Saturday, April 16, 2011

Libya -- heckuva job Brownie ! (er, Obama, Hilary)

Time to send another strongly worded email ... or fax ... or op-ed ...

Charles Krauthammer On what’s happening in Libya:

It’s not only Senator McCain who said the United States is not doing enough. It’s obvious that our closest allies and the ones who are nearest to the fight on the ground, the British and the French, are saying exactly that. They are complaining, yes, that the Turks and Germans and others aren’t helping. But what they are really talking about is the United States.

You’ve got Qaddafi defying us, going through the street in an open car the way the president of the United States or prime minister of England would not be able to do. He does that in Tripoli supposedly in the middle of a war that we are pretending he is losing. [Meanwhile,] the leaders of the three great countries of the United States, France, and Britain are penning an op-ed. That’s really going to worry Libya.

You’ve got the meeting of the allies and the Arab states in Doha declaring today that the changing of the regime is an objective. And yet there is a stalemate. We are not doing what we can. We are in fact doing far less than we did early in the campaign, and deliberately.

And again I say, if you are going to enter into a war, you are either serious or not. You don’t enter into a war to defend a UN resolution. You enter into a war to achieve a real strategic objective on the ground. If that is not what you will do, stay out of it.


Natonic Implosion?

I think everyone felt some grim, sad irony in watching Qaddafi’s tiny forces hold off a British-French NATO intervention, revealing the once-vaunted rebels to be mostly a Potemkin force — all as the U.S. outsourced its historic leadership role after less than two weeks. But that schadenfreude should have passed long ago, and at some point the U.S. is going to have to decide whether NATO is still a viable organization and worth saving, now that it is on the verge of being utterly humiliated in Libya.

It was always a predominately U.S.-led alliance, but our engagement kept up appearances and seemed at times to provide the Europeans a measure of unity. No longer: The U.S. is detached, the European NATO members are bickering and squabbling, and no one in Washington can explain to them the mission in Libya, the methodology to achieve it, the ultimate results desired, or the extent of NATO commitment in the postwar aftermath. Meanwhile, NATO member Turkey is an open supporter of Hamas and hostile to most of what NATO is for.

We are on the razor’s edge here, and it is not hard to see the alliance disintegrating — all at a time when the traditional supremacy of the dollar is questioned, the financial reputation of the U.S. is still sinking, the traditional use of affordable energy in America seems by intent to be over — and quite abruptly, unless the Obama administration, in its Libyan misadventure, finally decides to take the proverbial Vienna.




Hail To The Campaigner In Chief

Will the whole country wake up to the facts about Obama that many already know ?


Charles Krauthammer On Obama opening his 2012 reelection campaign headquarters in Chicago:

I think it’s interesting that Obama is setting up his headquarters in Chicago. He wants to give the impression, as he has throughout his time in office, that he is not from Washington. He’s not really a politician. He’s not even a Democrat. He stands above the fray.

Look at the way he acted last week when the deadline approached on the budget. He said: You’ve got to act as grown-ups, addressing Republicans and Democrats in Congress — as if he isn’t a Democrat, he wasn’t behind the resistance to the Republican ideas.

He always does this game — the man who hovers above it all, the transcender who isn’t in the trenches.

It’s not going to work. He’s been the president. He is Washington.



Speaking Truth to Power

If you want to understand why Paul Ryan has suddenly become the de facto leader of the sad, pathetic, shriveled thing known as the Republican party, you need look no farther than his response to the classless sandbagging he got from the Bringer of Kinetic Military Action and Vacationer-in-Chief:

“I thought the president’s invitation…was an olive branch. Instead, what we got was a speech that was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our country’s fiscal challenges… What we heard today was a political broadside from our campaigner in chief. This is very sad and very unfortunate. Rather than building bridges, he’s poisoning wells.”

As I said on the radio yesterday, if anyone had spoken like this to the princeling earlier in his life, he very likely never would have become president. Instead, Obama has been coddled and cosseted throughout his glide-path trajectory — maverick Democrat Mickey Kaus justcalled him “the biggest affirmative action baby in history,” and said he was a lousy politician to boot. No one, it seems, has ever sat him down and explained to him how thoroughly mediocre he really is. Call it the audacity of mope.

And yet there he is, partying it up in the White House and launching his billion-dollar reelection bid with a speech that would have made Rosa Luxemburg proud, so maybe believing your own myth can take you all the way from Punahou to the presidency without every having to accomplish a damn thing. As the saying goes, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Which is why it’s important that the handful of Republicans with spine speak sternly to Obama the way Ryan did. Pace all the number-crunchers and crystal-ball-gazers, he won’t be defeated by conventional means, or by hopeful comparisons to Jimmy Carter, or by competing programs, and certainly not by the weak-tea “collegiality” of Boehner & Co. Playing by the rules doesn’t work when the other team is playing a different game entirely.

There’s no there there with Obama, just the legend of his own invincibility. The sooner the Republicans come to grips with that, the sooner they’ll figure out how to beat him.

That is, if they really want to.



Re: As I Was Saying

It’s difficult to discern an Obama “campaign speech” from any other that he gives. Partisanship is a hallmark of most of his speeches, vapidity a hallmark of all.

By attacking Ryan, who has forced him to address (however ineptly) the $14,500,000,000,000 debt and $1,700,000,000,000 deficit to which he’s contributed so substantially, Obama (further) reveals how profoundly small and frivolous he is.



As I Was Saying . . .

This just in, from The Hill:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Friday responded to President Obama’s criticism of Republicans that was caught on a live microphone during a fundraiser.

At a press conference before a vote on a series of budget proposals, Boehner appeared to take a subtle jab at the president.

“I didn’t see his remarks. But I think you mentioned it was a campaign speech,” he said.

Republicans have criticized Obama as the “campaigner in chief” ever since he announced he was officially beginning his reelection bid last week.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Hypocrisy Alert: Obama repudiates his 2006 vote against raising debt ceiling

Uh Huh.



White House: POTUS Regrets 2006 Debt-Ceiling Vote

White House press secretary Jay Carney just told reporters that President Obama regrets his 2006 vote against raising the debt ceiling. To refresh your memories, here’s what then-Senator Obama said at the time:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

But today, Carney said Obama believes his vote was a “mistake” that he regrets, that the debt ceiling is too important to play politics. Carney didn’t say whether it was also too important to vote ‘present’ — something Obama did on debt-ceiling votes in 2007 and 2008.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Obama, the $14 Trillion Debt, the $1.7 Trillion Budget Deficit - The Great Pretender

In the event there are any suckers still left out there who believe that Obama is capable of addressing this Nation's massive debt in a serious and responsible manner .... well, you are hopeless.

Not that Congress is likely to do much better, but Obama will be dragged kicking and screaming to any meaningful spending cuts; will demonize Paul Ryan and his proposals; will propose again raising taxes (more revenue = more spending !).

Game on.

Read Andrew McCarthy:
You’re kidding, right?

Read Michael Walsh: Bam's Fiscal Feint, The next round of Lip Service