May 22, 2012
FSM HOT TOPICS
Exclusive: Wednesday, July 30
by PRESIDENTIAL WATCH July 30, 2008
Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll
Following his speech in Berlin, Obama enjoyed two very strong nights of polling on Thursday and Friday. His lead grew to six-points for results released on Saturday (see recent daily results). However, polling on Saturday and Sunday showed the candidates much closer with single-day results similar to polling from before the Berlin speech.
Obama earns the vote from 77% of Democrats, McCain is supported by 82% of Republicans. Unaffiliated voters are evenly divided. GO HERE.
Obama Policies Could Cause Depression
Keith Koffler, Roll Call.com
A top aide to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) today suggested that his o pponent’s economic proposals could send the United States into an economic depression.
Former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina, in a conference call with reporters, said the Great Depression of the 1930s was just a recession until the United States raised taxes and instituted protectionist trade policies. This, she said, is exactly what presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) plans to do. Read article.
Is the Press Actually Hurting Obama?
Carol Platt Liebau, Townhall.com
Even with the “we are the world” euphoria attending Barack Obama’s international tour last week, Democrats have reason to be worried. Europeans may embrace Obama like he’s a rock star, but unfortunately for them – and for his campaign – it’s the American voter who has the final word. And so far, despite the best efforts of assorted elites, the press and the citizens of Europe, he has yet to close the deal with the only audience that really matters.
Even after showering American voters with some of the most dazzling political images ever featured in a presidential campaign, the Real Clear Politics poll average yesterday showed Obama leading John McCain by a lackluster 5%. According to a Quinnipiac poll released on July 24, McCain is figuratively breathing down Obama’s neck in important states like Colorado, Michigan and Minnesota.
Now consider that around this time in 1988, with a similarly enthused Democrat electorate eager to support a “change” after eight years of a President that many of them despised, Michael Dukakis was leading George H.W. Bush by a whopping 17 points in the polls. So what’s going on? Read article.
Obama the Prideful
Jeff Dobbs, American Thinker.com
Obama created his very own presidential seal.
Obama felt that 17,000 people watching his speech at the DNC convention was too small, and moved it to Invesco Field at Mile High to try and give another 60,000 or so the privilege of watching him.
Only after striking out in trying to grab the Brandenburg Gate to cast himself in the same light as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. did he settle for a speech at the a Prussian battle monument relocated by Hitler.
History and literature are rich in examples of pompous, overly proud, and arrogant figures. They make familiar objects of mirth and contempt. Chanticleer, the rooster of fable who takes credit for the rising of the sun, may be the ultimate archetype of the popmpous
Edmond Rostand's play Chantecler offers one of the more famous satirical expressions of pride:
"And when I feel that vast call to the Day arising within me, I so expand my soul to make it more sonorous, by making it more spacious, that the great cry may still be increased in greatness; before giving it, I withold it in my soul a moment so piously; then, when, to expel it, I contract my soul, I am so convinced of accomplishing a great act, I have such faith that my song will make night crumble like the walls of Jericho- .
"I sing! Vainly Night offers to compromise, offers a dubious twilight - I sing again! And suddenly - .
"I fall back, blinded by the red light bathing me, dazzled at having, I, the Cock, made the Sun to rise! .
"That which opens flower, eye, soul, and window! Certainly! My voice dispenses light!
"Barackadoodledoo! Read article.
Go Ahead, Laugh at Obama
Byron York, NRO.com
Don’t listen to what they say. The presumptuous — er, presumptive — Democratic nominee is funny.
Just a few weeks ago, it seemed nobody could make a joke about Barack Obama. The New York Times published a front-page story declaring that “there has been little humor” about Obama because “there is no comedic ‘take’ on him, nothing easy to turn to for an easy laugh.” Television comedy writers fretted that audiences didn’t want to hear anything even slightly negative about the Democratic nominee. The political press corps went nuts over a satirical New Yorker cover that wasn’t even directed at Obama.
And this was about a man who made up his own pretend presidential seal and motto, Vero Possumus; a man who, upon securing the Democratic nomination, said, “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”; a man who has on a number of occasions seemed to forget that he is not, or at least not yet, the President of the United States, who has misstated the number of states in his own country, who has forgotten on which committees he serves in the U.S. Senate. Professional comedians — and their audiences — couldn’t find anything funny about any of that? Read article.
The Obama Hypnosis
Monica Crowley, Human Events.com
The Obama Hypnosis was interesting and relatively harmless for a while, but now it's starting to slide into Creepsville: The adoring throngs prepared to show up in western Europe to greet him this week. His selection of Berlin's Victory Column at which to give a major speech -- nothing says “change” like a symbol of Prussian and Nazi militarism! His choice to give a stadium acceptance speech during the Democratic convention. The "Dear Leader" overtones are hard to miss.
And then there's this week's story that the New York Times turned down an op-ed on Iraq written by John McCain because it didn't "mirror" one written by Obama last week.
The left-wing media's bias against McCain doesn't surprise. But what does is their blatant explanation that McCain -- like everyone else in America and the world -- ought to fall under the hypnosis and "mirror" Obama.
Mindless, automatic, unquestioning acceptance of the Man With All the Answers: it's very Stepford. Several months ago, while the Democratic primary fight was still in its infancy, there was a widely seen YouTube video mocking Hillary Clinton as a "Big Brother" brainwasher. Her face filled a giant screen, her voice booming platitudes and instructions to a silent, passive, sheep-like crowd. At the very end of the video, a woman puts an end to the mind-control by throwing a sledgehammer at the screen.
Isn't it the height of irony that the real brainwasher is now upon us, hypnotizing, seducing, and controlling, and no one seems ready, willing, or able to throw the sledgehammer? Read article.
The Operative Term is 'Hubris'
J.R. Dunn, American Thinker.com
He has a seat on his campaign aircraft marked "president". He has taken a shot at creating his own presidential seal, complete with Latin motto. He has laid claim to personal control over the world's oceans and seas. He has repeatedly attempted to dictate how and on what level he, his ideas, and his activities may be discussed. He has encouraged a portrayal of himself as a messianic figure, including a portrait of himself as Christ, complete with halo. He is even now completing a triumphant grand tour of the old world, during which he attempted to shanghai an ancient monument for personal use without consulting the host government.
The operative term here is "hubris". A word of Attic Greek origin, hubris was a major concept animating classical Greek thought. Hubris is overweening pride, an arrogance so profound and so visible as to affront the gods themselves. Hubris was a quality often identified with Greek tragic heroes. The hero allowed simple human pride in his accomplishments and station to burgeon to offensive proportions, at which point the wheels of fate began rolling. The ending was never good -- the valiant Ajax stabs himself to death at a lonely spot, the kingly Oedipus is transformed into a howling, self-blinded wreck.
Barack Obama embodies hubris in chemically pure form. Not that he's a tragic hero, or a hero of any sort, to anyone apart from his deluded legions of college freshmen. Beyond cleaning Hillary's clock, he has no accomplishments to speak of. Read article.
Ten Questions Obama Will Never Be Asked
Infidels Are Cool.com
1) Why does Senator Obama advocate a surge of troops in Afghanistan though he considers a surge of troops in Iraq to have been a mistake?
2) Why is a stable Afghanistan crucial to US interests while a stable Iraq is not?
3) How long does Senator Obama expect to keep troops in Afghanistan?
4) Why is an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan manageable while the same in Iraq is not?
5) How much does Senator Obama expect to spend rebuilding Afghanistan?
6) Why is rebuilding Afghanistan affordable while rebuilding Iraq is not?
7) Why does Senator Obama consider the ethno-sectarian issues in Iraq to be nearly intractable while in Afghanistan they are something we can overcome?
8) If leaving Iraq will make the Iraqi government behave more responsibly, how will an increased presence in Afghanistan affect the Afghan government?
9) Why does Senator Obama advocate a “surge in diplomacy” and multilateralism in Iraq while simultaneously advocating unilateral action in the Pakistani tribal areas?
10) How large of a “residual force” will be left in Iraq and for how long? Read original.
Organizer in Chief
Steven Malanga, City-Journal.org
Barack Obama could become our first community-activist president.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, a war hero turned political leader, has traveled a familiar journey in pursuit of the White House. But his Democratic counterpart, in vaulting from the precincts and wards of American cities into a prominent national role, represents the first appearance in a presidential race of a relatively new political type: the community organizer. Barack Obama’s ascendance is a testament to community activists’ success in amassing political power since the mid-1960s, when the War on Poverty fueled their rise and changed the electoral calculus in many U.S. cities.
Community organizing’s roots stretch back to the 1930s and Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky, founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation and author of Rules for Radicals. But it wasn’t until President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious plan to end poverty through massive federal spending that the Alinsky model—grassroots organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood—really took off. Starting in the mid-1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to neighborhood groups, convinced that they knew better than Washington what their communities needed. Read article.
What Did Obama Learn in Iraq? The senator hasn't shown us much yet.
John Dickerson, Slate.com
Barack Obama's trip to Iraq was so presidential that at moments, he sounded like our current White House resident. When Karen Tumulty of Time asked Obama what he'd learned on his trip, he said, "It confirmed a lot of my beliefs." Lara Logan of CBS asked him if he was ever in doubt that he could lead the country in war as commander in chief, and he answered, "Never."
Before Obama flew to Baghdad, I asked his top foreign-policy adviser, Susan Rice, what kinds of questions he'd asked of his advisers over the months to test whether his Iraq withdrawal plan still matched the realities on the ground in Iraq. Rice gave me no examples.
And now that the trip is over, we have no better sense of how Sen. Obama thinks about Iraq. It's not that I expect grand revelations. But Obama still holds the same policy views he did more than a year and a half ago, even though a lot has changed since then in Iraq, and a lot of those events appear to contradict his earlier views. We know that Obama hasn't moved, but we don't know, really, why that's so. Read article.
Obama's Excellent Adventure
Oliver North, Washington Times.com
"What's this guy running for, 'Emperor of the world?' " asked the sunburned fellow at the next table where we stopped for lunch. Mr. Sunburn was holding a copy of the Charleston Post and Courier and pointing to a headline, "Obama pledges to work for peace." The inquiry, addressed to those sitting beside him elicited only shrugs, so he answered his own question. "Just doesn't make any sense to me."
The Obama Machine's, "Hope & Change World Tour" has left more than a few people perplexed. Some - like the gentleman beside us at the restaurant - are American voters who wonder why the presumptive Democrat nominee is campaigning in foreign countries for president of the United States. Others seem baffled by the places and people chosen for meetings and photo-ops with the candidate. Apparently, among the mystified are members of the media who should have been asking tough questions.
Bottom line: Image is everything. Lots of great pics, which we're sure to see again. Nothing changed on issues that matter - but a big bill for beleaguered U.S. taxpayers to cover the costs of Mr. Obama's excellent adventure. Read article.
Eventually, we will all hate Obama too
David Aaronovitch, Times Online.co.uk
It amuses me that some of those who criticise the present US Administration for its Manichaeism - its division of the world into good and evil - themselves allocate all past badness to Bush and all prospective goodness to Obama. As the ever-improving myth has it, on the morning of September 12, 2001, George W. and America enjoyed the sympathy of the world.
They just threw it away.
But there isn't anything that can't be fixed with a sprinkling of genuine fairy dust. What Bush lost, Obama can find. Where the Texan swaggered, the Chicagoan can glide. Emotional literacy will replace flat iteration, persuasion will supplant force as the preferred means of achieving what needs to be achieved, empathy will trump narcissism. Those who hate America may find their antipathy waning, those who were alarmed by unilateralism will warm to softer, moral leadership. A new dawn will break, will it not? Maybe not. Read article.
A President for America, Not for Hollywood
Mike Gallagher, Townhall.com
It was fun interviewing Sen. John McCain this week on my radio show.
Sen. McCain isn't someone who strikes you as a particularly dynamic speaker. He doesn't seem to like the formality of giving speeches. He clearly isn't too comfortable reading off a TelePrompter. In other words, this isn't a guy who would be cast as a U.S. President on a TV show.
Barack Obama would fit that description.
Come to think of it, the actor who played a president on the hit TV show "24" resembles Sen. Obama a bit. No, not because they're both black, but the fictional president possessed some of the same characteristics as Obama: tall, lanky, self-assured, photogenic; a smooth delivery and a warm demeanor.
Yes, Barack Obama could easily be cast as an American president in a movie or TV show.
But this ain't Hollywood. And we're far from the world of pretend and make-believe. Read article.
The Iraq We'd Have, If We'd Heeded Obama
Bob Owens, NY Post.com
Barack Obama is enjoying a popular jaunt through the Middle East, but if America had heeded his judgment over the last five years, the fawning stories that have followed him this trip might be quite different.
Imagine:
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama overflew the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Najaf Monday, where the mass graves for an estimated 240,000 victims of sectarian violence killed since 2007 were visible even from an altitude.
Sen. Obama was on his way to meet with American soldiers completing the US withdrawal from Iraq in Kuwaiti ports. Miles away, Iranian and Saudi delegations were meeting in an emergency summit in Kuwait City in an effort to keep the Iraqi civil war from boiling over into open regional conflict. Both sides have accused the other of providing advanced weaponry and training, while faulting American leaders for the bloody collapse of the Iraqi state.
Fortunately, of course, none of that happened. If we'd listened to him in 2005-2006, when things were at their worst, then the nightmare scenario might well be playing out: an open Iraqi civil war, verging on a wider regional war, with Saudi Arabia and Iran backing different sides in Iraq. I doubt Obama would be flying to Baghdad. Read article.
The brilliance of the Electoral College
Jeff Jacoby, JWR.com
Over the last two centuries, constitutional amendments to abolish or alter the Electoral College have been proposed in Congress more than 700 times. None has ever come close to being adopted - an indication, perhaps, of the existing system's enduring value.
The most recent such proposal, introduced by US Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, would eliminate the Electoral College in favor of direct popular election of the president. "If the principle of one-person-one-vote is to mean anything," Nelson declares, "the candidate who wins a majority of the votes should win the presidency."
Actually, in no more than four of the nation's 54 presidential elections since 1789 has the electoral vote winner not been the candidate who won the popular vote - and in each case, the margin separating the candidates has been minuscule.
Such concerns didn't trouble the framers of the Constitution, who did not believe that political contests should be decided by majority rule. They rejected "pure democracy," as James Madison explained in Federalist No. 10. They knew that with "nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual," blind majoritarianism can become as great a menace to liberty as any king or dictator. The term "tyranny of the majority" was coined for good reason. Read article.
Family Security Matters does not endorse any candidate for any public office. Our Contributing Editors’ opinions are their own, and do not reflect those of FSM.
Archives Pre-May 8, 2008: Please click here
Join FSM and stay informed. Get your daily Security Update delivered each day to your e-mail.
The #twittergulag saga continues: @gopfirecracker suspended, others still trapped
May 21, 2012 11:54 PM
#freegopfirecracker #freegopfirecracker #freegopfirecracker #freegopfirecracker— Dale Holt (@DaleHolt8) May 22, 2012 Come on conservatives! Everyone rallied around @ChrisLoesch when he was suspended! Now its @gopfirecracker so stand up! #freegopfirecracker— Schmoop (@RGSchmoop) May 22, 2012 Hey @twitter and @support – #FreeGOPfirecracker's account has been suspended. Please fix this mishap. Thank you.— Gabriella Hoffman (@Gabby_Hoffman) May 22, 2012 [...]
Cory Booker tweets #IStandWithObama; Hashtag hijackers flood the zone
May 21, 2012 11:39 PM
Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, the Democrat who defended Bain from the Obama campaign's attacks yesterday morning, has been backpedaling more furiously than a clown on a high wire. Tonight, in an effort to mollify his critics on the Left, he posted four tweets that included the hashtag #IStandWithObama. Conservatives immediately took over the #IStandWithObama hashtag to mock President Obama, and within an hour it became a trending topic.
Cory Booker tries to clear up his position on Bain attacks
May 21, 2012 10:25 PM
Cory Booker continued his quest to run screaming away from the apparently too candid comments he made on Meet the Press on Sunday. Despite attempts earlier today to #FreeCoryBooker from those trying to force him to apologize Booker went on the Rachel Maddow show to do everything he could to walk back what he said. Que the mockery.
Obama's 'When you're president' picture spawns hashtag
May 21, 2012 09:59 PM
"When you're president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot." -Barack Obama
Cue #WhenYouArePresident
Obama takes anti-Romney rant to Twitter
May 21, 2012 09:49 PM
It started off this morning with a video of a woman named Valerie from Indiana posted by Barack Obama’s official Twitter account. 12 hours, 12 tweets and a failed hashtag later, Obama’s reelection team took the day to tweet ongoing misinformation about Mitt Romney’s record in the private sector, specifically Bain Capital’s work with the [...]
FSM Archives
blog comments powered by Disqus