Unsustainable's the New Normal

Mark Steyn, OC Register.com

 

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or, as the president called him, "Corpseman Bouchard." Twice.

 

Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander in chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there's no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it's revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don't know that he doesn't know that kinda stuff, or they don't know it, either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don't know what they don't know.

 

Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they're the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they're having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of "The West Wing" they can only conceive of the public – and, indeed, the world – as crowd-scene extras in "The Barack Obama Show." They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor manager tells you to, but the notion that, in return, he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them. Read article.

Jennifer Rubin, Commentary Magazine,com

 

Justice Clarence Thomas, appearing at a Florida law school, made some interesting remarks about the Supreme Court’s decision striking down portions of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law. The New York Times dutifully reports his jab, “I found it fascinating that the people who were editorializing against it were The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company. … These are corporations.” And there was more:

 

“If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group, you’d say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association,” he said. “If you all then formed a partnership to speak, you’d say we still have that First Amendment right to speak and of association.”

 

“But what if you put yourself in a corporate form?” Justice Thomas asked, suggesting that the answer must be the same.

 

Asked about his attitude toward the two decisions overruled in Citizens United, he said, “If it’s wrong, the ultimate precedent is the Constitution.”

 

That’s as compelling and succinct an argument as you will get in defense of constitutional principles and the sanctity of political speech. Most interesting, perhaps, were his remarks on attending the State of the Union: Read article.

 

Ben Shapiro, Townhall.com

 

President Obama is a man who embodies all the personal characteristics of a fascist leader, right down to the arrogant chin-up head tilt he utilizes when waiting for applause. He sees democracy as a filthy process that can be cured only by the centralized power of bureaucrats. He sees his presidency as a Hegelian synthesis marking the end of political conflict. He sees himself as embodiment of the collective will. No president should speak in these terms -- not in a representative republic. Obama does it habitually.

 

It would be pointless to discuss at length the dictatorial, demagogic nature of much of Obama's address -- the attacks on the banking system; the unprecedented personal assault on the Supreme Court justices; the dictatorial demands ("I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay"); the scornful looks and high-handed put-downs directed at his political opponents. It would be even more pointless to discuss the incomprehensible stupidity of Obama's policy proposals. (Export more of our goods? Why didn't anyone else think of that?)

 

It is worth examining, however, the deeper philosophy evident from Obama's address. From the outset, his speech was an ode to himself. He opened, bizarrely, by comparing this moment in history to past American crises: "when the Union was turned back at Bull Run …" He suggested that "America prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation, as one people." This, of course, is unmitigated, self-serving rubbish -- 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War because we didn't move forward as one nation. But that is irrelevant to Obama -- in his mind, today's crisis is just like the Civil War. He is a modern-day Lincoln, and those who oppose him are benighted rebels. What's more, only his powerful leadership can lead us through. Read article.

James Lewis, American Thinker.com

 

Three strikes and you're out. Obama has blown two so far, and he's got one chance left when it comes to national security. What will happen if in the next twelve months or so the suicide-preaching fanatics of Tehran explode a nuclear bomb, as they obviously are dead-set on doing? What will happen if Israel tries a preemptive strike? What if the Saudis, Egyptians, and Gulf States then imported a Sunni bomb from Pakistan?

 

All those countries are unstable and have sizable radical martyrdom groups trying to overthrow their regimes. If a nuclear Iran led a Shiite Axis with Syria, Lebanon, Hamas, and Hezbollah, a tectonic shift would bring radicals to power from Tehran to Lebanon, the worst alignment of America's enemies since Stalin. That is a colossal challenge even to the most competent U.S. foreign policy team. Obama has shown no capacity to deal with national security crises so far. This may therefore be the most dangerous moment since Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. If this White House can't handle huge instability at the wellspring of the world's oil supplies, then every other great power will try to muscle in, including Russia and China. That will be Strike Three. Read article.

 

William A. Donohue, WashingtonTimes.com

 

When the United States imposed sanctions on South Africa in the 1980s, it was done for sound moral reasons. There are even more important reasons why sanctions against Iran are needed today: If it succeeds in developing nuclear weapons - and it is strongly committed to doing so - world peace surely will be threatened. That is why I joined with Christian leaders in the fall in signing a letter to Congress calling for sanctions and a boycott of arms sales to Iran. Regrettably, President Obama has shown little interest in supporting this effort. In his State of the Union address this week, Iran was barely a footnote.

 

No one objects to the peaceful pursuit of uranium enrichment programs. But when the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism embarks on such a quest and is known to be building underground nuclear facilities, it's more than a game changer - it's an international outrage. From all that we know, Iran already has enough uranium to make at least two nuclear bombs. No one seriously believes that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants nuclear power to enhance the lifestyle of his oppressed people. 

 

One wonders what it will take to shake the Obama administration out of its slumber. Diplomatic appeals work fine when friendly and democratic nations are at odds, but when the president of a terrorist regime promises to wipe a friendly and democratic nation "off the map," and when he repeatedly thumbs his nose at such world bodies as the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the only credible nonviolent response is sanctions. Read article.

Timothy P. Carney, Washington Examiner.com

 

More than 40 former lobbyists work in senior positions in the Obama administration, including three Cabinet secretaries and the CIA director. Yet in his State of the Union address, Obama claimed, "We've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs."

 

Did Obama speak falsely?

 

Well, it depends on what the definition of "excluded lobbyists" is.

 

I asked the White House if he chose his words poorly, but the media affairs office defended the president's statement: "As the President said," a spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail, "we have turned away lobbyists for many, many positions."

 

So, the country may have heard, "we haven't hired lobbyists to policymaking jobs," but the White House tells us Obama meant, "we only hired some of the lobbyists who applied for policymaking jobs." In other words, they've excluded some lobbyists.

 

And this was in the context of reducing the "deficit of trust."

 

So Obama has, indeed, taken a Clintonian turn, but not toward the center. Instead, he has adopted our 42nd president's use of clearly misleading statements that can be parsed so as to be factually correct, at least in a general sort of way. Read article.

Austin Hill, Townhall.com

 

While the President’s plummeting popularity may be based mostly on things that we can all observe publicly, I suspect that there are also many Americans who have had private, personal experiences with the many new ways that our government has intervened into the private economy, and what was purported to be an offer of “help” turned out to be a “cure” that was more painful than the ailment.

 

Yet, for however disingenuous or dysfunctional America’s new, bigger government has become, it has been remarkably consistent with one particular agenda - its ability to exercise ever-increasing levels of control over the lives of private citizens. This has been perhaps the most disappointing facet among those who had previously been President Obama’s most ardent supporters. A child-like belief in a politician who promised to improve everything has, I suspect for many, led to confusing and constraining entanglements with cold and impersonal bureaucracies. Read article.

 

Michael Barone, Rasmussen Reports.com

 

Just whom are we trying to impress?

 

That's a question that occurred to me when, on his second full day in the presidency, Barack Obama announced we would close the Guantanamo detainee facility within one year.

 

It's a question that has kept occurring to me over the last year and nine days, even though Obama and his administration have proven unable to keep that promise.

 

Whom are we trying to impress by ruling out enhanced interrogation techniques on unlawful combatants, techniques that produced valuable intelligence that saved American lives? Whom are we trying to impress by limiting questioning to the Army Field Manual?

 

That's a good guide for handling prisoners of war and other lawful combatants covered by international law. But whom are we trying to impress by extending those protections to those who are not covered by the Geneva Conventions or other treaties we have signed? Read article.

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