Great WSJ write up on what an empty suit Obama is.
What Happened to Obama? Absolutely Nothing.
He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president.
By NORMAN PODHORETZ
It's open season on President Obama. Which is to say that the usual suspects on the right (among whom I include myself) are increasingly being joined in attacking him by erstwhile worshipers on the left. Even before the S&P downgrade, there were reports of Democrats lamenting that Hillary Clinton had lost to him in 2008. Some were comparing him not, as most of them originally had, to Lincoln and Roosevelt but to the hapless Jimmy Carter. There was even talk of finding a candidate to stage a primary run against him. But since the downgrade, more and more liberal pundits have been deserting what they clearly fear is a sinking ship.
Here, for example, from the Washington Post, is Richard Cohen: "He is the very personification of cognitive dissonance—the gap between what we (especially liberals) expected of the first serious African American presidential candidate and the man he in fact is." More amazingly yet Mr. Cohen goes on to say of Mr. Obama, who not long ago was almost universally hailed as the greatest orator since Pericles, that he lacks even "the rhetorical qualities of the old-time black politicians." And to compound the amazement, Mr. Cohen tells us that he cannot even "recall a soaring passage from a speech."
Overseas it is the same refrain. Everywhere in the world, we read in Germany's Der Spiegel, not only are the hopes ignited by Mr. Obama being dashed, but his "weakness is a problem for the entire global economy."
In short, the spell that Mr. Obama once cast—a spell so powerful that instead of ridiculing him when he boasted that he would cause "the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal," all of liberaldom fell into a delirious swoon—has now been broken by its traumatic realization that he is neither the "god" Newsweek in all seriousness declared him to be nor even a messianic deliverer.
Hence the question on every lip is—as the title of a much quoted article in the New York Times by Drew Westen of Emory University puts it— "What Happened to Obama?" Attacking from the left, Mr. Westen charges that President Obama has been conciliatory when he should have been aggressively pounding away at all the evildoers on the right.
Of course, unlike Mr. Westen, we villainous conservatives do not see Mr. Obama as conciliatory or as "a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election." On the contrary, we see him as a president who knows all too well what he believes. Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a European-style social democracy while diminishing the leading role it has played in the world since the end of World War II. The Democrats have persistently denied that these are Mr. Obama's goals, but they have only been able to do so by ignoring or dismissing what Mr. Obama himself, in a rare moment of candor, promised at the tail end of his run for the presidency: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
This statement, coming on top of his association with radicals like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi, definitively revealed to all who were not wilfully blinding themselves that Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s and that by the end of the decade had spread metastatically to the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry. Like their communist ancestors of the 1930s, the leftist radicals of the '60s were convinced that the United States was so rotten that only a revolution could save it.
But whereas the communists had in their delusional vision of the Soviet Union a model of the kind of society that would replace the one they were bent on destroying, the new leftists only knew what they were against: America, or Amerika as they spelled it to suggest its kinship to Nazi Germany. Thanks, however, to the unmasking of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian nightmare, they did not know what they were for. Yet once they had pulled off the incredible feat of taking over the Democratic Party behind the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, they dropped the vain hope of a revolution, and in the social-democratic system most fully developed in Sweden they found an alternative to American capitalism that had a realistic possibility of being achieved through gradual political reform.
Despite Mr. McGovern's defeat by Richard Nixon in a landslide, the leftists remained a powerful force within the Democratic Party, but for the next three decades the electoral exigencies within which they had chosen to operate prevented them from getting their own man nominated. Thus, not one of the six Democratic presidential candidates who followed Mr. McGovern came out of the party's left wing, and when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (the only two of the six who won) tried each in his own way to govern in its spirit, their policies were rejected by the American immune system. It was only with the advent of Barack Obama that the leftists at long last succeeded in nominating one of their own.
To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass. And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) "non-threatening," all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?
And so it came about that a faithful scion of the political culture of the '60s left is now sitting in the White House and doing everything in his power to effect the fundamental transformation of America to which that culture was dedicated and to which he has pledged his own personal allegiance.
I disagree with those of my fellow conservatives who maintain that Mr. Obama is indifferent to "the best interests of the United States" (Thomas Sowell) and is "purposely" out to harm America (Rush Limbaugh). In my opinion, he imagines that he is helping America to repent of its many sins and to become a different and better country.
But I emphatically agree with Messrs. Limbaugh and Sowell about this president's attitude toward America as it exists and as the Founding Fathers intended it. That is why my own answer to the question, "What Happened to Obama?" is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.
8/30/2011
Wolf and Sheep analogy...
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Democracy: Two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
Representative democracy: Two thousand wolves and one thousand sheep electing two wolves and a sheep who vote on what to have for dinner.
Constitutional Republic: Two thousand wolves and one thousand sheep electing two wolves and a sheep who vote on what to have for dinner, but are restricted by a Constitution that says they cannot eat sheep. The Supreme Court then votes 5 wolves to 4 sheep that mutton does not count as sheep.
Liberty: Well-armed sheep contesting the above votes.
Democracy: Two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
Representative democracy: Two thousand wolves and one thousand sheep electing two wolves and a sheep who vote on what to have for dinner.
Constitutional Republic: Two thousand wolves and one thousand sheep electing two wolves and a sheep who vote on what to have for dinner, but are restricted by a Constitution that says they cannot eat sheep. The Supreme Court then votes 5 wolves to 4 sheep that mutton does not count as sheep.
Liberty: Well-armed sheep contesting the above votes.
8/28/2011
Bat $%@! crazy Al Gore
Al Gore is threatened because he has entered the level of mediocrity. Also, one must remember that Al Gore's FATHER...Albert Gore, Sr...was one of the few who voted AGAINST the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Complete hypocritical idiot.
Gore: Global warming skeptics are this generation’s racists
Gore: Global warming skeptics are this generation’s racists
8/16/2011
8/11/2011
Felonious Munk Presents: Stop It B! OBAMA PAY YOUR &*%$#% BILLS
I laughed at this one, so true...so entertaining!
8/06/2011
Tim Geithner: “No risk”
Now tax cheat Geithner can be called lying tax cheat Geithner.
Flashback: “Is there a risk the US could lose its AAA rating?” Tim Geithner: “No risk”
Let's see, here is today's headlines...
S&P downgrades U.S. credit rating
U.S. triple-A debt rating cut by Standard & Poor’s
Flashback: “Is there a risk the US could lose its AAA rating?” Tim Geithner: “No risk”
Let's see, here is today's headlines...
S&P downgrades U.S. credit rating
U.S. triple-A debt rating cut by Standard & Poor’s
8/04/2011
Bias anyone?
US borrowing tops 100% of GDP: Treasury...that's a pretty serious headline. It appears that it's not important to the liberal media because it will make their idol look bad.
Here are the front pages of web sites, showing what they deem important. I'll first show Fox News, at least they are reporting it.
Here are the front pages of the websites of media sources that are liberal friendly. I see no mention of the debt to GDP announcement.
To quote the original Yahoo News story.
"The last time US debt topped the size of its annual economy was in 1947 just after World War II. By 1981 it had fallen to 32.5 percent.
Ratings agencies have warned the country to reduce its debt-to-GDP ratio quickly or facing losing its coveted AAA debt rating.
Moody's said Tuesday that the government needed to stabilize the ratio at 73 percent by 2015 "to ensure that the long-run fiscal trajectory remains compatible with a AAA rating."
I would consider this pretty serious, but it would also blemish the Obama administration. The bias of choosing to not report something like this is pretty serious cause for concern. It makes me appreciate the internet even more.
Here are the front pages of web sites, showing what they deem important. I'll first show Fox News, at least they are reporting it.
Here are the front pages of the websites of media sources that are liberal friendly. I see no mention of the debt to GDP announcement.
To quote the original Yahoo News story.
"The last time US debt topped the size of its annual economy was in 1947 just after World War II. By 1981 it had fallen to 32.5 percent.
Ratings agencies have warned the country to reduce its debt-to-GDP ratio quickly or facing losing its coveted AAA debt rating.
Moody's said Tuesday that the government needed to stabilize the ratio at 73 percent by 2015 "to ensure that the long-run fiscal trajectory remains compatible with a AAA rating."
I would consider this pretty serious, but it would also blemish the Obama administration. The bias of choosing to not report something like this is pretty serious cause for concern. It makes me appreciate the internet even more.
8/02/2011
The spending-cut myth
An excellent write up on the whole "debt crisis"...
The spending-cut myth
Posted By Robert Ringer On August 2, 2011 @ 12:01 am In Conservative Politics,Government,Personal Liberty Articles | 192 Comments
As we move toward a business-as-usual finish to the phony debt-ceiling drama playing out in Washington, history will record that no one — not even the Tea Party members of Congress — ever got around to talking about specific, major spending cuts (other than defense spending). Isn’t that weird?
Everyone involved claims to be in agreement that the U.S. has to cut spending, but not one Congressperson has been willing to name a specific program or bureaucracy that should be completely eliminated. Even if Republicans had gotten their Cut, Cap and Balance proposal accepted, it wouldn’t have mattered, because “cut, cap, and balance” are nothing more than hollow words.
Cut and cap what? Which programs and agencies are you going to cut and cap, and by how much? In any event, the purported major cuts are always years down the road, while increasing the debt ceiling is immediate — meaning that out-of-control government spending continues on.
And, of course, balance simply guarantees American taxpayers that if Congress doesn’t make the necessary cuts — which it never does, and never will — their taxes will be raised in order to “balance the budget.” In fact, a cynic might say that balancing the budget is just a euphemism for raising taxes.
Again, back to my original point: No one in Congress wants to talk about making specific cuts. After all, when you cut a program or agency, you’re going to make the beneficiaries of that program or agency very angry. And since the main objective of the vast majority of Congresspersons is to get reelected, mad is bad. Thus, the reality is that cutting any program or government agency is unthinkable.
For example, as the debt ceiling circus has worn on, I’ve repeatedly heard media pundits say things like, “What happens to the guy who’s planned a camping trip to Yellowstone National Park with his son, only to find that the park has been closed because Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling?” The answer you never hear is: He takes his son somewhere else!
I don’t know how much you and I pay to keep Yellowstone National Park operating, but I do know that neither I nor any of my family or immediate circle of friends has ever visited Yellowstone National Park, nor do any of us have any plans to do so.
That being the case, why are we required to pay for the guy who wants to take his son camping? Is he willing to pay for my family’s outing to an Orioles or Redskins game? These are private corporations that charge customers enough to cover their overhead and, hopefully, make a profit. Government doesn’t have to worry about such mundane matters.
Just like all the other land it lays claim to, the United States government should sell Yellowstone National Park to a company like Disney or Universal Studios and use the proceeds to pay down the national debt. I’m talking about principle, not interest. Ditto all of the other national parks, which would cut billions from our bread-and-circus budget.
Speaking of Yellowstone National Park, what about the Department of the Interior? Do we really need it? On its website, it proudly states:
Our Mission: Protecting America’s Great Outdoors and Powering Our Future
Question: Why does a bankrupt nation need a bunch of bureaucrats to protect its “great outdoors?” The government is supposed to protect people and private property, not the “outdoors.” I won’t even comment on “powering our future,” since it has no discernable meaning.
Beneath the Department of the Interior’s mission statement are the words:
The U.S. Department of the Interior protects America’s natural resources and heritage, honors our cultures and tribal communities, and supplies the energy to power our future.
Again I ask, why does a bankrupt nation need a bunch of bureaucrats to protect its “natural resources and heritage?” How in the world does the government protect our heritage? Again, no discernable meaning.
“Honors our cultures and tribal communities?” Why does a bankrupt nation need to honor American cultures and tribal communities? Sounds like an interesting thing to do if you’re rich. But we aren’t. Psst… we’re broke!
Finally, “supplies the energy to power our future?” Government doesn’t know beans about supplying energy. In fact, it does everything within its power to prevent the U.S. from using its energy resources.
A bankrupt nation that fails at everything it attempts to do should get out of the way so private industry can exploit our natural resources, beginning with oil, natural gas and coal deposits. The government has never produced a drop of oil, a cubic foot of natural gas or a single chunk of coal — and never will.
Trees, of course, are a natural resource that present no problem whatsoever, because, thanks to capitalistic forestry corporations, we have more trees today than we had 50 years ago.
You can go right down the list of government agencies and draw the same conclusion: They should be shut down!
Do we really need a National Labor Relations Board to prevent Boeing from creating 1,000 jobs in South Carolina?
Do we really need a Securities and Exchange Commission to give a guy like Bernie Madoff a stamp of approval for 25 years while he bilks gullible investors out of billions of dollars?
Do we really need an Environmental Protection Agency to stifle economic growth in America and create ever-increasing unemployment? Closing down the EPA not only would save billions of dollars a year in operating costs, but would explode the economy and send the Dow Jones industrial average soaring. Who knows, we might even be able to compete with China someday.
The Department of Labor, the Commerce Department, Amtrak, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services (which runs 400 separate subsidy programs!)… the list is endless.
Message to the government: Stop protecting our resources, stop redistributing our hard-earned income and start focusing on protecting, not stealing from, the people you work for.
The truth is that no one — whether Democrat or Republican — will propose legislation to reduce, let alone close down, any of these government agencies. They will keep growing until their employees are paid in worthless dollars — or not paid at all. And there is a 100 percent certainty that when government employees don’t get paid, it will lead to protests… followed by “civil unrest”… followed by violence… followed by a government crackdown on civil liberties.
As everyone now knows, the government has plenty of money coming in each month to pay interest on the national debt, Social Security, Medicare and our current military obligations (all of which total about 70 percent of current revenues). It’s the other 30 percent or so of “scheduled expenditures” that need to be “prioritized” — meaning that some of them have to be cut.
But when you ask a politician which ones he would cut, he unfailingly skirts the question. That’s why the debt ceiling will continue to be raised — again and again and again (75 times since 1962!) — and the U.S. debt will continue to spin out of control until the only thing left of the U.S. economy is a (hopefully) thriving black market.
Russian historians can tell you all about the phenomenon of the black market when the government shuts down the free market. It’s the only thing that kept even more people from starving to death in the Soviet Union during the heyday of communism.
Of course, if you’re the adventuresome type, you’ve got to be excited thinking about what living in a runaway-inflation society might be like. Hint: Sieg Heil!
–Robert Ringer
The spending-cut myth
Posted By Robert Ringer On August 2, 2011 @ 12:01 am In Conservative Politics,Government,Personal Liberty Articles | 192 Comments
As we move toward a business-as-usual finish to the phony debt-ceiling drama playing out in Washington, history will record that no one — not even the Tea Party members of Congress — ever got around to talking about specific, major spending cuts (other than defense spending). Isn’t that weird?
Everyone involved claims to be in agreement that the U.S. has to cut spending, but not one Congressperson has been willing to name a specific program or bureaucracy that should be completely eliminated. Even if Republicans had gotten their Cut, Cap and Balance proposal accepted, it wouldn’t have mattered, because “cut, cap, and balance” are nothing more than hollow words.
Cut and cap what? Which programs and agencies are you going to cut and cap, and by how much? In any event, the purported major cuts are always years down the road, while increasing the debt ceiling is immediate — meaning that out-of-control government spending continues on.
And, of course, balance simply guarantees American taxpayers that if Congress doesn’t make the necessary cuts — which it never does, and never will — their taxes will be raised in order to “balance the budget.” In fact, a cynic might say that balancing the budget is just a euphemism for raising taxes.
Again, back to my original point: No one in Congress wants to talk about making specific cuts. After all, when you cut a program or agency, you’re going to make the beneficiaries of that program or agency very angry. And since the main objective of the vast majority of Congresspersons is to get reelected, mad is bad. Thus, the reality is that cutting any program or government agency is unthinkable.
For example, as the debt ceiling circus has worn on, I’ve repeatedly heard media pundits say things like, “What happens to the guy who’s planned a camping trip to Yellowstone National Park with his son, only to find that the park has been closed because Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling?” The answer you never hear is: He takes his son somewhere else!
I don’t know how much you and I pay to keep Yellowstone National Park operating, but I do know that neither I nor any of my family or immediate circle of friends has ever visited Yellowstone National Park, nor do any of us have any plans to do so.
That being the case, why are we required to pay for the guy who wants to take his son camping? Is he willing to pay for my family’s outing to an Orioles or Redskins game? These are private corporations that charge customers enough to cover their overhead and, hopefully, make a profit. Government doesn’t have to worry about such mundane matters.
Just like all the other land it lays claim to, the United States government should sell Yellowstone National Park to a company like Disney or Universal Studios and use the proceeds to pay down the national debt. I’m talking about principle, not interest. Ditto all of the other national parks, which would cut billions from our bread-and-circus budget.
Speaking of Yellowstone National Park, what about the Department of the Interior? Do we really need it? On its website, it proudly states:
Our Mission: Protecting America’s Great Outdoors and Powering Our Future
Question: Why does a bankrupt nation need a bunch of bureaucrats to protect its “great outdoors?” The government is supposed to protect people and private property, not the “outdoors.” I won’t even comment on “powering our future,” since it has no discernable meaning.
Beneath the Department of the Interior’s mission statement are the words:
The U.S. Department of the Interior protects America’s natural resources and heritage, honors our cultures and tribal communities, and supplies the energy to power our future.
Again I ask, why does a bankrupt nation need a bunch of bureaucrats to protect its “natural resources and heritage?” How in the world does the government protect our heritage? Again, no discernable meaning.
“Honors our cultures and tribal communities?” Why does a bankrupt nation need to honor American cultures and tribal communities? Sounds like an interesting thing to do if you’re rich. But we aren’t. Psst… we’re broke!
Finally, “supplies the energy to power our future?” Government doesn’t know beans about supplying energy. In fact, it does everything within its power to prevent the U.S. from using its energy resources.
A bankrupt nation that fails at everything it attempts to do should get out of the way so private industry can exploit our natural resources, beginning with oil, natural gas and coal deposits. The government has never produced a drop of oil, a cubic foot of natural gas or a single chunk of coal — and never will.
Trees, of course, are a natural resource that present no problem whatsoever, because, thanks to capitalistic forestry corporations, we have more trees today than we had 50 years ago.
You can go right down the list of government agencies and draw the same conclusion: They should be shut down!
Do we really need a National Labor Relations Board to prevent Boeing from creating 1,000 jobs in South Carolina?
Do we really need a Securities and Exchange Commission to give a guy like Bernie Madoff a stamp of approval for 25 years while he bilks gullible investors out of billions of dollars?
Do we really need an Environmental Protection Agency to stifle economic growth in America and create ever-increasing unemployment? Closing down the EPA not only would save billions of dollars a year in operating costs, but would explode the economy and send the Dow Jones industrial average soaring. Who knows, we might even be able to compete with China someday.
The Department of Labor, the Commerce Department, Amtrak, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services (which runs 400 separate subsidy programs!)… the list is endless.
Message to the government: Stop protecting our resources, stop redistributing our hard-earned income and start focusing on protecting, not stealing from, the people you work for.
The truth is that no one — whether Democrat or Republican — will propose legislation to reduce, let alone close down, any of these government agencies. They will keep growing until their employees are paid in worthless dollars — or not paid at all. And there is a 100 percent certainty that when government employees don’t get paid, it will lead to protests… followed by “civil unrest”… followed by violence… followed by a government crackdown on civil liberties.
As everyone now knows, the government has plenty of money coming in each month to pay interest on the national debt, Social Security, Medicare and our current military obligations (all of which total about 70 percent of current revenues). It’s the other 30 percent or so of “scheduled expenditures” that need to be “prioritized” — meaning that some of them have to be cut.
But when you ask a politician which ones he would cut, he unfailingly skirts the question. That’s why the debt ceiling will continue to be raised — again and again and again (75 times since 1962!) — and the U.S. debt will continue to spin out of control until the only thing left of the U.S. economy is a (hopefully) thriving black market.
Russian historians can tell you all about the phenomenon of the black market when the government shuts down the free market. It’s the only thing that kept even more people from starving to death in the Soviet Union during the heyday of communism.
Of course, if you’re the adventuresome type, you’ve got to be excited thinking about what living in a runaway-inflation society might be like. Hint: Sieg Heil!
–Robert Ringer
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