Category: Barack Obama

Obama: Dream and Reality

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

The aspirational presidency and its predictable failure:

When they found him, he was a rare breed: a genuine African American (his father was Kenyan) who thought and talked like the academics on both sides of his family, a product of the faculty lounge who dabbled in urban/race politics, a man who could speak to both ends of the liberals’ up-and-down coalition, and a would-be transformer of our public life whose quiet voice and low-key demeanor conveyed “moderation” in all that he spoke and did. Best of all, he was the person whom the two branches of the liberal kingdom — the academics and journalists — wanted to be, a man who shared their sensibilities and their views of the good and the beautiful. This was the chance of a lifetime to shape the world to their measure. He and they were the ones they were waiting for, and with him, they longed for transcendent achievements. But in the event they were undone by . . . their signature weaknesses: They had too much belief in the brilliance of experts, they were completely dismissive of public opinion, and they had a contempt for the great middle class.
From the beginning, they made it clear that the Obama regime would be different from all others that had come before. The damaged economy was the critical issue, but the creation of jobs took a back seat to boutique left-wing causes. The stimulus, costing more than a trillion dollars, came and went leaving nothing behind it, unlike the spending of FDR’s era, which at least for a while gave jobs to real people, and left behind things like bridges and dams and parks. “Climate change” had become an obsession, symbolized by the refusal to act on the Keystone pipeline proposal, which would have created jobs in Middle America, but which Obama’s Hollywood backers denounced as unclean. . . .

Read the whole thing at The Weekly Standard. Has the Earth begun to heal? Have the oceans begun to recede? I think not.

 

So What If The #VA Scandal Is Just #ObamaCare Meets #Benghazi?

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by Smitty

Americans in general and veterans in particular are far too spun up about the VA scandal. This has led to at least one scurrilous photo-bumming incident already. And why? What difference, at this point, do these veterans make? The WSJ gets it all wrong:

The recent revelations about the Department of Veterans Affairs point to serious problems. But the root of the scandal is not what self-serving bureaucrats failed to do or tried to cover up; it is a federal budget that prevents us from meeting even the national needs on which our polarized political parties can agree.
Whatever the disagreements about the long wars of the past decades, Democrats and Republicans agree that we must fully honor the debt we have incurred to the tiny fraction of the population that does the fighting for the rest of us. Yes, the budget for the VA has risen sharply since 2002. But the number of returning veterans has risen even faster. Many live with grievous wounds from which they would have succumbed in previous conflicts. Many others struggle with the multiple effects of repeated deployments. Aging Vietnam-era patients require more care, and new responsibilities such as coping with Agent Orange add to the VA’s burden.

Aw, c’mon: these veterans, in the main, don’t even vote correctly! And now that ObamaCare is sucking the lifeblood right out of the American healthcare system, these veterans are just a doubly useless load on a Constitutional system that has been fundamentally transformed since the 2008 election.

If these veterans aren’t given the the Doherty & Woods Special, then their block of votes could become an embarrassment for Her Majesty’s 2016 Coronation event.

Besides: American voters gave #OccupyResoluteDesk a pass in 2012. We knew him for an incompetent boob all four years leading up to Benghazi. We knew that ObamaCare was going to make the Titanic seem a minor bathtub incident by comparison.

We have begged to have our warriors treated dishonorably by a completely honor-free rodeo clown, and he hasn’t shown a smidgen of hesitation in delivering.

So. Just. Screw. Us. To. The. Wall.

Because history is going to wonder if we aren’t kind of into this stuff.

Obama the Angry

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First it was Benghazi, then it was the IRS, and now it’s the VA. Ace of Spades describes the Obama Scandal Reaction Method:

Always he says the same things:
1. He’s “mad. Or “angry.” Or “madder than hell.” Or even “apopleptic.” Obama vows he’s much, much angrier than you are — “no one is angrier than I am” — despite having no appearances of actual anger. Rather like a very controlled, uptight WASP Hulk.
2. He vows to “get to the bottom of this.” He says this in a way to suggest that he, personally, will be getting to the bottom of this. Of course he doesn’t. Within a week he’s playing golf and parcheesi with the White House motor pool.
3. Despite pronouncing this newest scandal extraordinary, he then demands that we… allow the routine, ordinary Bureaucratic Process to fix everything.
“Putting something in the process” is standard Bureaucratic jargon meaning that “nothing is being done and go f*** yourself raw.”

Media sonambulism makes it possible for him to get away with this.

 

‘Impeachable Offenses’: Obama Policy Releases Criminal Illegal Aliens

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A new book exposes malfeasance by President Obama, and the administration’s defenders are trying to “kill the messenger”:

Houston immigration attorney Raed Gonzalez claims the controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s release of tens of thousands of criminal illegal aliens is just a “publicity stunt” generated by the authors of a book documenting the case for impeaching Obama.
Gonzalez has been the liaison between the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which administers the immigration court system, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Asked about the scandal on Fox News’ “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” Gonzalez told the audience, “I think all of you fell for the publicity stunt of Mr. Elliott and miss, miss, what was it, Brenda Elliot and Mr. Aaron Klein, with their book, ‘Impeachable Offenses,’ that came out a couple of weeks ago. And they were denouncing the Obama administration for releasing all of these people.” . . .
Recently reported information about the Obama administration’s release in 2013 of 36,007 criminal illegal aliens . . . originated with internal memos from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, as cited in a report by the Center for Immigration Studies.
However, in “Impeachable Offenses: The Case to Remove Barack Obama from Office,” New York Times bestselling authors Klein and Elliott cite further ICE documentation showing the release of thousands more criminal illegals from 2009 to 2011.
“Impeachable Offenses” further documents that of the more than 7,000 criminals released in those years, some went on to be charged with 19 more murders, three attempted murders and 142 sex crimes after their release from jail by the Obama administration.
The statistics pose a grim outlook for the 36,007 additional criminal illegal aliens reportedly released last year by ICE.

Read the whole thing. Gonzalez is using a favorite liberal tactic: Trying to divert attention from a story by referring to the allegedly malicious motives of the people reporting or promoting the story. To say that Klein and Elliott are conservatives, or to say that attention to the criminal alien scandal helps Klein and Elliott sell books — well, these things may be entirely true, without changing one iota the basic facts of the story, or the policy issues involved, or the political impact of the story.

It’s like when the Left screams “Koch money!” as if the funding of any particular project by the Koch brothers immediately discredits that project. This is just a distraction tactic, and when Democrats use these tactics, they should be called out for it.

Also, you should probably buy Impeachable Offenses: The Case to Remove Barack Obama from Office by Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliott. If the Left hates it this much, it’s got to be pretty awesome.

 

Benghazi: A Hole in the Tick-Tock

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Tick-tock: Journalism jargon for a story that recounts events in chronological order, as if accompanied by the soundtrack of a ticking clock.

Last summer, at the request of American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., I spent several days trying to get the White House Press Office to answer a simple question:

The President of the United States is not only the most powerful man in the world, but also the most public, his daily life chronicled to the minute by the national press, his every word and action reported and analyzed by journalists and commentators. What the American president says and does is always automatically newsworthy and therefore it is profoundly mysterious that a hushed silence surrounds one of the most disturbing events of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Where was the president? This is a simple question, one to which the American people might reasonably expect an answer, but more than nine months after that deadly night, we still have not gotten a detailed answer and most in the media seem to have lost all interest in the question. . . .

You can read the rest. The point was, and is, that we never got the “tick-tock” version of the White House’s Benghazi story — we don’t have a timeline of where Obama was and what he was doing, during the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2012. Here we are, nearly a year later, and journalists still haven’t gotten the tick-tock. Patterico did some poking around over the weekend:

Here is an interesting tidbit from the White House Visitor Logs for 9/11/12: Obama met with three people, at an unknown time, for “debate prep.” . . .
Obama appears [from the official White House schedule] to have been gone from the White House for much of the early part of the day. He observed a moment of silence on the South Lawn; visited the Pentagon Memorial; visited veterans at Walter Reed in Bethesda; returned to the White House; and met with Leon Panetta at 5 p.m. There are not too many holes in his schedule during the day — increasing the chances that the “debate prep” took place in the evening, after the meeting with Panetta . . . in other words, when the Benghazi attack was unfolding.

Patterico makes clear we don’t know when that happened, because we never got that tick-tock, and thus the question:

“What difference, at this point, does it make?”

It makes a difference because everybody — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the likely 2016 Democrat presidential nominee — spent weeks lying about what happened.

When the truth began to trickle out, the White House press corps was negligent in its duty, and let the Benghazi lies go unexamined during the weeks while President Obama got himself re-elected.

We still don’t have the whole truth, but Democrats are calling for a “boycott” of a congressional investigation trying to get the truth, many in the media are dismissive of the investigation, and thus actively participating in this partisan cover-up!

The questions must be answered, and those who participated in the cover-up — including the media — must be held to account.

 

A Typical ObamaCare Nightmare

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The damage caused by the ObamaCare catastrophe — arguably the worst federal public policy initiative of the past 40 years — are usually discussed in terms of politics and macroeconomic statistics: X-number of jobs lost, an X-percent decline in President Obama’s poll numbers. True enough, the harms of the paradoxically named “Affordable Care Act” have impacted our entire society, hindering economic growth, incentivizing job losses, and resulting in policy cancellations and higher premiums for millions of Americans.

The very worst has been suffered by small businesses (both owners and employees) and by self-employed independent contractors. Statistics cannot adequately express what at an unprecedented nightmare many people have gone through. One of these ObamaCare victms, blogger Rich Vail, describes his frightening ordeal:

Last fall we received a letter saying that because of the myriad of changes that HHS had ordered health insurance companies to make to individual policies that were purchased on the open insurance market, that our health insurance would be cancelled…and it was despite they lies presented by President Obama and Sen’s Ben Cardin and Barbara Mikulski. “If you like your insurance, you can keep it, period.”
Because last year was a pretty good year for me, we don’t qualify for subsidies…so my insurance which had costs us $132 per month rose to $137 per week. We had the choice of paying that or the rent…
The problem now is that I have four fractured ribs…

Read the whole thing and please hit Rich’s tip jar. I did.

 

Goldberg Misses His Own Punchline

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by Smitty

Goldberg goes for a fairly straightforward South Park play in discussing Obama’s foreign policy, “Obama’s foreign-policy plan B”, but misses the obvious gag: the whole thing is an extended Plan B Abortion pill.

Keith Koffler enumerates, by country, most of #OccupyResoluteDesk’s non-triumphs. He’s missing my personal favorite, and Obama’s first cock-up, which was Honduras.

David Haig, as Inspector Grim, speaks to Obama for all of us:

No, Barack’s foreign policy has never been other than a phoned-in, hashtagged abortion. In his defense, it’s just never easy. As tempting as an isolationism sounds, that’s not going to work. However, Obama’s superficial non-interventionism, backed by Spec Ops guys and drones in the night, is proving an expensive lesson in how not to do it, either.

While falling short of jumping on the neo-con bandwagon, I hope the GOP can craft a foreign policy featuring principle, simplicity and strength. Such would counterbalance Obama’s chaotic, Byzantine weakness.

If we can’t have John Bolton for POTUS, let’s at least have him for Secretary of State. After the last two buffoons, we need somebody to pick up the pieces.

Scapegoated for ObamaCare Failures, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Resigns

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Thursday’s resignation of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is the biggest move yet in President Obama’s effort to rescue his signature government health-insurance plan, and to limit the political impact of the program’s failure.

The administration and its allies are trying to convince Americans that problems with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are just temporary technical glitches with a website — the “botched rollout” narrative — rather than fundamental flaws with the law itself.

Sebelius’s resignation fits that narrative, permitting Democrats and their media sympathizers to claim that problems with ObamaCare were caused by the former HHS secretary’s incompetence, and not by any basic problem in the president’s program. This is likely to become a key issue in the campaign for the fall mid-term elections, in which Republicans seeking to capture the Senate majority will argue that ObamaCare is a complete failure that should be repealed, while Democrats will say the policy is successful, but simply had a few early glitches that have now been fixed. Liberal blogger Ezra Klein offers the Democrat spin:

Obamacare has won. And that’s why Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius can resign.
Calls for Sebelius’s resignation were almost constant after Obamacare’s catastrophic launch. The problem wasn’t just that Sebelius had presided over the construction of a fantastically expensive web site that flatly didn’t work. It was that she didn’t know healthcare.gov was going to instantly, systemically fail. And so the White House didn’t know that healthcare.gov was going to instantly, systemically fail. The demands that Sebelius to step down — or be fired — were as deafening inside the building as outside of it.
But President Obama refused. As National Journal’s Major Garrett reported, Obama believes that “scaring people with a ceremonial firing deepens fear, turns allies against one another, makes them risk-averse, and saps productivity.” Moreover, there was too much to be done to fire one of the few people who knew how to finish the job. Sebelius would stay. The White House wouldn’t panic in ways that made it harder to save the law.
The evidence has piled up in recent weeks that the strategy worked. Obamacare’s first year, despite a truly horrific start, was a success. More than 7 million people look to have signed up for health insurance through the exchanges. Millions more have signed up through Medicaid. And millions beyond that have signed up for insurance through their employers.

In Klein’s pro-Obama narrative, then, not only is ObamaCare a successful policy, but the president’s handling of problems with the website’s launch demonstrated his competence as an executive.

Ben Domenech offers the conservative interpretation:

Kathleen Sebelius is resigning, and Rachel Maddow is right to not be happy about it, not one little bit. For once, I completely agree with Maddow’s analysis. This surprise resignation presents Republicans with an unexpected opportunity to refocus the conversation on Obamacare’s negatives, offers a chance to force vulnerable Senate Democrats to take a hard vote on Obamacare six months before the midterms, and serves to disrupt what had been a positive few days of media spin for the health care law into another conversation about its many failings.

Domenech sees the upcoming confirmation vote for Sebelius’s appointed successor at HHS — Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Matthews Burwell — as a “golden opportunity” for Senate Republicans “to reignite their crusade against Obamacare,” forcing Democrats to give an up-or-down vote on a nominee who will serve as a “proxy” symbol for the program’s failures.

Domenech should caution his GOP friends on Capitol Hill to tread carefully, as Democrats and their media allies may be luring Republicans into a “War on Women” trap, setting up a situation in which a bunch of old white guys are seen attacking a female nominee.

This trap could best be avoided simply by calling attention to how the administration is deliberately setting up Burwell.

Having made one woman (Sebelius) a scapegoat for ObamaCare’s failures to date, now the White House disingenuously shoves another top female administration official into the political meat-grinder, hoping to obtain a short-term political benefit from Burwell’s public humiliation in Senate hearings. Considering how Hillary Clinton was scapegoated for the Benghazi massacre, Republicans might well ask, “Why does Obama always blame women for his failures?”