Another Failed Presidency
By Geoffrey P. Hunt in the American Thinker ———————-
Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson.
In the modern era, we’ve seen several failed presidencies–led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait– they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China.
George Bush Jr didn’t fail so much as he was perceived to have been too much of a patrician while being uncomfortable with his more conservative allies. Yet George Bush Sr is still perceived as a man of uncommon decency, loyal to the enduring American character of rugged self-determination, free markets, and generosity. George W will eventually be treated more kindly by historians as one whose potential was squashed by his own compromise of conservative principles, in some ways repeating the mistakes of his father, while ignoring many lessons in executive leadership he should have learned at Harvard Business School. Of course George W could never quite overcome being dogged from the outset by half of the nation convinced he was electorally illegitimate — thus aiding the resurgence of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.
But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What’s going on?
No narrative. Obama doesn’t have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn’t connect with us. He doesn’t have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don’t align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, Reagan.
But not this president. It’s not so much that he’s a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task– all contributory of course. It’s that he’s not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn’t command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don’t add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don’t make sense and don’t correspond with our experience.
In the meantime, while we’ve been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he’s dissed just about every one of us–financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: “For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn’t give me enough time; if only I’d had a second term, I could have offended you too.”
Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state–staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there’s always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.
Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.
Support Vijay Kumar for Congress
We must recognize that we are engaged in a worldwide war against terrorists who use unconventional tactics. We have achieved all we can militarily and must recognize that there is no central front in this conflict. That is, we cannot win the war in any particular place or location. This war must be waged on an ideological level as well as on a military level. Setting a timetable for withdrawal is setting a timetable for failure. The timetable for withdrawal is when we have achieved complete victory over forces determined to establish an Islamist front in the Middle East.
America is not alone in this struggle. We can accomplish our goals by engaging our allies. Inclusion and diplomacy should be our catchwords. We must strengthen our alliances and develop a strategy of cultural defense for Western Europe, Great Britain, India, and other nations that have been victims of Islamic terrorism. We must not substitute short-term solutions for long-term goals. Our objective is to empower moderates by attacking the underlying philosophy that breeds terrorism. Also, we must realize that independence from Middle Eastern energy sources is integral to winning the war on terrorism.
War on Terror has failed simply because there is no such a thing as War on Terror. War on Terror is War on Shadows. Terrorism is a technique. an Insutrument to reach certain ends. I maintain that this War can be won within five years, for less than one billion dollars, and without further loss of any American Life. Provided we name our enemy. ……Terrorists are not alquid….it is unversal Jhad.
Obama, The Emperor, Has No Clothes: We’ve Reached The Tipping Point And His Programs Must Be Stopped
By HERB DENENBERG, The Bulletin
If we had a Winston Churchill in the White House, America would still be in mortal danger and we would have a long, tough fight for survival ahead. We face a threat of Islamic terrorism as dangerous as any of the many threats of our history including that of Nazi Germany, Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and Japanese Imperialism. We face economic problems and international competition that call into question our ability to maintain the productive economy necessary to support the military machine needed for survival. We have a failed educational system that will not provide the scientific innovation and educated personnel and other advances necessary to maintain economic viability in the 21st Century. We have a biased, dishonest, and fraudulent mainstream media that misleads and deceives rather than informing and educating the public on the issues of our times.
But we don’t have this best-case scenario in the White House — we have the worst-case scenario. Yes, it’s about time America wakes up to the fact that we have a radical, leftist, socialist politician who still carries the trademark of the corrupt Cook County Chicago political machine from which he came and who has populated the White House with wild radicals and thugs willing to use intimidation and anything else if needed to achieve their goals. The Chicago machine adopts the Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals that says the end justifies the mean, i.e., anything goes. On top of that our president is incompetent. At this time of the greatest danger to America, we have another even greater danger: a president not up to the job and not fit for the job.
Someone has to ask the president, “Have you no decency? Have you no character? Have you no honesty? Do your words and your promises mean nothing? Are you willing to justify any means to achieve your ends?” Yes, we are well past the tipping point, and it is time for the obvious conclusion, “The emperor has no clothes.” If we don’t recognize Mr. Obama for what he is by now, we must be clueless and hopeless.
President Barack Hussein Obama has clearly demonstrated he is exactly what many expected and even much worse. For example, right from the beginning, early in the last presidential campaign, I said Mr. Obama was a world-class fraud, phony, faker, fibber, and four-flusher and a radical, liberal, leftist socialist, America-hater to boot. Now, I realize that description may sound strong, but it wasn’t strong enough. Mr. Obama is much worse than that.
Every politician may break campaign promises. But even the most corrupt ones have limits. Mr. Obama has no limits. At the very core of his campaign, he claimed to be the great post-partisan, non-partisan unifier to bring us all together and listen to every side of every issue. He told us a gazillion times there are no Red States and Blue States but only the United States. He claimed a new politics, with openness and transparency in all matters. He was the great courier of hope and change. But that was just campaign rhetoric and even post-election rhetoric. He has demonstrated he is the exact opposite of his basic claims. He is highly partisan, content to shutout, shut up, and ignore Republican ideas and Republican voices. He rejects transparency, and is as secretive and opaque as possible. Other politicians have broken campaign promises, but never on a scale such as this involving the promises most central to their campaigns, and never before so openly and brazenly with so little regard for the citizens who were sold this fraudulent bill of campaign goods.
For proof of Mr. Obama’s breaking all of his core promises, look at what is going on with ObamaCare. Everyone probably remembers his promise, repeated at least eight times, that negotiations on the health-care bill would be televised on C-SPAN and would be streaming on the Internet. Among his statements: “We’re going to do all these negotiations on C-SPAN…We will work on the process publicly … These negotiations will be on C-SPAN.” He constantly explained that putting all negotiations (yes, he said, “all”) on C-SPAN would assure that everyone could see for themselves whether their Congressmen were putting forth arguments on behalf of insurance companies, drug companies, and other special interest groups or making arguments on behalf of most of their constituents. You can hear him make this promise by going to the Internet, where at least eight videos of Mr. Obama making that promise are collected (www.thenakedemperornews.com).
The other examples of Mr. Obama’s breaking his promise of transparency and openness in every way can be cited that are just as extreme as the C-SPAN promise. The negotiations to reconcile the Senate and House version of ObamaCare are being carried out behind closed doors in secrecy. Republicans are not even represented.
And his core promise of bipartisanship has also been demonstrated to be a total fraud, which is what Mr. Obama is. He called for bipartisanship and a new politics all during the campaign and continues to do so (apparently in an attempt to silence Dick Cheney and other leading critics of his policies that are making America vulnerable to terrorism). But Mr. Obama’s words and rhetoric have no connection with his actions and programs. Republicans have had no part in drafting the legislation and their ideas and amendments have been ignored. There has been no real attempt to adopt the many sound suggestions and legislative proposals made by Republicans, such as permitting the purchase of health insurance across state lines and doing something to curb malpractice lawsuit abuse. Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have been strictly partisan, and haven’t even been willing to adopt a token idea from across the aisle. They do not want one note of dissent and not one baby compromise. They have made it clear that ObamaCare will be jammed down the throat of the American people regardless of their views and regardless of democratic values and traditions. Even a question about the constitutionality of Obamacare was fobbed off by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, as if the reporter asking the question must be deranged for even raising the issue. In fact, there are serious questions about aspects of the ObamaCare proposals.
What is even more outrageous than breaking the most fundamental Obama promises is the attempt to pretend they are not being broken. Obama’s White House actually refuses to explain why these promises are being broken. In fact, they won’t even respond to questions about the C-SPAN promise. When Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was asked about it, he simply ignored the question and did so the next day when the same question was asked. When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was asked about it, she went into a speech claiming this was the most open and transparent legislative process in memory. Her reply was Orwellian, being the exact opposite of the truth. The Obama team apparently thinks the Americans are totally idiots willing to believe brazen, blatant, bold-faced lies.
This isn’t hope and change. This isn’t politics as usual. This is worse than politics as usual. This is the corrupt Chicago-style machine politics of thugs and intimidators. Recall that Mr. Obama came out of the corrupt Chicago machine and even refused to work with those trying to bring about its reformation. And now we see he has brought the corruption and thuggery of that style of politics to the White House. We not only have that style of politics in control in the White House, but even worse, its agenda is the radical, liberal, leftist, socialist program that runs contrary to American values and the very principles of our Founding Fathers. As we know, right before his election, Mr. Obama said he was going to fundamentally transform America. And that’s what he is doing, but transforming it by destroying its constitutional structure.
He is involved in an unprecedented expansion of government, explosion of spending, national debts and deficits, taxation, and regulation of every aspect of American life. His debt is unsustainable, and his expansion of government is so great that it is going to squeeze out and kill the private sector. That government expansion will also kill American entrepreneurship upon which America’s productivity has always depended. At the same time, it is contracting our liberties. A gargantuan government controls almost everything and that means the private market and the private citizen control almost nothing. His signature legislation on health-care is an attempt to control America and Americans. The Obama agenda is nothing more than the “road to serfdom.”
If that’s not bad enough, this corrupt Chicago-style politician has demonstrated he is incompetent, as this column has documented. (See, for example, “Time for a Change? Obama’s Mistakes Say So,” Jan. 10.) In addition, he seems detached from our major threat of Islamic terrorism. As Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, his initial responses to the Christmas terrorism in Detroit sounded more like a police report than a leader responding to an existential threat to American survival. Mr. Obama spoke of a “suspect” who was an “isolated extremist” who “allegedly” committed certain acts. It took him three days to come up with that initial, pathetically lame response. Only on his fifth attempt did Mr. Obama finally recognize we are at war. But, his earlier responses probably reflected his true views and feeling, and his fifth attempt was probably an act, scripted by his advisors who realized his early statements were turning the public off.
Mr. Obama and the radicals and thugs now entrenched in the White House are bad enough, and are a certain formula for the destruction of America. But making a bad situation worse is the mainstream media, which acts more as an advocate for Mr. Obama and his programs and less like a fair and balanced source of information the public needs to have. Further compounding this lethal formula is a Democratic Party, led by the Obama/Reid/Pelosi triumvirate that is a virtual rubber stamp of any program. And that party has adopted the Obama philosophy based on Rules for Radicals that says the ends justifies the means. In other words, anything goes. That’s why they are content to ignore the public’s views and the traditions and precedents of Congress, and jam through legislation that is not analyzed, debated, or even read. They are immoral, unprincipled zealots that put their agenda above that of the American people, American values, and the American Constitution.
So, it should be past the tipping point. We should be at the point when most Americans can say, “The Emperor has no clothes.” If Americans don’t stop this headlong rush to destroy America, there will soon be no America left to save. Now is the time. The citizens of this greatest nation on earth have to rise up, protest the Obama agenda, and stop it before it succeeds in transforming America into something our Founding Fathers of yesterday and our citizens of today would not even recognize.
We’ve had more than enough of Mr. Obama’s plans. And we have to start acting like we mean it. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country… and to stop Mr. Obama’s plans to destroy America, as we know it.
http://thebulletin.us/articles/2010/01/16/commentary/op-eds/doc4b515392bea7a605381517.txt
Understanding the Democrats’ Scheme By John F. Gaski
Poor Bill O’Reilly and Brit Hume. There they were on the O’Reilly show a few weeks ago, puzzling over why Barack Obama and the Democrats are doing so many things that are damaging to our country. Bill and Brit agreed that they couldn’t possibly be harming the nation intentionally, because negative voter reaction would redound to them politically and electorally. Can’t the Democrats see this? Did they suddenly get stupid politically? This is so unlike them. How to explain this anomaly?
Poor Bill and Brit, and many others, indeed. It is time to think the unthinkable and speak the ineffable. Apart from the troubling question of intent, or whether Obama-Pelosi-Reid just have a novel view of the public interest, the national Democrats are unnaturally and mysteriously sanguine despite growing backlash by the American people. Why? One reason: The Dems don’t believe they will ever have to face a real election again. Is their plan not becoming obvious? It is very straightforward:
(1) Grant amnesty to the illegal aliens (the correct term for lawbreaking invaders, regardless of their natural and rational motives) which will create up to 30 million reliably Democrat voters — especially after being registered at least once each by ACORN. That is cushion enough to carry any national election. Why else could Dems be so fixated on this agenda item?
(2) Speaking of which, between ACORN and the SEIU, the Democrats will be stealing all the elections they really need anyway, starting next November. (The New Jersey and Virginia governorships aren’t quite as big a prize as control of the U.S. Congress, are they? And one wonders what the real margin of Republican victory in New Jersey was, absent ACORN’s intervention.)
Many laymen still don’t understand how the ACORN scam works. To them, ACORN’s excuse that they are merely committing voter registration fraud, not vote fraud, seems plausible. Here’s the deal: Register 100,000 phony voters such as Mickey Mouse and the Seven Dwarves, thus expanding the nominal voter rolls, and the Democrat vote counters then have the latitude to create 100,000 extra votes out of thin air on election night. This is what “community organizer” really means, and Barack Obama is forever stained by his ACORN background. Not that it matters to him.
America should brace for the biggest vote fraud and election theft caper of all time on election night 2010 — and in the months following. We now know as well that the Dems are guaranteed to win any statewide recount where there is a Democrat Secretary of State. And who, we must ask, is there to enforce the election laws now?
What of Florida 2000? It is easy to correct the prevailing misconception. One can usually tell what offenses against the commonweal the liberal Democrats are committing by what accusations they make against others (into which they project their own tendencies). In November 2000, Democrats did everything they could to try to steal a national election for the second time in forty years, right before a nation’s very eyes, with local partisan functionaries inventing Gore votes out of those dimpled chads. Still, the Democrats have claimed since Y2000 that George W. Bush stole that year’s election, even though every Florida recount, including those sponsored by the media, demonstrated that Bush 43 really won under the law. Republicans have been so ineffective in publicizing these true results in answer to the Democrat mantra that the propaganda has largely taken hold in the public consciousness.
(3) As if they need it, the Dems will be secretly encouraging (maybe even hiring) third-party candidates wherever they need them, because they know that is the way to split the opposition vote. It almost always happens that way to the Democrats’ benefit. If people such as Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck don’t realize this soon, instead of talking up the third-party route, they will only help to ensure a permanent Democrat stranglehold on Congress and the presidency — although any one of this litany of methods would probably be sufficient for that. So the Dems are actually conservative in the sense of wanting some built-in redundancy!
(4) What do we suppose the extra trillion dollars of “stimulus” money to be spent from 2010 to 2012 is really for? Just a coincidence, or a ready-made election slush fund? How much has already been committed to ACORN and SEIU?
(5) Then there is the “universal voter registration” plan that the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund has spotlighted, granting automatic voting privilege to anyone who has ever registered for practically anything, anywhere, anytime. The Democrats and their henchmen could work with that, couldn’t they? Or why are they so eager to enact it? Their entire history has been to oppose laws that prevent vote fraud, after all. (What could be their motive for that particular laxity?)
These five strategies should be enough to ensure permanent Democrat control of our federal government — a virtual dictatorship. For them, it is a royal flush. But another part of the scheme may be the most pernicious of all. The worst is yet to come.
(6) When you become dependent on the decision of a Democrat bureaucrat for crucial medical treatment — after the health care takeover — how much power does that give the Democrats over you? Elderly voters tend to vote more conservative than younger voters, so letting the elderly dies because care is “too expensive” can reshape the political profile of the electorate. But can we reasonably foresee that party registration or political contributions might enter the bureaucrat’s calculus? Might it occur to the intense partisans of the Obama administration to grant lifesaving treatment to those they regard as “their people,” but not to others? What a neat way to eliminate the opposition! Party registration is already public information. And if they can overturn the secret ballot for union elections via “card check,” how long before they try to impose the same more generally, so they will always know how you have voted? Do not trust the judiciary to save us, either, after President Obama packs the courts with more ultra-leftists.
Chilling, isn’t it? But not extreme: Obama himself has notoriously displayed his disregard for human life by the stated willingness to sacrifice “grandma” to a pain pill and his coarse support for unrestricted abortion — even opposition to the Infant Born Alive Act, which he has tried to subvert.
When the Democrats achieve literal death-grip power over the lives of all our citizens, that’s when they also achieve their long-cherished dream of absolute power in a virtual one-party state. Now is it becoming transparent (so to speak) what the real scheme behind their mania for “health-care reform” is? Now does it all make sense? This is not your father’s Democrat party.
This issue is not about health care, ultimately. It is about raw political power and the long-promised radical takeover of the United States. For anyone who hasn’t thought of all this before, I guarantee that Obama and his party’s other leaders have.
Dictatorship in a one-party state indeed seems to loom for us. As one prominent commentator has pointed out, the normal order of the human condition is tyranny, subjugation, and dictatorship, with only a couple of respite periods throughout history, including our time in the West over the past two centuries or so. It just took that long for the totalitarian types to gain near-total power in our country, which they are now consolidating over the coming year. What are the betting odds that they will ever let it go voluntarily?
No wonder the national Democrats aren’t concerned about having to face the electorate again. Pity the naïve, hapless Republicans who actually imagine they have a fair chance later this year and in ‘12!
The long-time president of my university, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, used to say, “At our school, we ask all the questions, even the tough ones.” How’d I do, Father?
The most troubling aspect of my analysis is that it represents the logical extension of irrefutable, objective facts. At least five of the six premises are no more and no less than observable Democrat behavior, and the other is a mild extrapolation at most. This is not good.
It’s over, America. We are now living under a proto-dictatorship in the United States. In less than a year, the full reification of it will be apparent to all. Have a nice day. R.I.P., U.S.A.
WE MUST NEVER FORGET…NOW MORE THAN EVER..!
In God We Trust
When I was a kid, Ike was president, I couldn’t ever imagine why he was so popular. Maybe this has something to do with it:
General Eisenhower Warned Us
It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower,found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.
He did this because he said in words to this effect:
‘Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened’
This week, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offends’ the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as yet.. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.
It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended.. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests Who were ‘murdered, raped, burned, starved, beat, experimented on and humiliated’ while the German people looked the other way!
Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be ‘a myth’,it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets?
This e-mail is intended to reach 400 million people! Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.
How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center
‘NEVER HAPPENED’,
because it offends some Muslim in the U.S. ???
FREEDOM ISN’T FREE…SOMEONE HAD TO PAY FOR
—
Pastor Freddy McMillen
John 3:30
The Obama Administration: A Systematic Failure
Janet Napolitano’s incompetence is merely the tip of the iceberg.
by Bill Levinson
Many circus and Coney Island sideshow performers have genuine talent and qualifications; the human blockhead act, for example, requires skill and practice to avoid self-injury. In 2008, however, the American people played a sick practical joke on themselves by electing a clown (more like the Joker as portrayed by the late Heath Ledger) with no talent or qualifications whatsoever, and said clown promptly staffed his Administration with a collection of equally unqualified freaks as shown below. Unless voters close this sideshow by removing the Democratic majority in the House and Senate, its admission price will consist of trillions of dollars in taxpayer money and economic damage to the United States.
Janet Napolitano demonstrated her total unfitness to lead Homeland Security when she defined gun owners, pro-lifers, veterans of our Armed Forces, and people who oppose illegal immigration (i.e. they oppose something that is a crime under the laws of the United States) as potential terrorists, while apparently overlooking militant “Muslims” who correspond with Al Qaida. After one of the latter allegedly tried to blow up an airplane with explosives he had smuggled aboard, she declared that the system that supposedly protects us from such acts worked. Dolores Umbridge pink is exactly the right color for Napolitano, noting that the fictional villainess of the Harry Potter series said that people like Harry Potter, as opposed to Lord Voldemort, were the “potential terrorists” of her world.
Next we come to Eric Holder’s “Justice” Department, which seeks to prosecute CIA agents who protect us from terrorism (but Lord Voldemort doesn’t exist, and Harry Potter is the boy who lies, correct?) but overlooks alleged intimidation of voters by the Obama campaign, as well as potentially illegal Internet gambling by the Obama campaign. The former was alleged not by Republicans but by Hillary Clinton (Barry’s current Secretary of State) while we have personal knowledge of the latter; we received solicitations for “Dinner with Barack” that required a donation of $5 or more to enter.
Only after complaints from Minnesota law enforcement did the Obama campaign modify this solicitation to allow entry without a donation, thus making it not a lottery. In addition, the announcement of a winner (Dorothy Unruh) before the entry deadline suggested that not every entrant had an equal chance to win, thus making it not only a lottery but a dishonest lottery whose organizers cheated. Even an illegal numbers game that is run by organized crime is more honest, because at least everybody who enters has the same chance to win.
More recently, a veteran Justice Department attorney was removed from his post and transferred–possibly for doing his job by seeking prosecution of stick-wielding Black Panthers who allegedly intimidated voters during the 2008 election.
The complaint, which accused party members of intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place while wearing black berets, black combat boots, black dress shirts and black jackets with military-style markings, and wielding a nightstick, was later dismissed by Obama administration political appointees at the Justice Department.
Since it is apparent that Eric Holder is going to enforce one U.S. Code Title 18 for Barack Obama’s campaign and the Black Panthers, and a different U.S. Code Title 18 for ordinary citizens, and also Barack Obama’s executive order that grants diplomatic immunity to Interpol agents, we must now familiarize our readers with their rights and responsibilities as jurors and also what to say when questioned by the police (or, more importantly, a member of Obama’s civilian security force, private army, Obamajugend, or whatever): “I have nothing to say, Sir,” or “I have nothing to say, Officer.” See also “Do Not Talk to the Police” as presented by an attorney and a veteran police officer.
The above does not apply, of course, if you see a militant “Muslim” assembling what appears to be a bomb, chanting to Allah, and placing phone calls to Al Qaida while waiting at an airport terminal. In that case, you talk to the police on the spot, and hope you don’t get sued for “profiling.” We meanwhile just reported an illegal online pharmacy to the DEA for offering to sell Xanax over the Internet. “Do Not Talk to the Police” does NOT apply to your moral and possibly legal duty to report a felony, and especially a violent felony, or to testify about what you saw. The YouTube presentation points out, however, that Martha Stewart would not have gone to jail had she simply refused to talk to Federal investigators, and there is the classic example of the traffic cop who pulls you over and asks, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” If you tell him what you thought you might have done, he can write a ticket without having to worry about a successful defense in court. On the other hand, if he was confident that he could write a ticket that would hold up in court, he wouldn’t need to ask.
There was also the situation, admittedly on George Bush’s watch, in which New Orleans police illegally confiscated firearms from city residents during the flood. Citizens could have handled this by replying to the question, “Do you have any guns in the house?” with “I have nothing to say, Officer.” If he asks if he can come inside and look, ask “Do you have a warrant, Officer?” Since he doesn’t, the answer is, “No, Officer, I cannot allow you inside without a warrant.” It is unfortunate that we must discuss these things but, in light of the Eric Holder Justice Department’s two sets of U.S. Codes along with an executive order that grants diplomatic immunity to foreign law enforcement personnel, they now need to be discussed.
Next we come to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, who recently proclaimed a gas we all exhale every few seconds a hazard to human life. The Wall Street Journal published a credible allegation of scientific misconduct, specifically suppression of research or information that does not support a given commercial or political agenda, in Ms. Jackson’s organization. The buck stops with her, and she is responsible for the alleged scientific misconduct and academic dishonesty.
Dr. Alan Carlin, a 37-year agency veteran, was muzzled earlier this spring. Dr. Carlin offered a report poking holes in the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming. His superior, Al McGartland, complained the paper did “not help the legal or policy case” for Team Obama’s decision to regulate carbon, told him to “move on to other issues,” and forbade him from discussing it outside the office.
Scientific misconduct is cause for a private business or university to be banned from receiving Federal contracts, and Lisa Jackson’s EPA underscores our belief that there is now one set of laws for Barack Obama and his cohorts, and an entirely different set of laws for everybody else. This in turn reinforces the need for what we just discussed above.
Finally we have Obama’s Green Jobs czar Van Jones: the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier who signed a letter that questions what “really happened” on 9/11. It speaks for itself, and it is vital that Americans end the Democrats’ majority this November to prevent further damage to the country. Then we must correct the root cause of the problem in November 2012.
Obama’s Worst Policy Decisions –by Thomas Del Beccaro
From Guantanamo to Health Care, Obama is certainly seeking to Change America – or more accurately -to accelerate the pace of change from a private enterprise-freedom based civilization to a Big Government-run society. According to Thomas Paine, “It is the duty of a patriot to protect his country from his government.” I realize that is a slightly different definition than Joe Biden would use, but nevertheless, in that light, here is my listing of the worst of his policy decisions:
6. Bailing Out GM. “His policy of public investments prevented necessary liquidations. The businesses he hoped thus to save either went bankrupt in the end, after fearful agonies, or were burdened . . . by a crushing load of debt. [He] undermined property rights . . .pushed federal credit into the banks and bullied them into inflating . . .” Historian Paul Johnson wrote that of Herbert Hoover. You can almost substitute Obama’s name for Hoover’s in every detail. By the way, Government Motors sales are declining at 3 times the rate of the industry as a whole. Hoover would be proud.
5. The Energy Farce. In what universe does economics work like this: A $14 trillion economy is sinking and employers are cutting jobs, so…let’s raise the costs of doing business even more and that will lead to a recovery fueled by an industry, i.e. green technology, which barely exists? Cap & Trade is right out of a classic “command economy” model worthy of 1940’s Eastern Bloc imaginations. If it passes, its regulations will stifle the US economy for decades before someone is wise enough to junk it amidst global cooling.
4. The So-Called Stimulus Bill. So far, this is Obama’ signature legislative “accomplishment.” In time it will be his albatross. The basic policy decision made by Obama was directly the opposite of the choice Reagan made. Reagan said government was not the solution to our problems – Government was the problem. Reagan dramatically cut taxes and regulations, the economy rebounded and tax revenues doubled. Obama’s policy, on the other hand was, and is, to have government spend our way out of our economic problems. Sadly for us, spending, taxing and borrowing is not an economic remedy for too much existing debt and the far too high existing tax burden. Indeed, as the Congressional Budget Office pointed out, in the long run, Obamanomics will hurt more than it will help. Given its short term-failure, it’s hard to imagine something worse and it is even harder not to dub this one of his worst policy decisions.
3. Socialized Health Care. Do I really have to explain the demerits of this decision? Socialized medicine doesn’t work, never has and never will and will be nearly impossible to repeal – oh, and it will bankrupt us. Next!
2. Trying Terrorists in American Courts. As I stated my article, Internment, CSI and Eric Holders Disarming of America, throughout our history, we have treated enemy combatants as those committing an act of war. That is so because (a) they are not US citizens, and (b) their acts were acts of war. In other words, they were not criminal acts of a US citizen committed during peace time. Now however, Obama has allowed at least one enemy combatant to be tried in a US criminal court subject to the constitutional laws of our country. The parade of horribles that will emerge from this decision are numerous and include putting America on trial, tearing down the barriers between citizens and non-citizens and changing the way we fight wars.
1. Cancelling the Missile Defense System. On November 16, 2008, fresh off Obama’s victory, Time Magazine carried an article that read: “Missile-defense skeptics yearning for a fresh look at the wisdom of pumping $10 billion annually into missile defense aren’t going to get it from Barack Obama when he moves into the Oval Office.” How so very wrong Time was. Obama did cancel the long range system – just as every liberal Democrat has been want to do to American defense systems in pursuit of less guns and more butter. So why was that Obama’s worst policy decision? Even worse than nationalization of health care?
Let me count the ways:
1) Defense spending on defense technology is dollar-for-dollar very productive (compared to most gov’t spending) and leads to break-throughs thereby employing and encouraging US scientists – I thought the liberals told me we needed to encourage future scientists?
2) You do not negotiate for years with an at-risk ally, i.e. Poland, and then pull the plug on the deal – what does that say to future at-risk allies, like say Israel! It says you can’t count on the U.S.
3) Obama’s decision to abandon the longer range missiles is based on an assumption that Iran is no longer interested in longer based offensive missiles. You read that right, Obama is trusting Iran against the advice of Bush era advisors,
4) The decision leaves the U.S. without a long range system for the Eastern Seaborg – You are on your own NYC – don’t worry it can’t happen twice,
5) The Decision tells Middle Eastern countries, like Saudi Arabia, that you better defend yourself, i.e. it could/will start a local arms race.
6) It was an obvious caving into Russia without a serious, tangible benefit, and
7) It is in keeping with his other defense cuts which send a strong message when you consider his weak rhetoric. Dean Acheson, who turned his back on South Korea, which led to the Korean War, could not be more impressed.
All in all, when it comes to the nuclear world, ignoring Jefferson’s advice that “Weakness provokes insult & injury,” seems beyond a bad policy decision – it is his worst policy decision.
So there they are – the 6 worst. Stay tuned, however, the worst may be yet to come!
http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/28/obamas-6-worst-policy-decisions/
Why Are We Tiring of Obama? by Victor Davis Hanson
December 23, 2009
Why Are We Tiring of Obama?
by Victor Davis Hanson
The China Presidency
I have an heirloom china pitcher on my mantle that has dozens of glued cracks — so much so that it is now purely ornamental and will not hold water. When I was a boy I’d ask my mother when, and under what circumstances, did the china crack apart.
She would provide stories about each fissure and mend, many of the break narratives handed down to her from her own grandparents in the house. There wasn’t one single accident, but instead dozens that rendered a once useful pitcher into a non-functional art object.
Something of the same is happening with our President. He is experiencing the sharpest popularity decline in the history of first-year administrations. The problem is not just that he inherited a bad economy; Reagan did too. Or that the war in Afghanistan heats up, since it is not nearly as bad as the mess Nixon inherited in Vietnam.
Instead, after 11 months there has emerged a series of bothersome incidents that the public has come to associate with Obama, both the man and his philosophies. Some are major policy issues; others trivial acts of no cosmic importance. None in themselves matter all that much. Each gaffe or mistake was contextualized and mended, or attended to by Robert Gibbs. Some are Obama’s fault; others the work of associates. Sometimes mere chance is the culprit.
I know Bush had his own list of catastrophes; other Presidents did as well. Again, my point is not trying to adjudicate relative culpability, but rather just to remind us all how and why Obama dived over 20 points in the polls in just 11 months—and his speeches transformed from inspirational to caricatures.
In short, taken together, after nearly a year, these fissures have nearly ruined the once pretty texture of the Obama administration, and almost rendered it incapable of effective governance.
Here is a random selection. I provide no chronology or theme. Nor do I judge the relative importance of any one incident. The point, again, is only that each was a fissure, some small, some major—all were glued over. The result is that now the public understands that its china presidency is fragile and held together by mere glue.
Here it goes:
Constant apologies abroad for everything from slavery to Hiroshima
Bows to Saudi royalty, the Japanese emperor, and Chinese autocrats
The on-again/off-again Guantanamo shut-down mess
The fight with the former CIA directors
The public show trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed
The reach out to Ahmadinejad Castro, Chavez, and assorted thugs
The Honduras fiasco
Czars everywhere
The serial “Bush did it”/reset whine abroad
The Queen of England/I-pod fiasco
Gordon Brown gets snookered in his gift-giving
Unceremoniously shipping back the Churchill bust
The end of the special relationship with the UK
The New York on-the-town presidential splurge
Anita Dunn and her Mao worship
Timothy Geithner/Tom Daschle/Hilda Solis and their taxes
What ever happened to Gov. Richardson?
“No lobbyists” = gads of them
The Podestas’ insider influence-peddling empire
Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” chauvinism
The Special Olympics silly quip
Trashing Nancy Reagan
The Skip Gates/police acting “stupidly” mess
The get-Chicago-the-Olympics jaunt to Copenhagen
Cap-and-trade boondoggle
“Millions of green jobs”
Ignore gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power production
Cash-for-clunkers
The Joe Biden gaffe machine
Jobs “saved” or “created” rather than references to the actual unemployment rates
Van Jones, the racist and truther
Desiree Rogers won’t testify
The blowback from, and silence about, the Rangel/Dodd corruption
The White House party crashers plan to take the 5th Amendment
The ‘bipartisanship’ con
The pork-barrel stimulus spoils
The demonization of the Town-Hallers
The Acorn Mess
The Kevin Jennings/Safe School Czar embarrassment
The SEIU direct access to the White House
The Asian Tour comedown
The politicization of the take-over of GM and Chrysler
The Obama readjustment in the order of paying back car creditors
Car dealerships closed on shaky criteria
Obama as “Caesar”
The Emanuel “never let a serious crisis go to waste” boast
The Black Caucus/Rangel/Waters bid to bail out the inner-city radio stations
Yosi Sergant and the NEA
$1.7 trillion deficit
The planned $9 trillion added to the national debt
New income tax rates; health care surcharge talk; and payroll tax caps to be lifted
Rahm Emanuel’s promised payback to those states that trash the stimulus
The supposed C-span aired health care debate
The promised website posts of pending legislation
Czechs and Poles sold out on missile defense
Sermons to and finger pointing at the Israelis
The failed ‘Putin helps to stop a nuclear Iran’ gambit
Voting present on the Iranian reformers in the street
Serial but empty deadlines to Ahmadinejad
The good war/bad war twisting and turning on Iraq/Afghanistan
The months-long dithering over Afghanistan
Renditions, tribunals, Patriot Act, etc. once trashed, now OK
Healthcare take-over
The 2,000 page proposed new health code
The embarrassing Nobel Peace Prize nomination
The attacks on surgeons, Chamber of Commerce, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc.
The Islam mythologies in the Cairo Speech
The al Arabiya “Bush did it” interview
Obama’s TV “my Muslim faith” gaffe
The Nobel Speech
I listened to it this morning quite early and posted at NRO. Bottom line: an academic sermon on peace/war with the now accustomed Obama characteristics:
1) long again (4,000 words); 2) “I” or “me” 34 times: same old self referencing; 3) the inadvertent cosmic arrogance [“I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.” = you think?]; 4) straw men trope: some say this; others say that; but I uniquely say…; 5) reference to my own personal inspirational story; 6) trash my predecessor or his policies; 7) end with hopey/changey cadences.
That was pretty much it — a pulpit exegesis that could have been cut to 500 words. I would have done the speech in 10 minutes and used the extra time to have lunch with poor neglected King Harald. (Second recommendation: Obama should try to hire some speech-writers over 40. There are a lot of old pro Democrat wordsmiths around that might come in and offer something new other than the now tired boilerplate.)
Some books…
As I mentioned a few posts ago, I’m rereading two great books on Belisarius—the 1828 classic by the then 24-year-old Lord Mahon (with a new intro by Jon Coulston), and a new biography by Ian Hughes. They read like Greek tragedies: Belisaurius is Justinian’s fireman, sent to stop Persians, Goths, Vandals, etc. always with too few troops, a plotting wife, court intrigue at his back, and a never satisfied emperor at home — apparently in some hope that Romanism could hold back the tide in the crumbling 6th century.
I am halfway through David Horowitz’s moving tribute to his late daughter Sarah (A Cracking of the Heart) that recounts their four-plus-decades relationship through turbulent politics, ill heath, and the often baffling past three decades in America. A sad, but fine reflection on life and the inevitably of change and death.
Buyer’s Remorse on Obama will finally cause a Jewish shift to the right?
By NORMAN PODHORETZ
One of the most extraordinary features of Barack Obama’s victory over John McCain was his capture of 78% of the Jewish vote. To be sure, there was nothing extraordinary about the number itself. Since 1928, the average Jewish vote for the Democrat in presidential elections has been an amazing 75%—far higher than that of any other ethno-religious group.
Yet there were reasons to think that it would be different in 2008. The main one was Israel. Despite some slippage in concern for Israel among American Jews, most of them were still telling pollsters that their votes would be strongly influenced by the positions of the two candidates on the Jewish state. This being the case, Mr. McCain’s long history of sympathy with Israel should have given him a distinct advantage over Mr. Obama, whose own history consisted of associating with outright enemies of the Jewish state like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the historian Rashid Khalidi.
Nevertheless, Mr. Obama beat Mr. McCain among Jewish voters by a staggering 57 points. Except for African Americans, who gave him 95% of their vote, Mr. Obama did far better with Jews than with any other ethnic or religious group. Thus the Jewish vote for him was 25 points higher than the 53% he scored with the electorate as a whole; 35 points higher than the 43% he scored with whites; 11 points higher than the 67% he scored with Hispanics; 33 points higher than the 45% he scored with Protestants; and 24 points higher than the 54% he scored with Catholics.
These numbers remind us of the extent to which the continued Jewish commitment to the Democratic Party has become an anomaly. All the other ethno-religious groups that, like the Jews, formed part of the coalition forged by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s have followed the rule that increasing prosperity generally leads to an increasing identification with the Republican Party. But not the Jews. As the late Jewish scholar Milton Himmelfarb said in the 1950s: “Jews earn like Episcopalians”—then the most prosperous minority group in America—”and vote like Puerto Ricans,” who were then the poorest.
Jews also remain far more heavily committed to the liberal agenda than any of their old ethno-religious New Deal partners. As the eminent sociologist Nathan Glazer has put it, “whatever the promptings of their economic interests,” Jews have consistently supported “increased government spending, expanded benefits to the poor and lower classes, greater regulations on business, and the power of organized labor.”
As with these old political and economic questions, so with the newer issues being fought out in the culture wars today. On abortion, gay rights, school prayer, gun control and assisted suicide, the survey data show that Jews are by far the most liberal of any group in America.
Most American Jews sincerely believe that their liberalism, together with their commitment to the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle, stems from the teachings of Judaism and reflects the heritage of “Jewish values.” But if this theory were valid, the Orthodox would be the most liberal sector of the Jewish community. After all, it is they who are most familiar with the Jewish religious tradition and who shape their lives around its commandments.
Yet the Orthodox enclaves are the only Jewish neighborhoods where Republican candidates get any votes to speak of. Even more telling is that on every single cultural issue, the Orthodox oppose the politically correct liberal positions taken by most other American Jews precisely because these positions conflict with Jewish law. To cite just a few examples: Jewish law permits abortion only to protect the life of the mother; it forbids sex between men; and it prohibits suicide (except when the only alternatives are forced conversion or incest).
The upshot is that in virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.
All this applies most fully to Jews who are Jewish only in an ethnic sense. Indeed, many such secular Jews, when asked how they would define “a good Jew,” reply that it is equivalent to being a good liberal.
But avowed secularists are not the only Jews who confuse Judaism with liberalism; so do many non-Orthodox Jews who practice this or that traditional observance. It is not for nothing that a cruel wag has described the Reform movement—the largest of the religious denominations within the American Jewish community—as “the Democratic Party with holidays thrown in,” and the services in a Reform temple as “the Democratic Party at prayer.”
As a Jew who moved from left to right more than four decades ago, I have been hoping for many years that my fellow Jews would come to see that in contrast to what was the case in the past, our true friends are now located not among liberals, but among conservatives.
Of course in speaking of the difference between left and right, or between liberals and conservatives, I have in mind a divide wider than the conflict between Democrats and Republicans and deeper than electoral politics. The great issue between the two political communities is how they feel about the nature of American society. With all exceptions duly noted, I think it fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at this country is injustice and oppression of every kind—economic, social and political. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a nation shaped by a complex of traditions, principles and institutions that has afforded more freedom and, even factoring in periodic economic downturns, more prosperity to more of its citizens than in any society in human history. It follows that what liberals believe needs to be changed or discarded—and apologized for to other nations—is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating and proudly defending against attack.
In this realm, too, American Jewry surely belongs with the conservatives rather than the liberals. For the social, political and moral system that liberals wish to transform is the very system in and through which Jews found a home such as they had never discovered in all their forced wanderings throughout the centuries over the face of the earth.
The Jewish immigrants who began coming here from Eastern Europe in the 1880s were right to call America “the golden land.” They soon learned that there was no gold in the streets, as some of them may have imagined, which meant that they had to struggle, and struggle hard. But there was another, more precious kind of gold in America. There was freedom and there was opportunity. Blessed with these conditions, we children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these immigrants flourished—and not just in material terms—to an extent unmatched in the history of our people.
What I am saying is that if anything bears eloquent testimony to the infinitely precious virtues of the traditional American system, it is the Jewish experience in this country. Surely, then, we Jews ought to be joining with its defenders against those who are blind or indifferent or antagonistic to the philosophical principles, the moral values, and the socioeconomic institutions on whose health and vitality the traditional American system depends.
In 2008, we were faced with a candidate who ran to an unprecedented degree on the premise that the American system was seriously flawed and in desperate need of radical change—not to mention a record powerfully indicating that he would pursue policies dangerous to the security of Israel. Because of all this, I hoped that my fellow Jews would finally break free of the liberalism to which they have remained in thrall long past the point where it has served either their interests or their ideals.
That possibility having been resoundingly dashed, I now grasp for some encouragement from the signs that buyer’s remorse is beginning to set in among Jews, as it also seems to be doing among independents. Which is why I am hoping against hope that the exposure of Mr. Obama as a false messiah will at last open the eyes of my fellow Jews to the correlative falsity of the political creed he so perfectly personifies and to which they have for so long been so misguidedly loyal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574402591116901498.html