Category: Barack Obama

The Media’s President

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

Da Tech Guy makes the obvious point: The reason the media aren’t going after the IRS scandal is because Barack Obama is their president. Not since JFK’s fictitious “Camelot” have the media invested so heavily in maintaining the image of a president, an image of competence and success that can be maintained only by ignoring all contrary evidence and pretending that all criticism of Obama is racist — RAAAAACIST!

This is more than just “liberal bias,” it’s outright dishonesty, made easier by the blind partisan hatred of Republicans that has become prevalent among journalists since the Bush era. Reporters and editors were convinced (and remain convinced) that George W. Bush (a) “stole” the 2000 election, and (b) lied about the Iraq war, which all Democrats believe was fought for bad motives — and Democrats outnumber Republicans in the press corps by a factor of at least 5-to-1.

Even if you set aside the usual liberal prejudices about Republicans — that they are greedy, hateful, sexist, racist homophobes who destroy the environment for profit — the Iraq war confirmed in the minds of the press corps what they already believed, that Republicans are dishonest warmongers. Thus, the media believe, it is not only a professional obligation but also a matter of civic duty that journalists do all they can to ensure no Republican is ever elected president again.

Among the multitudinous ramifications of this belief system is the despicable prejudice of James Fallows, a Democrat Party hack of the most shameless sort: “James Fallows of The Atlantic and Media Matters are on a crusade to silence Republicans from ever appearing or have their voices heard in the Media.” Joe Fein was trying to call attention to this problem on Twitter a few days ago, but Joe was so angry about it he couldn’t make his point clearly. I understand: The mere thought of James Fallows should make any honest man angry.

When I was in Mississippi to cover the GOP primary a couple weeks ago, I sat next to Molly Ball of the Atlantic. The association between Fallows and the Atlantic came to mind and I went off on a rant about that despicable fraud. Molly responded by assuring me that James Fallows is a very nice person and, alas, I didn’t have the presence of mind to invoke The Banality of Evil. Of course, the press corps is nowadays so crammed full of despicable frauds that it is perhaps unfair to single out Fallows, except that he has been practicing this fraudulence for so  many years and is in some sense typical of Our Moral Superiors™ — the elite-educated fools whose contempt for the common sense of ordinary Americans is so dangerous because it is entirely unconscious.

Whenever I think of James Fallows, I immediately think of The Vision of the Anointed, a book no liberal has ever read, because if they ever read it, they wouldn’t be liberals anymore. But I digress . . .

The decline of Obama’s approval ratings must disturb Fallows and his comrades among Our Moral Superiors™ — how can the American people be so ungrateful for the presidency that the media have so diligently sold them? Of course, Fallows could answer the question easily, by referencing his belief that the American people are profoundly stupid.

And if all other explanations fail: RAAAAACISM!

 

Call Implausible IRS Lie About ‘Lost’ Emails What It Is: Obstruction of Justice

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Democrats lie routinely and habitually, and are accustomed to having their lies accepted without question by the media. It is therefore significant that the media are openly mocking the preposterous claim that Lois Lerner’s emails have been “lost”:

Last Friday afternoon, the Internal Revenue Service claimed that Lois Lerner, a former executive tasked with overseeing tax-exemption applications, lost thousands of emails after her computer crashed. Many of those emails, the tax collection agency claimed, could not be recovered.
This convenient excuse for failing to comply with a request from House investigators is not sitting well with some in the journalistic community.
“Do you believe in the Easter Bunny?” CNN’s John King asked his panel of political reporters on Monday. “Do you believe in Santa Claus? Do you believe that Lois Lerner’s emails suddenly went ‘poof?’” . . .
In a sardonic segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday, hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough ruthlessly mocked the notion that a hardware crash could eliminate files stored on remote servers.
“Mika, even you have to admit this is pretty ridiculous,” Scarborough probed.
“Pretty ridiculous,” Brzezinski replied. “Those emails exist.”
Perhaps made uncomfortable by the implications surrounding this admission, Brzezinski quickly changed topics.

Of course, Democrats want to change topics, because “the implications surrounding this admission” are logically obvious: If we know the administration is lying about the “lost” emails, why are they lying?

The only logical explanation: Lois Lerner’s emails, subpoenaed by congressional investigators, must include evidence that the IRS targeting of conservative groups was approved by the White House.

This is what the “lost” email lie is intended to conceal. It can have no other purpose. For the past year, Democrats and their media allies have insisted that this is a “phony scandal,” even while evidence and testimony disproved a series of excuses offered by the administration, e.g., that the targeting was the work of a few “rogue” employees in the Cincinnati IRS office. The so-called “investigation” by the Justice Department is part of the cover-up, a whitewash designed to hide the truth of the scandal.

Ever since this scandal first became public, congressional investigators have believed (although they would never say so, on the record) that the IRS targeted Tea Party groups because of political pressure from the White House and congressional Democrats. If the IRS has deliberately destroyed (or attempted to conceal) relevant evidence, we need not wonder why. Cleta Mitchell is not deceived:

Federal courts have held, in the context of trial, that the bad faith destruction of evidence relevant to proof of an issue gives rise to an inference that production of the evidence would have been unfavorable to the party responsible for its destruction. . . . The fact that the IRS is statutorily required to preserve these records yet nevertheless publicly claimed that they have been “lost” appears to evidence bad faith.

It’s time to call this what it so obviously is: Obstruction of justice.

 

Back to Iraq

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The “optics,” as they say, are unpleasant:

Nearly 300 armed American forces are being positioned in and around Iraq to help secure U.S. assets as President Barack Obama nears a decision on an array of options for combating fast-moving Islamic insurgents, including airstrikes or a contingent of special forces.
The U.S. and Iran also held an initial discussion on how the longtime foes might cooperate to ease the threat from the al-Qaida-linked militants that have swept through Iraq. Still, the White House ruled out the possibility that Washington and Tehran might coordinate military operations in Iraq.
Obama met with his national security team Monday evening to discuss options for stopping the militants known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Officials said the president has made no final decisions on how aggressively the U.S. might get involved in Iraq, though the White House continued to emphasize that any military engagement remained contingent on the government in Baghdad making political reforms.
Still, there were unmistakable signs of Americans returning to a country from which the U.S. military fully withdrew more than two years ago. Obama notified Congress that up to 275 troops would be sent to Iraq to provide support and security for U.S. personnel and the American Embassy in Baghdad. The soldiers — 170 of which have already arrived in Iraq — were armed for combat, though Obama has insisted he does not intend for U.S. forces to be engaged in direct fighting.
About 100 additional forces are being put on standby, most likely in Kuwait, and could be used for airfield management, security and logistics support, officials said.

As with the hasty and unwise total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, this redeployment is essentially a matter of domestic politics for the Obama administration. Having made opposition to “Bush’s war” a centerpiece of their campaign rhetoric since 2004, when John Kerry was the anti-war candidate, Democrats then nominated Barack Obama in 2008 based on his promise to completely withdraw from Iraq.

From a standpoint of policy, it would have made sense to leave at least a token military presence there — say, 5,000 troops holding a small base near the Baghdad airport — both as a tactical foothold, and to signify a continued U.S. commitment to defend a stable, peaceful and democratic Iraq. But, no, the Democrats (and Obama foremost among them) were fanatically determined to un-do all Bush had done, and so the U.S. presence had to be reduced to zero.

Now, predictably, we realize that zero was not an ideal number.

Yet it is still obvious that domestic politics — not policy — is controlling the Obama administration’s response to the Iraq crisis. While partisan apologists scramble to exculpate the president for the consequences of his errors, the administration is caught between its own pacifist commitments and the pragmatic political realization that anarchy in Iraq looks bad for “swing voters.” The pressure to “do something” — anything — was irresistible, yet Obama will make only a token deployment, too small to make a difference, because a larger deployment would be tantamount to an admission that his general policy has been all wrong.

Now, imagine the cussing of senior NCOs at Fort Bragg as they react to chatter about sending Special Forces into the Iraq mess. This scenario has “Mogadishu” written all over it and, as much as these guys love to fight for the sake of fighting, the prospect of being thrown willy-nilly into this Iraq disaster cannot be a welcome thought. The seriousness of the Iraq crisis is impossible to exaggerate:

[T]he events unfolding in Iraq point toward a much wider war, reaching from the Iranian frontier to the Mediterranean coast. The long open border between Iraq and Syria, and the big stretches of ungoverned space, has allowed extremists on each side to grow and to support one another. . . . [T]wo of the strongest groups fighting in Syria, were created by militant leaders from Iraq, many of whom had fought with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia against the United States. The vast swath of territory between the Euphrates and the Tigris — from Aleppo, in Syria, to Mosul, in Iraq — threatens to become a sanctuary for the most virulent Islamist pathologies, not unlike what flourished in Afghanistan in the years before 9/11. Among those fighting with isis and Al Nusra are hundreds of Westerners, from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. At some point, the survivors will want to go home; they will be well trained and battle-hardened.

Meanwhile, a “senior advisor” to the Obama administration is blithely describing a return of the Islamic caliphate as inevitable.

 

Shorter Krugman: ‘Kool-Aid, Anyone?’

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Delusional partisan cheerleading:

Several times in recent weeks I’ve found myself in conversations with liberals who shake their heads sadly and express their disappointment with President Obama. Why? I suspect that they’re being influenced, often without realizing it, by the prevailing media narrative.
The truth is that these days much of the commentary you see on the Obama administration — and a lot of the reporting too — emphasizes the negative: the contrast between the extravagant hopes of 2008 and the prosaic realities of political trench warfare, the troubles at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the mess in Iraq, and so on. The accepted thing, it seems, is to portray Mr. Obama as floundering, his presidency as troubled if not failed.
But this is all wrong. You should judge leaders by their achievements, not their press, and in terms of policy substance Mr. Obama is having a seriously good year. In fact, there’s a very good chance that 2014 will go down in the record books as one of those years when America took a major turn in the right direction.

A major turn in the right direction? Krugman isn’t just drinking the Kool-Aid, he’s huffing the glue and smoking the meth.

 

The Politics of Blame

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After five years of excuses, straw-man arguments and scapegoating, the Obama administration’s incompetence and irresponsibility have exhausted the patience of many Democrats, Ron Fournier reports:

The email hit my in-box at 9:41 p.m. last Wednesday.  From one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington, a close adviser to the White House, the missive amounted to an electronic eye roll. “Even I have had enough.”
Another Democrat had quit on President Obama.
The tipping point for this person was the Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl case—not the soldier-for-Taliban swap itself as much as how the White House mishandled its obligation to communicate effectively and honestly to Congress and the public. More than that, Obama’s team had failed once again to acknowledge its mistakes, preferring to cast blame and seek cover behind talking points.
“DC is hard, and depressing,” the Democrat wrote. “I still believe good comes from government (e.g. 8 million in ACA). But that Politico story is a cautionary one: good reminder that you can’t go so in the bunker [and] no longer identify legitimate criticism.” That day, Politico had posted a story channeling the White House communications team’s response to the Bergdahl backlash. . . .

Read the whole thing.