OODA Thunk It?

Who would have thought that John McCain could use skills learned as a fighter pilot to undermine the Obama campaign? Michael Barone explains the OODA strategy here.

That term was the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

"The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy," Boyd's biographer Robert Coram writes. "The key thing to understand about Boyd's version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather the need to execute the cycle in such a fashion as to get inside the mind and decision cycle of the adversary."

For a fighter pilot, that means honing in above and behind the adversary so you can shoot him out of the sky. For a political candidate, it means acting in such a way that the opponent's responses again and again reinforce the points you are trying to make and undermine his own position.

The whole thing is short; I highly recommend reading. The election isn't over, Obama hasn't been "shot out of the sky", but it's hard to see how all his George Bush talk is going to help him. I suppose I'm not one to ask since I don't loathe Bush like so many, and I can't shake the contrast between Cheney and Palin out of my head. I stand by my earlier remark, that I'd rather go fishing with Sarah Palin than hunting with Dick Cheney.

Doggone it, do people still like me?

Ohhhhh, my gosh, I love this campaign ad.



Reckless. Ridiculous. Wrong.

I love it. There's nothing like seeing a goofball like Al Franken hoisted on his own petard. Michael Medved mentioned this on his show because he appears in the ad around 11-12 seconds in. I remember another time Franken was on Medved, I think it was 2006, when he flipped out because John O'Neill was on the show.


My brother, a university professor who has a doctorate in history, reminded me 10 years ago when this nutball got elected governor than Minnesota has always played host to strange political characters. But the line has got to be drawn somewhere. Let's have some more Norm-alcy, what do you say, MN?

So hopefully all the "talk" talk is nothing but talk

Joshua Muravchik's Commentary Magazine article on Obama's expressed desire to have talks with world leaders is worth reading. In it, he takes a serious look at the historical record to illustrate why this has never worked to the advantage of the United States. Here's his conclusion:

Finally, we must always remember that such regimes are in a state of permanent war with their own subjects, and that every measure of legitimation they receive from the outside serves to discourage those subjects’ hopes for freedom and impair their will to resist. Even the government of the Soviet Union, our superpower counterpart, was eager for the symbolism of being treated by America as an equal. How much more so would the power of the petty tyrants or would-be tyrants who rule Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea—the countries with whose leaders Barack Obama expressed his readiness to meet and talk in the first year of his administration—be inflated by an audience with an American President. In this, especially, there is much to be lost—by ourselves and by those under their rule.

Should we talk with our enemies? Yes—to tell them what we think of them, and what we ourselves stand for. We should talk to them, that is, on our own terms and not theirs, and with their captive peoples in mind. But to the question that Anderson Cooper put to Senator Obama, the simple and correct answer was “No.” If Obama ever gains the presidency, the world will be safer if he has figured that out before he enters office.

"You've been sitting way too long"

Is there a permanent crease in your, uhhhh... "right and wrong"?

"All he really wanted was his car"

The Civil Twilight by James McCoy



Please discuss.

Blackwell on Presumption of Stupidity

Ohio's very own Mr. Sensible, Ken Blackwell, runs down the list of reasons why Obama thinks the voters are stupid pointing to his truth-challenged and contradictory remarks on such issues as abortion, gun control, Reverend Wright, Iraq, etc. My favorite part is in regards to the Bill Ayers connection which we've known about for some time:

Bill Ayers is another stunner. Mr. Ayers bombed a police station and the Pentagon, and recently said he wished he had done more. He is an unrepentant terrorist, but is popular among the ultra-left in Chicago. When Mr. Obama was asked about Mr. Ayers, he implied that he barely knew him.

But once again facts have surfaced. We now know that Mr. Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Mr. Obama. They served for years together on a board with only a few people, and they worked closely on financial matters during those years. Does that sound like someone he barely knows?

So I think that Obama is counting on the voters being stupid. Of course, maybe the voters will be stupid, they've been stupid before many, many times. Hopefully articles like this can serve as a kind of "crash course" to make folks give more serious consideration.

It's up to Ohio

From the Financial Times.

Of the five, Ohio is the most important. With 20 electoral college votes, it can decide the race on its own. In other words Mr Obama could lose all four other swing states but still take first prize if he clinches Ohio. In the modern era, no Republican candidate has won without taking Ohio. If a few thousand social conservatives in Ohio had sat on their hands in 2004, rather than voting for George W. Bush, then Mr Kerry would now be campaigning for re-election.

Hold, hold, hold on one second, sweetie...

Uhhhh....



Who's advising this guy? Rick Lazio? How much energy are they going to have to put into explaining that this wasn't about Palin's earlier famed lipstick remark?

Here's a longer piece for some "context", but it's just as embarrassing to endure his stuttering choir-preaching as it is to witness the knee-jerk misogyny.