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Friday with the ‘hammer – Obama wages war just like a professor; and the weakest war president ever?

by Mojambo ( 212 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, History, Libya at March 25th, 2011 - 2:30 pm

As Dr. K. points out – Obama wages a military campaign as if it were drawn up in the faculty lounge of Harvard University. We do not even call it a war, it is a kinetic military action in which we do not even seek to overthrow Gaddafi but instead are trying to get the lunatic to be “more reasonable”.

by Charles Krauthammer

President Obama is proud of how he put together the Libyan operation. A model of international cooperation. All the necessary paperwork. Arab League backing. A Security Council resolution. (Everything but a resolution from the Congress of the United States, a minor inconvenience for a citizen of the world.) It’s war as designed by an Ivy League professor.

True, it took three weeks to put this together, during which time Moammar Gaddafi went from besieged, delusional (remember those youthful protesters on “hallucinogenic pills”) thug losing support by the hour — to resurgent tyrant who marshaled his forces, marched them to the gates of Benghazi and had the U.S. director of national intelligence predicting that “the regime will prevail.”

But what is military initiative and opportunity compared with paper? Well, let’s see how that paper multilateralism is doing. The Arab League is already reversing itself, criticizing the use of force it had just authorized. Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, is shocked — shocked! — to find that people are being killed by allied airstrikes. This reaction was dubbed mystifying by one commentator, apparently born yesterday and thus unaware that the Arab League has forever been a collection of cynical, warring, unreliable dictatorships of ever-shifting loyalties. A British soccer mob has more unity and moral purpose. Yet Obama deemed it a great diplomatic success that the League deigned to permit others to fight and die to save fellow Arabs for whom 19 of 21 Arab states have yet to lift a finger. And what about that brilliant U.N. resolution?

Russia’s Vladimir Putin is already calling the Libya operation a medieval crusade.

China is calling for a cease-fire in place — which would completely undermine the allied effort by leaving Gaddafi in power, his people at his mercy and the country partitioned and condemned to ongoing civil war.

Brazil joined China in that call for a cease-fire. This just hours after Obama ended his fawning two-day Brazil visit. Another triumph of presidential personal diplomacy.

And how about NATO? Let’s see. As of this writing, Britain wanted the operation to be led by NATO. France adamantly disagreed, citing Arab sensibilities. Germany wanted no part of anything, going so far as to pull four of its ships from NATO command in the Mediterranean. France and Germany walked out of a NATO meeting on Monday, while Norway had planes in Crete ready to go but refused to let them fly until it had some idea who the hell is running the operation. And Turkey, whose prime minister four months ago proudly accepted the Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights, has been particularly resistant to the Libya operation from the beginning.

And as for the United States, who knows what American policy is. Administration officials insist we are not trying to bring down Gaddafi, even as the president insists that he must go. Although on Tuesday Obama did add “unless he changes his approach.” Approach, mind you. In any case, for Obama, military objectives take a back seat to diplomatic appearances. The president is obsessed with pretending that we are not running the operation — a dismaying expression of Obama’s view that his country is so tainted by its various sins that it lacks the moral legitimacy to … what? Save Third World people from massacre? Obama seems equally obsessed with handing off the lead role.

[….]

Read the rest – The professor’s war

Nile Gardiner states what is increasingly obvious, that Barack Obama is the weakest United States commander-in-chief ever ( I used to think that LBJ was the worst war president, and James K. Polk the best one we ever had). I know there are Jimmy Carter “fans” who would contest Obama’s title ! How I wish that Ronald Reagan were at the helm (or even Margaret Thatcher!).

by Nile Gardiner

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll released today reveals a striking lack of public confidence in President Obama’s ability as Commander-in-Chief, with just 17 percent of Americans describing his leadership as “strong and decisive”, compared to 36 percent who believe it is “indecisive and dithering”. This should come as no surprise as the Obama administration floundered for several weeks before even committing to international efforts to rein in Colonel Gaddafi.

As NATO prepares to take over command of the no-fly zone in Libya, there remains a great deal of confusion in Washington as to exactly what the US role will be, and what kind of endgame is envisaged by the White House. While the US military has been extensively involved in missile strikes against Libyan targets, the lead role in the campaign on the world stage has been taken on by Great Britain and France, with President Obama playing a distinctly back seat role.

The president has come under heavy fire from both sides of the political aisle in Washington for failing to assert strong US leadership, and hesitating to outline a clear strategy moving forward on Libya. His administration seems almost paralysed in terms of decision-making, and has barely consulted the US Congress. In sharp contrast, British Prime Minister David Cameron has made a direct appeal to Parliament, outlining the reasons why Britain is intervening in Libya, and why he is putting the British armed forces in harms way.

[…]

Whatever the role of NATO in the Libyan mission, US leadership remains vital, both within the alliance and as part of any coalition of the willing. At this time, President Obama appears to have gone AWOL, leaving his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to outline the latest US position. America is now engaged in military operations in North Africa, but led by a president who increasingly makes Jimmy Carter look like General Patton. This is not a moment for weakness and vacillation but a time for American assertiveness and self-confidence in the face of a monstrous tyrant who has brutalised his own people for decades and murdered hundreds of Americans.

Read the rest – Is President Obama the weakest commander-in-chief in US history?

Tags: Charles Krauthammer, Nile Gardiner
Posted in Barack Obama, History, Libya | 212 Comments »

Friday with the ‘hammer – Obama prepares to lead the charge against entitlement reform; and the Democrats weird budget ‘logic’

by Mojambo ( 237 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Economy, government at March 11th, 2011 - 1:30 pm

Dr. K reminds us that our FICA taxes are not put away in some “lock box” to be returned to us in the form of social security/medicare benefits when we retire. Essentially we are paying the benefits for current retirees and the remainder is going back to the United States Treasury to pay for infrastructure. When Social Security was first introduced the average life expectancy in America was around 62years old, but using the current actuarial statistics we are going to be running out of money to pay for the entitlements. Sadly, social security reform is the “third rail” of American politics i.e. instant death because left-wing politicians will demagogue the issue whenever responsible people seek to reform the S.S.A. with cries of “The Republicans are going to take away your benefits”. Barack Obama – who views himself not as president but king of the United States, will pass the problem on to his successor.

by Charles Krauthammer

Everyone knows that the U.S. budget is being devoured by entitlements. Everyone also knows that of the Big Three – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – Social Security is the most solvable.

Back-of-an-envelope solvable: Raise the retirement age, tweak the indexing formula (from wage inflation to price inflation) and means-test so that Warren Buffett’s check gets redirected to a senior in need.

The relative ease of the fix is what makes the Obama administration’s Social Security strategy so shocking. The new line from the White House is: no need to fix it because there is no problem. As Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew wrote in USA Today just a few weeks ago, the trust fund is solvent until 2037. Therefore, Social Security is now off the table in debt-reduction talks.

This claim is a breathtaking fraud.

The pretense is that a flush trust fund will pay retirees for the next 26 years. Lovely, except for one thing: The Social Security trust fund is a fiction.

If you don’t believe me, listen to the OMB’s own explanation (in the Clinton administration budget for fiscal 2000 under then-Director Jack Lew, the very same). The OMB explained that these trust fund “balances” are nothing more than a “bookkeeping” device. “They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits.”

In other words, the Social Security trust fund contains – nothing.

Here’s why. When your FICA tax is taken out of your paycheck, it does not get squirreled away in some lockbox in West Virginia where it’s kept until you and your contemporaries retire. Most goes out immediately to pay current retirees, and the rest (say, $100) goes to the U.S. Treasury – and is spent. On roads, bridges, national defense, public television, whatever – spent, gone.

[…]

On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia denounced Obama for lack of leadership on the debt. It’s worse than that. Obama is showing leadership. With Lew’s preposterous claim that Social Security is solvent for 26 years, Obama is preparing to lead the charge against entitlement reform as his ticket to reelection.

Read the rest: Et tu, Jack Lew

Jonah gives us a good example of what frugality means to a Democrat.

by Jonah Goldberg

By earth-logic, if you got a raise of 10 percent last year, but this year you’re only getting a raise of 8 percent, you’re still getting a raise. On Planet Washington, that qualifies as an indefensible slashing.

So when the GOP cut $4 billion from the budget last week, the Democrats acted as if it was an involuntary amputation.

Now the GOP wants to cut $61 billion of discretionary nondefense spending from the total budget of $3.7 trillion, and Democrats are responding as if this will spell the end of Western civilization.

But given their terror of forcing a government shutdown, Democrats were forced to counteroffer with a cut of $10.5 billion, or 0.28 percent of the federal budget.

Imagine you have a budget of $10,000 (about 40 percent of it borrowed on a credit card), then “slash” 28 bucks. That’s what it’s like to be a frugal Democrat.

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace repeatedly pressed Sen. Dick Durbin: Is $10.5 billion in cuts “really the best the Democrats can do?” The No. 2 Senate Democrat responded, eventually: “We’ve pushed this to the limit.” Any cuts beyond that would simply crater our economy and gut “investments” to make us competitive with China. Apparently, Durbin thinks trimming the staff at the Oregon National Laboratory will result in us all becoming busboys at a Beijing restaurant.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s solution to the deficit is — wait for it — spend a whole bunch more. In October, Pelosi said that every dollar spent on unemployment benefits and food stamps puts another $1.79 into economy. “It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance.”

Her latest version of teenage-mutant ninja Keynesianism is to “invest” even more on education. “Nothing brings more to the treasury than investing in education,” Pelosi said.

[….]

Would another trillion spent on education really have a greater return than, say, allowing US companies to drill for the billions of gallons of oil and the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas under our soil?

Why am I talking about Durbin and Pelosi? Well, Obama is in a fetal crouch under the Oval Office desk, muttering something about the need for courage and bipartisanship while quietly proposing $6.5 billion in cuts, which the Congressional Budget Office said is really only $4.7 billion. (That’s about $700 million more than the US spends in borrowed money every day.)

Oh, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seems determined to keep talking until the men in the white coats escort him off the Senate floor. He was last heard saying the GOP has gone crazy because it had cut funding for a Nevada cowboy-poetry festival. No, really.

In 2007, the budget was 19.6 percent of the GDP. In 2009, it went up to 25 percent of GDP. That’s where the Democrats would like to see it stay.

[…..]

We owe $14 trillion we don’t have. Our total liabilities — i.e., Social Security and other entitlements — dwarf that. So we can’t just cut discretionary spending alone. But if it’s this hard to ask cowboy poets to pony up, how are we going to deal with what everyone agrees is the much harder stuff?

Read the rest Planet Washington

Tags: Charles Krauthammer
Posted in Barack Obama, Economy, government | 237 Comments »

Friday with the ‘hammer – Everyone is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda

by Mojambo ( 76 Comments › )
Filed under Egypt, George W. Bush, Iraq, Libya, Middle East at March 4th, 2011 - 1:00 pm

Dr. K. points out the anomaly (and hypocrisy) of the same people who want us to get rid of Khadafy, were the same ones who denounced our getting rid of Saddam Hussein (a far bloodier tyrant). The so called Arabs street in Libya is now actually calling for the return of George W. Bush (you do not hear any one putting much stock in Barack Obama). Although the Iraqi War was badly handled in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, it is possible that the verdict though still out on the Bush Doctrine, might not be as unfavorable as the liberals think it will be.

by Charles Krauthammer

Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the United States has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism.

A strange moral inversion, considering that Hussein’s evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gaddafi’s. Gaddafi is a capricious killer; Hussein was systematic. Gaddafi was too unstable and crazy to begin to match the Baathist apparatus: a comprehensive national system of terror, torture and mass murder, gassing entire villages to create what author Kanan Makiya called a “Republic of Fear.”

Moreover, that systemized brutality made Hussein immovable in a way that Gaddafi is not. Barely armed Libyans have already seized half the country on their own. Yet in Iraq, there was no chance of putting an end to the regime without the terrible swift sword (it took all of three weeks) of the United States.

No matter the hypocritical double standard. Now that revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda, it’s not just Iraq that has slid into the memory hole. Also forgotten is the once proudly proclaimed “realism” of Years One and Two of President Obama’s foreign policy – the “smart power” antidote to Bush’s alleged misty-eyed idealism.

[…]

It’s Yemen’s president and the delusional Gaddafi who are railing against American conspiracies to rule and enslave. The demonstrators in the streets of Egypt, Iran and Libya have been straining their eyes for America to help. They are not chanting the antiwar slogans – remember “No blood for oil”? – of the American left. Why would they? America is leaving Iraq having taken no oil, having established no permanent bases, having left behind not a puppet regime but a functioning democracy. This, after Iraq’s purple-fingered exercises in free elections seen on television everywhere set an example for the entire region.

Facebook and Twitter have surely mediated this pan-Arab (and Iranian) reach for dignity and freedom. But the Bush Doctrine set the premise.

Read the rest: From Baghdad to Benghazi

Tags: Charles Krauthammer
Posted in Egypt, George W. Bush, Iraq, Libya, Middle East | 76 Comments »

Friday with the ‘hammer – The Blinding Clarity of Reactionary Liberalism

by Mojambo ( 152 Comments › )
Filed under Democratic Party, Economy, Elections 2012, Liberal Fascism, Progressives, Republican Party at February 25th, 2011 - 2:00 pm

Dr. K. feels that finally the Republican Party has a wedge issue to separate themselves from the Democratic Party. An issue that the majority of Americans seem to understand and to agree with which is that public sector unions – thanks to enabling politicians – have run amok with an arrogant sense of entitlement (due to Democrats and to “compassionate conservatives” such as George Pataki, i.e. the political heirs of Nelson Rockefeller). The key question is – will the Republicans stand firm and hold the line? If they do, we might actually have a chance in 2012.

by Charles Krauthammer

The magnificent turmoil now gripping statehouses in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and soon others marks an epic political moment. The nation faces a fiscal crisis of historic proportions and, remarkably, our muddled, gridlocked, allegedly broken politics have yielded singular clarity.

At the federal level, President Obama’s budget makes clear that Democrats are determined to do nothing about the debt crisis, while House Republicans have announced that beyond their proposed cuts in discretionary spending, their April budget will actually propose real entitlement reform. Simultaneously, in Wisconsin and other states, Republican governors are taking on unsustainable, fiscally ruinous pension and health-care obligations, while Democrats are full-throated in support of the public-employee unions crying, “Hell, no.”

A choice, not an echo: Democrats desperately defending the status quo; Republicans charging the barricades.

Wisconsin is the epicenter. It began with economic issues. When Gov. Scott Walker proposed that state workers contribute more to their pension and health-care benefits, he started a revolution. Teachers called in sick. Schools closed. Demonstrators massed at the capitol. Democratic senators fled the state to paralyze the Legislature.

Unfortunately for them, that telegenic faux-Cairo scene drew national attention to the dispute – and to the sweetheart deals the public-sector unions had negotiated for themselves for years. They were contributing a fifth of a penny on a dollar of wages to their pensions and one-fourth what private-sector workers pay for health insurance.

The unions quickly understood that the more than 85 percent of Wisconsin not part of this privileged special-interest group would not take kindly to “public servants” resisting adjustments that still leave them paying less for benefits than private-sector workers. They immediately capitulated and claimed they were only protesting the other part of the bill, the part about collective-bargaining rights.

Indeed. Walker understands that a one-time giveback means little. The state’s financial straits – a $3.6 billion budget shortfall over the next two years – did not come out of nowhere. They came largely from a half-century-long power imbalance between the unions and the politicians with whom they collectively bargain.

In the private sector, the capitalist knows that when he negotiates with the union, if he gives away the store, he loses his shirt. In the public sector, the politicians who approve any deal have none of their own money at stake. On the contrary, the more favorably they dispose of union demands, the more likely they are to be the beneficiary of union largess in the next election. It’s the perfect cozy setup.

[…]

We have heard everyone – from Obama’s own debt commission to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – call the looming debt a mortal threat to the nation. We have watched Greece self-immolate. We can see the future. The only question has been: When will the country finally rouse itself?

Amazingly, the answer is: now. Led by famously progressive Wisconsin – Scott Walker at the state level and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan at the congressional level – a new generation of Republicans has looked at the debt and is crossing the Rubicon. Recklessly principled, they are putting the question to the nation: Are we a serious people?