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January 9, 2010
Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Saturday, January 9
New Media leader exposes myth of Obama's 'bottom-up' Internet-driven 2008 campaign - CLICK HERE.
Is Profiling the Solution to Stopping Terrorists? - HERE.
What We've Been Doing in 2009 and Will Be Doing in 2010 - SEE HERE.
Papa B's Predictions for 2010 - HERE.
Democrats on the Health-Care Precipice
Kimberly A. Strassel, WSJ.com
Barack Obama emerged from his meeting with Senate Democrats this week to claim Congress was on the "precipice" of something historic. Believe him. The president is demanding his party unilaterally enact one of the most unpopular and complex pieces of social legislation in history. In the process, he may be sacrificing Democrats' chances at creating a sustainable majority.
Slowly, slowly, the Democratic health agenda is turning into a political suicide pact. So why the stubborn insistence on passing health reform? Think big. The liberal wing of the party—the Barney Franks, the David Obeys—are focused beyond November 2010, to the long-term political prize. They want a health-care program that inevitably leads to a value-added tax and a permanent welfare state. Big government then becomes fact, and another Ronald Reagan becomes impossible. See Continental Europe.
The entitlement crazes of the 1930s and 1960s also caused a backlash, but liberal Democrats know the programs of those periods survived. They are more than happy to sacrifice a few Blue Dogs, a Blanche Lincoln, a Michael Bennet, if they can expand government so that in the long run it benefits the party of government.
What's extraordinary is that more Democrats have not wised up to the fact that they are being used as pawns in this larger liberal game. Maybe Mr. Obama will see a bump in the polls if health care passes; maybe not. What is certain is that this vote is becoming one that many in his party will not survive. Read article.
Wake Up Calls and Snooze Buttons
David R. Stokes, Townhall.com
September 11, 2001 was a wake-up call, one that kept us vigilant for a period of time roughly equivalent to the length of our involvement in World War II. We had been attacked, we knew who the enemy was, and we were resolved to find and annihilate him.
But that was then.
Some understandably suggest these days that we are in a “pre-Sept. 11” mindset. This is, of course, somewhat true, but the cliché doesn’t tell the whole story. Because before that dreadful day when the world changed forever – or as so many of us thought – there had been other ominous moments and indications of terror to come. The bombing of the USS Cole and attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for example. However, these obvious acts of war were preceded by one on our very soil – the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. And the very mistakes we made following that attack (and those that followed before Sept. 11, 2001) we seem to be determined to make again.
History rhymes one more time.
The day after – September 12, 2001 – Daniel Pipes, director of The Middle East Forum (www.meforum.org), wrote passionately about how, though the moral blame for what happened fell upon those who planned and carried out the attacks, the tactical blame actually fell on the U.S. government, “which has grievously failed in its topmost duty to protect American citizens from harm.” His list of mistakes back then included:
8. Seeing terrorism as a crime
9. Relying too much on electronic intelligence
10. Not understanding the hate-America mentality
11. Ignoring the terrorist infrastructure in this country
Can anyone with a brain possible grade our efforts in these areas, now more than eight years later, as anything higher than, say, a D+? Bear in mind that self-given marks don’t count and in matters of life and death there is no grading on a curve. It’s the same principle that says “almost” doesn’t work in horseshoes or hand grenades.
We are not really just in a “Pre-Sept.11th” mindset, we are actually approaching current Islamism-driven horror in ways reminiscent of how we did things in the 1990s.
How’s that working for you? Read article.
History Is Knocking for Obama
James Lewis, American Thinker.com
Even the President of France is sending out public warnings about America's moral weakness. Moral weakness means an inability to make the hard choices and then follow them up even when things get tough. George W. Bush was the most morally serious president we've had in the last twenty years. Bush is like Harry S Truman: He recognized 9/11 and prioritized it. Everything else came second, and he kept the country safe. Bush and Cheney got it.
Obama and Bill Clinton are the two most grossly irresponsible presidents we've ever had -- bar none. But between those two, Obama looks even worse. Even Bill Clinton didn't go around like Daffy Duck picking up all the ego goodies here, there, and everywhere.
The only thing that will save us is the strength and resilience of the American people, the fundamental soundness of the U.S. Constitution, and the strength of our armed forces in defensive warfare -- since preemptive attacks have now been ruled out. They are not politically correct. The Israelis will have to do that job for us.
We have let our citizens become fools by failing to teach them our own history, and they naturally elected somebody just like them to the highest office in the land. He looks good on TV if he's got that teleprompter turned on. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and Obama goes body-surfing in Waikiki. Aloha, Dude!
The good news is that Mad magazine is publishing again.
The bad news is that in the White House, "what, me worry?" explains national security policy. Read article.
Who is the Enemy?
Victor Davis Hanson, NRO.com
I don't think anyone knows quite what this administration's anti-terrorism policy is. Last August, Obama's counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, lambasted the Bush administration, citing "the inflammatory rhetoric, hyperbole and intellectual narrowness that has often characterized the debate over the president's national security policies" and criticizing the conduct of counterterrorism during the eight years following 9/11.
But more than one-third of all terrorist plots since 9/11 transpired in 2009 — despite loud chest-thumping about rejecting the idea of a war on terror, reaching out to the Muslim world, and apologizing for purported American sins. A non-impoverished Major Hasan or Mr. Mutallab (or Mr. Atta or KSM) does not fit with the notion that our enemies act out of poverty or oppression or want.
In fact, what we are witnessing is a strange mishmash. On the one hand, after repeatedly trashing the Bush protocols in 2007–08, Obama has quietly adopted most of them — keeping the Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, renditions, the concept of tribunals, Predator attacks, forward offensive strategies in Afghanistan, and the Bush-Petraeus timetable in Iraq.
But on the other hand, the Obama administration has embraced largely empty symbolism. Read article.
Are Democrats Thieves?
Mitchell-Langbert.Blogspot.com
One of my neighbors took some offense at my recent characterization of Democrats as thieves in the pages of the Olive Press. My neighbor is not a thief, and that is probably true of a majority of the 36% of Americans who are registered Democrats. Nevertheless, I stand by my letter. For there are two kinds of Democrats: (a) thieves and (b) those fooled by (a). Category (b) Democrats might blame 2,500 years of propaganda. In Open Society and Its Enemies Karl Popper argues that Plato was the first to propagandize for collectivism by identifying collectivism with altruism. But collectivism has almost always helped the rich at the expense of the poor, not the reverse. Thus, "limousine liberals" advocate a class- and self-interested view.
The (a) category goes back to the days of Boss Tweed and "Plunkitt of Tammany Hall." In 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) extended the federal edifice that the Progressive Republicans led by Theodore Roosevelt (TR) had established. The crux of the New Deal was FDR's abolition of the gold standard, which permitted the Federal Reserve Bank unlimited power to create ("print") money. The chief function of the Federal Reserve Bank has been and still is to expand the money supply by printing new reserves and then depositing them in money center banks who have the power to print a multiple of the money, as much as six times, of which they lend a disproportionate share to Wall Street.
If you doubt that a disproportionate share goes to Wall Street, check out Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed about Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). The banking system had lent this early hedge fund 100 billion dollars when it collapsed. One hundred billion that time was more than one percent of the entire economy but LTCM employed only about 200 people. This kind of thing has accelerated during the Bush-Obama administration, with Obama donating untold trillions to his supervisors on Wall Street.
On the local level, the corruption of the Democrats never disappeared. Read article.
Obama and End-Stage Metastatic Liberalism
One Cosmos.Blogspot.com
With his trademark smug stupidity, Barack Obama affirmed the following absolute truth in his The Audacity of Hope: "Implicit in [the Constitution's] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course...."
Where to even begin? In a single stroke of blind ignorance (or is it malevolence?) that only a tenured barbarian could believe, Obama transmogrifies the most important conservative political document in history into a monstrous recipe for perpetual revolution that would appall the men who risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in defense of principles that were and are absolute, timeless, and universal, precisely.
And if these principles are not conserved, mankind is finished -- or at least Man as such is. There will always be room for the little human beastlings who cash in their manhood for the soul-grinding security offered by the swaddling state, and hop around like Nietzsche's fleas at the end of history.
This is how it begins -- and ends. That is, the decadent myth of liberalism is ultimately rooted in a crude relativism that reduces truth to opinion, and therefore exalts cosmic stupidity above all. The bang of Marx ends in the whimp of Obama. Or at least Obama's bong gives off a whiff of Marx. Read article.
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