Culture

Allow me to demonstrate my meaning, re Mohammad Ali. Reading something by Budd Schulberg, on boxing. Only okay, but I like the subject. He knew Ali, traveled with him to Zaire for the Rumble. Once, just before the fight with Norton, Ali was goofing about acting with Schulberg's wife, actress Geraldine Brooks. Scene set.

Then the mischievous Ali had another idea. "Let's go to the middle of the lobby and you turn on me and in a loud voice call me nigger." Again Geraldine obliged. As they were walking long, Gerry the consummate actress suddenly stopped. "Damn you, Ali, I came up here to do a photo shoot on you and you backed out on my! You promised!" Ali improvised, "Don't bother me, lady. I never promised you nothin', now leave me alone." Then Gerry dropped it on him. "You know what you are, you're just a god-damn lying nigger!"

Ali's bodyguards, his sparring partners, his entourage, the whole bristling Ali brigade started moving in with bad intentions, and I was thinking that this time Ali the mishcief maker had gone too far. But at the last moment Ali announced that this whole mad scene was this idea -- they were just practicing acting together -- and the tension dissolved in nervous laughter.

Okay. There it is. So what? Well first, you never disrespect a man's wife. If you do, you apologize, and mean it. Perhaps some reader fails to see the disrespect? I commend him to his conscience. Ali put a woman in danger. More telling, consider the thugs Ali surrounded himself with, who would menace a woman. Bodyguards? Arrogance-guards. Maybe you don't get it. When I read it I was disgusted. Followers, entourage, hangers-on, pilot fish, take their lead from the shark. Ali hired and surrounded himself with scum who would intimidate a woman. End of story.

How Obama-like. Either O is lying about the murders in Lybia, or he employs liars who lie to him. "But every piece of information that we got as we got it we laid it out for the American people," he averred to Lefty intellectual-leader slash funnyman Jon Stewart. Not true. Email to the White House Situation Room, here.

Note the date: 9/11. Note the time: a half hour after the attack started. Note the information: "approximately 20 armed people" is not "a flash mob of protesters incensed over a months' old Youtube video." Both the Benghazi Consulate and the American Administration's pants have suffered catastrophic fire damage.

We had troops an hour away, in Italy, and a Delta squad 2 hours away. The terrorist mortar position was laser-targeted by our side. But ... nothing.

If Obama gets or takes any credit at all (one cannot in this context call it 'responsibility') for the bin Ladin-killing, does he get any credit for the Chris Stevens-killing? These Americans died not because of Obama's indecision. It was because of his decision.

Feckless dithering hypocrite coward.

At best, Obama has surrounded himself by liars. He has allowed a culture of indifference, expedience and deceit to thrive around him, which is inimical and crippling to good governance. Excusing him from any other failing, this alone disqualifies him from the office of high honor he would continue to hold.


J