Goodwin suggests Obama believes America is an intolerant nation.
Obama should know. He is the most intolerant president we have experienced in decades. (See 1 below.)
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This New York Times op ed writer lays the predicate for why Obama is not doing well. He links it to the fact that the modern presidency is becoming a captive and/or victim of global circumstances and thus Obama's problems are out of his control.
Perhaps a more objective, less poppycock, reading is Obama's own policy failures and incompetent leadership. Obama's petulant need to blame others, his self-importance are character flaws that have begun to leave an indelible imprint.
Another view.(See 2 and 2a below.)
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I am about 60% through Tony Blair's biography. It is not the most readable and captivating book - maybe because I have less familiarity with the players and England's governing and political system.
That said. Blair comes across as a refreshing political figure, admittedly naive and uninformed but capable of insight into human nature and a wonderful sense of self effacing humor.
The few Brits I know consider him a disaster mostly because of his relationship with GW and the Iraq War, I suppose.
Blair possesses some qualities, however, which, if Obama had them would make him an easier pill to swallow. Alas, Obama is too self-important, too convinced of the correctness of his mission to change. After all Obama does not have time to change because he is too busy changing us.
Obama may not be a Muslim but he governs in much the same way as so many Muslim leaders who conjure up external blame to turn their own citizen's attention away from their plight and circumstances.
Even worse, in those rare instances when Obama tries to change, he becomes more of the same. Hard to sweeten the heart when the head is filled with bitterness. (See 3 below.)
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Netanyahu will allow some restrained building to go forward after moratorium ends.
If Abbas uses this as a provocation and ends the talks then he probably was not that serious in the first instance so better to flush him out now. (See 4 below.)
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Former Mossad head tells the West what it does not want to hear - it must attack Iran because sanctions will not stop them.
If Obama wants to turn the November election around he would be wise to do so and stop his imbecilic blathering.
Then I could congratulate him for having guts while everyone would be attacking him for his political ploy. (See 5 below.)
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Did Pinocchio speak in Ohio? (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)Bam's 'sorry' mistake
By Michael Goodwin
Coming nine years into the world created by 9/11, his words are haunting. And timely.
"The problem is not simply the extremism. And I think one of the mistakes is in thinking that if you deal with the extremists, you deal with the problem."
Ideally, such words of wisdom would come from President Obama. But they didn't, because Obama remains stuck in the feel-good myth that the problem is limited to a "tiny minority" of Muslims distorting Islam and that America must prove it is worthy of trust.
We therefore turn to Tony Blair for the clear-eyed view that the problem is larger and more complicated. The former British prime minister, in a TV interview, laid out his realizations about global jihad. His conclusions are a must-read for anyone serious about understanding Public Enemy No. 1.
The false narrative fueling the terror movement, Blair told interviewer Charlie Rose last week, "is basically that Islam is under oppression from the West, that the West is hostile, and that by the leadership of Muslim countries being in alliance with the West, they are somehow complicit in a betrayal of the fundamentals of their religion."
The myth attracts believers well beyond the actual terrorists, Blair said, adding, "That is a narrative that has a broader reach than we think."
The last point is as critical as it is controversial. It helps explain the "X factor" -- why most Muslims around the world, including millions in America, remain silent in the face of the grisly atrocities committed under the banner of their religion.
It also explains how scores of "homegrown" terror cells of young men educated in the West become radicalized and plot to blow up airliners, trains and buildings in Times Square and London.
Blair, summarizing his new memoir, said many Muslims who believe in the al Qaeda narrative do abhor its violence. But suggesting their divided sympathies and sense of victimization create a fertile ground for terror, he also said: "You would get a worrying proportion of people who subscribe to the view that the West is, in fact, hostile to Islam."
The difference between Blair's view and Obama's is not academic. By his misguided actions and words, including apologizing to foreigners for America's pursuit of its national interests, Obama inadvertently feeds the myth that our nation is Islamophobic.
That myth, as Blair aptly describes it, is the central justification for indiscriminate slaughter against our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and our civilians at home
The world had to be remade as a result of September 11th," Blair said, citing a "completely different type of terrorist threat" willing to use nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
"It's not just the 3,000 people that died that day, but the fact that, if it could have been 30,000, they would have killed 30,000 or 300,000," he said.
For that reason, he defends the invasion of Iraq and believes Iran must not get a nuclear weapon, even supporting a military attack to stop it.
By contrast, Obama's misty-eyed mistake started from Day One, with his groveling in Egypt and elsewhere and abject expressions of respect for the thugocracy running Iran. These genuflections serve to confirm the belief among many Muslims that America has wronged Islam and that Obama will correct the error. It is no coincidence that among US religious groups, Muslims are Obama's biggest supporters.
He continued down the wrong road at his news conference Friday, a revealing performance where he removed any doubt he still supports the Ground Zero mosque and a civilian trial for the mastermind of 9/11, citing the need to bolster "our image in the world."
As for the vast majority of New Yorkers and Americans who oppose both, Obama dismissively referred to "political rhetoric" and said people are "fearful."
"At a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then fears can surface, suspicions, divisions can surface in a society," he said.
The comments recall his campaign claim that small-town Americans are "bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Two years later, he still holds the same elite condescension toward his countrymen. The people continue to disappoint their leader, but, as the polls confirm, the feeling is mutual.
Just as he did with health care and his other policies, the president regards opposition to his views of Islam as irrational or illegitimate. He sees the resistance to closing Guantanamo as simple "politics" and declares we cannot let 9/11 and the fear of more attacks "completely distort us" and "dominate our foreign policy."
He even drew George W. Bush to his side, saying he admired how the ex-president he blames for everything else was "crystal clear" that we were at war with terrorists, not Islam.
"I was so proud of the country rallying around that idea, that notion that we are not going to be divided by religion," Obama said, leaving the impression he views Koran burning and opposition to the Ground Zero mosque and a 9/11 trial as morally indistinguishable sins. "And I think it is absolutely important now for the overwhelming majority of the American people to hang on to that thing that is best in us, a belief in religious tolerance."
In fact, except for a few wing nuts bent on provocative, legal acts, the nation's firm belief in religious tolerance is stronger than ever. The big difference now is that we have a president who sweepingly sees the millions upon millions of Americans who dissent from his orthodoxy as ignorant bigots.
Obama's views are no less dangerous for being heartfelt. He panders to Muslims but is ignorant about the true nature of the jihad movement. He puts pressure on Israel to compromise its security while turning a blind eye to the culture of death that drenches Palestinian society.
In addition to a thumping in November, he needs a good lecture from Tony Blair about the expanding global conflict and its silent sympathizers. "What is producing this conflict is not something the West is doing," Blair said. "It is being produced by a religious view that is based, incidentally, on a perversion of Islam . . . that's got too big a reach. And we've got to counter that."
You certainly don't counter the perversion of Islam by pleading guilty to it. If Obama comes to that realization, he will be a better president. Who knows, he might even be proud of America again.
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2)The Presidency, Chained to the World
By MATT BAI
PRESIDENT OBAMA tried to seize the moment last week, at the traditional start of the midterm election season, by laying out a series of new economic proposals. And yet, at least politically, there was something almost tangential about Mr. Obama’s latest initiatives, which included $50 billion for infrastructure projects and an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans. The country’s economic trajectory heading into November is probably unchangeable at this point, which means that nothing the president does now is likely to alter the grim data confronting the electorate.
Such powerlessness in the face of economic free fall has emerged as a hallmark of the modern presidency. While Mr. Obama is facing a more acute economic crisis moment than his predecessors, characterized by a near depression, the truth is that every president going back to Jimmy Carter, at one point or another, has had to campaign or govern in an environment dominated by the same cyclical and stubborn factors — recession, unemployment, rising energy costs. And so perhaps Mr. Obama’s presidency, as it reaches its midway point, is best understood not in isolation, but rather as part of a longer and still undefined political moment.
The farther we get from presidencies, after all, the more we tend to view them as belonging to periods rather than individuals, as sometimes overlapping clusters along the country’s historical continuum. We’ve had pre-Civil War-era and Reconstruction-era presidents, Industrial-era presidents and Depression-era presidents. The last discernible era belonged unmistakably to the cold war and can be said to have encompassed every president from Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan, all of whom served under the shadow of Armageddon.
When historians look back 50 years from now, in what era will they place Mr. Obama’s presidency, and what does it say about the challenges he faces?
Historians have different ways of looking at the question. But in interviews, several hit on the same basic theme, which is that Mr. Obama and his immediate predecessors have been forced to contend with the erosion of self-sufficiency. In other words, until the end of the Soviet Union, America’s economic and national security were largely self-determined, thanks to its manufacturing might and its ability to negotiate treaties with other states. But the advent of truly global markets, along with threats from non-state forces like Al Qaeda, changed all that. Now we live in an integrated world where American jobs rely on the economic policies of governments in Asia or Latin America, while our security is subject to the whims of a cleric living in a cave.
In “Futurecast,” his book about this new age, the economist Robert J. Shapiro notes that the percentage of the world’s combined gross domestic product that is traded across borders rose to just under 30 percent by 2005, from 18 percent in 1990.
The Stanford historian, David M. Kennedy, points out that for most of the 20th century, foreign trade accounted for roughly 10 percent of America’s G.D.P. That number started rising in the 1970s and now hovers at above 25 percent of G.D.P.
Mr. Kennedy said he suspected that his future fellow historians would classify our most recent presidencies as encapsulating an “era of globalization” in which “the whole concept of sovereignty is less meaningful than it once was.”
John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale historian and pre-eminent scholar of the cold war period, calls the last decade or so an “age of regression,” meaning that the popular notion of a “unipolar” world — one in which the United States was supposed to have no serious economic or military competitors — gave way to the realization that the best America could aspire to was a stable balance of power.
All of this has significant ramifications for Mr. Obama and our concept of the presidency generally. The presidents whose statues ring the National Mall are those who were deemed not just wise and just, but also masters of our national destiny. We celebrate them as decisive men who, by making the right choices, seemed to define and control the events of their times.
What the historians are suggesting, however, is that the modern president may simply not be able to exercise that same firm grasp — or at least not most of the time. With global interdependence comes a certain lack of control, a vulnerability to disparate influences beyond our territorial borders that are less obvious and less easily answered than the launch of a Soviet satellite. And those influences, perhaps, directly undermine our ideal of what a president should be.
We are susceptible to presidents who talk with the self-assuredness of a Western movie sheriff or who, like Mr. Obama, seem to project an aura of celebrity or historic greatness. But we are disappointed when they inevitably turn out to be a less than omnipotent or, like George W. Bush, fall victim to their own romantic notions of American power.
“This is what will end up defining this era of the presidency — the diminished power, the diminished authority, the diminished capacity to shape events,” says Robert Dallek, the presidential biographer. “It’s the presidency in eclipse.”
Of course, such pessimism about what Mr. Dallek calls the “ungovernable qualities” of the moment are often overstated in difficult times. For a period in the 1980s, it was fashionable to say that New York City, too, had become “ungovernable”; no one says that anymore. Pronouncements of the nation’s fading dominance rang out regularly in the years before the nation won the cold war. It would be unfair to suggest that Mr. Obama or any other president is simply awash in historical currents, unable to navigate himself or the country through challenging times.
What probably is true, however, is that even a president’s successes, in an age where a debt crisis in Greece can lead to a sudden panic on Wall Street, are likely to seem more uneven and less resounding to voters than, say, the completion of the Continental Railroad or the surrender of Japan. If you’re the American president, you still have the opportunity to lead in a crisis and ultimately prevail. But you probably shouldn’t expect any marble monuments for your trouble.
2a)Obama's Attempt to Turn the Page Failed
By Jed Babbin
In a dizzying series of speeches and White House events last week, President Obama tried to raise foreign policy issues to the top of the political agenda. In part, the president's purpose was to relieve the growing sense of panic among congressional Democrats by giving them a campaign issue that doesn't require them to defend his economic policies. He didn't succeed because he didn't "turn the page" - even briefly - on the seemingly constant flow of bad economic news. But he did confuse our military and our allies about what he intends for the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
The Democrats' state of panic was made official last weekend by Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen: the first death panel will be established - not by Obamacare administrator Donald Berwick - but by Van Hollen's Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to triage Democratic candidates and decide which will be abandoned by their party. Van Hollen plans to cut off campaign funding for those who can't be saved in November.
According to a Rasmussen poll, only 29% of Americans believe that the nation is headed in the right direction. The last time Democrats faced such an angry electorate was in 1994. They had a personally-popular president then. Now, as Reid Wilson reported, one Democratic strategist called President Obama a "walking radioactive disaster."
Obama worked hard to refocus the debate from domestic crises to his foreign policy initiatives which he believes have succeeded or will in the future. In two weeks he went from riding a bicycle (wearing a grin and oversized helmet reminiscent of Michael Dukakis' tank pose in the 1988 campaign) to Rose Garden and Oval Office speeches and meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to push another round in the "peace process."
The White House envisions a one-year negotiation process leading to an agreement that is supposed to provide a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. In Obama's Oval Office Iraq speech he claimed success in ending combat operations there and - despite dissenting statements by prominent military commanders - he insisted that he would stick to his July 2011 plan to begin withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Using claims of foreign policy success to gain electoral advantage isn't new. The most memorable incident occurred on the morning of the 1980 Wisconsin Democratic primary. Iranian revolutionaries had taken American diplomats hostage more than three months before, paralyzing Jimmy Carter's government.
Faced with a growing challenge from Ted Kennedy, Carter called an unusual 7:15 a.m. press conference to announce - falsely - a "positive development" in freeing the hostages. Carter defeated Kennedy in the primary by two-to-one. And nothing came of the "positive development."
Obama's political problem stems from his inability to connect domestic policy with success in the war. To be fair, the problem was created by President Bush who told Americans to go on with their daily lives, assuring us that we need not make any personal sacrifice to win the war. But Obama's problem is exacerbated by his own efforts to exclude the war from the national agenda.
Obama's August 31 Oval Office address wasn't the first time he used the "turn the page" line on the Iraq war. In a presidential primary campaign speech on August 1, 2007 Obama condemned the Iraq war as "a misguided invasion of a Muslim country that sparks new insurgencies, ties down our military, busts our budgets, increases the pool of terrorist recruits, alienates America, gives democracy a bad name, and prompts the American people to question our engagement in the world," adding, "It is time to turn the page. It is time to write a new chapter in our response to 9/11."
From the beginning of his brief Senate career, Obama's interest in the war was purely political. Since his election, because of the economic crisis he worsened, far more people believe the continuing economic crisis as a much higher priority for the White House than the war.
Without even enough Democratic votes to pass further war funding, Obama has to find public support for another year of war - and more -- in Afghanistan. He sent Gen. David Petraeus out on a publicity tour to gain that support, but Petraeus's effort went virtually unreported and failed to affect the domestic political equation. And Obama's attempt to link his economic policy to support for the troops hasn't been effective either.
Obama confused military leaders - and voters - with his Oval Office speech. Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway had said that setting the withdrawal date was giving the enemy sustenance and that the Taliban leaders would have a lot of explaining to do with their troops when we didn't leave. Gen. David Petraeus, Afghanistan commander, said repeatedly that the withdrawal would depend on conditions on the ground.
Obama recited that "conditions on the ground" as rote. He repeated his goal, saying that, "We will disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists."
But Obama contradicted himself and overrode what Conway and Petraeus said, reconfirming the July 2011 withdrawal date regardless of the circumstances: "But make no mistake: this transition will begin - because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people's." He then proceeded to cite a litany of liberal spending initiatives (education, reducing oil consumption) as the way to honor returning troops.
Obama can't call on his own party to support the war, so his appeal - directly and indirectly through Gen. Petraeus - had to "turn the page" so that Americans would focus more on the war and less on the economy. In this, he has failed.
Obama, like Jimmy Carter, is shrinking in his Oval Office chair. With unemployment rising to 9.6% -- about 14.9 million people without jobs - and no noticeable progress in Afghanistan, the president is too small and too weak to exercise leadership on either front.
How do you "turn the page" when the world - and our economy - are ripping it up?
Jed Babbin served as a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush. He is the author of several bestselling books including "Inside the Asylum," and "In the Words of Our Enemies."
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3)Political theater or poor policy?
Whether or not President Obama's plan to spend $50 billion on transportation is a ploy to help fellow Dems, it's a lousy idea.
By The Denver Post
President Barack Obama's latest plan to spur the economy back to health has rightly found a new group of detractors. This time, though, it's his fellow Democrats, many of whom are locked in tight races, who are saying no.
Their rush to say no makes us wonder if the president put forth a serious plan or if this latest blueprint to stimulate the economy, in part by spending $50 billion to rebuild roads, railways and airports, is more political theater than legitimate policy.
Several Colorado Democrats who supported past stimulus spending — and at much greater levels — are rejecting the president's proposal.
Michael Bennet, in a close Senate race with Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck, says he won't support Obama's infrastructure plan unless the money comes from unspent stimulus money.
Rep. Betsy Markey, in a re-election fight with state Rep. Cory Gardner, agrees with Bennet. Rep. John Salazar, also in a tough re-election battle with state Rep. Scott Tipton, says he too is skeptical of new spending.
Even Diana DeGette, who's running against Republican Mike Fallon but is considered to be in a safe seat, told us she wouldn't support the infrastructure plan unless the money came from the Transportation Department or other existing revenue.
Obama would seek to avoid adding to the debt by financing the plan in part with higher levies on oil and gas companies — an obvious problem for Colorado politicians who want the support of those industries.
The obvious question is whether Obama is propping up a straw man for Democrats in tight races to knock down, and thereby look more serious about returning the nation to a path of fiscal discipline.
Besides, true believers in Keynesian economics — that is, infusing the economy with massive government spending in down economic times — argue that another stimulus bill would have to be much larger than what Obama is prescribing.
That said, Bennet and Co. are correct to stand against the plan.
Paying for the plan with new taxes in a down economy is not acceptable. And the country just can't take any more debt.
Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, an Obama cabinet member, said last week that our debt threatens our national security. "It undermines our capacity to act in our own interest, and it does constrain us where constraint may be undesirable. And it also sends a message of weakness internationally."
When Obama and Democrat- controlled Washington first proposed nearly $800 billion in deficit spending to try to spur the country out of recession, we decried the effort because it was more of a political wish list than an actual plan to get folks working. We had hoped to see far more spent on infrastructure, such as the plans Obama now touts.
But now, with a $13 trillion debt, we agree with Bennet that unless the president can pay for the plan with existing money, he should shelve it.
Meanwhile, we'll assume this is not all simply political theater because an anemic economy is no place to play partisan games.
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4)PM: We won't build massively in West Bank
Benjamin Netanyahu tells Quartet envoy Tony Blair that while Israel will not build tens of thousands of housing units, it will not freeze lives of Judea and Samaria residents either
By Attila Somfalvi
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Quartet envoy to the Middle East Tony Blair on Sunday that the Palestinians want "zero construction" in the West Bank after the end of the freeze – a demand that will not be met by Israel.
He stressed that Israel will not be able to continue with the construction moratorium.
In a meeting held at the prime minister's office in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said that on the one hand Israel will not build the tens of thousands of housings units awaiting approval, but on the other hand it will not freeze construction and the lives of the residents of the West Bank's Jewish communities either.
The two also discussed preconditions for peace negotiations, and the prime minister said none should be set by either side.
He noted that he is not putting the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition and by the same token it would be unreasonable for the Palestinians to pose a precondition and threaten to abandon talks. It's not the way to seriously move forward towards a peace agreement, he said.
Minister Uzi Landau (Yisrael Beiteinu) said, "Regardless of what the prime minister says, the binding decision is the one reached by the government," adding that "any signal indicating (to the Palestinians) that the Israeli government is withdrawing from what it has presented as a red line will cast a shadow over the negotiations."
Minister Daniel Hershkowitz (Habayit Hayehudi) said, "I do not like partial freezes. As far as I'm concerned, there is a cabinet decision according to which we resume construction on September 26. We must resume construction in two weeks.
"There is a solid majority in cabinet against the construction moratorium, also a partial one," he said.
Other ministers said they would await the results of the upcoming summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt before responding to Netanyahu's remarks.
Meanwhile, settler leaders are infuriated over Netanyahu's remarks suggesting that a partial settlement construction freeze will continue even after the end of the month.
Yesha Council Chairman Danny Dayan told Ynet that he expects the prime minister to deliver on the pledges he made in November 2009.
"The miserable cabinet decision, which brought the freeze upon us, also included a pledge to return to full construction after 10 months," he said. "Any deviation from this pledge would be akin to an ongoing freeze through other means."
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5)
---'West needs to mobilize into coalition to strike Iran'
By YAAKOV KATZ
Danny Yatom, former head of Mossad, says sanctions are not enough, attack is needed to stop Iranian nuclear arms race.
Western countries need to mobilize together into a coalition that will strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, former head of the Mossad Danny Yatom said on Sunday.
Speaking at the International Institute of Counter-Terrorism (ICT) Conference at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Yatom, a former Labor Party MK, said that only military force will succeed in stopping Iran.
“Since the sanctions are not enough I am hopeful that the world will come to its senses and reach the conclusion that in order to stop the Iranian nuclear arms race we will have to attack some of their nuclear facilities,” Yatom said in rare comments for a former top Israeli security official regarding the use of military force against Iran.
While some of the Iranian nuclear facilities are scattered throughout the country and are built underground in fortified bunkers, if the world “mobilizes its capabilities” it would be possible to cause enough damage to delay the program.
“If the modern air forces led by the United States mobilizes its capabilities it is possible if not to completely remove the threat to delay it for years to come,” Yatom said.
While refraining from discussing specific Israeli capabilities, Yatom said that if the world failed to meet the challenge, Israel would “retain the right to self defense.”
“Figure out for yourselves what that means,” he then told the audience.
Yatom said that Israel could not live with a nuclear Iran. “I don’t want to be in a situation that I will be sitting in Israel and my fate will be in the hands of others especially when we are talking about a lunatic regime,” he said. “I don’t want to be the subject of an Iranian experiment.”
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6)Obama 15 most obvious lies in Ohio Speech plus one Freudian slip David Swindle calls it like it really is!
By Ed Crowe
The naked lies were too numerous to count in President Obama’sspeech in Ohio today. But let’s try and respond to a couple.
*15. “We also hoped for a chance to get beyond some of the political divides between Democrats and Republicans…”*
One cannot “get beyond” the political divides of this country when the objective is to “fundamentally transform” the United States. Obama’s talk of bi-partisanship has been clearly demonstrated to just be a campaign technique to woo moderates.
He could have ruled from the Center — the model was there in Bill Clinton’ssecond term. Instead he chose to push a leftist agenda, thus further exacerbating the divide.
*14. “Because we are proud to be Democrats, we are prouder to be Americans.” *
Says the Post-American President who rejects the concept of American exceptionalism and bows to foreign kings.
*13. “I ran for President because for much of the last decade a very specific governing philosophy had reigned about about how American should work.”*
He expects us to believe that anything President Bush did in any way inspired him to run for President?
*12. “Folks were forced to put more debt on their credit cards and to borrow against homes that many couldn’t afford to buy in the first place.”*
*Forced*? As if Discover Card and American Express put a gun to their customers head and demanded they load themselves up with debt? Monster House came by and threatened to devour people if they didn’t sign the mortgage?
*11. “I ran for president because I believed that this kind of economy was unsustainable for the middle class and the future of our nation.”*
Obama is not interested in sustainability. The debt levels we already have and that he is further burdening us with make a mockery of his claims for interest in sustainability.
*10. “I ran because I had a different idea about how America was built. It was an idea rooted in my own family’s story.”*
*Built?* Obama does not have a different idea about how America was built. The historical facts are quite clear. He has a different idea about the America that *he* wants to build — and build by destroying what already exists.
*9. “Yes, our families believed in the American values of self-reliance and individual responsibility and they instilled those values in their children. But they also believed in a country that rewards responsibility, a country that rewards hard work, a country built on the promise of opportunity and upward mobility.”*
If Obama was raised with the American value of self-reliance and individual responsibility then why was a communist like Frank Marshall Davis allowed to be one of his mentors?
*8. “The flawed policies and economic weaknesses of the previous decade culminated in a financial crisis and the worst recession of our lifetimes.”*
This is perhaps the most fundamental, important lie in Obama’s entire speech: the recession we’re going through right now was caused by Republicans’ economic policies. The truth is far less dramatic: everyone is to blame for the economic recession. “Blame” can be pointed toward the Left, the Right, the Democrats, the Republicans, the “fat cats” on Wall Street, and the poor people who took out mortgages they could not pay
If everyone is to blame for something then no one is to blame for it. And we can understand this recession as just one more wave in a perpetual cycle of booms and busts .
*7. “Some Republicans thought it was smart politics to sit on the sidelines and let Democrats solve the mess. Others believe on principle that government shouldn’t meddle in the markets — even when the markets are broken.”*
No, Republicans thought it would be smart politics to fight Democrats and try to stop them from making the problems we face worse. No, conservatives who believed on principle that government should not interfere in a company failing did not believe the market was broken. A boom and bust business cycle is not an example of the market being “broken” but of it functioning in the same pattern it has ever since the Roman empire.
Obama — and the rest of the Left — are unable to actually confront the conservative argument. They always have to lie about their opponents’ position. Observe how in the fight over the Ground Zero Mosque somehow the debate magically shifted to whether there was a legal right to build a mosque at the location.
*6. “The same philosophy that led to this mess in the first place.”*
*What* was the philosophy that led us here? Friedman economics? Keynesianism? Obama can’t say because he needs to be as vague as possible in order to try and manipulate the least educated people listening. That’s who Obama relies on to develop and maintain power.
*5. “Their argument is should insurance companies go back to denying care for people who are sick or let credit card companies go back to raising rates without any reason… Cleveland, that is not the America I know. That is not the America we believe in.”*
Insurance companies do not “deny care.” They deny paying for some procedures. This is an inevitability of every healthcare system on the planet. If we had the most socialist healthcare system imaginable — like Britain’s for example — all that would be different is it would be the government being forced to make the decisions to deny paying for something. There is not a health insurance tree in the backyard yielding unlimited insurance fruit for all.
But at least there is a moment of honesty here — yes, the America that actually exists today is not something Obama believes in. When he talks of an America he loves he speaks of the country that exists in his imagination — one decades down the line that has come into being through his brilliant policies.
*4. “It’s still fear versus hope, the past versus the future.”*
As stated in *The Art of Political War*, “fear” and “hope” are just symbols used in political combat. In his previous breath it was Obama himself evoking fear by lying about insurance companies “denying” people care.
*3. “I’ve never believed that it’s government’s role to create jobs or prosperity. I believe it’s the drive and ingenuity of our entrepreneurs, small businesses, the skill and dedication of our works that’s made us the wealthiest nation on earth. “*
You can just feel the disdain in his voice. He can push through government “stimulus” programs that cost more than all the money spent on the Iraq war and actually tell this with a straight face.
*2. “I believe it’s the private sector that must be the main engine for our recovery.”*
If this was the case the he would fuel that engine through slashing taxes across the board.
*1. “But in the words of the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, I also believe that government should do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves.”*
Yeah, um, let’s read the quote in context to see what a shameless liar our current president is.
And the *damning* Freudian slip:
*“I believe government should be lean, government should be efficient, I believe government should **lead** people free to make the choices that are best for themselves and their families so long as those choices don’t hurt others.”*
He meant to say government should *leave** people free to make the choices. But **lead** came out instead. Read the prepared remarks here. This is, of course, his embrace of the big government philosophies of his czar Cass Sunstein, co-author of the book **Nudge ** which argues government should push people to make the right choices.*
*This is a President with such disdain for America and its people that he demands he and his elite team **lead** the citizens in making the choices that are best for you.*
*In the words of Kathy Shaidle : “You’re not smart enough to tell me how to live!” *
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