Polls Like Carter

(with apologies to Maroon 5)

[Barack:]
They all liked my smile
Praised my big brain
I won by a mile
Over McCain
In every debate
Two thousand and eight
It really felt great

Said "I'm like LeBron
And I got this"
Both Kos and MoveOn
said "He can't miss"
But what did I find?
Two thousand and nine
Made me lose my mind

And it goes like this:
Bad taste on my tongue
It went to Hell
And down rung by rung
Ratings all fell
To polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter

No stimulus
Or ObamaCare
Can lift me back up
From way down there
With polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter

All of my crew
Stay up late nights
Crafting appeals to
Working class whites
Bitter-clinger slobs
The English call "yobs"
Who all lost their jobs

But I've got no tricks
That can get through
To ignorant hicks
So I'll stick to
The upper-class Greens
And union machines
And Nan and Maxine

And it goes like this:
Bad taste on my tongue
It went to Hell
And down rung by rung
Ratings all fell
To polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter

No stimulus
Or ObamaCare
Can lift me back up
From way down there
With polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter

[Michelle:]
You wanna know
How to get their votes?
Take control,
Grab 'em by their scroats
And if you nationalize
Then they will rationalize:
Vote for you or get downsized

Your style grates
Cold and pedantic
Just imitate
My First Lady shtick
And if you nationalize
Then they will rationalize:
Vote for you or get downsized

[Barack:]
And it goes like this:
Bad taste on my tongue
It went to Hell
And down rung by rung
Ratings all fell
To polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter

No stimulus
Or ObamaCare
Can lift me back up
From way down there
With polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter

Bad taste on my tongue
It went to Hell
My bell will get rung
In two thousand twelve
If I poll like Carter
If I still poll like Carter
I've got the polls like Carter

Bad news for the mullah-ocracy

Iranians burn a gas station and nearby cars during a protest against gas-rationing, in northwest Tehran June 26, 2007. Angry Iranians set fire to a Tehran petrol station and chanted anti-government slogans in a northwest area of the capital on Tuesday in protest against fuel rationing introduced in OPEC's number two oil producer. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi (IRAN)

Here's an object lesson why socialist programs nominally for the benefit of the poor end up hurting the poor along with everyone else.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Angry Iranians attacked several gas stations in protest after the government suddenly began long-threatened fuel rationing, while many others rushed to fill their tanks....

The Oil Ministry announced the start of rationing Tuesday night, just three hours before it was due to begin at midnight. Some stations in Tehran had lines more than a half-mile long as drivers tried to get one last fill-up before the limitations kicked in....

"Is this good timing, to announce rationing only three hours before it starts?" complained Ahmad Safai, a 30-year-old shopkeeper who was in line. "I had no gas in my car's tank when I heard the report...."

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in the 2005 election based largely on his promises to improve the faltering economy. But his failure to do so has sparked widespread criticism.

"This man Ahmadinejad has damaged all things. The timing of the rationing is just one case," said Reza Khorrami, a 27-year-old teacher who was among those lined up at one Tehran gas station before midnight.

Iran is the second-biggest exporter in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. But because it has low refining capability, it has to import more than 50 percent of its gasoline needs. To keep prices low, the government subsidized gas sales, saddling it with enormous costs.

Under the rationing plan, owners of private cars can buy only 26 gallons of fuel per month at the subsidized price of 38 cents per gallon.

If Iranian drivers are like American drivers (and I bet they are), right about now they're feeling the same love for Ahmadinejad as we used to feel for Jimmy Carter during the 1979 oil crisis (coincidentally caused by another Iranian madman). This could be the beginning of the end for Ahmadinejad's regime.

UPDATE:

It got a little ugly, and it may yet get worse:

Iranians smashed shop windows and set fire to a dozen gas stations in the capital Wednesday, angered by the sudden start of a fuel rationing system that threatens to further increase the unpopularity of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Police were sent to guard some stations after the violence, and there was calm during the day as motorists lined up to fill their tanks under the new restrictions.

Jimmy Carter: evil incarnate

Back in 1979, Jimmy Carter was the most dangerous man in the West:

We just don't get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called "dim-witted cowboy," has created the entire mess.

The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the ayatollah Khomeini.

Carter viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism. Carter's ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, said "Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint." Carter's Iranian ambassador, William Sullivan, said, "Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure." Carter adviser James Bill proclaimed in a Newsweek interview on February 12, 1979 that Khomeini was not a mad mujahid, but a man of "impeccable integrity and honesty."

The shah was terrified of Carter. He told his personal confidant, "Who knows what sort of calamity he [Carter] may unleash on the world?"

Let's look at the results of Carter's misguided liberal policies: the Islamic Revolution in Iran; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (Carter's response was to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics); the birth of Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization; the Iran-Iraq War, which cost the lives of millions dead and wounded; and yes, the present war on terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Today he's just as evil and misguided, but thankfully less able to perpetrate his crimes upon the world.

During his speech to Ireland's eighth annual Forum on Human Rights, the 83-year-old former president said monitors from his Carter Center observed the 2006 election in which Hamas won 42 percent of the popular vote and a majority of parliamentary seats.

Carter said that election was "orderly and fair" and Hamas triumphed, in part, because it was "shrewd in selecting candidates," whereas a divided, corrupt Fatah ran multiple candidates for single seats.

Far from encouraging Hamas's move into parliamentary politics, Carter said the US and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, has sought to subvert the outcome by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.

"That action was criminal," he said in a news conference after his speech.

"The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah," he said.

Carter said the United States and others supplied the Fatah-controlled security forces in Gaza with vastly superior weaponry in hopes they would "conquer Hamas in Gaza" - but Hamas this month routed Fatah because of its "superior skills and discipline."

"Superior skills and discipline." That's exactly what "qualified" the Nazi war machine to rule over Europe.

Israelis not good at this apartheid/genocide stuff

Wow, no wonder Jimmy Carter is saying things he doesn't really mean. Here he has a book about the apartheid regime of Israel, and then the Palestinians go and start doing things to each other that the Israelis wouldn't even dream of doing.

In fact, I'm beginning to think that the Israelis don't really have their hearts in this "annihilate the Palestinians" stuff. Look at these eyewitness accounts by actual Gazan Palestinians:

"May God burn all of them," cursed Amar Hamada, 27, a young Fatah security service agent who was pulled out of a car by Hamas gunmen.

After whipping him with the butt of a Kalashnikov, they took him prisoner overnight, broke his arms with a hammer and fired multiple shots at his legs from point-blank range.

He is now being treated under special permit in Ashkelon's Barzalai Hospital, where patients too seriously injured for Gaza's Shifa Hospital can be transferred with Israeli security clearance.

Crying with pain, one of his arms is in a heavy plaster cast while the other is swathed in bandages. His legs, too, are bandaged from hip to toe and blood oozes from under the gauze.

Down the hall, Mohammed Bazat waits anxiously outside an operating theatre for news of his son. He was working for Mr Abbas's security chief, Rashid Abu Shbak, when the chief's home was attacked by Hamas fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades. Five guards were killed in the raid.

"All of them will make a deal, God willing - Hamas and Fatah, and also Israel," said Mr Bazhat, whose wife and 10 other children wait in Gaza as he sits by his son's bed during the day and is escorted by Israeli security to a hotel at night.

"If they all continue to act the same way, there will never be peace," he said. "I am worried to return to Gaza - but I must. There is nowhere else to go, so we will stay there. There is no nation that will rescue us."

What the hell? Treating them in Israeli hospitals? Sounds like the Hamas folks are much better at oppressing Palestinians than the Israelis are.

And the Israelis might also take some lessons from the Lebanese Army on how to deal with Palestinian militants operating in dense urban areas. The Israelis were accused of a massacre in their 2002 battle against Palestinian militants in Jenin, but the Israelis actually sent soldiers and armor into the Jenin refugee camps to fight at close range -- more dangerous to Israeli forces but less dangerous to civilian non-combatants. No such concerns slow down the Lebanese Army in its operations against Fatah al-Islam in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in northern Lebanon:

Some of the 11,000 refugees who escaped from Nahr al-Bared reported that the militants had threatened to shoot those who left, effectively using the camp’s civilians as a human shield to prevent an all-out assault.

But Elias Murr, the Lebanese defence minister, insisted that the militant group, which has been linked to al-Qa’eda, must surrender or face an army onslaught.

“We won’t negotiate with terrorists,” he said. This afternoon, a stream of ambulances which had been helping Nahr al-Bared’s under-resourced clinics and evacuating the most seriously injured withdrew.

“I have put more than 20 people in the back of the ambulance to evacuate them,” said Mazen Fakih, who described increasingly desperate scenes inside the camp.

“One of the women I brought out said that Fatah al-Islam had promised to shoot anyone who leaves.”

He said that “tens” of bodies from the first days of fighting between the militants and the army, which started at the weekend, still littered the streets and scrubland within the camp.


Last night the military standoff continued at the camp, about 60 miles north of capital Beirut. But doctors fear that if it descends into all-out fighting, as is widely expected, trapped civilians will bear the brunt of the violence.

The Lebanese army has already faced accusations of indiscriminately using tank shells and artillery in the first days of combat.

“Most injured civilians who have made it out have shrapnel wounds,” said Dr Abdel Aziz Bekai, at the nearby Safad hospital.

“Those wounds are from the Lebanese army bombs and artillery. “But many others have bullet wounds. They were hit by snipers. We don’t know which side the snipers were fighting for,” he said.

“Even the victims don’t know. They are just stuck in the middle.”

Maybe Jimmy Carter needs to have a word with the Israelis. Their refusal to live down to his characterization of their behavior is really making him look bad.