Lloyd Marcus, like Bill Cosby, tells it like it is and says what far too many Black American's do not want to hear. (See 1 below.)
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Ryan makes sense? How could a radical speaking the truth be capable of making sense? Ryan is dangerous because he believes increasing the deficit with abandon is not wise. He is seeking to bring about change and anyone who proposes change must be radical. Ooops that is something Obama said wasn't it?
(See 2 below.)
Do you want to know who Ryan is or are you willing to be snowed again by the trash and lies of Obama, his thugs and media and press lap dogs? (See 2a and 2b below.)
Even Obama's Erskine Bowles praises Ryan. If you believe Bowles, then how radical can Ryan be? (See 2c below.)
in order to reinforce and sustain their bias. This is the only rational way they can justify maintaining
calling Ryan a radical.
Ryan is radical in the minds of these dolts because he believes in paying for what you spend. Balancing a budget is radical to their way of thinking. Not leaving your bar bill for the next generation is grossly radical. Being responsible and telling voters what they intuitively know to be the truth is radical and when
a politician comes along and speaks reality to voters ,who have been have been lied to for decades, that too is totally radical.
a politician comes along and speaks reality to voters ,who have been have been lied to for decades, that too is totally radical.
I am confident, in the next few weeks the press and media will tell us more about Ryan, warts and all, than they have allowed us to learn about Obama over the last three years. Is that radical?
Therefore, I have to conclude the way the apologist media and press have portrayed Ryan is radical and biased but then what's new?
Of course, nothing radical about D.C. continuing to be dysfunctional since that is normal. (See 2d below.)
Then there is Europe. (See 2e below.)
---Of course, nothing radical about D.C. continuing to be dysfunctional since that is normal. (See 2d below.)
Then there is Europe. (See 2e below.)
Where does Mitt fit in this matter? (See 3 below.)
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Obama the divider. (See 4 below.)
And every president seems to have his Svengali. Obama's is Valerie Jarrett, to whom he owes more than to Rev. Wright. (See 4a below.)
And every president seems to have his Svengali. Obama's is Valerie Jarrett, to whom he owes more than to Rev. Wright. (See 4a below.)
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Prager and American character. Is it in decline? You decide. (See 5 below.)
I will be incapacitated over the net weeks so memos will be sporadic if at all. Prager and American character. Is it in decline? You decide. (See 5 below.)
You will just have to make do.
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Dick
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1) A BLACK MAN'S TROJAN HORSE
By Lloyd Marcus As millions of my fellow Americans, I am outraged, devastated and extremely angry by the democrat's unbelievable arrogance and disdain for We The People. Despite our screaming "no" from the rooftops, they forced Obamacare down our throats. Please forgive me for using the following crude saying, but it is very appropriate to describe what has happened. "Don't urinate on me and tell me it's raining." Democrats say their mission is to give all Americans health care. The democrats are lying. Signing Obamacare into law against our will and the Constitution is tyranny and step one of their hideous goal of having as many Americans as possible dependent on government, thus controlling our lives and fulfilling Obama's promise to fundamentally transform America .
I keep asking myself. How did our government move so far from the normal procedures of getting things done? Could a white president have so successfully pulled off shredding the Constitution to further his agenda? I think not.
Ironically, proving America is completely the opposite of the evil racist country they relentlessly accuse her of being, progressives used America 's goodness, guilt and sense of fair play against her. In their quest to destroy America as we know it, progressives borrowed a brilliant scheme from Greek mythology. They offered America a modern day Trojan Horse, a beautifully crafted golden shiny new black man as a presidential candidate. Democrat Joe Biden lauded Obama as the first clean and articulate African American candidate. Democrat Harry Reid said Obama only uses a black dialect when he wants.
White America relished the opportunity to vote for a black man naively believing they would never suffer the pain of being called racist again. Black Americans viewed casting their vote for Obama as the ultimate Affirmative Action for America 's sins of the past.
Then there were the entitlement loser voters who said, "I'm votin' for the black dude who promises to take from those rich SOBs and give to me."
Just as the deceived Trojans dragged the beautifully crafted Trojan Horse into Troy as a symbol of their victory, deceived Americans embraced the progressive's young, handsome, articulate and so called moderate black presidential candidate as a symbol of their liberation from accusation of being a racist nation. Also like the Trojan Horse, Obama was filled with the enemy hiding inside.
Sunday, March 21, 2010, a secret door opened in Obama, the shiny golden black man. A raging army of democrats charged out. Without mercy, they began their vicious bloody slaughter of every value, freedom and institution we Americans hold dear; launching the end of America as we know it.
Wielding swords of votes reeking with the putrid odor of back door deals, the democrats landed a severe death blow to America and individual rights by passing Obamacare.
The mainstream liberal media has been relentlessly badgering the Tea Party movement with accusations of racism. Because I am a black tea party patriot, I am bombarded with interviewers asking me the same veiled question. "Why are you siding with these white racists against America 's first African American president?" I defend my fellow patriots who are white stating, T hese patriots do not give a hoot about Obama's skin color. They simply love their country and oppose his radical agenda. Obama's race is not an issue."
Recently, I have come to believe that perhaps I am wrong about Obama's race not being an issue. In reality, Obama's presidency has everything to do with racism, but not from the Tea Party movement. Progressives and Obama have exploited his race from the rookie senator's virtually unchallenged presidential campaign to his unprecedented bullying of America into Obamacare. Obama's race trumped all normal media scrutiny of him as a presidential candidate and most recently even the Constitution of the United States . Obamacare forces all Americans to purchase health care which is clearly unconstitutional.
No white president could get away with boldly and arrogantly thwarting the will of the American people and ignoring laws. President Clinton tried universal health care. Bush tried social security reform. The American people said "No" to both presidents' proposals and it was the end of it.
So how can Obama get away with giving the American people "the finger?" The answer: He is black.
The mainstream liberal media continues to portray all who oppose Obama in any way as racist. Despite ist of failed policies, overreaches into the private sector, violations of the Constitution and planned destructive legislation too numerous to mention in this article, many Americans are still fearful of criticizing our first black president. Incredible.
My fellow Americans, you must not continue to allow yourselves to be "played" and intimidated by Obama's race or the historical context of his presidency. If we are to save America , the greatest nation on the planet, Obama must be defeated.
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2)Paul Ryan on the Rule of Law
By Joe Palazzolo
- AFP/Getty Images
- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) greet supporters at a campaign rally in North Carolina.
Rep. Paul Ryan, the man chosen to be Mitt Romney’s Republican running mate, is known as the carrier of his party’s fiscal message. But what about his views on the rule of law? He laid them outin a speech last year on Constitution Day.
H/T to Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law, who highlighted the speech on his blog. In it, Mr. Ryan criticizes the Federal Reserve (for moving, in his opinion, too far away from rules-based monetary policy), TARP, the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank and the Obama administration’s energy policy.
As Professor Blackman notes, Mr. Ryan casts the ever-present tension between liberty and security in economic terms. From the speech, given at Hillsdale College in Michigan last September:
Usually, our defense of the Constitution is presented as a defense of America’s founding principles and values, and rightfully so. But our constitutional system is not just a collection of principles; it embodies an approach to government with profound practical implications for both our freedom and our prosperity. When that system is threatened, both freedom and prosperity suffer.
Freedom is lost by degrees, and the deepest erosions usually take place during times of economic hardship, when those who favor expanding the sphere of government abuse a crisis to persuade free citizens that they should trade in a little of their liberty for empty promises of greater economic security.
His main beef with the ACA and other Obama initiatives is that they empower and enlarge the federal bureaucracy.
The Constitution’s Framers knew that there is a human inclination to increase personal power at the expense of law, so they created Congress as a decentralized and internally divided institution, but they granted it ample authority to secure the rule of law in every case. Congress holds the power of the pen as well as the purse. It has the power necessary to address attacks on the rule of law in our executive bureaucracies and even in the courts. The Constitution provides us with the power to solve these problems; what we need, is the will to do it.
The solution, the defense of the rule of law, will have to involve alternative ways to address the public problems that too many on the Left want to solve by delegating power to bureaucrats. For every government curtailment of our liberty through the discretion of bureaucrats, there are alternative reforms that could address the same problems within the framework of the rule of law, and indeed they could address those problems more effectively.
House Republicans have proposed a policy agenda to do just that: reclaiming America’s exceptional promise, charting a path not only to fiscal sustainability, but also to renewed prosperity.
Restoring the rule of law — reducing the influence of bureaucrats in the lives of Americans and empowering them to take more control over their own lives — is central to the budget we passed earlier this year. In fact, such reforms go hand in hand with our efforts to lift the crushing burden of debt, secure our social safety net, and spur job creation and sustained economic growth for all Americans.
The whole speech is worth a read. Mr. Ryan, who is not trained as a lawyer, seems to know his stuff, regardless of whether you agree with him. The vice presidential debate — remember: Joe Biden taught constitutional law – could be very interesting, as Professor Blackman points out.
2a)The Paul Ryan Choice
Governor Mitt Romney's choice of Congressman Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate is one of those decisions that seem obvious -- if not inevitable -- in retrospect, even though it was by no means obvious to most of us beforehand.
2a)The Paul Ryan Choice
Governor Mitt Romney's choice of Congressman Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate is one of those decisions that seem obvious -- if not inevitable -- in retrospect, even though it was by no means obvious to most of us beforehand.
Anyone who wants to get a quick sense of who Paul Ryan is should watch a short video of a February 2010 meeting in which Congressman Ryan politely, but devastatingly, "schools" Barack Obama on the utter fraudulence of the statistics that the Obama administration was using to claim that ObamaCare would reduce the deficit. That video is available on the Drudge Report.
As a long-time member, and now chairman, of the Budget Committee in the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan is thoroughly familiar with both the facts and the fictions in the federal government's budget. In recent years, the fictions have grown much bigger than the facts. But, as Congressman Ryan reminded the president, hiding spending is not the same as reducing spending.
If this year's election is going to be decided on the basis of hard facts, the Obama administration is doomed. But the Obama campaign is well aware of that, which is why we are hearing so many distracting innuendoes and outright lies about such peripheral issues as what Mitt Romney is supposed to have done while running Bain Capital -- or even what is supposed to have happened at Bain Capital, years after Mitt Romney was long gone.
The Obama campaign's big smear, about how Romney is supposed to have caused a woman to die of cancer, has been exposed as a lie by CNN, hardly a Republican network. What smears like this show is that the Obama administration cannot run on its track record, so it has to run on distractions from the country's real problems.
When Senator Harry Reid claims that Mitt Romney hasn't paid his income taxes, and demands that Governor Romney disprove this unsubstantiated allegation, that raises an obvious question as to why the Internal Revenue Service has not prosecuted Romney, instead of leaving that to a partisan politician in an election year.
What makes this a farce is that Senator Reid himself has not released his own income tax records, while claiming that Romney's release of only two years of his income tax records is not enough, even though it has been enough for other candidates in other years.
If Mitt Romney releases all his tax records going back to his childhood, it will not put a stop to this fishing expedition, much less bring an apology when those records show nothing illegal. It will just provide more material for making more distracting claims to change the subject from the track record of the Obama administration.
When Ronald Reagan ran against President Jimmy Carter back in 1980, he asked the question that should be asked of the voters when any president is seeking reelection: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"
Four years later, when Reagan ran for reelection, he implicitly asked and answered that same question in a campaign commercial titled "Morning in America," which listed the ways the country was better off than it had been four years earlier. Don't look for any "Morning in America" ads from Obama. "Mourning in America" might be more appropriate.
This election is a test, not just of the opposing candidates but of the voting public. If what they want are the hard facts about where the country is, and where it is heading, they cannot vote for more of the same for the next four years.
But, if what they want is emotionally satisfying rhetoric and a promise to give them something for nothing, to be paid for by taxing somebody else, then Obama is their man. This is not to say that the public will in fact get something for nothing or that rich people will just pay higher taxes, when it is easy for them to escape taxation by investing overseas -- creating jobs overseas.
Even if most Americans do not have their own taxes raised, that means little, if they end up paying other people's taxes in the higher prices of goods and services that pass along the higher taxes imposed on businesses.
There are no doubt voters who will vote on the basis of believing that Obama "cares" more about them. But that is a faith which passeth all understanding. The political mirage of something for nothing, from leaders who "care," has ruined many a nation.
2b)Liberal Surprise: Ryan Can't Be "Palin-ized"
By Jonathan Tobin
The liberal assault on Paul Ryan has commenced. But the first round of attacks can’t provide much solace to Democrats, who assume they will be able to demonize the Republican vice presidential candidate with ease. The first 48 hours of Ryan’s candidacy has already seen a deluge of abuse from the mainstream media editorial pages and columnists. If all you read is the opinion pages of the New York Times, which trotted out its second editorial rant against Ryan in two days, then you probably think that political strategist turned pundit Robert Shrum’s boast in the Daily Beast that by the time the Obama campaign is through with him, Ryan will be as toxic as Sarah Palin. Liberals like Robert Reich, who took to the Huffington Post to howl that Ryan’s ideas are “social Darwinism” or former Times editor Bill Keller who damned the prospective next GOP administration as a compendium of every wicked conservative idea ever conceived, clearly believe all they need to do is to just call Ryan and to a lesser extent Romney, every name they can think of.
But the problem with this effort to Palin-ize Ryan is that the first returns show it probably won’t work.
One piece of evidence is the full length front-page profile of Ryan published in today’sTimes. The story it tells of a small town boy whose intellectual prowess is matched only by his work ethic is not one that easily lends itself to the “extremist” narrative that the paper’s editorial page has been screaming about since Saturday. But the authors do their best to skew the portrait with language that doesn’t belong on the news pages of a reputable newspaper.
Part of the problem is that the Times can’t seem to find anyone who knows the likable congressman to dish any non-existent dirt on him. For example, in describing Ryan as an ambitious and accomplished teenager with numerous activities to his credit, theTimes stoops to describe him as a “politically astute suck up.” No, that’s not a quote from some teenage rival but an editorial comment inserted into the article by the authors without quotes or even an attempt to attribute this opinion to anyone who knew him.
The article describes Ryan’s college career by again using a pejorative without quotes in which it characterizes his economic philosophy as “trickle down economics.” One can disagree with Ryan’s belief in the importance of economic freedom and the importance of encouraging the creation of wealth rather than expecting it to emerge as a result of some miraculous government intervention, but to use that kind of language again shows liberal reporters are trying a little too hard to follow their paper’s editorial party line in descriptions of the candidate.
Reality again collided with ideology last night on “60 Minutes.” The CBS program got the first post-announcement interview with Romney and Ryan last night, and there’s little doubt that liberals tuning into the program were hoping the Ryan roll-out would conjure up memories of how Sarah Palin was felled in her first network interviews after John McCain tapped her to be his vice presidential nominee. But Bob Schieffer never laid a glove on either Romney or Ryan. Much of the interview was softball material, but even when Schieffer attempted to attack the duo on the Ryan budget plan or entitlement reform, they easily turned away the assault and honed in on the president’s failings and the need to have the country face up to the tough issue of entitlement reform. Just as important, unlike Katie Couric’s confidence that she could embarrass Palin in 2008, Schieffer knew better than to try to tangle with the formidable Ryan.
While we can expect the assault on Ryan to only intensify in the coming days, liberals are already starting to show some frustration as they come up against the fact that whatever you may think of his ideas, he is both likable and admirable, something even President Obama was willing to admit earlier in his administration when he hoped to co-opt the intellectual leader of House Republicans.
Moreover, unlike Palin, Ryan is clearly ready to not merely hold his own on the enemy turf of the mainstream media but, as President Obama learned to his sorrow, is able to go on the offensive and challenge liberal orthodoxies without appearing like the snarling cartoon character that Democrats hope to paint to the public.
As I wrote earlier, it is an open question as to whether the American public will be willing to choose Ryan’s ideas about reforming our out-of-control tax and spend cycle over Democrat demagoguery intended to defend the status quo. But whatever the outcome of the election, the liberal boasts about turning Ryan into another Palin will fail miserably.
2c)Erskine Bowles is a Paul Ryan Fan
Thanks to Ed Morrissey for bringing attention to this priceless video of Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chair of the Obama Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, praising Paul Ryan and his budget plan during a lecture at the University of North Carolina last September:
2c)Erskine Bowles is a Paul Ryan Fan
Thanks to Ed Morrissey for bringing attention to this priceless video of Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chair of the Obama Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, praising Paul Ryan and his budget plan during a lecture at the University of North Carolina last September:
Bowles is hardly advocating for the Ryan budget here, but he clearly admires both Ryan and his plan. And that isn’t even the most damning part of the clip for the Obama campaign. After praising Ryan’s budget as “sensible, straightforward, honest, serious,” Bowles adds, “I don’t think anybody took [Obama’s] budget very seriously.” That’s how you dig in the knife in academia:
Have any of you all met Paul Ryan? We should get him to come to the university. I’m telling you, this guy is amazing. I always thought I was okay at arithmetic, this guy can run circles around me. And he is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere. And the budget he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, honest, serious budget, and it cut the budget deficit, just like we did, by $4 trillion.The president came out with his own plan. And, the president as you remember, came out with a budget. And I don’t think anybody took that budget very seriously. The Senate voted against it 97-to-nothing.
Do you think the RNC is even going to bother editing this down for their campaign ads, or are they just going to run the clip as it is?
This basic gap was obscured in the 2008 campaign by the window trappings of inspiration. Among all the plastic pillars and stolen quotes from poets who stole them from sermons, it was harder to see that the underlying theme of the campaign was dissatisfaction with America. But in 2012, Obama can no longer run as a reformer or an optimist.
The coalition that he committed to last year is a coalition of those who are unhappy with America, not in the last four years, but in the last two-hundred years. Its core is composed of groups that fear democracy and distrust the will of the people. There is no optimism here, but a deeply rooted pessimism about human nature and the country as a whole. It is the Democratic Party's coalition against democracy.
After 2010, the numbers were crunched, and it was clear that Obama and the Democrats could not win a mainstream campaign. Instead, they targeted narrow groups, stirred up conflicts over issues aimed at that group, whether it was union pensions, racism or birth control. There was no more pretense of a national election, only a frenzied rush to polarize as many groups as possible and join them together into an acrimonious coalition, not so much for anything, as against Republicans.
There isn't any inspiration here. Just paranoia over everything from gay marriage to abortion to racial profiling to illegal immigration. A dozen illegal benefits being handed out with the explicit threat that they will be lost if Romney wins. A dozen mini-civil wars being stirred up to divide Americans and set them at each other's throats for the benefit of the Obama campaign.
From Occupy Wall Street to Wisconsin, from Trayvon Martin to Chick-fil-A, the goal of these manufactured conflicts has been to divide and conquer the electorate by emphasizing group rights over individual economic welfare.
Obama can't win on the economy. He can't win on foreign policy. He can't win on any aspect of his administration. All he can do is stir up violence and then promise to heal the country in his second term while winking to all the representatives of the grievance groups. It's not a new game, but the Democratic Party has never played it quite this baldly in a national election. And if it succeeds, then national politics will have finally been reduced to the level of a Chicago election.
We were expected to believe that the typical Obama voter in 2008 was hoping for a better country, but in 2012 there is no more hope, only hate and fear. The typical Obama voter is not acting as an American, but as a representative of an entitled group looking to secure and expand those entitlements at the expense and the detriment of the country at large.
To vote for Obama after years of grotesque economic mismanagement that has no precedent in history, that exceeds the worst actions of Andrew Jackson or Ulysses S. Grant, is not the instinct of an American, but a selfish greedy looter scrambling to grab a few dinner rolls off the tray while the ship is going down. There is no policy justification for voting for a man with the worst economic and foreign policy record in the country's history. There is no American justification for voting for him. Only the UnAmerican motivation of carving up a dying country into group fiefdoms privileging identity politics over the common good.
This is an UnAmerican campaign. It is an Anti-American campaign. It is a campaign by those who hate and fear what America was and who resent having to care about anyone outside their own group. Its group jingoism, its dog whistles and special privileges are repulsive and cynical, treating the people of a great nation like a warren of rats eager to sell each other out for a prize from the Cracker Jack box of identity politics entitlements.
In his DNC keynote address in 2004, Obama said, "There is no Black America or White America or Latino America or Asian America, there is just the United States of America." And now he has completely disavowed it. He isn't campaigning to lead the United States of America, instead he is running for the presidency of a dozen little Americas, Trayvon Martin America, Abortion America, Illegal Alien America, Sharia America, Gay Marriage America, Starbucks America and any others you can think of. And if he can collect enough of these little Americas together, then he may get the privilege of running the United States of America into the ground for another four years.
Obama has never been the President of the United States of America. He has been the president of Washington D.C., of Wall Street and of Solyndra. He has been the President of Green America and of Chicago. He has been the President of Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Gates, Penny Pritzker and James Crown. He is the President of George Clooney, Harvey Weinstein and Anne Hathaway. And now, facing disaster, he still isn't running to be President of a country, but of a dozen little countries with money from freshly bailed out Green America and Wall Street, not to mention Hollywood.
The Obama campaign is not accidentally divisive. It did not stumble into divisiveness. It is not even divisive as a byproduct of its real aims. Divisiveness is its aim. Divisiveness is the only way that a divisive administration can hold on to power. The anger and the violence are not an accident, they are the whole point. Set one group against another, feed the hate, massage the grievances and very soon there is no longer a nation but a handful of quarreling groups being roped into a mutual alliance to reelect their lord protector whose appeal is that of the outsider becoming the insider.
Bain is a metaphor whose details don't truly matter. The target audience for that swill doesn't really care where Romney was when a steel plant was shut down. It doesn't care that like so many private equity bigwigs, the man who actually was in charge is one of Obama's bundlers. This isn't about truth, it's about menace. The Bain message is that Romney is a man who takes things away. That is the image that the UnAmerican alliance is meant to take away. The ominous sense that Obama's era of giving them things is about to come to a close and Romney's era of taking away things will begin.
It doesn't take much prompting for the UnAmericans to come to this conclusion. Thieves are always looking over their shoulders. They always expect to have their ill-gotten gains taken away from them. And that is Obama's true achievement. Like Tammany Hall, he has corrupted a massive section of the population and made it complicit in his criminality. What the old political machines did to cities or small groups of vested interests, the Zero has done to tens of millions, if not a hundred million people, who want him in power not because they think he's the best man for the job, but because he's their crook. The middle man for a crime ring that begins with him and ends with them.
The true insidious evil of the man is that he is the face of a machine of power and privilege that turns Americans into UnAmericans, that corrupts and degrades every ideal and principle, suborns every office and picks every pocket, while wrapping that thievery in the flag and every bit of history that it can filch. The Hussein Way is the clearest expression of the rot at the heart of the Democratic Party, the marriage of leftist agitation and powermongering with the old urban political machines for a level of abuse usually seen only in banana republics.
The abomination in Washington is a welfare-state technocracy that mixes crony capitalism with radical social policy. It steals from everyone and gives back to some. It plays the game of divide and conquer with the panache of marketing executives knowing that the worse the economy is, the more likely everyone is to look in everyone else's mouth. Its worst aspect is its insistence on cloaking its cynicism as righteousness, wrapping every ugly means in the glorious flag of the ends when the truth is that its means are its ends.
Divide and conquer isn't just a means to the greater end of giving Zero Hussein another four years. And perhaps another four years after that. It's also the end. Every tyrant from Joseph Stalin to Saddam Hussein knew that a divided people are easier to rule. The more you divide them, the less likely they are to give you any trouble when you're raiding their last pennies to pay for the latest Green gimmick that your billionaire backers have thrown up all over Wall Street.
Obama is the ultimate Post-American figure passing himself off as the embodiment of all that is truly American. But the UnAmericans got the real message in 2008 and in 2012 there is no other message. There is no more hope and faith, and the ones who have been waiting for are the UnAmericans who think that they are about to come into their own, when they are little more than pawns being used to rob and destroy a great nation.
This is the Post-American, Anti-American and UnAmerican campaign to divide up, carve up and toss aside the laws and traditions of the United States and replace them with the power of arrogance. It is the last stand of a beleaguered nation facing barbarians inside its gate. Every previous election was a contest between two American candidates who wanted to preside over the United States.
The entity is already here. Its czars are running things in D.C., and its judges are dismantling both constitutional government and democratic elections. It creates a crisis and then makes sure that it doesn't go to waste. It has excellent design skills and terrible planning skills. It has all the money in the world and none at all. It is the Post-American America, and 2012 is its big referendum. The one that will decide whether this Post-American America, this horrid graft of E.U. governance and Mussolini economics, Soviet propaganda and FDR volunteerism, Tammany populist criminality and U.N. foreign policy will be permitted to devour the United States of America.
Obama cannot win an American election. But he isn't running in an American election. He's running in a Post-American election.
4a)
Obama's Strange Dependence on Valerie Jarrett
By Karin McQuillanPresident Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden three times before saying yes, because he got cold feet about the possible political harm to himself if the mission failed. Instead of listening to advisors from the U.S. military, Defense, or even State, Obama was acting on the advice of White House politico and close friend Valerie Jarrett. Valerie Jarrett?
This account comes from Richard Miniter's upcoming book Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors who Decide for Him. Miniter has written a half-dozen books on the war on terror. He is relying on an unnamed source within the U.S. military Joint Special Operations Command who was directly involved in the operation and planning of the Osama bin Laden kill mission.
Is the story credible? According to Edward Klein, a reporter once asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett. Obama answered, "Yep. Absolutely."
Edward Klein, former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine for many years, describes Jarrett as "ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple's friend and consigliere." Klein -- who claims he used a minimum of two sources for each assertion in his book on the Obama presidency, The Amateur -- writes in detail about Jarrett opposing the raid on bin Laden. She told Obama not to take the political risk. Klein thought Obama ignored Jarrett's advice. Miniter tells us he listened to her, three times telling Special Operations not to take the risk to go after bin Laden.
We need to understand the role Valerie Jarrett plays in Obama's private and political life.
"If it wasn't for Valerie Jarrett, there'd be no Barack Obama to complain about," starts Klein's chapter on Jarrett. He quotes Michelle Obama on Jarrett's influence over her husband: "She knows the buttons, the soft spots, the history, the context."
No one outside Michelle has the access or power over Obama's decision-making like Jarrett does. Here's an odd little fact that gives some insight into what kind of president Obama is: Michelle, Michelle's mother, and Valerie, and only a few others in Washington, are allowed to call Barack by his first name. After work, Jarrett joins Obama at night in the Family Quarters, where she dines often with the First Family. She goes on vacation with them.
Jarrett's title is the weird mouthful "Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs." She is the gatekeeper, but she is also much more than that. She occupies Karl Rove's and Hillary's old office and has an all-access pass to meetings. She shows up at the National Security Council, at meetings on the economy and budget. She stays behind to advise Obama on what to think and do. Obama uses her as his left-wing conscience. Klein's sources describe how at each pressing issue, Obama turns to ask her, "What do you think the right thing to do is?" As president, he likes to have her next to him "as the voice of authentic blackness in a White House that is staffed largely by whites."
A longtime friend told Klein that Jarrett is the "eyes, ears and nose" of the Obamas. She tells them whom to trust, who is saying what, whom to see at home and abroad. Michelle wants her there: "I told her ... it would give me a sense of comfort to know that (Barack) had somebody like her there by his side." As Obama told the New York Times, "Valerie is one of my oldest friends. ... I trust her completely."
To understand why Obama relies so heavily on Jarrett, we must remember the president's identity crisis as a black man, which is the main subject of his memoir, Dreams from My Father. Valerie Jarrett's adoption of the Obamas as her friends and protégés in Chicago's upper-crust black society was one of the greatest things that ever happened to Obama. Until becoming a community organizer, Obama tells us he felt himself to be an inauthentic American black. Nothing in his life helped him understand or fit into the American black community.
Within a few weeks of Obama's birth, conceived out of wedlock as he was, his mother moved away to a different college, leaving Obama's African birth father behind in Honolulu. There may have been a shotgun wedding or not -- in the memoir, Obama says he is not sure. The only time Barack set eyes on his father was a brief visit when he was ten. Our president lived with his white mother, then with her and her Indonesian husband in Indonesia from age six to ten. He was so unhappy that he chose to leave his mother and live with his white grandparents back in America. Obama's America was the tolerant, wealthy American world of Honolulu's top prep school.
His only black experience was his grandfather's creepy old friend, Frank Marshall, a card-carrying Communist and self-disclosed pederast, who was Obama's voice of authentic blackness. One result of this lonely and unhappy childhood as a mixed-race child was Barack Obama's envy problem. The key to understanding Jarrett's power over the president is that Obama didn't just envy people with normal parents and loving, successful fathers. He envied American blacks, especially those who grew up in intact black families, knowing who they were, comfortable in their black skin.
Valerie Jarrett reflects Obama in many ways. Like himself, Valerie looks more white than black. Her mother had three white grandparents, and her father was black. Like Obama, she lived in the Muslim world for part of her childhood, when her father practiced medicine in Iran. Like Obama, she is a committed leftist. But there are crucial differences. Her father was not a drunk Kenyan polygamist like Obama's, but a famous pathologist and geneticist. Her mother was not a leftist expatriate like Obama's, but a distinguished psychologist. Valerie married into Chicago's black elite, the top rung of African-American society. She went to Stanford, got a law degree from Michigan, and became Mayor Richard Daley's deputy chief of staff, "the public black face" of his administration.
When Valerie Jarrett hired Michelle to work for Daley and befriended her, the Obamas gained access to the exclusive world of upper-class black Chicago politics. Valerie knew everyone whom it was important to know in black and Jewish money circles. She gave Barack entrée and legitimacy. She financed and promoted his ambitions for national office.
Obama finally belonged. Not that Jarrett's record in Chicago was anything to be proud of. Jarrett was known for her corruption and incompetence. Daley finally had to fire her after a scandal erupted over her role in misuse of public funds in the city's substandard public housing. She went on to become CEO of Habitat Executive Services, pulling down $300,000 in salary and $550,000 in deferred compensation. Again, she managed a housing complex that was seized by government inspectors for slum conditions. The scandal didn't matter to Obama. The sordid corruption was all part of Jarrett's Chicago success story.
Every insider in Chicago told Klein the same thing: Jarrett has no qualifications to be the principal advisor to the president of the United States. She doesn't understand how Washington works, how relations with Congress work, how the federal process works. She doesn't understand how the economy works, how the military works, how national security works. But she understands how Obama works.
The president turns to Valerie Jarrett for definitive advice on all these issues. She has given him terrible advice over and over, and still he turns to her.
Her true job is to make Obama feel proud of himself. When Obama looks at Jarrett, he sees himself as whole and good and real. He is no longer the fake black, the fatherless kid flailing around in a white world, tortured by the unfairness of it all. She fills the emptiness at the core of his identity. She admires and adores him. Jarrett told New Yorker editor David Remnick that the president is "just too talented to do what ordinary people do." And the icing on the cake -- she shares his left-wing politics that project unfairness out onto white America.
Obama relies on Jarrett to create the White House bubble he likes to live in, where his narcissism is stroked and his desire to do the big, left-wing thing is encouraged. Jarrett is the doorman. She runs access to the president. As Klein puts it, she guards him from meeting with "critics and complainers who might deflate his ego." No one gets past Jarrett who has an incompatible point of view.
Jarrett pushed ObamaCare. At the beginning of Obama's presidency, there was pressure on Obama to focus on the economic crisis. Rahm Emanuel advised a small, bipartisan health care reform with popular items such as coverage for young adults -- to get it passed quickly and focus on the country's money problems. Jarrett urged the president to be true to his left-wing agenda. She was all for having Reid-Pelosi create the ObamaCare assault on the American health system and ramming it through on a one-party vote, using Chicago-style politics, while Obama crossed the country doing what he does best: make speeches. Obama liked Jarrett's idea. Emanuel is now out of the White House.
Jarrett pushed the Solyndra fiasco. Jarrett promoted Solyndra because one of her richest Chicago connections, billionaire George Kaiser, a top Obama bundler, had a 35% share in Solyndra. Kaiser visited the White House sixteen times.
Larry Summers, the director of the president's National Economic Council, warned Obama that the federal government should not get involved in venture capital of any sort. Summers understood that crony capitalism sabotages economic growth. Huge government funding distorts and destroys whatever market segment it touches, replacing economic decisions with political ones.
A member of Obama's finance committee warned the president that Solyndra was going bankrupt. But it is Obama and Valerie who see eye to eye, and they saw the value to Obama of rewarding his political cronies. It worked fine in Chicago. Larry Summers is now out of the White House.
Jarrett pushed Obama to take on the Catholic Church over contraception, arguing that it would appeal to single women (she was right) and that religious freedom isn't important (she was wrong). Bill Daley, who had replaced Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff, argued against Obama pushing contraception on the Church and invited Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York to meet with a displeased Obama, who didn't appreciate hearing from the Church. Daley is now out of the White House.
Valerie Jarrett is the most powerful woman in Washington. She has guided the president's decisions on health care, the budget, the stimulus, the deficit, foreign affairs.
So when Jarrett told Obama that the mission to kill bin Laden was too politically risky, and to play it safe, it is entirely plausible to believe that the president listened to her. It is consistent with everything we know about Obama's dependence on her. According to Miniter's source in the U.S. Military Joint Special Operations Command, Obama listened to her for four months, dithering and deciding no the first three times the military told him that the time to get bin Laden was now.
In The Amateur, Klein reports that another worry won out. Obama was even more scared of the political fallout if voters learned he'd passed up the chance to get bin Laden. What decided him wasn't the national interest, but politics. For once, the president disagreed with Valerie Jarrett.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5) Paul Ryan and the American Character
The Republican vice-presidential candidate, Congressman Paul Ryan, is the Democrats' political version of the Anti-Christ. He believes in self-reliance; the left believes in reliance on the state. His moral values are shaped by religion (Catholicism); the left is frightened by religious Christian politicians (and athletes, and members of the armed forces, and talk show hosts, and, for that matter, clergy). He believes in individualism; the left believes in collectivism. He believes in small government and powerful citizens; the left believes in large government and dependent citizens.
Nevertheless, the Democratic Party claims to be overjoyed at his selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee.
The Democrats' glee -- even if exaggerated -- emanates from their belief that Americans will reject Ryan's economic and social plans to reduce the American debt, unleash private economic growth (the only type there is), and reform unsustainable government programs such as Medicare.
Democrats believe that if Americans perceive that their entitlements may be affected -- even if only beginning a decade from now, and even if the American debt is thereby cut by one third, and even if they, as well as the country, will ultimately benefit -- so many Americans have become so used to government benefits, the Republicans stand little chance of winning the upcoming elections.
In other words, and tragically, the left and Democrats are relying on the decline of the American character that left-wing policies have produced (not only here but in Latin America, Europe, and everywhere else). The Democrats are hoping that older Americans are (irrationally) frightened by Medicare reform even though these reforms will not affect them, and that younger Americans will likewise reject these reforms because they are counting on receiving Medicare as it now exists.
Left-wing social policies are predicated on giving more and more Americans more and more benefits and demanding less and less from them.
The left's party, the Democratic Party, seeks to have the state pay for Americans' health care, give record numbers of Americans food stamps (now in a form similar to ATM and credit cards so that no stigma be involved), provide their children with school meals and provide women with child care and contraceptives, while enabling more and more Americans to pay no federal taxes to pay for any of these benefits.
The negative impact these policies have had on the character of Americans is indisputable. Every parent -- and probably most adults who are not parents -- knows what giving things they have not earned and demanding nothing from them in return produces: spoiled children.
Left-wing, Democratic Party policies have negatively impacted the American character in another way. Whenever possible, the left and the Democrats have de-stigmatized irresponsible behavior.
Left-wing, Democratic Party policies have negatively impacted the American character in another way. Whenever possible, the left and the Democrats have de-stigmatized irresponsible behavior.
One example is women who give birth to and raise children without fathers in their children's lives. This past Sunday's New York Times opinion section featured another attack on those who stigmatize out of wedlock birth and single motherhood.
Another example is the cultural left's glorification of graffiti -- once regarded as vandalism of public and private property -- as "street art."
A third example is how difficult the Democratic Party and the left-wing education establishment have made it for teachers and principals to discipline disruptive and foul-mouthed students. The Department of Education has just declared education the "civil rights" issue of our generation" because black students are disproportionately suspended and otherwise punished by school officials. The effect? Black young people who abuse their teachers and schools feel empowered to continue their anti-social behavior.
At the same time, the left works to weaken the single most effective device for character building in American history: Judeo-Christian religions. Increasingly, the American motto "In God We Trust" has been replaced by "In Government We Trust" and "In Experts We Trust."
Since the Democrats could not win any national election with the votes of liberals alone -- according to Gallup, self-described liberals constitute just 21 percent of the electorate -- the great question of the 2012 American presidential election is this: Have the left and Democratic Party sufficiently weakened the character of enough Americans to enable the demonization of Paul Ryan to lead Barack Obama to victory?
I don't believe so. But given the enormity of the national debt incurred by this administration, its spectacular failure to improve the nation's economy, and its commitment to weakening American defense, if there were a better explanation for a Democratic victory, I would welcome it.
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