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October 5, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Monday, October 5
President Obama’s weekly address HERE
Congress’s Secret Plan to Pass Obamacare - CLICK HERE.
Change and Hope - The Olympic Fiasco
Victor Davis Hanson, Pajamas Media.com
I think most Americans were rooting for Chicago. As I wrote on NRO’s corner, I know I was. But Rio had a really convincing hope and change/ multicultural/new guy on the block case. And consider: given the recent bad windy city publicity (You Tube beatings, state and city corruption, Blagoism, Daley ward mobsterism, rumors of pre-Olympic wheeling and dealing on land angles, administration Chicago hard-ball Rahm Emanuel/David Axelrod politics, etc.), Chicago, Illinois was seen abroad as less competitive, far less competitive, than the other cities. I think almost any fair-minded neutral judge could grasp how those realities were going to play out. (Do not forget that Euros love to be gratuitously fickle and so in the first round trashed the reset-button, fawning American who wants to wow them through obsequiousness.
And the more I watched Barack/Michelle do the “I grew up in the neighborhood” thing, the more I noticed the Euro-audience wincing [Not smart bragging about your childhood Chicago “right hook” to an audience that has just watched horrific fighting in the streets of Chicago]).
But even without the self-centered story-telling it was a hard sell anyway. How can a post-national, I’m sorry Obama, trapped in a sort of we are the world paradox, be seen in nationalistic and near tribal fashion stumping for his own home town? Again, it did not help that he appeared in campaign mode, tossing out the usual personal, somewhat hokey (and all but narcissistic) stories about himself and his family, that I know don’t resonate, much less make effective arguments, in the less therapeutic world of hardball politics abroad. In short, the community organizer was out organized by the multicultural ascendant Rio. Read article.
The Olympics, Obama, and the Permanent Campaign
Jay Cost, RCP.com
Chicago has lost its Olympics bid, despite Obama's insertion into the process. People are shocked because they figured that Obama would fly in if and only if the deal was done.
But why? That assumes a typical allocation of the presidential prestige. President Obama has been anything but typical in the use of that asset. Let's remember that this is the President who in the last nine months has appeared on both 11:30 PM talk shows. This is the President who can be seen on TBS in a spot advertising the upcoming George Lopez Show. This is the President who has had more primetime news conferences and more joint addresses to Congress than any president up to this point in his campaign tenure. This is the only President to pull a "Ginsberg" (and my guess is that he'll set the record for that when it's all said and done). This is the President who has gone out on the campaign trail again and again and again, even though the election is long since passed. This is the President who puts himself - and his family - on the cover of all sorts of supermarket and newsstand magazines month after month. This is the President who never hesitates to inject himself into the public consciousness for any little reason he likes.
This is the permanent campaign. We have talked about its imminence for years. Well, now it's here and this is what it looks like. This is what a President does in it. Previous Presidents would only put themselves out there in this kind of diplomatic situation if there was no more campaigning, lobbying, and cajoling to be done. But this President sees himself above all as the chief campaigner, lobbyist, and cajoler. That explains so many of the ways in which the Obama Presidency differs from previous administrations (Democratic and Republican alike), and it also explains why we should not be so shocked by this result. This particular campaign failed. Read article.
Obama's French Lesson
Charles Krauthammer, Townhall.com
"President Obama, I support the Americans' outstretched hand. But what did the international community gain from these offers of dialogue? Nothing." -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Sept. 24
Confusing ends and means, the Obama administration strives mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling and pious concern about Iran's nuclear program -- whereas the real objective is stopping that program. This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb.
Don't take it from me. Take it from Sarkozy, who could not conceal his astonishment at Obama's naivete. On Sept. 24, Obama ostentatiously presided over the Security Council. With 14 heads of state (or government) at the table, with an American president at the chair for the first time ever, with every news camera in the world trained on the meeting, it would garner unprecedented worldwide attention.
Unknown to the world, Obama had in his pocket explosive revelations about an illegal uranium enrichment facility that the Iranians had been hiding near Qom. The French and the British were urging him to use this most dramatic of settings to stun the world with the revelation and to call for immediate action.
Obama refused. Not only did he say nothing about it, but, reports Le Monde, Sarkozy was forced to scrap the Qom section of his speech. Read article.
Obama's not met with GOP leaders since May
Stephen Dinan, Washington Times.com
President Obama has cut off communication with Republican leaders, going more than four months without hosting the bipartisan congressional leadership at the White House to discuss his health care proposal, the No. 2 Republican in the House said Wednesday.
Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican, told The Washington Times that health care reform has been an "utter disaster" for Mr. Obama and predicted if he pushes through a public option as part of a final bill, Republicans will win back at least one chamber of Congress in the 2010 elections.
Mr. Cantor said Mr. Obama initially asked for Republican help on health care, but Republicans have heard nothing since they offered their ideas.
"No matter what the cry is from the White House, no matter what the president claims, they have not engaged with us," he said.
"The White House at this point has shut down, as far as any kind of engagement. I think that the last time that we as a Republican leadership were at the White House was in May, and that's when they called us in at the beginning of the health care discussion so that they could get our ideas," Mr. Cantor said. "The president enlisted us and said we want your ideas. [Minority Leader John A.] Boehner and I sent a letter to the White House in response to that request. Nothing." Read article.
Barack Obama’s top five embarrassing speeches on the world stage
Niles Gardiner, Telegraph.co.uk
Last week’s débacle at the United Nations where Barack Obama delivered a speech so naïve that even Jimmy Carter would have blushed, has inspired this list of the five most embarrassing speeches by the president (so far) as a world leader. By embarrassing I mean embarrassing to the United States, speeches that have projected weakness rather than strength, policy statements that have forced millions of Americans to cringe in front of their television sets.
In compiling this list I have picked the five presidential addresses by President Obama that represent the antithesis of the kind of leadership that Ronald Reagan demonstrated in confronting the Soviet Empire and winning the Cold War. These are all speeches that show either staggering naïveté or have gone out of their way to apologize for American power or America’s past, humiliating the United States in the process.
Here is my list, in descending order: Read article.
Obama's Work Ethic
Ed Lasky, American Thinker.com
Barack Obama has displayed a disturbing pattern of work ethics: shirking work; claiming success when he was not entitled to do so; hiding his failures; and claiming the work of others as his own -- when it was successful. These are not character traits that we should associate with Presidents.
Barack Obama won praise for Dreams From My Father, a 1995 memoir of his life that was published when he reached the grand old age of thirty-four. The provenance of the book has come into question, led by a series of American Thinker columns by Jack Cashill, who used textual analysis to ascribe its writing --or at least a good portion of it -- to Bill Ayers, Obama's neighbor, former Weatherman, Obama campaign supporter and partner in various activist groups in Chicago. This claim has been echoed in a new book by best-selling author Christian Andersen, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage who wrote that sources close to the Obamas told him that Barack Obama turned over his notes and tapes to Bill Ayers to compose the book.
Subsequently, under questioning by Cashill on a nationally-syndicated radio program, Andersen averred that two separate sources in Hyde Park confirmed to him the story of sending the notes and tapes to Ayers.
Whoever wrote Dreams clearly embellished Obama's work history following graduation from Columbia. Obama claimed to have worked at a high powered consulting firm as a research assistant. A former colleague who sat down the hall from him debunked Obama's puffery in 2005:
First, it wasn't a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I'm sure we all wished that we were high-priced consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low salaries and heavy workload.
Barack worked on one of the company's reference publications. Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country, punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack's job was to get copy from the country correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some research involved as well, since correspondents usually don't send exactly what you ask for, and you can't always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting.
Obama may have felt the need to polish a resume that would fit on the back of a postage stamp, as my colleague Kyle Shiver has characterized his curriculum vitae. But the problem goes deeper than Cashill may have uncovered.
As a young attorney did he engage in the grind that is the fate of all young associates in law firms? Was he buried in books at the law firm library, barely able to keep his eyes open? Was he paying his dues? Not quite. Instead, he can be pictured with his feet up on his desk, scribbling ideas on a legal pad for Dreams of My Father -- the book that helped make him a star.
Allison Davis, a founding name partner of the firm that hired the young Barack Obama out of law school had this bit of history to share:
"Some of my partners weren't happy with that, Barack sitting there with his keyboard on his lap and his feet up on the desk writing the book."
I am sure Barack Obama's fellow associates were none-too-pleased, either. They were doing the work that paid for his salary. To whom did he bill his time? Tony Rezko? We will never know, since Barack Obama refused to release his billing records.
Incidentally, he did not finish the book when he was contractually required to do so. He jetted off to Bali, purportedly to work full-time on the book. Now, I ask you dear reader, is there any place in the world less conducive to work -- especially the arduous, thankless task of writing -- than a lush tropical paradise like Bali? Even the novelist James Michener had to wait until returning to the states to write a book about his time in the South Pacific. Nevertheless, somehow, miraculously, the manuscript was later completed -- but by whom? Read article.
Cut and Walk from Afghanistan?
Tony Blankley, Rasmussen Reports.com
The gist of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's analysis that presumably will be presented to President Barack Obama is: If 1) you and Congress fully resource the effort (troops, materiel and civilian aid) and 2) if we get much better at coordinating all our assets -- Defense and State departments, the U.S. Agency for International Development, intelligence, contractors, NATO and others -- then 3) there is a better than even chance of success in Afghanistan, which will take 4) between five and seven more years. Note that the president is not likely to be told that the Pentagon can "predict" success -- only that it would be more likely than not to succeed.
Thus, the president will have to place a heavy bet at odds barely better than a gambler would get on even or odd at the roulette table. But unlike the gambler, who can leave the table, the president is forced to bet -- either go or no go. There is a potentially huge danger to leaving (as well as to escalating) -- for both national security and political reasons. Read article.
A Marine Corps Sergeant Major Speaks
Diana West.net
With cessation of the draft in the early 1970s America cultivated a professional warrior class. For over thirty years we have trained and equipped the most lethal fighting force ever known to mankind. They have sworn an oath to our Constitution that they take seriously. The question is whether or not their political leadership takes their own oath seriously. Our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines are worthy of competent leadership that they can trust.
Our president has demonstrated his contempt for America on foreign soil. In speeches around the world he has apologized for our history and failed to recognize our contributions. His personal history is littered with questionable personal friendships and professional associations. He has denied our Judeo-Christian heritage and stated that “Victory” is not in his vocabulary. We need to ask ourselves if he is worthy to be trusted with making policy that may mean the lives of our brave Warriors.
President Obama and General McCrystal need to review their history. When you treat the Afghans with kid gloves, they will bite off your hand. Read article.
A Pragmatic Look at Obama’s Pragmatism: Is reality prying him from his ideological cocoon?
Jonah Goldberg, NRO.com
‘When John McCain said we could just ‘muddle through’ in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights,” Barack Obama thundered as he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in Denver last year. “John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell. But he won’t even go to the cave where he lives.”
It was a shabby bit of rhetoric, even for a campaign. Insinuating that McCain, of all people, didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to take the fight to bin Laden was not only absurd on its face, it smacked of overcompensation coming from the former community organizer whose greatest foreign-policy passion prior to his presidential bid had been nuclear disarmament.
But the line did what it needed to do: communicate that Obama had the sort of true grit required to fight the good, i.e. popular, war in Afghanistan. That war may or may not be good anymore, but it is most certainly not popular. And so what was for Obama a “war of necessity” has become a de facto war of choice. At least that’s the sense one gets as the president is suddenly searching for a politically palatable strategy other than the one he announced months ago. Read article.
What Obama Gets for Scrapping Missile Defenses in Europe
The Foundry, Heritage.org
The Kremlin perceives the Obama Administration’s decision to scrap the third site anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic as a radical review of the US global leadership policy and a serious concession to Russia. At the same time, the Kremlin does not think it necessary to meet Washington halfway and is confining itself to verbal promises.
Indeed, Russia in the person of President Dmitry Medvedev and a number of military commanders, announced its decision to reverse its plans to deploy Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad Region. In reality this is no concession to America. Russia does not have any Iskanders to station close to the Polish borders. The Kremlin’s declaration concerning their possible deployment there was more like a bluff designed to intimidate America’s East-European partners and sow a discord within NATO.
The White House expected Moscow’s most genuine reciprocity over the Iran issue, but the Kremlin’s stance remains far removed from a policy of tough deterrence and termination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Read article.
What’s the Difference Between a Conservative and a Liberal?
Warner Todd Huston, Stop the ACLU.com
People often wonder what is the difference between a conservative and a liberal. The simple fact of the matter is that the major difference is that conservatives wonder first what it is they are responsible for while liberals wonder first what everyone else should be doing for them.
Here are some brief rules of thumb:
If a conservative sees a U.S. flag, his heart swells with pride.
If a liberal sees a U.S. flag, he feels shame.
If a conservative doesn’t like guns, they don’t buy them.
If a liberal doesn’t like guns, then no one else should have one either.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, he won’t eat meat.
If a liberal is, they want to ban all meat products for everyone.
If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat it.
If a liberal see an enemy he wonders what he can do to appease him. Read article.
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