Category: Barack Obama

Postvarication

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by Smitty

Obama caves to Romney, according to Munro in the Examiner:

President Barack Obama used Air Force One to conduct a policy loop-de-loop Wednesday, asserting in a CBS interview that he supports Americans’ right to criticize Islam, following almost 18 hours of determined condemnation from Team Romney and damaging news from Egypt and Libya.
“We believe in the First Amendment,” Obama told CBS’s Steve Kroft during an interview arranged days earlier.
“It is one of the hallmarks of our Constitution that I’m sworn to uphold, and so we are always going to uphold the rights for individuals to speak their mind,” he said, according to a transcript narrated by White House spokesman Jay Carney.

This is about the bazillionth time in the last three years that:

  1. Crisis event occurs.
  2. Obama administration offers a creepy response.
  3. American outrage ensues.
  4. Obama administration mumbles something recognizably American.

I submit that:

  • #2 represents the actual Obama opinion on #1 for his real audience, for which he’ll have more flexibility after his re-coronation in November.
  • #4 is just a bone thrown to those bitter, racist cling-ons in flyover country.

This administration is pretty much guilty until proven innocent by non-Commie validation, as far as I’m concerned. The sense of the word prevaricate seems to be a sequence of fact distortion moving from false to true, as investigation drags facts to light.

Maybe one of the few genuine ‘accomplishments’ of this administration is creation of a new form of lying: postvarication, where the truth is served up for the target audience, and then a pile of hooey follows for the purported rubes. Postvarication goes from true to false.

This blog doesn’t believe much of anything said by the administration or the media. Even though I didn’t like Clinton, I was still willing to give the creep the benefit of the doubt. BHO & Co. have a tremendous problem on their hands, as they systematically de-legitimize everything about our culture and its institutions.

via SissyWillis

Update: much more at The Daley Gator.

Anybody Who Thinks General Dempsey Went Rogue And Called Terry Jones Is Missing The Point

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by Smitty

I’ve got to call Preston for having blown by the point entirely:

Gen. Dempsey’s call was a PR stunt designed to show the Islamic world that the US government takes jihadist threats more seriously than it takes American citizens’ rights to free speech.
The top soldier in America’s armed forces has deliberately chilled free speech and has violated the oath he took when he entered the armed forces, to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He has also elevated an obscure, fringe preacher to a powerful position impacting US foreign policy.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is, in other words, an idiot.

People in uniform, even the JCS chair, take orders. There are just a couple links, albeit weak, in the chain of command above JCS chair.

Keep in mind that the party which ordered Dempsey to place that call

So, treating the JCS chair like a flunky continues to communicate to the Middle Eastern audience that the U.S. military is something of a joke, and need not be a concern. No doubt, the U.S. military karma is cosmically enhanced by all this, and the world will respect us more if our military image is less. . .combative.

SHOCKING: Libyan Mob Attack Kills Four, Including U.S. Ambassador
UPDATE: ‘Full-Blown … Crisis’
UPDATE: Hey, MSM, No Fair Shouting Questions at President Gutsy Call

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Just woke up to this news. When I went to bed last night, I knew that one American had been killed in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. But when I woke up — wow. This is stunning.

UPDATE: Washington Post:

U.S. Ambassador to Libya John Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed Tuesday in an assault on the American consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, the White House said.
In a statement issued by the White House early Wednesday morning, President Obama said he had directed an increase in security at U.S. diplomatic posts around the world. CNN reported that the Defense Department has dispatched two Marine anti-terrorism security teams to Benghazi to reinforce security there.
Stevens and the others were fleeing the consulate when a rocket-propelled grenade struck their vehicle, news reports from Benghazi said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton identified one of the dead as Sean Smith, a Foreign Service information management officer. The names of the other two people killed were being withheld pending notification of their families.

UPDATE II: Remember that yesterday, immediately after the attacks on our embassies in Egypt and Libya, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo issued an apology, which the White House then retracted, and as Allahpundit said:

Really looking forward to hearing Carney explain which part of the embassy’s earlier statement failed to represent the views of the U.S. government. I want to hear it in his own words; hopefully the press corps will make him elaborate.

This administration’s absurd policy deserves to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how:

UPDATE III: Toby Harnden of London Daily Mail:

The Obama administration is engulfed in a full-blown foreign policy crisis just two months before the presidential election with the two campaigns trading angry accusations over events in Libya, Egypt and Israel.
Footage of the body of Christopher Stevens, United States ambassador to Libya, slung over the back of a protester, was reminiscent of the 1993 ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident in Somalia in 1993 when militia fighters lynched American aircrew in the streets of Mogadishu.
President Barack Obama’s staff will also be mindful that a shadow was cast over Jimmy Carter’s presidency by the Iranian hostage crisis after the US embassy in Tehran was stormed by Islamist extremists following the Iranian revolution.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE IV: The Lonely Conservative:

Obama Using the Carter Model
of Strength Through Confused Weakness

UPDATE V: On Twitter, David Limbaugh called this “unbelieveable”:

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland cautioned reporters not to assume that the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo today reflected growing anti-American sentiment among the Egyptian people.
In response to a reporter’s comment that “it does seem as if there is a growing anti-American sentiment in Cairo,” Nuland said, “I would urge you not to draw too many conclusions because we’ve also had some very positive developments in our relationship with Egypt.”
Protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and tore down and desecrated the American flag, replacing it with a flag bearing the Islamic inscription, “There is no god but Allah.”

As anyone who has studied this problem knows, our State Department’s Mideast section is crammed full of alumni of elite schools where the foreign policy curriculum is based on the works of Edward Said and other anti-American academics.

UPDATE VI: “Never let a crisis go to waste”:

UPDATE VII: I watch MSNBC so you don’t have to:

– – –





@BarackObama Campaign Running Low On Cash, #WarOnWomen Hyperbole

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by Smitty

Stacy has been covering the questions about the Obama campaign’s cash. Tonight, though, Dan Riehl’s tweet alerted me that this hysterically hysterical ad running in Virginia is now online.



The Hill:

“We can’t afford to let him take away our choices, to take away basic healthcare,” the woman in the ad continues. “I don’t think that women’s health issues have faced a crises like this in decades.”

Helpy-helperblog that we are, our sacred honor compels us to lend a hand with a few augmented completions to “I don’t think that women’s health issues have faced a crises like this since. . .”

Obama’s ‘Bounce’ That Wasn’t

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“To put it as bluntly as possible, the economy sucks, and the attempt by Democrats to exculpate Obama for this situation — to place the blame on Republicans, or to say that the economy would suck even worse if Romney were elected — is perhaps more difficult than Nate Silver’s statistics suggest.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Omens of Doom,” The American Spectator, Sept. 10, 2012

The media’s effort to manufacture the appearance of a decisive shift toward President Obama — not merely a predictable post-convention “bounce” in the polls — dismayed, discouraged and enraged Republicans who were not psychologically braced for it.

When people are attempting to manipulate your perceptions, your awareness of their effort is your first defense. Your second defense is your knowledge of the underlying reality. Long experience in following campaigns and polls would forewarn you that (a) all presidential campaigns get a poll “bounce” from their conventions, (b) the liberal media’s enthusiasm for Obama would make his “bounce” larger, and (c) none of this changes the underlying reality that the economy sucks.

Americans are not as stupid and gullible as the liberal media would like to think, and so the coordinated effort to turn Obama’s “bounce” into a decisive shift in the campaign has predictably failed:

Last week’s Democratic National Convention helped President Obama improve his standing against Republican Mitt Romney, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, but did little to reduce voter concern about his handling of the economy.
The survey shows that the race remains close among likely voters, with Obama at 49 percent and Romney at 48 percent, virtually unchanged from a poll taken just before the conventions.
But among a wider sample of all registered voters, Obama holds an apparent edge, topping Romney at 50 percent to 44 percent, and has clear advantages on important issues in the campaign when compared with his rival.

What does this tell you? Even after a week of the media’s giggly schoolgirl gushing during the Democrat convention, the most active and engaged citizens — “likely voters” — harbor such profound doubts about Obama’s economic policies that it is still a dead heat. Whatever actual edge Obama has over Romney occurs among the “low-information voters” who aren’t even sure they’ll vote.

Yesterday’s CNN poll that produced such indignation — showing Obama leading 52-46 — was a  statistical outlier, a dot far outside the main cluster of the scatter chart.

The idea that the electorate shifted a full six points in the span of a week (the same CNN poll had the race tied at 48% a week earlier) is absurd. People do not suddenly change their minds that way, merely because of speeches at a convention — especially a convention where the incumbent seeking re-election is less popular than President Blowjob.

This is not to say that media manipulation is irrelevant or harmless. John Nolte rips Politico today for its transparent effort to create an “Inevitability Narrative” for Obama:

[Politico editors John] Harris and [Jim] VandeHei and their team of shameless JournOlisters don’t give a damn about the jobless or the poor or the middle class or the concept of objective and honest reporting — all Harris and VandeHei and their team of shameless JournOlisters care about is dragging Their Precious One over the finish line.
Obama-hugger gets more attention than 368,000 people dropping out of the workforce.
Romney not mentioning the troops in his speech gets more attention that Obama blowing his speech entirely.
Democrats booing God and Israel at their convention gets 1/50th the attention Clint Eastwood received.
Ryan’s marathon brag gets more attention than middle class incomes falling.
Romney’s tax returns get more attention than the increase in poverty.
Ryan being branded a liar for telling the truth about that GM plant in Janesville gets more attention than manufacturing contracting three months in a row.
And over the next 57 days, the dishonest, corrupt Politico will only get worse.

The “news” at Politico is all about gloomy clouds for Romney, while the sun is always shining in Obamaville.

Do not be deceived, and do not be discouraged.

The economy still sucks.

 

 

RECENTLY:


Obama Campaign Fundraising Claim Deserves More Than a Few Grains of Salt

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August was not yet over when word got around during the Republican convention in Tampa that Romney and the GOP had raised more than $100 million in August — their third consecutive month of nine-digit fundraising. The Democrats had nothing to say in reply at that time. You could hear the crickets chirping at Obama HQ in Chicago.

OK, so overnight the Romney campaign announced a specific figure — $111.6 million — for August and immediately the Democrats answered with the claim that they’d raised $114 million, resulting in a blitz of headlines like this:

Obama beats Romney
in August fundraising
— Washington Post

Obama fundraising edges
out Romney in August
— CBS News

This news contributes to the sense of a shift toward Obama, but permit me to offer an important caveat: We won’t get the official Federal Election Commission reports for another 10 days, and the official numbers on those reports may add up to different totals than those announced by the two campaigns. There isn’t any law that requires campaigns to tell the truth in their public statements about fundraising, and if you think Democrats wouldn’t fudge the numbers in order to gain a 10-day advantage in the media narrative of the campaign, you have a far higher estimate of Democrat probity than I do.

Be that as it may, however, even if we take the total fundraising numbers at face value, there remains the question of “burn rate.”

Ever since May, we’ve seen the Democrats burning through campaign cash faster than they can bring it in. The Obama campaign has built a very expensive infrastructure, with high fixed costs for staff salaries, and they launched an early ad blitz this summer in key swing states, at a time when the Romney campaign was hoarding its resources in preparation for the fall season. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air calls our attention to this detail from a Politico reporter:

Romney’s campaign, including the RNC and state parties it raises money through, have about $168.5 million cash on hand. The Obama camp has not announced how much they have.

Right. Some readers may remember how angry I got toward the Gingrich campaign in March, when Newt was acting like he was still Mitt’s chief GOP rival at a time when it was obvious to me — and to any experienced observer — that his campaign’s burn rate was out of control and that they were running up huge debts with no chance to win, thereby hurting Santorum’s chance to stop Romney.

Manipulating perceptions is part of the game in politics, largely because so many people are swayed by bandwagon psychology and susceptible to confirmation bias, believing what they want to believe. If you aren’t braced to expect these manipulations, you can be misled. This was why the Romney campaign felt obliged to issue a warning against panic in the face of the post-convention media blitz suggesting that Obama’s already won the election. And this was also why I felt the need to remind readers of a campaign that faced an even worse blitz of slanted media coverage:

Sixty-four days remain in the 2012 presidential campaign. Election Day is nine weeks from tomorrow, both party conventions are now in the rearview mirror, and Mitt Romney’s uphill battle to unseat President Obama has reached its most crucial phase. Everything that happened before today was merely prelude to this, the heart of the fall campaign season, and no “expert” can confidently predict today what the final result will be on November 6.
These basic facts are important to establish at the outset of any discussion of the current state of the race, because there are many influential people who would like you to believe that the outcome of the election has somehow already been determined, and that they have clairvoyant insight on what that outcome will be. But why bring Nate Silver into this?
Silver is the poll-analyzing guru of the New York Times, whose reputation as a wizard was developed in crunching baseball statistics before being applied to political campaigns. On Saturday afternoon, Silver published an analysis which asserted that Obama now has a nearly 80 percent chance of winning the election, with 317 Electoral College votes and 52 percent of the popular vote. All of which is very interesting — and very important, if true.
However, baseball isn’t politics, and public-opinion polls are not batting averages or on-base percentages or any other such metric of past performance. Readers of Michael Lewis’s bestseller Moneyball may appreciate this distinction, especially if they have any extensive experience in following polls and election campaigns. For myself, to cite just one example, I recall the Sunday in October 2010 when I arrived in New York’s 25th Congressional District and was greeted by a Syracuse Post-Standard headline proclaiming that Democrat Rep. Dan Maffei had opened up a 12-point lead over Republican challenger Ann Marie Buerkle with barely two weeks remaining until Election Day. There was a mood of grim determination at the Buerkle campaign events I attended that Sunday and Monday, and I was far from certain that she could pull off an upset. On Election Night, the vote was “too close to call” and it was only after an extended recount that Buerkle was declared the winner — two days before Thanksgiving — by a margin of fewer than 600 votes. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

 

 


Why Don’t We Just Give In To Low Self-Esteem And Re-Elect Barack?

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by Smitty

Building on the theme of this Power Line post, let’s just admit that:

  • We can’t have nice things.
  • Our ancestors were bad.
  • Taking our turn at the bottom of the global gutter is the only way we can hope to be shriven of the defects that Barack has identified in our national character.

I, for one, welcome my finger-pointing overlord. Stockholm Syndrome, they say, is good for the karma. Whip me, beat me, make me vote Democrat.

Jeremiah Wright Rates A Second Look In The Light Of D’Souza’s 2016

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by Smitty

Red State serves the mix:

If we’re subscribing to the 2016 thesis that BHO Junior is informed by Senior’s anti-colonial politics, then Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation theology dovetails nicely with the anti-Colonialism to demonize the United States and offer the country up as a target for punishment. That’s a fairly crude and simplistic connection of dots. Let’s call it a theory for now, and see how much explanatory power the idea has with respect to Obama’s record, for example, acting as a roadblock to the Keystone XL pipeline.

Generalizing a bit, it seems that a vast amount of our political dialogue is what I’ll call argumentum ad culpam (for which coinage I feel kinda bad). The capacity to manipulate feelings of guilt in you positively  (the 1787 U.S. Constitution was silent on the scourge of slavery) and negatively (you may not be culpable for your monstrous hormonal urges) is weapons-grade political plutonium, currently dropping economic bombs on a country near you.

When having a discussion with another, pay attention to what degree the arguments in play are straightforward appeals to how you should feel bad about something to which you’ve no connection, and how we ought to expand government to ‘solve’ this matter.

More at Nice Deb.

Update: linked at Jackie Wellfonder

Update II: why am I surprised, Bill? I guess I’m taken aback by the complicity of the mainstream media, not to team up and get their dude elected, but to commit suicide like this.