There’s been some speculation about John Bolton running for president. He actually might be the right antidote to Obama; the guy looks like he has more real world experience in his mighty mustache than Obama has in his entire cabinet.

The problem with Obama is that we have a ton of real world problems and it’s now obvious Obama has no experience at doing anything useful ever. People thought he’d be a new politicians, but all he ending up being was the larva of one of those useless career politicians we all hate. He’s like a younger Biden. By 2012, people are going to be desperate for someone who actually knows how to do something, and one look at John Bolton and you know this guy didn’t get where he was just on his personal charisma and charm.

So Bolton is worth consideration. Plus, he already has an awesome slogan ready: ‘Stache Strength!

It’s the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks tomorrow. It’s a good time to reflect, but I’m not sure everyone knows on what exactly. Of course, there are the tragic deaths, but one of the reasons to remember is to keep in mind the lessons we need to learn to keep such a horror from happening again. And what is that lesson?

Here’s what I think we need to learn from 9/11: There are large numbers of violent, irrational people out there and we can’t just ignore them and hope they go away. As we sit around with our iPads and our DVRs and enjoy our culture, it’s easy to forget there are barbarians standing just outside. They aren’t very good at anything, but they would like to see us dead.

I don’t think in this post 9/11 world most people have learned the appropriate lesson from this. The whole Koran burning insanity illustrates this. That a handful of people in Florida can hold the world hostage by threatening to burn a few books is beyond silly, yet the main reaction has been not to tackle how ridiculous that is but to figure out how to appease the irrational violent people. You can’t appease irrational people. They’ll get violent over one guy burning Korans. They’ll get violent over cartoons. They’ll get violent because of false rumors of Korans being flushed down toilets. And yet are focus is on how to keep these crazy people happy and calm.

There’s a popular school of thought that if we just got out of the Middle East, then all the irrational violent people would be happy and stuff. We want to prescribe rational notions to irrational people. The left think the people in the Middle East are like angry dogs; you can just do a few tricks to keep their simple minds calm. But they’re people, and people have a complex crazy. And you can’t just push that crazy off to some isolated area and think it will all work out for the better. At some point, we have to engage it. That doesn’t just mean militarily — hopefully it doesn’t mean anymore fighting — but at some point we have to stand up for ourselves. We can’t have people attack us and be all like, “Oh, we’re sorry. Let’s try to be nicer to you people.” We act weak, and we get attacked. The radical Muslims are stomping all over Europe now because those people are nothing but weak; they can’t even stand up for their culture anymore. We have to be strong, and if we’re strong enough, we can give people something better to hold onto that their current violent, craziness. The culture over there has to change one day, and we might as well lead the way.

We haven’t been good at the not being weak lately. We can do better. We can’t appease the craziness in the Middle East — we have to be more willing to call it out. With all the oppression and violence that goes on there every day, we should have been more willing to ridicule the notion that a bunch of Korans burning was anything worth our attention.

Well, that’s my ramble. 9/11 is complicated. There’s my attempt this year to figure some things out.

The imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has warned that moving the Ground Zero mosque could spur radicals. Also, they’d probably have to come up with another name than “Ground Zero mosque”. While I can’t dispute the second point, I wonder about the first. I mean, really, with all the things going on, that’s what’s going to spur on radicals now?

It’s funny how we can go over to the Middle East and blow stuff up and shoot Muslims, and we expect them to get along with us still because they’re kinda used to that, but it’s the Koran burning or Muhammad cartoons that will really anger the Muslims over there and supposedly turn them into rabid badgers but less rational. And now I guess the mosque moving would anger them too. Soon we’ll have radicals over there shouting, “Kill the mosque movers! They have moved a mosque, so they must die! Out of the 3,794,101 square miles of the U.S., there are a couple of blocks where they don’t want a mosque built so we must behead them!”

I think I speak for everyone who doesn’t suck when I say who cares what the Islamic radicals want? Isn’t that why we make those de-radicalizers so we can do what we want in America without worrying about what stupid violent people think about it? You know, de-radicalizers — I think some people call them “rifles”.

As we approach the November elections and it looks like the Democrats are going to take a major hit, there will be a lot of speculation on why so many people have turned against the Democrats and Obama. Here is my speculation.

I think the key to the Democrats’ troubles is the sucking. It’s just hard for anyone not to turn against them with such complete and epic sucking. They said they needed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars or unemployment could get as high as 8%, and they’ve spent their hundreds of billions we didn’t want them to and now it’s 9.6%. And then there was that health care bill we really didn’t want either which they wasted time on when all they were supposed to focus on was the economy. It’s hard to suck more than that. That’s record sucking.

But some will respond, “The Republicans also suck.” And yes, that is true. But the degree is important.

Let’s say you had a twenty dollar bill. And let’s say you accidentally misplaced it and lost it. That would suck. Now let’s say you had a bag of ten thousands dollars. Now let’s say you lost that. That would really suck. Now let’s say you had a choice between losing twenty dollars and losing ten thousands dollars. Both suck, but it’s still a really easy choice. And that’s why everyone but the most blindly partisan are turning against the Democrats. It’s pretty easy to vote for the lesser sucking when we’re talking such Brobdingnagian levels of sucking on the Democrats’ side.

So write that in your politics book on lessons learned: Don’t suck. At least not at fabled levels.

So Fidel Castro has admitted the Cuban economic model doesn’t work. Considering how much he ran the country into the ground, you’d think he would have figured that out after maybe a decade. Or if not that, surely he would have noticed things hadn’t improved after two decades. And if not that, surely he should have seen how it wasn’t a great idea after three decades — especially when the Soviet Union collapsed. But if that wasn’t enough, you’d think four decades of the ruining the country would be enough to make him say, “Maybe we were wrongheaded.” But, no, it took five decades.

So, anyway, here’s a preview of what Obama will be like fifty years from now. The important thing is that eventually he learns.

So Obama is asking to spend $50 billion more to get the economy going. So I guess the last trillion he spent didn’t do anything, but this next $50 billion is totally going to fix the economy. So who is actually dumb enough to believe Obama any idea whatsoever of how to help the economy? I think much more disturbing than the number of people who think Obama is Muslim is the number of people who still think he’s competent.

This is why we need the “Party of No” in power — or better yet, the Party of “Shut up, stupid!” If the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate, then anytime Obama proposed some idiotic new idea, the Republicans would just say, “Shut up, stupid!” and that would be the end of it. I don’t know why Democrats thought branding the Republicans the “Party of No” would hurt them. Doing nothing doesn’t cost anything.

So Obama is going to raise taxes on those making over $250,000, so there goes any suggestion that actually helping the economy might ever be more important to Obama than the brain dead liberal agenda. And what does he need more tax money for? When did whether he could afford things actually start to be important?

So when we’re hurting for jobs, we’re going to take more money away from the people who actually create jobs to go into the giant black hole that is the federal government under Obama. And some people — the whiners –won’t even care that will hurt the economy as long as the rich get hurt too. You want my strategy to stimulate the economy? We tell the whiners we accidentally dropped a Snickers bar in a cannon. And when they climb in the cannon to get the Snickers bar — BOOM! — we seal up a crate around the cannon and ship it out of the country. And here’s the thing: The Snickers bar was really in my pocket the whole time.

I bet you’re thinking, “Why don’t you just fire the whiner out of the cannon?” I looked into doing that, and it ends up there was too many regulations around the amount of gunpowder that would be involved. But think of how our economy would flourish if we could fire all the whiners out of cannons; it would make the 80s look like a recession in comparison.

So some guy is planning to burn Korans on 9/11 and it’s this big international thing with everyone condemning it. If some guy were going to burn Bibles, we’d be like, “I guess it’s Tuesday.” I mean, we’re just used to offenses like that and know to shrug them off, but the assumption is that Muslims are much lesser than civilized people — like children but violent — and moronic, violent behavior has to be expected as a result of this.

Now, I think burning Korans is a jerky thing to do. It’s sort of an infantile, “Look how offensive I’m being!” I mean, refute the Koran, but burning it is just silly. It makes it look like we’re scared of it like Saudi Arabia is with the Bible. Plus, the whole point is to cause conflict, and the guy doing it says he’s a pastor but that doesn’t sound very Christany.

At the same time, Muslims have to get offended sometimes and learn to shrug it off. That’s part of being in the civilized world, and if Muslims can’t take it then they have to stay seated at the kiddie table and don’t get to be equal with everyone else. It’s also just beyond absurd with all the people being murdered in the Middle East and our troops and innocent civilians getting killed over there, a couple books being burned is what gets everyone all offended. Plus, being able to offend people and not be murdered for it is an important American right, and more people need to stick up for that.

At this point, I almost hope the Koran burning goes down just so everyone can learn to shrug it off. I mean, if it happened and there was nothing but the verbal condemnation, wouldn’t that be a huge step forward. That would improve people’s perceptions of Muslims a lot more than some mosque at Ground Zero.

There is now a Like button on IMAO posts so you can share what you like on that new Facebook site all the kids are talking about. Even my dad uses Facebook, and he’s constantly calling me up with technical questions like, “How do I type a letter ‘Q’ on the screen.”

And I tell him, “Find the button with the circle on it that has a line down through the corner of it… No, that’s the button for making an ‘O’ appear. It needs a line down in the corner to be a ‘Q’.”

Plus, Facebook is good for keeping up with old friends… except I like to forget my past. So I mainly use it for playing Bejeweled and Scrabble.

Anyway, you can now Like IMAO posts. But don’t like this post because it was stupid.