Get ready for Obama on all the TV talks shows on Sunday (that few watch anyway) - everywhere but Fox, of course.
This dude is a complete narcisist !
Obama and the Sunday Talkies [Benjamin Zycher]
I see that President Obama is going to be featured on four or five (!) of the Sunday talk shows this weekend.
It is simply unbelievable to me that none of the political experts in the White House has told or convinced the president that more yakking on his part on health care or anything else would be counterproductive, and that this is the time for him to sit back and be presidential, while the crass politicians in Congress fight things out.
But . . . no. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, ACORN's gotta engage in fraud, and Obama's gotta talk. It's really that simple; and it is amazing, given how little this guy actually knows about economics, about foreign affairs, about, well, just about anything. This reminds me of a footnote, minor but revealing, from the 2004 Democratic National Convention, at which Obama was the keynote speaker. His rhetoric, as usual, was as empty as a dry well, even as it drew the crowd to its feet time and again. Obama was reported, after the speech and the thunderous reception that it received, to have said to someone, "You know, I can play in this league."
And so there we have it: Obama really believes at his core that empty rhetoric is the same as substance and judgement. I have to believe that it was then that he began to view himself as presidential timber. A small bit of vanity for a man; a giant looming danger for America and the cause of liberty.
— Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Obama Throws Missile Defense (& Poland / Czech Repub) Under the Bus
Did he Lie ? (and am I racist for asking ?) You be the Judge.
Obama Circa April [Rich Lowry]
In Prague:
So let me be clear: Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran's neighbors and our allies. The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven. (Applause.) If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed. (Applause.)
Obama Administration Today:
Adding Fuel to the Russian Fire [David Satter]
President Obama’s decision not to deploy an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic is intended to improve U.S.–Russian relations. In fact, it will make them worse.
The missiles were never a threat to Russia. This has been acknowledged by Russia’s own experts. Russia’s ICBM force is designed to attack the U.S. over the North Pole and the missiles intended for deployment in Poland are too slow to catch them and designed for a totally different purpose. The constant anti-western propaganda around this issue was referred to in the Soviet Union as “information for fools.” It served to consolidate the support of the population around a corrupt leadership by directing its frustrations against an external foe.
Russia opposed the missile deployment for a completely different reason. Had they been deployed on the territory of the former Warsaw Pact they would have demonstrated that this region was once and for all part of the defense architecture of the West. By using propaganda to induce Obama to back down, Russia has divided the NATO alliance into those countries where Russia has a veto over deployments and those where it does not with serious negative implications for the cohesion of the West.
The Obama administration undoubtedly hopes that the next step will be Russian cooperation over Iran. But having achieved a major strategic victory at no cost, the Russians are not likely to take steps that would alienate the Iranians and strengthen the West. Support for Iran gives Russia weight in international politics because, in the absence of any willingness on the part of the West to penalize Russia, it compels worried Western countries constantly to court the Kremlin. At the same time, a corrupt and criminalized regime whose stability depends on the price of oil may actually welcome tension in the Middle East capable of raising oil prices to stratospheric levels.
Officials in Washington have insisted that the decision to cancel the missile deployment was dictated by a new understanding of the threat posed by Iran. This is not the way it is being seen in Russia where officials are delighted by the demonstration of Russian strength which they think it represents. Russian news agencies recently reported that Russia will detain Georgian ships off Abkhazia in legally recognized Georgian territorial waters. As Russian “strength” becomes more self confident we can expect more such reactions to Russian success in the months ahead.
— David Satter is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His latest book is Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State.
Tone Deaf [Andrew Stuttaford]
You can agree or not with Obama's decision to abandon plans to build those missile-defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland, but we ought to be able to agree that publicly announcing this on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland is an act of quite remarkable insensitivity.
Excellent Timing on Missile-Shield Decision! [Mark Hemingway]
Aside from Thursday being the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, here's the latest from the Associated Press:
Nuke agency says Iran can make bomb
VIENNA - Experts at the world's top atomic watchdog are in agreement that Tehran has the ability to make a nuclear bomb and is on the way to developing a missile system able to carry an atomic warhead, according to a secret report seen by The Associated Press.The document drafted by senior officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency is the clearest indication yet that the agency's leaders share Washington's views on Iran's weapon-making capabilities.It appears to be the so-called "secret annex" on Iran's nuclear program that Washington says is being withheld by the IAEA's chief.The document says Iran has "sufficient information" to build a bomb. It says Iran is likely to "overcome problems" on developing a delivery system.
Obama Circa April [Rich Lowry]
In Prague:
So let me be clear: Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran's neighbors and our allies. The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven. (Applause.) If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed. (Applause.)
Obama Administration Today:
Adding Fuel to the Russian Fire [David Satter]
President Obama’s decision not to deploy an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic is intended to improve U.S.–Russian relations. In fact, it will make them worse.
The missiles were never a threat to Russia. This has been acknowledged by Russia’s own experts. Russia’s ICBM force is designed to attack the U.S. over the North Pole and the missiles intended for deployment in Poland are too slow to catch them and designed for a totally different purpose. The constant anti-western propaganda around this issue was referred to in the Soviet Union as “information for fools.” It served to consolidate the support of the population around a corrupt leadership by directing its frustrations against an external foe.
Russia opposed the missile deployment for a completely different reason. Had they been deployed on the territory of the former Warsaw Pact they would have demonstrated that this region was once and for all part of the defense architecture of the West. By using propaganda to induce Obama to back down, Russia has divided the NATO alliance into those countries where Russia has a veto over deployments and those where it does not with serious negative implications for the cohesion of the West.
The Obama administration undoubtedly hopes that the next step will be Russian cooperation over Iran. But having achieved a major strategic victory at no cost, the Russians are not likely to take steps that would alienate the Iranians and strengthen the West. Support for Iran gives Russia weight in international politics because, in the absence of any willingness on the part of the West to penalize Russia, it compels worried Western countries constantly to court the Kremlin. At the same time, a corrupt and criminalized regime whose stability depends on the price of oil may actually welcome tension in the Middle East capable of raising oil prices to stratospheric levels.
Officials in Washington have insisted that the decision to cancel the missile deployment was dictated by a new understanding of the threat posed by Iran. This is not the way it is being seen in Russia where officials are delighted by the demonstration of Russian strength which they think it represents. Russian news agencies recently reported that Russia will detain Georgian ships off Abkhazia in legally recognized Georgian territorial waters. As Russian “strength” becomes more self confident we can expect more such reactions to Russian success in the months ahead.
— David Satter is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His latest book is Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State.
Tone Deaf [Andrew Stuttaford]
You can agree or not with Obama's decision to abandon plans to build those missile-defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland, but we ought to be able to agree that publicly announcing this on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland is an act of quite remarkable insensitivity.
Excellent Timing on Missile-Shield Decision! [Mark Hemingway]
Aside from Thursday being the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, here's the latest from the Associated Press:
Nuke agency says Iran can make bomb
VIENNA - Experts at the world's top atomic watchdog are in agreement that Tehran has the ability to make a nuclear bomb and is on the way to developing a missile system able to carry an atomic warhead, according to a secret report seen by The Associated Press.The document drafted by senior officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency is the clearest indication yet that the agency's leaders share Washington's views on Iran's weapon-making capabilities.It appears to be the so-called "secret annex" on Iran's nuclear program that Washington says is being withheld by the IAEA's chief.The document says Iran has "sufficient information" to build a bomb. It says Iran is likely to "overcome problems" on developing a delivery system.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
UN Report: Disgusting, Nauseating
This is what happens when "people without morals pretend to be warriors for human rights. "
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804580173&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Will Obama direct UN Amb Susan Rice to veto any potential Security Council action regarding this fraudulent, biased, terror supporting "report" ? We shall see.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804580173&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Will Obama direct UN Amb Susan Rice to veto any potential Security Council action regarding this fraudulent, biased, terror supporting "report" ? We shall see.
ACORN
Another one of Obama's major questionable associations and supporters is engulfed in scandal.
Of course, ACORN's shall we say questionable tactics were widely known pre-election day, but for some strange reason, most of the media didn't want to cover it.
Thanks to two enterprising kids, ACORN is exposed as a hotbed of criminal activity and incompetence that should NEVER have been funded one single penny by the US taxpayer !
And now the Democrats in Congress are cutting off ACORN faster than you can say Charlie Rangel. And the MSM is still wilfully negligent (see Charlie Gibson story below).
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/09/15/acorn-watch-charlie-gibson-and-the-ostrich-media/
Excerpt:
While listening to Don Wade and Roma this morning on WLS AM Chicago, they had Charlie Gibson on as their usual Tuesday morning guest. Don asked Charlie, why, after the senate last night voted to halt funding to ACORN and after three of those video tapes of ACORN employees helping the pimp and prostitute set up shop, there was no mention of it anywhere on the network news. Charlie gave out a most uncomfortable laugh and said that that was the first he heard of it!
Don: Okay, here’s my news question. A Senate bill yesterday passes, cutting off funds to this group called ACORN. Now, we got that bill passed and we have the embarrassing video of ACORN staffers giving tax advice on how to set up a brothel with 13-year-old hookers. It has everything you could want – corruption and sleazy action at tax-funded organizations and it’s got government ties. But nobody’s covering that story. Why?
Gibson: HAHAHAHAHA. HEHEHE. I didn’t even know about it. Um. So, you’ve got me at a loss. I don’t know. Uh. Uh.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/outing_acorn_q0mlOczlqFZkoBGLWHb99M
Of course, ACORN's shall we say questionable tactics were widely known pre-election day, but for some strange reason, most of the media didn't want to cover it.
Thanks to two enterprising kids, ACORN is exposed as a hotbed of criminal activity and incompetence that should NEVER have been funded one single penny by the US taxpayer !
And now the Democrats in Congress are cutting off ACORN faster than you can say Charlie Rangel. And the MSM is still wilfully negligent (see Charlie Gibson story below).
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/09/15/acorn-watch-charlie-gibson-and-the-ostrich-media/
Excerpt:
While listening to Don Wade and Roma this morning on WLS AM Chicago, they had Charlie Gibson on as their usual Tuesday morning guest. Don asked Charlie, why, after the senate last night voted to halt funding to ACORN and after three of those video tapes of ACORN employees helping the pimp and prostitute set up shop, there was no mention of it anywhere on the network news. Charlie gave out a most uncomfortable laugh and said that that was the first he heard of it!
Don: Okay, here’s my news question. A Senate bill yesterday passes, cutting off funds to this group called ACORN. Now, we got that bill passed and we have the embarrassing video of ACORN staffers giving tax advice on how to set up a brothel with 13-year-old hookers. It has everything you could want – corruption and sleazy action at tax-funded organizations and it’s got government ties. But nobody’s covering that story. Why?
Gibson: HAHAHAHAHA. HEHEHE. I didn’t even know about it. Um. So, you’ve got me at a loss. I don’t know. Uh. Uh.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/outing_acorn_q0mlOczlqFZkoBGLWHb99M
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Van Jones & The NY Times
Kyle Smith: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/van_jones_unfit_for_print_4fliXu4hcB1lqAqQmWV8NO
The green czar affair should put the final lie to The Times’ ‘objectivity’
“This is not an excuse,” the managing editor of The New York Times said after offering the following excuse for completely missing the Van Jones story, except in a blog post: “Our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period.”
Here’s how long-staffed The New York Times actually is. Long after Glenn Beck reported — back in July — that Jones was history’s first communist czar, and even after Gateway Pundit reported, on Sept. 3, that Jones had signed a wackadoodle 9/11 “truther” petition, The Times sent two reporters to Boston (in a story published Friday, Sept. 4) to pre-report the non-story of Joseph P. Kennedy II’s run for Ted Kennedy’s seat. (He later said he wasn’t interested. Also, the picture of Joseph the Times ran was actually of his brother Max.)
On Sept. 5 (still no word about Van Jones being a Red Green), the Times’ crack political team informed us that the Naked Cowboy was dropping out of the mayoral race.
On Sept. 6, The Times broke the story that “Diane Sawyer, coolly regal, is a born anchor, albeit in an ever-evaporating sea” and, under a piece headlined “Reading Underground,” gave us all food for thought with the subhed, “Even while pressed against strangers, even while stumbling home from a party, New Yorkers read on the subway.”
Granted, the Times must devote a lot of personpower to its vast corrections column. But if it is so flush that it can afford to hire, like the boy with the shovel who follows the elephant in the parade, a personal fact checker for TV critic Alessandra Stanley, surely it can scrounge up an intern to report that there’s a communist truther working as the president’s green jobs czar, or that a congressman was demanding his resignation (Sept. 4).
Jill Abramson, the managing editor, admitted only to being “a beat behind” the story but added that the paper had caught up — after the saga was over. The EMS equivalent of this statement would be, “Sorry I didn’t take your 911 call for four days. At least I was in time for the funeral.”
Although Abramson’s excuse was not an excuse, she proceeded to offer another one: “Mr. Jones was not a high-ranking official.”
Oh. And here I was, thinking that he was “one of Mr. Obama’s top advisers,” as I was told by, well, The Times, on its Caucus blog on Sept. 5. Confusing, confusing.
Only in Timesland can you be in charge of doling out $80 billion in contracts (“A Small White House Program” — The Times’ John M. Broder, on Sept. 6) and be less important than the Naked Cowboy.
The Times was aware of the story, knew it was bigger than most of the stuff it puts in the paper every day, and had plenty of resources to cover it.
But The Times purposely ignored it because it was hoping that the story would go away, because it likes people like Comrade Jones and was hoping he wouldn’t be forced out. The Times doesn’t like people like Glenn Beck and didn’t want him to be able to claim Jones’s scalp. The Times’ prejudice blinded it to the fact that Jones’ fall became obvious on Friday, when a White House spokesman refused to defend him.
Newspaper of record? The Times isn’t so much a newspaper as a clique of high school girls sending IMs to like-minded friends about their feuds and faves and raves and rants. OMFG you guys! It’s no more objective than Beck is.
Jones wasn’t an obscure functionary. There was a huge profile devoted to him in The New Yorker back in January. He was a “legendary figure” in the environmental movement, says The Washington Post. He got four breathless fanzine pages devoted to him in Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” He was a rising cstar, maybe even a supercstar.
To date, The Times has still not told its readers that Jones is or was a communist, calling this notion merely a charge made only by Republicans — we all know how nutty they are! — not as a fact.
Yet Jones said in 2005, “By August [of 1991], I was a communist” and “I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ ” If Comrade Jones has disavowed communism, I couldn’t find any mention of it.
The Times continues to treat communism as a cute campus peccadillo like pot smoking or nude streaking. A Times think piece (Sept. 9) worried that Jones’ fall was “swift and personal.” Being a communist is personal but being the pregnant teen daughter of a vice presidential candidate is public business?
Beck doesn’t claim to be neutral, and neither should The Times. It doesn’t have to report both sides of the news any more than Beck has to give equal time to Janeane Garofalo.
But — in both cases — wouldn’t that be fun?
The Van Guard [Mark Steyn]
The New York Post's Kyle Smith has a peach of a column on The New York Times' explanation that it missed the Van Jones story because "our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period":
There are two possibilities:
(a) the Times is as dopey as Ms Abramson seems eager to paint herself as;
or
(b), they decided to ignore what was very obviously a real story and thus (vastly overrating their waning powers as gatekeepers to "all the news that's fit") bury it.
The media have taken a conscious decision to serve as Obama's palace guard. This doesn't seem a commercially sound proposition. (The Washington Post is currently losing $1.10 on every copy, which suggests, as I've said before, way more than a transitional-challenges-of-the-Internet problem.) But, beyond that, it would seem unlikely to do much for your sense of self-worth.
Re: Them Gods Is Calmed Down [Andy McCarthy]
Jay, your post reminded me of Van Jones and Katrina — addressed in a fabulous Frontpage article about Obama, Soros and the radical Left yesterday by David Horowitz (further developing the themes in David's excellent but overlooked book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, which I noted in a post earlier this week):
According to his own account, Van Jones became a “communist” during a prison term he served after being arrested during the 1992 Los Angeles race riots. For the next ten years Jones was an activist in the Maoist organization STORM – “Stand Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement.” When STORM disintegrated Jones joined the Apollo Alliance and the Center for American Progress Democrats. As he explained to the East Bay Express in a 2005 article, he still considered himself a “revolutionary, but just a more effective one.” “Before,” he told the Express, “we would fight anybody, any time. No concession was good enough;… Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I’ll work with anybody, I’ll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward.... I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”
Pursuing the deep satisfaction of radical ends is the clear sub-text of Jones’ 2007 book, The Green Collar Economy which comes with a Forward by Robert Kennedy Jr. and enthusiastic blurbs from Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore. According to Jones, the Katrina tragedies were caused by global warming, white supremacy, free market economics and the “war for oil” in Iraq. This “perfect storm” of social evils deprived poor blacks of the protection of adequate levees and private vehicles which would have allowed them to escape. The fact that a fleet of public buses was available but the black mayor and the black power structure in New Orleans failed to deploy them go unmentioned in Jones’ indictment of white racism. Instead, “The Katrina story illustrates clearly the two crises we face in the United States: radical socioeconomic inequality and rampant environmental destruction.” To deal with these crises “we will need both political and economic transformation – immediately.”
The green czar affair should put the final lie to The Times’ ‘objectivity’
“This is not an excuse,” the managing editor of The New York Times said after offering the following excuse for completely missing the Van Jones story, except in a blog post: “Our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period.”
Here’s how long-staffed The New York Times actually is. Long after Glenn Beck reported — back in July — that Jones was history’s first communist czar, and even after Gateway Pundit reported, on Sept. 3, that Jones had signed a wackadoodle 9/11 “truther” petition, The Times sent two reporters to Boston (in a story published Friday, Sept. 4) to pre-report the non-story of Joseph P. Kennedy II’s run for Ted Kennedy’s seat. (He later said he wasn’t interested. Also, the picture of Joseph the Times ran was actually of his brother Max.)
On Sept. 5 (still no word about Van Jones being a Red Green), the Times’ crack political team informed us that the Naked Cowboy was dropping out of the mayoral race.
On Sept. 6, The Times broke the story that “Diane Sawyer, coolly regal, is a born anchor, albeit in an ever-evaporating sea” and, under a piece headlined “Reading Underground,” gave us all food for thought with the subhed, “Even while pressed against strangers, even while stumbling home from a party, New Yorkers read on the subway.”
Granted, the Times must devote a lot of personpower to its vast corrections column. But if it is so flush that it can afford to hire, like the boy with the shovel who follows the elephant in the parade, a personal fact checker for TV critic Alessandra Stanley, surely it can scrounge up an intern to report that there’s a communist truther working as the president’s green jobs czar, or that a congressman was demanding his resignation (Sept. 4).
Jill Abramson, the managing editor, admitted only to being “a beat behind” the story but added that the paper had caught up — after the saga was over. The EMS equivalent of this statement would be, “Sorry I didn’t take your 911 call for four days. At least I was in time for the funeral.”
Although Abramson’s excuse was not an excuse, she proceeded to offer another one: “Mr. Jones was not a high-ranking official.”
Oh. And here I was, thinking that he was “one of Mr. Obama’s top advisers,” as I was told by, well, The Times, on its Caucus blog on Sept. 5. Confusing, confusing.
Only in Timesland can you be in charge of doling out $80 billion in contracts (“A Small White House Program” — The Times’ John M. Broder, on Sept. 6) and be less important than the Naked Cowboy.
The Times was aware of the story, knew it was bigger than most of the stuff it puts in the paper every day, and had plenty of resources to cover it.
But The Times purposely ignored it because it was hoping that the story would go away, because it likes people like Comrade Jones and was hoping he wouldn’t be forced out. The Times doesn’t like people like Glenn Beck and didn’t want him to be able to claim Jones’s scalp. The Times’ prejudice blinded it to the fact that Jones’ fall became obvious on Friday, when a White House spokesman refused to defend him.
Newspaper of record? The Times isn’t so much a newspaper as a clique of high school girls sending IMs to like-minded friends about their feuds and faves and raves and rants. OMFG you guys! It’s no more objective than Beck is.
Jones wasn’t an obscure functionary. There was a huge profile devoted to him in The New Yorker back in January. He was a “legendary figure” in the environmental movement, says The Washington Post. He got four breathless fanzine pages devoted to him in Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” He was a rising cstar, maybe even a supercstar.
To date, The Times has still not told its readers that Jones is or was a communist, calling this notion merely a charge made only by Republicans — we all know how nutty they are! — not as a fact.
Yet Jones said in 2005, “By August [of 1991], I was a communist” and “I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ ” If Comrade Jones has disavowed communism, I couldn’t find any mention of it.
The Times continues to treat communism as a cute campus peccadillo like pot smoking or nude streaking. A Times think piece (Sept. 9) worried that Jones’ fall was “swift and personal.” Being a communist is personal but being the pregnant teen daughter of a vice presidential candidate is public business?
Beck doesn’t claim to be neutral, and neither should The Times. It doesn’t have to report both sides of the news any more than Beck has to give equal time to Janeane Garofalo.
But — in both cases — wouldn’t that be fun?
The Van Guard [Mark Steyn]
The New York Post's Kyle Smith has a peach of a column on The New York Times' explanation that it missed the Van Jones story because "our Washington bureau was somewhat short-staffed during the height of the pre-Labor Day vacation period":
There are two possibilities:
(a) the Times is as dopey as Ms Abramson seems eager to paint herself as;
or
(b), they decided to ignore what was very obviously a real story and thus (vastly overrating their waning powers as gatekeepers to "all the news that's fit") bury it.
The media have taken a conscious decision to serve as Obama's palace guard. This doesn't seem a commercially sound proposition. (The Washington Post is currently losing $1.10 on every copy, which suggests, as I've said before, way more than a transitional-challenges-of-the-Internet problem.) But, beyond that, it would seem unlikely to do much for your sense of self-worth.
Re: Them Gods Is Calmed Down [Andy McCarthy]
Jay, your post reminded me of Van Jones and Katrina — addressed in a fabulous Frontpage article about Obama, Soros and the radical Left yesterday by David Horowitz (further developing the themes in David's excellent but overlooked book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, which I noted in a post earlier this week):
According to his own account, Van Jones became a “communist” during a prison term he served after being arrested during the 1992 Los Angeles race riots. For the next ten years Jones was an activist in the Maoist organization STORM – “Stand Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement.” When STORM disintegrated Jones joined the Apollo Alliance and the Center for American Progress Democrats. As he explained to the East Bay Express in a 2005 article, he still considered himself a “revolutionary, but just a more effective one.” “Before,” he told the Express, “we would fight anybody, any time. No concession was good enough;… Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I’ll work with anybody, I’ll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward.... I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”
Pursuing the deep satisfaction of radical ends is the clear sub-text of Jones’ 2007 book, The Green Collar Economy which comes with a Forward by Robert Kennedy Jr. and enthusiastic blurbs from Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore. According to Jones, the Katrina tragedies were caused by global warming, white supremacy, free market economics and the “war for oil” in Iraq. This “perfect storm” of social evils deprived poor blacks of the protection of adequate levees and private vehicles which would have allowed them to escape. The fact that a fleet of public buses was available but the black mayor and the black power structure in New Orleans failed to deploy them go unmentioned in Jones’ indictment of white racism. Instead, “The Katrina story illustrates clearly the two crises we face in the United States: radical socioeconomic inequality and rampant environmental destruction.” To deal with these crises “we will need both political and economic transformation – immediately.”
Steyn: Obama to try to shove ObamaCare down our throats ...
Obama doesn't give a damn about the 1 million + ObamaCare protestors in DC yesterday. Or the rest of us that don't like what he's selling.
Read Mark Steyn:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTI2Y2YyMzExNGI2OWNjNWU2YWM2NTdiYzY2OTIzNGQ=&w=MA==
Where Is Obama’s ‘Center’?
Look at his Rolodex and then figure out just where such a man would estimate it to be.
By Mark Steyn
So why can’t the silver-tongued post-partisan healer seal the deal on this health-care business? Surely it should be the work of moments for the greatest orator in American history to whip up a little medicinal Gettysburg, a touch of Henry V-in-the-Agincourt-casualty-tent, and put this thing away. Yet there he was the other night with the usual leaden medley of tinny grandiosity (all the this-is-the-moment, now-is-the-hour stuff), slippery reassurances (don’t worry, you won’t be “required” to change your present health arrangements), imputations of bad faith to anyone who takes a different view (they’re playing “games”), and the copper-bottomed guarantee that you can have it all for no money down, no interest, no monthly payments, no nuthin’ (“I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit”).
This would barely have passed muster four months back. After a summer of seething town halls and sliding approval numbers, it was a joke. Or, rather, it would be a joke if the president’s intention was to persuade an increasingly skeptical if not downright hostile electorate. On the other hand, if the intention is to ram it down America’s throat whatever the citizenry thinks, then the joke’s on us.
If it was about “health care,” it would be easier. It was assumed, for example, that the president’s sly revision of “47 million people without health insurance” in his summer speeches to the substantially lower 30 million was a concession to those who said that his “plan” (he hasn’t actually produced one, but why get hung up on details?) will cover gazillions of illegal immigrants.
If so, it’s a rhetorical feint that’s otherwise meaningless. The minute a first-world country has “free” health care, it becomes the provider of choice to anyone who can get there, particularly for any long-term ailments requiring state-of-the-art medications. In 2004, Britain’s Health Protection Agency revealed that 44 percent of HIV patients being treated by the National Health Service were not residents of the United Kingdom at all, but from southern Africa. In essence, a huge number of AIDS patients in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Swaziland, and Lesotho have decided to outsource their health-care needs to British taxpayers. Similar trends will manifest themselves here in nothing flat.
But, for the sake of argument, let us concede the president’s current number of 30 million. In order to do something for the 10 percent of the population outside the current system, why is it necessary to destabilize the arrangements of the 90 percent within it?
Well, says the president, not so fast. Lots of people with insurance run into problems when they change jobs or move to another state. Okay, In that case, why not ease the obstacles to health-care portability?
Well, says the president, shuffling his cups and moving the pea under another shell, we’re spending too much on health care. By “we’re,” he means you and you and you and you and millions of other Americans making individual choices over which he casually claims collective jurisdiction.
And that, ultimately, gets closer than anything else he says to giving the game away. For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to “reform” health care. Most voters don’t buy it: They see it as Obama’s “war of choice,” and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he’s having difficulty selling it, that’s because it’s not about “health.” As I’ve written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, et al., is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture — one in which elections are always fought on the Left’s issues and on the Left’s terms, and in which “conservative” parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can. Listen to your average British Tory or French Gaullist on the campaign trail pledging to “deliver” government services more “efficiently.”
Three stories bubbled up in the last week, although if you read the New York Times and the administration’s other airbrushers you’ll be blissfully unaware of them; the resignation of Van Jones — former (?) Communist and current 9/11 “truther” — from his post as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar”; the “re-assignment” of Yosi Sergant at the National Endowment for the Arts after he was found to be urging government-funded arts groups to produce “art” in support of Obama policy positions; and, finally, the extraordinary undercover tape from Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website in which officials from ACORN (the Obama chums who’ll be “helping” with the next census) offer advice on how pimps can get government housing loans for brothels employing underage girls from El Salvador.
What do all these Obama associates have in common? I mean, aside from the fact that Glenn Beck played a key role in exposing them. We are assured by the airbrushing media and “moderate” conservatives that Beck is crazy, a frothing spokesnut for the lunatic fringe. By contrast, Van Jones, Yosi Sergant, and ACORN are all members of the lunatic mainstream, embedded philosophically and actually in the heart of Obamaland.
What all these individuals share is a supersized view of the state, from a makework gig coordinating the invention of phony-baloney “green jobs” to Soviet-style government-licensed art in support of heroic government programs to government-funded “community organizers” organizing government funding for jailbait bordellos. Okay, government-funded child prostitution’s a bit of an outlier even for this crowd — for the moment. But you get the general idea.
The New York Times’s in-house conservative David Brooks was an early champion of Obama and is profiled in the current edition of The New Republic cooing paeans to the then-senator”s “pant leg and perfectly creased pant.” Alas, for David Brooks, the bottom has dropped out of Obama’s perfectly creased pants. The other day he was tutting that the Obama administration is in trouble because “it joined itself at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress.” My National Review colleague Jay Nordlinger was reminded of an old observation by the great Theodore Dalrymple. During his time as an English prison doctor, Dalrymple frequently met ne’er-do-wells who said they’d “fallen in with the wrong crowd,” but, oddly enough, in all those years, he never met the wrong crowd.
Likewise, Obama didn’t “join” himself to the liberal leadership; he is the liberal leadership. The administration didn’t fall in with the wrong crowd; they are the wrong crowd. Van Jones, Yosi Sergant, and ACORN are where Barack Obama has chosen to live all his adult life. Even if he wanted to be the bipartisan centrist of David Brooks’s fantasies, look at his Rolodex and then figure out just where such a man would estimate the “center” to be.
My sense from Wednesday’s speech is that the president’s gonna shove this through in some form or other. It may cause a little temporary pain in Blue Dog districts in 2010, but the long-term gains will be transformative and irreversible.
Read Mark Steyn:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTI2Y2YyMzExNGI2OWNjNWU2YWM2NTdiYzY2OTIzNGQ=&w=MA==
Where Is Obama’s ‘Center’?
Look at his Rolodex and then figure out just where such a man would estimate it to be.
By Mark Steyn
So why can’t the silver-tongued post-partisan healer seal the deal on this health-care business? Surely it should be the work of moments for the greatest orator in American history to whip up a little medicinal Gettysburg, a touch of Henry V-in-the-Agincourt-casualty-tent, and put this thing away. Yet there he was the other night with the usual leaden medley of tinny grandiosity (all the this-is-the-moment, now-is-the-hour stuff), slippery reassurances (don’t worry, you won’t be “required” to change your present health arrangements), imputations of bad faith to anyone who takes a different view (they’re playing “games”), and the copper-bottomed guarantee that you can have it all for no money down, no interest, no monthly payments, no nuthin’ (“I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit”).
This would barely have passed muster four months back. After a summer of seething town halls and sliding approval numbers, it was a joke. Or, rather, it would be a joke if the president’s intention was to persuade an increasingly skeptical if not downright hostile electorate. On the other hand, if the intention is to ram it down America’s throat whatever the citizenry thinks, then the joke’s on us.
If it was about “health care,” it would be easier. It was assumed, for example, that the president’s sly revision of “47 million people without health insurance” in his summer speeches to the substantially lower 30 million was a concession to those who said that his “plan” (he hasn’t actually produced one, but why get hung up on details?) will cover gazillions of illegal immigrants.
If so, it’s a rhetorical feint that’s otherwise meaningless. The minute a first-world country has “free” health care, it becomes the provider of choice to anyone who can get there, particularly for any long-term ailments requiring state-of-the-art medications. In 2004, Britain’s Health Protection Agency revealed that 44 percent of HIV patients being treated by the National Health Service were not residents of the United Kingdom at all, but from southern Africa. In essence, a huge number of AIDS patients in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Swaziland, and Lesotho have decided to outsource their health-care needs to British taxpayers. Similar trends will manifest themselves here in nothing flat.
But, for the sake of argument, let us concede the president’s current number of 30 million. In order to do something for the 10 percent of the population outside the current system, why is it necessary to destabilize the arrangements of the 90 percent within it?
Well, says the president, not so fast. Lots of people with insurance run into problems when they change jobs or move to another state. Okay, In that case, why not ease the obstacles to health-care portability?
Well, says the president, shuffling his cups and moving the pea under another shell, we’re spending too much on health care. By “we’re,” he means you and you and you and you and millions of other Americans making individual choices over which he casually claims collective jurisdiction.
And that, ultimately, gets closer than anything else he says to giving the game away. For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to “reform” health care. Most voters don’t buy it: They see it as Obama’s “war of choice,” and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he’s having difficulty selling it, that’s because it’s not about “health.” As I’ve written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, et al., is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture — one in which elections are always fought on the Left’s issues and on the Left’s terms, and in which “conservative” parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can. Listen to your average British Tory or French Gaullist on the campaign trail pledging to “deliver” government services more “efficiently.”
Three stories bubbled up in the last week, although if you read the New York Times and the administration’s other airbrushers you’ll be blissfully unaware of them; the resignation of Van Jones — former (?) Communist and current 9/11 “truther” — from his post as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar”; the “re-assignment” of Yosi Sergant at the National Endowment for the Arts after he was found to be urging government-funded arts groups to produce “art” in support of Obama policy positions; and, finally, the extraordinary undercover tape from Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website in which officials from ACORN (the Obama chums who’ll be “helping” with the next census) offer advice on how pimps can get government housing loans for brothels employing underage girls from El Salvador.
What do all these Obama associates have in common? I mean, aside from the fact that Glenn Beck played a key role in exposing them. We are assured by the airbrushing media and “moderate” conservatives that Beck is crazy, a frothing spokesnut for the lunatic fringe. By contrast, Van Jones, Yosi Sergant, and ACORN are all members of the lunatic mainstream, embedded philosophically and actually in the heart of Obamaland.
What all these individuals share is a supersized view of the state, from a makework gig coordinating the invention of phony-baloney “green jobs” to Soviet-style government-licensed art in support of heroic government programs to government-funded “community organizers” organizing government funding for jailbait bordellos. Okay, government-funded child prostitution’s a bit of an outlier even for this crowd — for the moment. But you get the general idea.
The New York Times’s in-house conservative David Brooks was an early champion of Obama and is profiled in the current edition of The New Republic cooing paeans to the then-senator”s “pant leg and perfectly creased pant.” Alas, for David Brooks, the bottom has dropped out of Obama’s perfectly creased pants. The other day he was tutting that the Obama administration is in trouble because “it joined itself at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress.” My National Review colleague Jay Nordlinger was reminded of an old observation by the great Theodore Dalrymple. During his time as an English prison doctor, Dalrymple frequently met ne’er-do-wells who said they’d “fallen in with the wrong crowd,” but, oddly enough, in all those years, he never met the wrong crowd.
Likewise, Obama didn’t “join” himself to the liberal leadership; he is the liberal leadership. The administration didn’t fall in with the wrong crowd; they are the wrong crowd. Van Jones, Yosi Sergant, and ACORN are where Barack Obama has chosen to live all his adult life. Even if he wanted to be the bipartisan centrist of David Brooks’s fantasies, look at his Rolodex and then figure out just where such a man would estimate the “center” to be.
My sense from Wednesday’s speech is that the president’s gonna shove this through in some form or other. It may cause a little temporary pain in Blue Dog districts in 2010, but the long-term gains will be transformative and irreversible.
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