You're absolutely right.....certain fanatics have turned this into a petty feud:roll:
Quit picking on Obama……
- Thread starter DaSleeper
- Start date
You're absolutely right.....certain fanatics have turned this into a petty feud:roll:
I myself support the war in Afghanistan, ironsides. That is a war that must be fought. regardless of what the public opinion says. It will be a disaster to let Afghanistan fall into the hands of Taliban/Al Qaeda.
This is totally different from Iraq war, Bush had no business invading Iraq. Iraq was not involved in terrorism in any major way, according to Osama, Saddam wasn’t even a good Muslim. So Iraq war was meritless.
But Afghanistan war isn’t meritless. And to be fair to Obama, he never said that he will pull out of Afghanistan. On the contrary, I think he specifically said during the campaign that he will continue the fight in Afghanistan. Obama is committed to pulling out of Iraq, but he will continue to fight in Afghanistan, and rightly so.
The Obama haters remain unrelenting in their hate for the president. But, as always, they haven't presented a shred of evidence to support any of the idiotic things they say about him.
But it sure makes for a good laugh!
But it sure makes for a good laugh!
Quote of the year!
''Obama ''is rather marching black Americans into the past, into the shackles of slavery, into the misery of hatred, into the hovels of hopelessness. ''
I'm saving this gem - it's definitely a keeper!:lol:
''Obama ''is rather marching black Americans into the past, into the shackles of slavery, into the misery of hatred, into the hovels of hopelessness. ''
I'm saving this gem - it's definitely a keeper!:lol:
You seem to be in a minority here. A few of your people are crying, begging in fact to get of Afghanistan now, they do not care what the reason for being there is or was.
Ironsides, this is one instance where I think politicians would be justified in disregarding the public opinion. People speak from both sides of their mouth, they are not paid to make tough decisions. If Afghanistan falls to Taliban and once again becomes a haven for terrorism, people will blame the politicians for it.
When it comes to Afghanistan, it should be a question of educating the public (why it is important to fight in Afghanistan), rather than changing the policy to suit the public opinion. Public can be fickle. If you have another terrorist attack on your mainland, the support for Afghanistan war may well shoot through the roof.
I agree with you. I would like to see the politicians and media get out of making war policy and let the troops do what they are paid to do. We don't need another 40,000 troops, we have more than enough to end the conflict. I say do a news blackout for how ever long it takes, the war will be over within months. Politicians, Media and bleeding hearts kill more than the enemy does. Educate the public when it is over.
This is what I mean, the in fighting has got to stop. Must present a united front.
"Pelosi, Reid at odds over war"
The eye roll said it all.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid emerged from the White House Tuesday with broad, bicameral smiles — until Reid put his arm around Pelosi to announce that “everyone” would support “whatever” Afghanistan policy the president produces.
Pelosi doesn’t agree with that — not at all — and the TV cameras captured the California Democrat rolling her eyes and slightly recoiling from Reid’s grasp as he spoke. Back at the Capitol, Pelosi made it clear that she was angry about Reid’s unilateral offer of unequivocal support, a person familiar with the situation said.
Pelosi insisted Wednesday that it wasn’t so, telling POLITICO that she was “not upset,” adding: “I don’t know where you would have heard such a thing.”
But whatever the precise level of Pelosi’s frustration, this much is clear: If President Barack Obama decides to send more troops to Afghanistan, he risks setting off an internal party struggle on a foreign policy issue that may well define his performance as commander in chief.
Pelosi, Reid at odds over war - Yahoo! News
"Pelosi, Reid at odds over war"
The eye roll said it all.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid emerged from the White House Tuesday with broad, bicameral smiles — until Reid put his arm around Pelosi to announce that “everyone” would support “whatever” Afghanistan policy the president produces.
Pelosi doesn’t agree with that — not at all — and the TV cameras captured the California Democrat rolling her eyes and slightly recoiling from Reid’s grasp as he spoke. Back at the Capitol, Pelosi made it clear that she was angry about Reid’s unilateral offer of unequivocal support, a person familiar with the situation said.
Pelosi insisted Wednesday that it wasn’t so, telling POLITICO that she was “not upset,” adding: “I don’t know where you would have heard such a thing.”
But whatever the precise level of Pelosi’s frustration, this much is clear: If President Barack Obama decides to send more troops to Afghanistan, he risks setting off an internal party struggle on a foreign policy issue that may well define his performance as commander in chief.
Pelosi, Reid at odds over war - Yahoo! News
October 8, 2009
Is Obama Becoming a Joke?
By David Paul Kuhn
Most presidents become a joke at some point. It's a matter of when and how. Both points should concern this president. In Winston Churchill's words, "a joke is a very serious thing." Or it can be, when the joke is about a very serious thing.
"Saturday Night Live" has long been a comedic benchmark. Last weekend, SNL took its first hard hit at President Obama. Fred Armisen, who plays the president, gave an Oval Office address questioning why some critics were distraught with him transforming the country: "When you look at my record it's very clear what I've done so far and that is nothing. Nada. Almost one year and nothing to show for it."
Political satire matters when it is larger than the joke. The growing rap on Obama is that he is a man both ineffective and meek; a man who is loved by all and feared by none.
Bill Maher hit the punch line first in mid-June: "You don't have to be on television every minute of every day. You're the president, not a rerun of 'Law & Order'... TV stars are too worried about being popular and too concerned about being renewed."
Soon Maher came to his key point: "You're skinny and in a hurry and in love with a nice lady, but so is Lindsay Lohan. And just like Lindsay, we see your name in the paper a lot but we're kind of wondering when you're actually going to do something."
Jon Stewart has been in on the joke all week. On Monday, Stewart hit Obama for "appeasing" the health care and energy industries. On Tuesday, Stewart showed clips of Obama's repeated campaign promises to allow gays to serve openly in the military.
Stewart to Obama: "I know you have a lot on your desk plate. But as a thin man who smokes, you may not understand the concept. All that stuff you've been putting on your plate, it's f-cking chow time, brother. That's how you get things off of your plate. "
The Olympics only helped reinforce the punch line. The president went to Copenhagen to rally for his hometown. Analysts assumed that the White House was in on a secret. The president could tip the vote? But Chicago lost on the first round. The president looked powerless.
Many Sunday political shows touched on Obama's Olympic failure. Was it a metaphor? On ABC's "This Week," George Will said yes. He listed Obama's big initiatives abroad and the absence of progress. "Saying no to the president is a habit," Will argued. "The world adores him and ignores him." The digs came from all sides. But SNL brought the point home.
Smart administrations take jokes seriously. By the spring of 1982, Ronald Reagan's staff was concerned by a running joke. A new comedy record was popular, portraying Reagan as the amicable dunce.
Satire helped undermine both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. And as Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, put it then: "the danger" of political satire "arises when the humor portrays the president as silly or impotent or portrays what he's trying to do as irrelevant--when it attacks some of the basic elements of his leadership."
Mocking the powerful is as old as Ben Franklin. A JFK impersonator won a Grammy in 1963 for satirizing the Kennedys. By the late 1970s, SNL became political satire's defining institution.
It was supposed to be hard to joke about Obama. White liberal comics were afraid to touch on race. Obama came to office in serious times. But it was also Obama's image. He ran on a lofty persona unlike any candidate since Reagan. But in the case of Obama, the liberal pop culture was buying and selling it. Obama was to bring, "change, we can believe in."
But the change maker has not made change--at least not on the hard fights, not yet. Hillary Clinton once asked why Obama "can't close the deal." Her dig is now a punch line. And most people get the joke, except CNN.
This week CNN actually ran a segment fact checking the Obama SNL skit. Bush and Palin may have wondered why CNN never came to their defense. But then, where's the humor in that?
As Garry Trudeau, of "Doonesbury" fame, told one reporter, "For something to be funny, the audience has to be in a position to sense the truth of it." And SNL's lampoon of Obama was funny.
Is Obama Becoming a Joke?
By David Paul Kuhn
Most presidents become a joke at some point. It's a matter of when and how. Both points should concern this president. In Winston Churchill's words, "a joke is a very serious thing." Or it can be, when the joke is about a very serious thing.
"Saturday Night Live" has long been a comedic benchmark. Last weekend, SNL took its first hard hit at President Obama. Fred Armisen, who plays the president, gave an Oval Office address questioning why some critics were distraught with him transforming the country: "When you look at my record it's very clear what I've done so far and that is nothing. Nada. Almost one year and nothing to show for it."
Political satire matters when it is larger than the joke. The growing rap on Obama is that he is a man both ineffective and meek; a man who is loved by all and feared by none.
Bill Maher hit the punch line first in mid-June: "You don't have to be on television every minute of every day. You're the president, not a rerun of 'Law & Order'... TV stars are too worried about being popular and too concerned about being renewed."
Soon Maher came to his key point: "You're skinny and in a hurry and in love with a nice lady, but so is Lindsay Lohan. And just like Lindsay, we see your name in the paper a lot but we're kind of wondering when you're actually going to do something."
Jon Stewart has been in on the joke all week. On Monday, Stewart hit Obama for "appeasing" the health care and energy industries. On Tuesday, Stewart showed clips of Obama's repeated campaign promises to allow gays to serve openly in the military.
Stewart to Obama: "I know you have a lot on your desk plate. But as a thin man who smokes, you may not understand the concept. All that stuff you've been putting on your plate, it's f-cking chow time, brother. That's how you get things off of your plate. "
The Olympics only helped reinforce the punch line. The president went to Copenhagen to rally for his hometown. Analysts assumed that the White House was in on a secret. The president could tip the vote? But Chicago lost on the first round. The president looked powerless.
Many Sunday political shows touched on Obama's Olympic failure. Was it a metaphor? On ABC's "This Week," George Will said yes. He listed Obama's big initiatives abroad and the absence of progress. "Saying no to the president is a habit," Will argued. "The world adores him and ignores him." The digs came from all sides. But SNL brought the point home.
Smart administrations take jokes seriously. By the spring of 1982, Ronald Reagan's staff was concerned by a running joke. A new comedy record was popular, portraying Reagan as the amicable dunce.
Satire helped undermine both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. And as Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, put it then: "the danger" of political satire "arises when the humor portrays the president as silly or impotent or portrays what he's trying to do as irrelevant--when it attacks some of the basic elements of his leadership."
Mocking the powerful is as old as Ben Franklin. A JFK impersonator won a Grammy in 1963 for satirizing the Kennedys. By the late 1970s, SNL became political satire's defining institution.
It was supposed to be hard to joke about Obama. White liberal comics were afraid to touch on race. Obama came to office in serious times. But it was also Obama's image. He ran on a lofty persona unlike any candidate since Reagan. But in the case of Obama, the liberal pop culture was buying and selling it. Obama was to bring, "change, we can believe in."
But the change maker has not made change--at least not on the hard fights, not yet. Hillary Clinton once asked why Obama "can't close the deal." Her dig is now a punch line. And most people get the joke, except CNN.
This week CNN actually ran a segment fact checking the Obama SNL skit. Bush and Palin may have wondered why CNN never came to their defense. But then, where's the humor in that?
As Garry Trudeau, of "Doonesbury" fame, told one reporter, "For something to be funny, the audience has to be in a position to sense the truth of it." And SNL's lampoon of Obama was funny.
How soon we forget. The honeymoon with the media has not ended. Political conflict does make stories.
Halperin Decries 'Disgusting' Pro-Obama Media Bias in Election Coverage
"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."
Halperin Decries 'Disgusting' Pro-Obama Media Bias in Election Coverage - Political Punch
Media Malpractice... How Obama Got Elected (Video) - JustGetThere
Halperin Decries 'Disgusting' Pro-Obama Media Bias in Election Coverage
"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."
Halperin Decries 'Disgusting' Pro-Obama Media Bias in Election Coverage - Political Punch
Media Malpractice... How Obama Got Elected (Video) - JustGetThere
I don’t’ think media was ever biased (not the mainstream media that is, FOX has always been a mouthpiece of the Republican base), TenPenny, it was mostly the right wing propaganda. Media always try to look for the shortcomings of any president. They did that for Clinton, they did that for Bush, they will do that for Obama.
But to listen to the Republicans, press had it in for Bush, while they are on the side of Obama. Press is no nobody’s side, except its own.
I think those are right wing website, ironsides. They would be expected to say that. Republican base evidently expects the mainstream press to run with each and every story put forth by the far right base, whether substantiated or not. When they don’t do that, the Republican base accuses the press of being biased. That is a political ploy, nothing more.
As I read......a little saying comes to mind...:roll:
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?
On another note...You have said before that you don't watch Fox news.....so how would you know......I watch CNN, NBC and Fox...
When you watch other networks...you sometimes find some Nuggets...
Just like it seems that Rachel Maddow is not completely for Obama...You might be surprised to find that Fox is not the extreme Right wing haven you think it is..:lol:
YouTube - MSNBC Rachel Maddow rips obama a new one!
Just like it seems that Rachel Maddow is not completely for Obama...You might be surprised to find that Fox is not the extreme Right wing haven you think it is..:lol:
YouTube - MSNBC Rachel Maddow rips obama a new one!
Of course they must be right wing websites. Again everyone always comes back to the one news network that is Republican FOX, but the difference with them is that they do express the news fairly equally. Unlike NBC who will cover up stories if they go against Democratic policy.
The War Inside NBC - HUMAN EVENTS
NBC’s Extreme Pro-Obama Bias To Make G.E. Billions Of Dollars? | The Truth
Of course no other major networks will openly oppose them. We do not or can not get a unbiased version of the news.
Conrad Black: The Obama fiasco
Posted: October 15, 2009, 10:00 AM by NP Editor
The Obama era to date has been wasted in a historic, amateurish botch of the health-care issue. This began as a crusade for social justice — to cover the uninsured, whose numbers were suitably exaggerated, as most of them are people changing jobs from one health-insuring employer to another, or foreigners resident in this country, legally or otherwise, or the indigent, who are eligible for Medicaid.
It wasn’t clear from this rationale, however, why Obama was also trying to take over the insurance of those already covered. He therefore pressed on to the need to take over health care to save money (by nationalizing it). His own budget officials blew that up, so the President moved crisply on to revenue-neutral health-care reform for its own sake. The corresponding promises of cost reductions proved to be shortchanging elderly Medicare recipients of $620-billion and chasing Washington’s eldest and most elusive will-o’-the-wisp, the last refuge of 220 years of desperate public officials, the ever-popular “waste and fraud.” And the “reforms” themselves are just aggravations of long-established mistaken practices.
The President’s reform plan has been seen by almost everyone to be bunk, and hackneyed bunk at that. His political capital is evaporating and, while the reception given Mr. Obama by the Republicans in his last appearance before Congress was a disgrace, a congressman’s screaming “You lie!” (which Obama did, about health care for illegal immigrants) is more understandable and likely to be more habit-forming than an Iraqi journalist’s throwing shoes at his predecessor.
Instead of following the Roosevelt 1933 formula of squarely acknowledging a crisis and pledging an immediate plan of action with inspiriting calls for solidarity and national effort, he magnified the problems in order to try to create an appetite for a more radical turn to higher taxes and social benefits than the country wanted. Instead of sending precise bills to Congress and generating public support for them as Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan did, Obama left it to the Democratic congressional leadership, which festooned every bill with pendulous payoffs to key votes and interests.
The $787-billion stimulus plan was a monstrosity of patronage and logrolling. The money that was borrowed (to stimulate, in reality, Democratic re-election prospects) has been taken from purposes that would have stimulated the economy just as efficiently. Larry Summers could not have believed his promises of instant results that would confine unemployment to 8%. Two-thirds of the stimulus is for dispersal closer to elections, and meanwhile unemployment is knocking at the door of 10%. The whole misconceived idea should be scrapped and replaced with tax cuts, but it won’t be.
The cap-and-trade bill is so loaded with rebates and exemptions that the administration’s own spokesmen acknowledge that while it would sharply raise heating and air-conditioning costs in tens of millions of American homes, it would neither raise federal-government revenues nor reduce carbon emissions. It was based on the unproved Al Gore science-fiction vision of the environment, and it won’t pass.
It looks like a patchy healthcare measure adding nearly another trillion dollars to the deficit may limp through on the politically hazardous reconciliation process. The President’s proposed tax increases, which have been the subject of an indecent amount of dissembling for over a year, will not pass either (and would be insane anyway).
And the forecast trillion-dollar annual deficits for a decade are allowed to fester in the thoughts of the financial world, unaddressed, pushing gold over $1,000 per ounce and dragging the dollar inexorably downward. This administration shows no will to pay down the debt accumulated by 15 years of borrowing trillions of dollars from China and Japan to buy trillions of dollars of non-essential goods from China and Japan, while outsourcing millions of jobs to China and Japan to produce these imports and admitting millions of unauthorized entrants who could have filled the vacated American mills and factories whose production was outsourced. Instead, it will just devalue the currency in which the debt is denominated and end America’s long reign as the world’s wealthiest per capita large country, an honour it already shares with six other advanced nations.
The political classes of both parties legislated and ordered the issuance of trillions of dollars of worthless real-estate debt, eliminated savings, penalized those in rented accommodation and promoted wild residential-real-estate speculation. It has now locked arms to over-empower the failed regulators who sat, mute as suet puddings, while this crisis developed, to save the Franks, Waxmans, Dodds, Rubins and Greenspans from their just desserts. They have agreed to blame everything on private-sector greed: Attorney General Eric Holder will prosecute avaricious businessmen, as he will Republican-appointed intelligence officials. The criminalization of policy differences, a corrosive and self-destructive process that began with the Watergate crucifixion of one of the country’s most effective presidents, and continued through the Iran-Contra nonsense and the absurd effort to remove president Clinton for undignified but hardly unprecedented peccadilloes, has resumed. It will beget nothing good or just, and will be revisited on its perpetrators.
The administration that was elected on the promise of change has been neutered by the trial lawyers, who donated $47-million to the Democrats last year and have prevented the measures necessary to cut health-care costs. It has been suborned by the dead hand of organized labour, which has been rewarded for decades of over-payment and shoddy work habits in automobile-making with entrenchment of the UAW’s unfeasible health-care benefits, continued protectionism and outright ownership of most of what is left of the U.S. auto industry.
Nothing is being done to defuse the Social Security or other benefit time bombs, or to reform a corrupt political system in which most of the legislators are bound hand and foot to different special interests, and are locked almost permanently into gerrymandered districts. Nothing is forecast to turn America back from a consumption to a production economy, apart from the President’s own fable about huge numbers of people building windmills: a new, enhanced version of quixotry.
Nothing is being done to fix a failed education system in which teachers’ unions fight tooth and nail against any connection between pay and performance and the dropout rate is 42%, or to reform a prosecution service that wins over 90% of its cases, enjoys a procedural stacked deck and has gutted the individual-liberties and due-process sections of the Bill of Rights with the plea bargain system’s wholesale exchange of perjury for immunity or reduced charges. Nothing has been suggested for improving the conduct of the failed drug war, which has reduced parts of Mexico to civil war without reducing access to unprescribed drugs in the U.S.; nor has the administration moved to reduce sentences for the more than 40% of Americans who at some point experiment with marijuana (the greatest cash crop in the Golden, bankrupt State of California).
The award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to President Obama unfortunately confirms the world’s love for weak or at least misguidedly diffident American leaders, in the mould of previous Nobel laureates Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr. all made immense contributions to peace and probably earned that prize but did not receive it. This President has engaged in wholesale, equal opportunity apologies for much past U.S. foreign and military policy success. He has appeased almost all of the world’s most odious and hostile regimes, including those of Putin, Ahmadinejad, Chavez and the Myanmar colonels. It’s possible that the emoting about nuclear disarmament will assist the efforts to discourage Iran and North Korea from developing a nuclear arms capability, and that pre-emptive concessions to Russia will promote sanctions that, when they don’t succeed (as they never do), will help create a consensus for decisive action against Iran — but it is unlikely. The “War of Necessity” in Afghanistan has become a waffle. Joe Biden, who wanted to divide Iraq into three countries and should be constitutionally barred from publicly discussing foreign policy, wants to fight the cave dwelling terrorists of Waziristan from offshore. This administration has mercilessly bullied Honduras to violate its own constitution and subvert its own fragile democracy, and has reneged on European missile defence, and on the Bush-Sharon agreement on West Bank settlements, the implementation of which caused Sharon to buck fierce opposition and found a new political party. Its foreign policy is a high-risk pursuit of appeasement which has few successful precedents, at a time when the U.S. is not strong in the world, and has its economic and strategic credibility to rebuild. The first U.S. president to win a Nobel Peace Prize in office, Theodore Roosevelt, knew to carry a big stick while speaking softly.
The Obama Kool-Aid drinkers, led, by right and tradition, by the political scientists of Hollywood, have, like Demi Moore, pledged to “fight for the President” to the bitter end (which is nigh). The less energetic, such as the inevitable Jimmy Carter, have charged the President’s critics with racism, a tawdry and almost always false claim. Worthy commentators like Tom Friedman have decried the coarsening of the American public debate, doubtless sincerely. More to the point, Peggy Noonan, whose kindly, sentimental Irish nature was briefly pixilated by Obamamania, now sees the President as “cool,” (i.e., cold), “faux eloquent” and even a Narcissus.
Barack Obama is obviously a very intelligent man, and should be a popular and successful President. But his mandate for profound reform and a steam-cleaning of the Augean Stable of Washington is being squandered. So far the change is more of the same, only worse. This President has achieved less in his first nine months than any incoming president since Warren Harding. It is not too late, but it looks now like the people will vote again for change, with increasing desperation, next year and in 2012. If the country does not get leadership equal to the scale of its problems, as it did in 1860 and 1932, the decline of America will move from a slope to a fall. This emperor still has no clothes, and it is not racism to notice it.
Let the ad hominem comments begin.
Posted: October 15, 2009, 10:00 AM by NP Editor
The Obama era to date has been wasted in a historic, amateurish botch of the health-care issue. This began as a crusade for social justice — to cover the uninsured, whose numbers were suitably exaggerated, as most of them are people changing jobs from one health-insuring employer to another, or foreigners resident in this country, legally or otherwise, or the indigent, who are eligible for Medicaid.
It wasn’t clear from this rationale, however, why Obama was also trying to take over the insurance of those already covered. He therefore pressed on to the need to take over health care to save money (by nationalizing it). His own budget officials blew that up, so the President moved crisply on to revenue-neutral health-care reform for its own sake. The corresponding promises of cost reductions proved to be shortchanging elderly Medicare recipients of $620-billion and chasing Washington’s eldest and most elusive will-o’-the-wisp, the last refuge of 220 years of desperate public officials, the ever-popular “waste and fraud.” And the “reforms” themselves are just aggravations of long-established mistaken practices.
The President’s reform plan has been seen by almost everyone to be bunk, and hackneyed bunk at that. His political capital is evaporating and, while the reception given Mr. Obama by the Republicans in his last appearance before Congress was a disgrace, a congressman’s screaming “You lie!” (which Obama did, about health care for illegal immigrants) is more understandable and likely to be more habit-forming than an Iraqi journalist’s throwing shoes at his predecessor.
Instead of following the Roosevelt 1933 formula of squarely acknowledging a crisis and pledging an immediate plan of action with inspiriting calls for solidarity and national effort, he magnified the problems in order to try to create an appetite for a more radical turn to higher taxes and social benefits than the country wanted. Instead of sending precise bills to Congress and generating public support for them as Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan did, Obama left it to the Democratic congressional leadership, which festooned every bill with pendulous payoffs to key votes and interests.
The $787-billion stimulus plan was a monstrosity of patronage and logrolling. The money that was borrowed (to stimulate, in reality, Democratic re-election prospects) has been taken from purposes that would have stimulated the economy just as efficiently. Larry Summers could not have believed his promises of instant results that would confine unemployment to 8%. Two-thirds of the stimulus is for dispersal closer to elections, and meanwhile unemployment is knocking at the door of 10%. The whole misconceived idea should be scrapped and replaced with tax cuts, but it won’t be.
The cap-and-trade bill is so loaded with rebates and exemptions that the administration’s own spokesmen acknowledge that while it would sharply raise heating and air-conditioning costs in tens of millions of American homes, it would neither raise federal-government revenues nor reduce carbon emissions. It was based on the unproved Al Gore science-fiction vision of the environment, and it won’t pass.
It looks like a patchy healthcare measure adding nearly another trillion dollars to the deficit may limp through on the politically hazardous reconciliation process. The President’s proposed tax increases, which have been the subject of an indecent amount of dissembling for over a year, will not pass either (and would be insane anyway).
And the forecast trillion-dollar annual deficits for a decade are allowed to fester in the thoughts of the financial world, unaddressed, pushing gold over $1,000 per ounce and dragging the dollar inexorably downward. This administration shows no will to pay down the debt accumulated by 15 years of borrowing trillions of dollars from China and Japan to buy trillions of dollars of non-essential goods from China and Japan, while outsourcing millions of jobs to China and Japan to produce these imports and admitting millions of unauthorized entrants who could have filled the vacated American mills and factories whose production was outsourced. Instead, it will just devalue the currency in which the debt is denominated and end America’s long reign as the world’s wealthiest per capita large country, an honour it already shares with six other advanced nations.
The political classes of both parties legislated and ordered the issuance of trillions of dollars of worthless real-estate debt, eliminated savings, penalized those in rented accommodation and promoted wild residential-real-estate speculation. It has now locked arms to over-empower the failed regulators who sat, mute as suet puddings, while this crisis developed, to save the Franks, Waxmans, Dodds, Rubins and Greenspans from their just desserts. They have agreed to blame everything on private-sector greed: Attorney General Eric Holder will prosecute avaricious businessmen, as he will Republican-appointed intelligence officials. The criminalization of policy differences, a corrosive and self-destructive process that began with the Watergate crucifixion of one of the country’s most effective presidents, and continued through the Iran-Contra nonsense and the absurd effort to remove president Clinton for undignified but hardly unprecedented peccadilloes, has resumed. It will beget nothing good or just, and will be revisited on its perpetrators.
The administration that was elected on the promise of change has been neutered by the trial lawyers, who donated $47-million to the Democrats last year and have prevented the measures necessary to cut health-care costs. It has been suborned by the dead hand of organized labour, which has been rewarded for decades of over-payment and shoddy work habits in automobile-making with entrenchment of the UAW’s unfeasible health-care benefits, continued protectionism and outright ownership of most of what is left of the U.S. auto industry.
Nothing is being done to defuse the Social Security or other benefit time bombs, or to reform a corrupt political system in which most of the legislators are bound hand and foot to different special interests, and are locked almost permanently into gerrymandered districts. Nothing is forecast to turn America back from a consumption to a production economy, apart from the President’s own fable about huge numbers of people building windmills: a new, enhanced version of quixotry.
Nothing is being done to fix a failed education system in which teachers’ unions fight tooth and nail against any connection between pay and performance and the dropout rate is 42%, or to reform a prosecution service that wins over 90% of its cases, enjoys a procedural stacked deck and has gutted the individual-liberties and due-process sections of the Bill of Rights with the plea bargain system’s wholesale exchange of perjury for immunity or reduced charges. Nothing has been suggested for improving the conduct of the failed drug war, which has reduced parts of Mexico to civil war without reducing access to unprescribed drugs in the U.S.; nor has the administration moved to reduce sentences for the more than 40% of Americans who at some point experiment with marijuana (the greatest cash crop in the Golden, bankrupt State of California).
The award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to President Obama unfortunately confirms the world’s love for weak or at least misguidedly diffident American leaders, in the mould of previous Nobel laureates Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr. all made immense contributions to peace and probably earned that prize but did not receive it. This President has engaged in wholesale, equal opportunity apologies for much past U.S. foreign and military policy success. He has appeased almost all of the world’s most odious and hostile regimes, including those of Putin, Ahmadinejad, Chavez and the Myanmar colonels. It’s possible that the emoting about nuclear disarmament will assist the efforts to discourage Iran and North Korea from developing a nuclear arms capability, and that pre-emptive concessions to Russia will promote sanctions that, when they don’t succeed (as they never do), will help create a consensus for decisive action against Iran — but it is unlikely. The “War of Necessity” in Afghanistan has become a waffle. Joe Biden, who wanted to divide Iraq into three countries and should be constitutionally barred from publicly discussing foreign policy, wants to fight the cave dwelling terrorists of Waziristan from offshore. This administration has mercilessly bullied Honduras to violate its own constitution and subvert its own fragile democracy, and has reneged on European missile defence, and on the Bush-Sharon agreement on West Bank settlements, the implementation of which caused Sharon to buck fierce opposition and found a new political party. Its foreign policy is a high-risk pursuit of appeasement which has few successful precedents, at a time when the U.S. is not strong in the world, and has its economic and strategic credibility to rebuild. The first U.S. president to win a Nobel Peace Prize in office, Theodore Roosevelt, knew to carry a big stick while speaking softly.
The Obama Kool-Aid drinkers, led, by right and tradition, by the political scientists of Hollywood, have, like Demi Moore, pledged to “fight for the President” to the bitter end (which is nigh). The less energetic, such as the inevitable Jimmy Carter, have charged the President’s critics with racism, a tawdry and almost always false claim. Worthy commentators like Tom Friedman have decried the coarsening of the American public debate, doubtless sincerely. More to the point, Peggy Noonan, whose kindly, sentimental Irish nature was briefly pixilated by Obamamania, now sees the President as “cool,” (i.e., cold), “faux eloquent” and even a Narcissus.
Barack Obama is obviously a very intelligent man, and should be a popular and successful President. But his mandate for profound reform and a steam-cleaning of the Augean Stable of Washington is being squandered. So far the change is more of the same, only worse. This President has achieved less in his first nine months than any incoming president since Warren Harding. It is not too late, but it looks now like the people will vote again for change, with increasing desperation, next year and in 2012. If the country does not get leadership equal to the scale of its problems, as it did in 1860 and 1932, the decline of America will move from a slope to a fall. This emperor still has no clothes, and it is not racism to notice it.
Let the ad hominem comments begin.