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October 19, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Monday, October 19
President Obama’s weekly address HERE
Odds of war with Iran spiking - Read REPORT here.
Obama Hasn't Closed the Health-Care Sale: Wait until the voters figure out how Congress is proposing to pay for reform. Read Karl Rove HERE.
America's last chances in 'AfPak' - We're stuck in two nations' civil wars
Ralph Peters, NY Post.com
Opponents of our involvement in Iraq -- foes of President Bush, really -- constantly claimed that country was in a state of civil war. Iraq came close, but the civil war never quite happened.
Yet no one seems to notice that we're now caught up in two authentic civil wars -- one in Afghanistan, the other in Pakistan.
We refuse to recognize the irreconcilable nature of these conflicts, the passionate motivation of our various enemies or the incompetence of those local officials -- starting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- who we insist are legitimate and popular.
We're too powerful to be defeated -- but too politically correct to win.
The sole hope for either Afghanistan or Pakistan isn't more weary American soldiers, nor is it our hugs-not-slugs counterinsurgency nonsense, nor is it lavish aid.
The only hope for either beleaguered territory (these really are territories, not authentic states) is a decision by its own population to fight and defeat the Taliban.
If the locals won't lay their lives on the line, our sacrifices are useless. Read article.
Whiner-in-Chief
John Nichols, The Nation.com
White House griping harms the White House more than it does the target of the complaint.
The bloggers should also take the criticism as confirmation that they are right when they suggest that this administration is increasingly out of touch with the progressive base that secured Obama the Democratic nomination and ultimately propelled him to the White House.
The fact is that the results of the 2008 election did not reveal "a closely-divided country." Obama arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the most muscular mandate accorded any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide.
The bloggers are right when they argue that the Obama administration can and should be doing more with that mandate.
As for the Obama administration, whether the grumbling is about Republicans on Fox or bloggers in pajamas, there's a word for what the president and his aides are doing. That word is "whining." And nothing -- no attack by Glenn Beck, no blogger busting about Guantanamo -- does more damage to Obama's credibility or authority than the sense that a popular president is becoming the whiner-in-chief. Read article.
If It Wasn't So Sad It Would Be Funny
Robert R. Owens, PhD, NMJ.us
I keep waiting for ex-sportscaster Keith Olbermann or Democratic Party Spokesman Chris Mathews to say, “wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more, say no more” when they deliver such classic lines as, “President Obama has appointed Mark Lloyd as the Chief Diversity Officer at the FCC” with a straight-face. Colbert and Stewart had better watch out or MSNBC will win the sweeps as the funniest thing on TV. Officer Lloyd left his perch at the Center For American Progress funded by the likes of George Soros where he co-authored a report entitled "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio" which offered this chilling bit of advice, “This analysis suggests that any effort to encourage more responsive and balanced radio programming will first require steps to increase localism and diversify radio station ownership to better meet local and community needs.”
Localism is a re-packaged Fairness Doctrine designed to control conservative commentary. Officer Lloyd’s goals are made clear in his book “Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America.” In this book Lloyd states, “Too often Americans use the First Amendment to end discussions of communications policy.” He continued, “This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of communications policies.”
Drawing upon the revolutionary tactics of the philosophical father of the Obama Administration Saul Alinksy Lloyd adds, “"We understood at the beginning, and were certainly reminded in the course of the campaign, that our work was not simply convincing policy makers of the logic or morality of our arguments. We understood that we were in a struggle for power against an opponent, the commercial broadcasters.” Leaving no doubt as to where he draws his inspiration Officer Lloyd comments, “"We looked to successful political campaigns and organizers as a guide, especially the civil rights movement, Saul Alinsky, and the campaign to prevent the Supreme Court nomination of the ultra-conservative jurist Robert Bork.” Read article.
If Obama Had Told Us Before His Election
Phyllis Schlafly, Townhall.com
If Barack Obama had campaigned on what he has actually done in his first 300 days in office, would he have been elected? That's the question so many are asking today.
If Obama had told us he would appoint 34 czars, reporting only to himself and not vetted or confirmed in the constitutional way, building a powerful unitary executive branch of government, would he have been elected? What if he had told us that his green jobs czar had been a Communist, that the science czar wrote in a college textbook that compulsory "green abortions" are an acceptable way to control population growth and that the diversity czar has spoken publicly of getting white media executives to "step down" in favor of minorities?
If Obama had told us he would take over the automobile industry faster than any socialist dictator ever nationalized an industry, fire the CEO of General Motors and replace him with a Democratic Party campaign contributor, would Obama have been elected? If Obama had campaigned on closing down thousands of profitable car dealers, nearly all Republicans, would we have believed that this vindictive financial retaliation against those who didn't vote for Obama could happen in America?
If Hugo Chavez, the communist who nationalized most of Venezuela's industries, had said before the election that "Comrade Obama" would nationalize the U.S. automobile industry and Chavez would "end up to his right," would anybody have believed it? If talk shows had warned against such a socialist takeover, would the Obama-loving media have accused them of McCarthyism?
If Obama had told us he would spend $3 billion in a Cash for Clunkers program that would use taxpayers' funds to buy mostly foreign cars and grind up the used American cars traded in to make them unusable, would he have been elected? Read article.
Independents Move Away From Obama Accelerating
YidWithLid.Blogspot.com
For any candidate, independents are the most important voters. In most cases they are the difference between winning and losing. This was especially true in the last presidential campaign. Independents went for Obama in a huge way, and they were one of the keys to his victory.
Independent voters are abandoning the President faster than people driving out of town just before a hurricane hits.
According to the IBD/TIPP poll since February support for the President among independents has dropped from 73% to 45%. And even worse for the POTUS, the President has lost independent support on the Economy, Health Care, The Federal Budget, and Foreign, Policy: Read article - VIEW CHARTS.
The Obama Fiasco - Failure all around.
Conrad Black, NRO.com
The whole 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). The Congressional Budget Office 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 hundreds of billions of dollars and chasing Washington’s oldest 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 it was disgraceful for a congressman to scream at him “You lie!” (which he was, about health care for illegal immigrants), this 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. Read article.
Reading Between the Lines of Obama's Poetry
Jonah Goldberg, JWR.com
The late Irving Kristol noted in his influential 1972 essay, "Symbolic Politics and Liberal Reform." "For him, writing poetry is a kind of symbolic action, in which he liberates his most earnest sentiments, and it is in this impatient action and in this instant liberation that he seeks fulfillment."
The successful poet, meanwhile, understands that good poetry is ultimately not about the experience of the author but of the reader. "He understands that a plea of sincerity is of no account in the ultimate court of literary judgment, which will look at the poem itself and simply ask: Does it work?
"It seems to me," Kristol wrote, "that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves."
Kristol -- who died last month, prompting me to reread him -- dubbed this heart-on-your-sleeve approach the "New Politics," and he lamented that it had taken over the Democratic Party. For Kristol, the "outstanding characteristic" of the New Politics was its "insistence on the overwhelming importance of revealing, in the public realm, one's intense feelings -- we must 'care,' we must 'be concerned,' we must be 'committed.' Unsurprisingly, this goes along with an immense indifference to consequences."
For Kristol, the "outstanding characteristic" of the New Politics was its "insistence on the overwhelming importance of revealing, in the public realm, one's intense feelings -- we must 'care,' we must 'be concerned,' we must be 'committed.' Unsurprisingly, this goes along with an immense indifference to consequences." Read article.
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