Republican Conservatives have given Speaker Boehner a road map that will fund the government based on negotiations to address spiraling spending.
Talk of a debt collapse is a shrill ruse to strike panic. The government has sufficient revenue to pay interest on the current and increased debt and with some prioritization can handle any increase in debt by deferring certain spending or payments..
The Federal Reserve will serve as a backup to any temporary shortfall so all this talk about a debt crisis is basically contrived and is simply a political ploy to cause cracks in Republican ranks.
If we are unwilling to get control over our unbridled spending then it matters not what happens near term because we are a doomed nation anyway..
Boehner should take the heat, stand firm and let the debt ceiling mess eventually land on Obama's front steps where it belongs.
Obama's obdurate behaviour, along with that of Reid and Pelosi, must be allowed to play out and be seen for what it is. Whether the majority of Americans are economically smart and shrewd enough to understand what is going on is another matter.
He who spends what isn't his'n will eventually go bankrupt or end in pris'n! (See 1 below.)
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Will Russia abandon Syria and hang tough with respect to Iran? Time will tell. (See 2 below.)
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Inarticulate Republicans! (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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No need to think his destructive incompetence is intentional.
Because Barack Obama was elected on a campaign promise of “fundamentally transforming” the United States, and because our nation then proceeded to lose much of its international influence and domestic economic dynamism, it is easy to say “this is intentional. It’s just what he wants.”
Yet while Obama might, in his heart of hearts, not bemoan the loss of jobs and economic growth at home, and American power and prestige abroad, ascribing it to an intentional effort gives Obama credit for qualities and skills he does not possess.
Neocon David Horowitz entitled a recent fundraising letter for his Freedom Center “Urgent: Is Obama’s incompetence by design?”
It surely feels that way sometimes.
But politics has rarely seen an elected leader, a man of supposed vision (even if a dark one), a prophet of hope and change, so desperate to do anything other than his job (and so eager to be on the golf course) as the current American president. He is not capable, or does he work hard enough, to “design” such fecklessness?
To paraphrase Freud*, sometimes incompetence is just incompetence.
The current chaos over federal government funding and its morbidly obese half-brother, the debt ceiling, is notable for Barack Obama’s absence. He is nowhere to be seen (except possibly teeing off) other than an occasional bit of televised vitriol attacking the “Republican shutdown” and Wednesday’s faux-meeting to reiterate that he won’t negotiate with Republicans (but he will plead for a handshake and discussions with the president of the terrorist regime in Tehran).
This is not leadership. It’s not even a particularly good political tactic. It is the behavior of a bully and, to put it plainly, a liar.
Obama’s shutdown rhetoric are not the words of a man who is honestly open to hearing the ideas of others; they are the words of a petty tyrant, an Alinskyite thug, whose true opinion of the GOP was summed up in 2008 when he said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
Much has been written about how likely Republicans are to find a way to lose — and it’s not a bad bet based on history. But if the president is not the brilliant and devious manipulator that many give him credit for being, just a few smart Republican maneuvers might start the polls moving toward equal blame for all sides, and thereby push the president to stop jumping up and down with his fingers in his ears, yelling “I can’t hear you!” Passing small bills funding popular parts of government, as the House has done several times in the past few days, is a good start.
The president’s lack of leadership is entirely within character and consistent with his history. Even his signature piece of legislation, Obamacare, was written by senators and lobbyists, with the president waiting in the background, ready for an unearned victory lap, emotionally and functionally unable to lead the charge for one of liberalism’s most cherished policy goals.
Private health insurance is collapsing, along with your choice of doctors, as prices explode.Physicians are retiring early, cutting back hours, and refusing to take new Medicaid patients — just as Obamacare aims to turn millions of Americans into little more than glorified Medicaid enrollees. The rate of “U-6” unemployment (which includes underemployment) is mired at a painful 14 percent. The national debt is up 60 percent since this president took office, representing a staggering current burden of over $53,000 per citizen and $148,000 per taxpayer.
But none of this — not the true effects of Obamacare, not the jobs stagnation, not even the national debt — represents Barack Obama being successful even in the context of his own simplistic world view, best summarized in his own words: “I do think at a certain point, you’ve made enough money.”
After all, thanks to cronyism, clever lobbyists, and the true nature of Progressive policies, the people Obama most claimed to want to help, namely the lower rungs of the American income ladder, are stuck in a swamp of the president’s creation with only more punishment in sight. Median household income has plunged under this president, with a devastating 11 percent drop among black Americans. Obama has indeed redistributed our money: to unions, bankers, and political donors. He’s not even a good socialist.
Vanishingly few of the Democrats’ legislative or electoral victories are due to President Obama being notably cleverer than any other well-practiced politician-fabulist. Even the most committed ideologue needs a modicum of leadership skill to be an effective leader. Obama has none, and therefore isn’t one. The many negative results of his presidency are not by design. He’s just not that clever.
His diminishment of the U.S. in foreign affairs is equally accidental,pace the musings of many experienced political commentators.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz writes that Obama’s foreign policy failures, particularly regarding Syria, are actually “a brilliant success as measured by what he intended all along to accomplish.”
And Rush Limbaugh (in large part discussing the Podhoretz article), recently wondered, “[Is] the decline of America by design?” while adding a bit of self-congratulatory “I like being joined” — apparently he believes the answer is a resounding “Yes!”
Whether the United States has declined in every relevant aspect on the international stage is beyond debate. Even the New York Timeswas compelled to state the obvious when reporting on President Obama’s recent address at the United Nations: “In the morning, it was a somewhat diminished American leader who faced a skeptical audience of world leaders here.”
The Washington Post editorial board complained that Obama’s approach in that same UN speech “can only diminish U.S. influence…”
And a few weeks earlier, the liberal website Daily Beast discussed “How Obama Lost His Influence in Egypt.”
Conservatives frequently refer to Barack Obama’s dismissal of American Exceptionalism, his promise of more “flexibility” with Russia, and his assertion that “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed” as evidence that a weakened United States is the intentional product of a considered strategy.
With his foreign policy being made by accident and gaffe and people with names like Vladimir, there is little reason to view Barack Obama as particularly clever or as an effective player on the chessboard of international affairs.
Instead, he is the subject of manipulation by every foreign leader from Mohamed “So this is what Mubarak felt like” Morsi to Vladimir “See my new Barack yo-yo” Putin to Bashar “Here’s my sarin (wink wink)” al Assad to Hassan “Shake this, Barack” Rouhani.
Obama’s apologetic calls for Islamic appreciation of a new American approach were not a subtly brilliant way to get jihadists to hate us even more.
His unscripted “red line” was not an imaginative ploy to make Secretary of State John Kerry look like a genius for his accidental off-ramp from a highway to a pointless, unwinnable war.
His disdain for American preeminence is not the cause of its waning; his fecklessness and stunning lack of leadership are.
After all, it remains likely that Obama, like many second-term presidents, will be forced by domestic politics, lame duck status, and various activities of foreign allies and opponents to focus the end of his presidency on foreign policy. For a man as profoundly narcissistic as Barack Obama, his inability to influence the stream of history any more than a thrown pebble influences the Mighty Mississippi will be personally frustrating and politically damaging (by even further reducing his clout at home).
It’s one thing to talk big on the campaign trail about taking the U.S. down a peg. It’s another thing when the main peg being lowered is your own influence.
Obama’s staggering incompetence on the international stage, careening from one unintended foreign policy consequence to another, is unmistakable because foreign affairs are almost exclusively the province of the president. He has no congressional human shields overseas.
Particularly for those still smarting from the Republicans’ inability to defeat a president whose first term was a tragi-comedy of stupid policies and their predictable results, it is tempting to ascribe a certain evil genius to the man who so often talks down the nation he dares to “lead” — a word used very loosely in this context.
But there is no aspect of Obama’s history, whether as a “community organizer,” undistinguished lecturer, state senator (frequently voting present), or president, in which he has demonstrated leadership, wisdom, or even a world view more sophisticated than that of a typical member of the College Democrats or its more radical predecessors.
Throughout George W. Bush’s presidency, Democrats mocked him as an idiot, a rube, even a chimpanzee. So why do conservatives routinely imply that Obama is a genius?
Those who oppose Obama make a mistake, both in terms of policy and politics, by ascribing his harmful impacts on the nation to Machiavellian cleverness, or by characterizing them as success by any definition — even his. Barack Obama has almost no idea what he is doing, why he is doing it, or how his actions affect ordinary citizens or the world around us.
While the most anti-American president in American history might not be too unhappy at the downward spiral of his nation’s international standing and economic strength, it is not by his design but rather a result of the sad accident of having (twice) elected a naïve, petulant, self-obsessed non-leader.
[One potential caveat: While Obama is not clever enough for his apparent imcompetence to be anything but real, some of his advisers/puppet-masters, like David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, are. For those enemies of America, Obama is just their front man, their very own Billy Mays, hawking a radical leftist vision in a pleasant container. The question then is what percentage puppet is our president.]
* The saying “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” is frequently attributed to Freud, but there is no evidence that he actually said it.
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2)Syria Expected To Spar With Inspectors As Weapons Hunt Begins
An international team of weapons experts is at work in Syria on the job of finding and destroying the nation's chemical stockpile. Inspectors crossed in Syria from Lebanon on Tuesday.
But the job will be difficult and possibly dangerous, says Amy Smithson, a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Smithson, an expert in chemical and biological weapons, tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon that Syrian President Bashar Assad has proven untrustworthy in the past and is unlikely to be completely upfront with inspectors about the location and extent of his chemical munitions.
He may also allow the joint team of experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations to come in harm's way, Smithson says.
Assad could also be scrambling to make his chemical weapons hard to find."The U.N. Security Council put the onus for providing security for these inspections on the Assad government, and when the investigators were there previously, it's very likely that the Assad government turned snipers loose," she says. "This is a dicey proposition, not in the least part because in the midst of Syria we also have Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaida."
"If Assad is true to form — and previously he has stalled and delayed and done everything he could to hide evidence of his nuclear weapons program — now's the time for him to be moving things about and perhaps hiding what he wants to try keep away from the inspectors," Smithson says.
Making a challenging circumstance even more precarious, the team is operating under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the Assad regime agreed to in September. The convention is designed for disarmament by cooperating partners, not states whose acquiescence has been coerced.
While the treaty allows access to Assad's weapons, it also give his government rights, Smithson says. Assad could potentially keep inspectors from certain areas, she says, declaring them irrelevant because they house conventional weapons or "unrelated" records.
"He can fence with inspectors a great deal. I do expect, given his past behavior, to try to hide evidence and maybe get away with what he can," Smithson says.
Intelligence experts may see through such smokescreens, she adds. However, she says, "previously there have been times when intelligence about chemical and biological weapons programs have been grossly off the mark."
Smithson expects the team will make significant progress in destroying Syria's chemical stockpile. The U.S. and Russia have powerful resources at hand to neutralize the weapons.
"There are a number of assets that the United States and also Russia can bring to bear to destroy bulk chemical warfare agents and even chemcial weapons munitions," she says. "These assets involved cargo-container-sized equipment that will put water in the agent and put other chemicals to degrade it with great effectiveness."
But Smithson is cautious.
"I'm just not sure that Assad, Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaida are going to cooperate with this," she says. "So it's just difficult every which way you look, but there are definitely practical things that can be brought to bear."
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3)Inarticulate Republicans
By Thomas Sowell
If the continued existence of mathematics depended on the ability of the Republicans to defend the proposition that two plus two equals four, that would probably mean the end of mathematics and of all the things that require mathematics.
Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, epitomized what has been wrong with the Republicans for decades when he emerged from a White House meeting last Wednesday, went over to the assembled microphones, briefly expressed his disgust with the Democrats' intransigence and walked on away.
We are in the midst of a national crisis, immediately affecting millions of Americans and potentially affecting the kind of country this will become if ObamaCare goes into effect -- and yet, with multiple television network cameras focused on Speaker Boehner as he emerged from the White House, he couldn't be bothered to prepare a statement that would help clarify a confused situation, full of fallacies and lies.
Boehner was not unique in having a blind spot when it comes to recognizing the importance of articulation and the need to put some serious time and effort into presenting your case in a way that people outside the Beltway would understand. On the contrary, he has been all too typical of Republican leaders in recent decades.
When the government was shut down during the Clinton administration, Republican leaders who went on television to tell their side of the story talked about "OMB numbers" versus "CBO numbers" -- as if most people beyond the Beltway knew what these abbreviations meant or why the statistics in question were relevant to the shutdown. Why talk to them in Beltway-speak?
When Speaker Boehner today goes around talking about the "CR," that is just more of the same thinking -- or lack of thinking. Policy wonks inside the Beltway know that he is talking about the "continuing resolution" that authorizes the existing level of government spending to continue, pending a new budget agreement.
But, believe it or not, there are lots of citizens and voters outside the Beltway. And what is believed by those people whom too many Republicans are talking past can decide not only the outcome of this crisis but the fate of the nation for generations to come.
You might think that the stakes are high enough for Republicans to put in some serious time trying to clarify their message. As the great economist Alfred Marshall once said, facts do not speak for themselves. If we are waiting for the Republicans to do the speaking, the country is in big trouble.
Democrats, by contrast, are all talk. They could sell refrigerators to Eskimos before Republicans could sell them blankets.
Indeed, Democrats sold Barack Obama to the American public, which is an even more amazing feat, considering his complete lack of relevant experience and questionable (at best) loyalty to the values and institutions of this country.
The Democrats have obviously given a lot of attention to articulation, including coordinated articulation among their members. Some years ago, Senator Chuck Schumer was recorded, apparently without his knowledge, telling fellow Democrats to keep using the word "extremist" when discussing Republicans.
Even earlier, when George W. Bush first ran for President, the word that suddenly began appearing everywhere was "gravitas" -- as in the endlessly repeated charge that Bush lacked "gravitas." People who had never used that word before suddenly began using it all the time.
Today, the Democrats' buzzword is "clean" -- as in the endlessly repeated statement that Republicans in the House of Representatives should send a "clean" bill to the Senate. Anything less than a blank check is not considered a "clean" bill.
The Constitution gives the House of Representatives the responsibility to originate all spending bills, based on what they think should and should not be funded. But the word "clean" is now apparently supposed to override the Constitution.
If Republicans want to show some seriousness about articulating their case, they might start by deleting the abbreviation "CR" from their vocabulary. As has been said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." That journey is long overdue.
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