at the front page. Headline: At Last! A Real Stimulus. The accompanying picture shows an exceptionally well-formed young lady in a bikini with total surface area the size of a couple of fortune cookie slips. Talk about keeping things in proportion: this young lady has kept herself in well-nigh perfect proportion. Sub-heading: Inside Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. There's a tasteful caption on that picture, too, quote: "Israeli bombshell Bar Rafaeli gives new meaning to Mideast 'piece' [that's "p—i—e—c—e"] in the new Sports Illustrated." That's my New York Post! And see, I told you there was an Israeli angle. When it comes to the news you really want to know, the New York Post is the breast. Er, best. Item: It's a statistical certainty that some of you out there in listener-land have lost your jobs. Well, not to worry. Losing your job is a blessing, says the Bishop of London. Quote: One of the great implications of this turbulence for us is to re-boot our sense of what a truly flourishing human life consists of. Right. Well, thanks for that, your Grace. Have there been many lay-offs among the clergy, I wonder? Anyway, all you newly-unemployed Radio Derb listeners: take a hint from the bishop and look on the bright side. You just have to re-boot your life. It's simple, see? Of course, first you have to find the Ctrl-Alt-Delete keys … Item: One has a new website. Yes, Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Dei Gratia Regina et Indiae Imperator, Fidei Defensor, et cetera, et cetera, head of state of the British nation and commonwealth, has upgraded her website, which you will find at www.royal.gov.uk. Log in to Her Majesty's spiffy new website for interesting historical titbits, news of royal events, transcripts of jug-ears' conversations with his houseplants, and video clips of Prince Harry insulting colored people. Item: Chinese New Year came and went, and we survived it all pretty well. Not so the 30-storey Mandarin Oriental Hotel in central Peking, which was totally burned out on the last day of the holiday. Apparently the fire was started when employees of China Central TV staged a huge firework display nearby. The 700 million dollar Mandarin Oriental building was not quite complete, so the sprinkler system wasn't turned on. In a proper spirit of contrition, the CCTV employees responsible have agreed to donate major organs to a state organ bank, after which they will take up new assignments at a salt-mining complex in Inner Mongolia. Item: Finally, one more snippet of news from Asia: A Hindu nationalist group in, of course, India is developing a new brand of cola made from cow's urine. They're hoping to launch their product by the end of this year. They claim this new drink will cure cancer. Possibly so; but you have to ask yourself which is worse — dying from cancer, or living on a diet of cow's urine. Anyway, if you happen to be visiting India and find yourself accosted in a shopping mall by some bright young fellow asking if you want to take the Peepee Challenge, my advice would be to get the heck out of there. And that is the end of the moos. [Groan.] |
11 — Signoff. Yes, folks, another week of madness and mayhem here on planet Obama. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to break off here and just re-read Wednesday's New York Post one more time — I don't feel I've really mastered all of its news content yet. After that my next-door neighbor Mr Viktananda, has asked me to go over and sample a couple of bottles of this new soda his relatives back in Calcutta have sent him. I'm looking forward to that. Then it'll be back to scouring the world for more news stories to bring you on Radio Derb! Take it away, Franz Joseph. |
[Music clip: More Derbyshire Marches.]