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January 11, 2010
Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Monday, January 11
President Obama's Lonely C-SPAN Fight - SEE HERE.
All 3 Major Domestic Terror Attacks of 2009 Were Directly Enabled by Obama's Reverse-Profiling Orders - HERE.
ROVE - "Obama's Fiscal Fantasy World." - GO HERE.
What the Dems Know: Universal Voter Registration - HERE.
The Risk of Catastrophic Victory
Peggy Noonan, WSJ.com
Passage of the health-care bill will be, for the administration, a catastrophic victory. If it is voted through in time for the State of the Union Address, as President Obama hopes, half the chamber will rise to their feet and cheer. They will be cheering their own demise.
If health care does not pass, it will also be a disaster, but only for the administration, not the country. Critics will say, "You didn't even waste our time successfully."
What a blunder this thing has been, win or lose, what a miscalculation on the part of the president. The administration misjudged the mood and the moment. Mr. Obama ran, won, was sworn in and began his work under the spirit of 2008—expansive, part dreamy and part hubristic. But as soon as he was inaugurated ,the president ran into the spirit of 2009—more dug in, more anxious, more bottom-line—and didn't notice. At the exact moment the public was announcing it worried about jobs first and debt and deficits second, the administration decided to devote its first year to health care, which no one was talking about. The great recession changed everything, but not right away.
In a way Mr. Obama made the same mistake President Bush did on immigration, producing a big, mammoth, comprehensive bill when the public mood was for small, discrete steps in what might reasonably seem the right direction.
The public in 2009 would have been happy to see a simple bill that mandated insurance companies offer coverage without respect to previous medical conditions. The administration could have had that—and the victory of it—last winter.
Instead, they were greedy for glory. Read article.
Hillary was right! O fails the '3 a.m. phone' test
Charles Hurt, NY Post.com
Turns out Hillary Rodham Clinton was right all along.
During the nastiest battle of the entire 2008 presidential race, she aired an alarming television commercial warning voters that they would come to regret nominating Barack Obama to occupy the White House.
If -- in a national security crisis -- the "red phone" rang at 3 a.m., the ad intoned, Obama would not hear it.
Or he would fail to answer it.
Or he would be on vacation.
In any case, an Obama White House would so diminish the threat of terrorism that the government's focus would shift away from the harsh and determined tactics used to protect the homeland. Instead, Obama would turn his attention to becoming more popular in the world and stress negotiations over hardball tactics.
This attitude from the commander in chief would trickle down to every corner of the federal government responsible for national security.
Obama lashed out at Clinton, dismissing her and accusing her of desperation and playing upon people's fears. Read article.
Thermopylae for Health Care
Quin Hillyer, Spectator.org
Conservatives want Thermopylae. Congressional Republican leaders instead imitate the Confederate defense of Atlanta -- the one that led a local editor to write that General Joseph E. Johnston's reputation had "grown with every backward step."
What infuriates conservatives is the attitudinal signals the Senate leadership sends. The health care bill is treated as just another piece of legislation -- certainly more important than most, as Atlanta was a more important city than most, but not ground to be defended by every available means, to the death, as if a civilization hangs in the balance the way Greek civilization was threatened by the Persians. Yet for millions upon many tens of millions of Americans, the health-care battle is indeed their generation's domestic version of the Greco-Persian War, and nothing less than a Thermopylae-like stand will be acceptable. These middle-Americans don't want amendments to the bills. They don't want to force bill supporters into tough votes that will be used against them in the 2010 fall campaigns. They don't care about positioning for future battles on other legislative subjects, and they don't give a flying expletive about maintaining the alleged dignity of the Senate.
What they want is to beat Obamacare: They want to ward off this abomination, this vicious assault on the Constitution and on the free market, this affront to individual liberty in a realm that is intensely and profoundly personal. They want to defeat it, trip it up, smother it, by any and all means within the law. They hate Obamacare! Read article.
For Liberalism, It's Hangover Time
Jonah Goldberg, Patriot Post.us
A year ago this month, the air over American liberalism was thick with champagne corks. Barack Obama, the newly elected president, was poised to be inaugurated, and he in turn would inaugurate the long-prophesized new progressive era. A year later, the champagne corks are hardly flying, and if this is to be morning in America for American liberalism, it seems to have come with a pretty nasty hangover.
The notion that the left is owed its turn has been, for some, an immutable law of history.
For instance, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late activist-historian, argued in "The Cycles of American History" that every 30 years or so, America swings like a pendulum between government activism and conservatism, between emphasizing public purpose and private gain. The 1930s and the 1960s saw statism in the saddle; in the 1920s, 1950s and 1980s, markets were ascendant. Based on his (very simplistic) theory, Schlesinger predicted that the 1990s would be a new progressive decade like the 1960s and 1930s. This was a widespread hope among liberals at the end of the Reagan-Bush era. As Dennis Hopper put it in a deservedly forgotten 1990 movie, "Flashback": "The '90s are going to make the '60s look like the '50s."
They were wrong, as even Schlesinger conceded. Bill Clinton might have had big ambitions when he entered office, but the failure of HillaryCare and the success of the Contract with America put an end to that. Americans didn't want anything like a replay of the 1960s. As a result, Clinton spent most of his tenure clinging to the polls, terrified of straying too far from the political center, and the healthy tension between him and the Republican-controlled Congress led to welfare reform, tough anti-crime measures and a reduction of the deficit. Read article.
Fasten Your Seatbelts: Bumpy Ride Ahead
Paul Greenberg, JWR.com
Winston Churchill was talking about Russia when he spoke of "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," but he could have been describing the 2,000-page heath-care bill now past the U.S. Senate and into law — after it's been melded with one just as big and indecipherable out of the House. Then the two mysteries will be twice as tricky.
The country won't find out about all the special clauses, side agreements, sweet deals and arcane exemptions tucked away in the final version of the bill till it's the law of the land. If then. But if a dazed observer of this semi-secret process had to sum up what has happened, this would be my best guess/stab in the dark:
The country's broken system of health care won't be fixed, but it'll be broken on a much bigger and more confusing scale. Which figures. After all, this unsystematic system has been patched together willy-nilly over the past half-century, one addition and expansion piled atop another without any clear, comprehensive, unifying plan. It's not unlike making a coat out of patches. Read article.
Out-to-lunch - 'O' living out a disaster film
Michael Goodwin, NY Post.com
Someday, somebody not from Hollywood will make a movie about President Obama's disastrous vacation. About how his aides waited for nearly three hours after the Christmas airliner attack to wake him. About how he waited three more days to appear publicly. About how even then, he didn't grasp the seriousness of the situation, racing through a bloodless speech so he could play golf.
Until that film is made, reality is frightening enough. Even the true believers in the White House now realize they blew the response to a potentially catastrophic attack by an al Qaeda-trained terrorist.
When the alarm first went off -- the 3 a.m. phone call -- they hit the snooze button, putting the president's personal comfort ahead of the country's.
Everything since has been damage control, including the endlessly advertised January 6 meeting with his national security team. Obama's remarks afterward were direct and forceful, but the door of doubt about his national security leadership has been blown off the hinges.
The images that stick are the ones out of Hawaii, with the president in vacation mode -- no tie, a perfunctory appearance on Dec. 28, no questions, then off for more fun in the sun. Behavior doesn't get less serious or more callow. Read article.
Hanging by an Ideological Thread
Arnold Ahlert, JWR.com
"We know that he (wannabe terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab) traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies" — President Barack Obama
Sometimes I wonder if the Obama administration, left-wing Democrats, and see-no-evil liberals have any idea how close they are to political destruction. Self-inflicted, and oh-so well-deserved destruction. Here's a clue, lefties:
One more domestic terror attack, and you're all political toast.
So far, the best defense the American left has come up with for the series of inexcusable breakdowns that gave Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his best shot at 72 virgins, is bashing former vice president Dick Cheney for stating the obvious, and the Republican party for "politically exploiting" the near-tragedy.
Do you feel safer now, my fellow Americans?
The above statement by Barack Obama contains perhaps the most annoying component of leftist fantasy with respect to terrorists. Let me spell it out for the hand-wringers: "crushing poverty" is not—repeat not — the primary impetus of terrorism. Far too many of these bloodthirsty thugs have never even sniffed poverty, and only the adherents of a bankrupt political ideology, steeped in mind-numbing political correctness, continue to insist otherwise. Read article.
Holder’s Haste Makes Waste of Intel: Abdulmutallab indictment is a bill of lost intelligence opportunities.
Andrew C. McCarthy, NRO.com
Eric Holder’s Justice Department rushed to file an indictment Wednesday against Flight 253 terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The telling document is a monument to lost opportunity. Come hell or high water, the Obama administration will press ahead with its commitment to treat al-Qaeda’s war against the United States as a crime wave best managed by the federal courts.
“Al-Qaeda,” in fact, is a term you will not find in the bare-bones, seven-page charging instrument. Nor will you encounter such words as “Yemen,” “jihad,” “terrorism” — neither “Islamic” or “Islamist.” And if you’re looking for the names of any co-conspirators — such as the al-Qaeda satellite (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) that has publicly claimed credit for the attempted Christmas Day atrocity, or the enemy combatants who’ve been running that outfit since their improvident release from Gitmo — you’d best look elsewhere.
Mentioning “enemy combatants,” of course, would be tantamount to saying there is an ongoing military conflict. It would be as if Congress had authorized the use of force after an attack against the United States — as if we had, say, a couple of hundred thousand American troops in harm’s way. There’s no hint of that in this indictment. Instead, we helpfully learn that Delta Airlines is a “United States commercial airline of which Northwest Airlines [is] a subsidiary.” We learn that Northwest’s Flight 253, along with the 289 passengers and crew onboard, were “at all times material to this Indictment . . . in the ‘special maritime jurisdiction of the United States.’”
That turns out to mean that we can have a civilian criminal prosecution in which “venue is proper in the Eastern District of Michigan.” What could possibly be more important than that? Read article.
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