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Posts Tagged ‘Charles Krauthammer’

Disrespecting Foreign Allies

by Mojambo ( 90 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, India, UK at April 2nd, 2010 - 6:00 pm

Dr. K.  recognizes the fact that Obama is an Anglophobe, Israelphobe and has a very low opinion of Western Civilization and democracy. Last night on Cavuto I saw former mayor Ed Koch rip Obama”s attempt to turn Israel into a  pariah nation and lament the fact that he endorsed him.  I thought to myself  “Why were you so naive in the first place”?

By the way Obama’s reurn of the bust of Winston Churchill was no accident. He despises anything Churchillian and as W.C. believed that the British Commonwealth was a force for good – that makes him a devil in The One’s eyes.

by Charles Krauthammer

What is it like to be a foreign ally of Barack Obama’s America?

If you’re a Brit, your head is spinning. It’s not just the personal slights to Prime Minister Gordon Brown — the ridiculous 25-DVD gift, the five refusals before Brown was granted a one-on-one with The One.

Nor is it just the symbolism of Obama returning the Churchill bust that was in the Oval Office. Query: If it absolutely had to be out of Obama’s sight, could it not have been housed somewhere else on U.S. soil rather than ostentatiously repatriated?

Perhaps it was the State Department official who last year denied there even was a special relationship between the U.S. and Britain, a relationship cultivated by every U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt.

And then there was Hillary Clinton’s astonishing, nearly unreported (in the U.S.) performance in Argentina last month. She called for Britain to negotiate with Argentina over the Falklands.

[…]

— Obama visits China and soon Indonesia, skipping India, our natural and rising ally in the region — common language, common heritage, common democracy, common jihadist enemy. Indeed, in his enthusiasm for China, Obama suggests a Chinese interest in peace and stability in South Asia, a gratuitous denigration of Indian power and legitimacy in favor of a regional rival with hegemonic ambitions.

— Poland and the Czech Republic have their legs cut out from under them when Obama unilaterally revokes a missile defense agreement, acquiescing to pressure from Russia with its dreams of regional hegemony over Eastern Europe.

— The Hondurans still can’t figure out why the United States supported a Hugo Chavez ally seeking illegal extension of his presidency against the pillars of civil society — its Congress, Supreme Court, church and army — that had deposed him consistent with Article 239 of their own constitution.

[…]

Read the rest here: Disrespecting Foreign Allies

Friday with the ‘hammer

by Mojambo ( 196 Comments › )
Filed under Healthcare at March 26th, 2010 - 11:00 am

How people think that Obama will pay for this massive increase in the debt without somehow raising taxes (even under Obama-speak it will be a tax increase hidden under the progressive guise of liberal mumbo-jumbo word speak) is beyond me. Obama’s goal was always to turn America into a larger version of Western Europe as well as redistributing wealth  from the middle classes who worked for it, to the lower classes who do not (also to take money from America and give it to his beloved Third World).

The VAT Cometh

by Charles Krauthammer

As the night follows the day, the VAT cometh.

With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.

We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200 billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) — is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.

It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare pre-empts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare’s $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.

This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health care costs.

Obamacare was sold on the premise that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, “health care reform is entitlement reform. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost.” But the bill enacted on Tuesday accelerates the spiral: It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million new recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.

Obama knows that the debt bomb is looming, that Moody’s is warning that the Treasury’s AAA rating is in jeopardy, that we are headed for a run on the dollar and/or hyperinflation if nothing is done.

Hence his deficit reduction commission. It will report (surprise!) after the November elections.

What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.

[…]

Ultimately, even that won’t be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health care rationing.

Read the rest: The VAT Cometh

In Praise of the Rotation of Power

by Mojambo ( 206 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2010 at March 12th, 2010 - 11:00 am

Normally I would agree with Dr. K’s thesis, however Obama is no mainstream Democratic politician as JFK,  LBJ,  and Bill Clinton were. Giving him  a majority in both the House and Senate was a damn  foolish thing to do.

by Charles Krauthammer

As the Afghanistan War intensifies — Marja, soon Kandahar, and the steady arrival of 30,000 new American troops — it has come to be seen as Obama’s war.

Not so. It’s become America’s war. When the former opposition party — habitually anti-war for the last four decades — adopts, reaffirms and escalates a war begun by the habitually hawkish other party, partisanship falls away, and the war becomes nationalized.

And legitimized. Do you think if John McCain, let alone George W. Bush, were president, we would not see growing demonstrations protesting our continued presence in Iraq and the escalation of Afghanistan? That we wouldn’t see a serious push in Congress to cut off funds?

Why not? Because Barack Obama is now commander in chief. The lack of opposition is not a matter of hypocrisy. It is a natural result of the rotation of power. When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That’s its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.

In this case, the anti-war party has followed the Bush endgame to a T in Iraq and has doubled down in Afghanistan. And there is no general restiveness (at least over this).

The rotation of power is the finest political instrument ever invented for the consolidation of what were once radical and deeply divisive policies. The classic example is the New Deal. Republicans railed against it for 20 years. Then Dwight Eisenhower came to power, wisely left it intact, and no serious leader since has called for its repeal.

[…]

Read the rest: In Praise of the Rotation of Power

Rich Lowry makes a  point that I myself have mentioned many times. The irony being that Obama’s best hopes for reelection in 2012 would be for a GOP congress which could rein him in.  Quite the conundrum!

by Rich Lowry

The undertakers of Bill Clinton’s political doom showed up in Little Rock, Ark., in 1992 for a meeting with the president-elect two months before his inauguration. They were the leaders of the Democratic Congress, and they might as well have been draped in black crepe.

“You can trust us,” House Speaker Tom Foley told Clinton, in an assurance as false as it was sincere. “We all want to make this administration succeed.”

Two years later, Clinton stood among smoldering political ruins. Democrats had lost both houses of Congress. A Republican upstart had defeated Tom Foley. In trusting the Democratic leadership in Congress, Clinton had nearly destroyed his presidency.

He learned a bitter lesson in the perils of trying to govern a center-right country in league with a left-wing Congress. It’s not an accident that the most sustained period of political success for any of the last three Democratic presidents, outside of their initial honeymoons, came after Clinton lost Congress. Only then was he forced to govern from the center.

If Pres. Barack Obama is ever going to regain the ground he’s lost as a bipartisan healer determined to transcend ideological divisions, he’ll need to have Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Majority Leader Harry Reid or both shunted back to the minority. For Obama, a Republican Congress could be a counterintuitive political boon.

[…]

Read the rest here: Obama’s Best Hope: A GOP Congress

Old Weird Howard: Don’t Pass Hellcare

by snork ( 112 Comments › )
Filed under Abortion, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Healthcare, Politics, Progressives at March 5th, 2010 - 1:00 pm

It’s starting to crack. The monolithic support for ramming through socialized medicine with the nuke option is giving cold feet to none other than Howard “Scream” Dean.

Passing the healthcare proposals before Congress will “hang out to dry” every Democratic incumbent running for reelection this fall, Howard Dean said Thursday.

Dean, a physician by training who’s a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), said that Democrats in Congress — and President Barack Obama — would do themselves more harm than good by passing the current healthcare bill.

“The plan, as it comes from the Senate, hangs out every Democrat who’s running for office to dry — including the president, in 2012, because it makes him defend a plan that isn’t in effect essentially yet,” Dean said during an appearance on the liberal Bill Press Radio Show.

Ya think, Howard? So what’s up with Olosi? Are they such political nincompoops that they don’t even have the political horse sense that Howard “Scream” Dean seems to have?

I think the whole thing is over for now anyway. The reconciliation process (“nuke option”) requires that the house pass the exact bill passed in the senate. It looks like that’s not going to happen, because there are a dozen donkeys who voted for the original bill, but won’t vote for the senate version over the publicly funded abortion provisions.

So I guess it’s all over but the screaming. Take it away Howard…


Addition by Speranza:

At the Washington Examiner yesterday an Editorial compared Obama’s obsession with trying to ram Obamacare down our throats despite the public’s opposition to it, to Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. “a horrendous, bloody carnage that could have been avoided, had not their commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee, been so determined to do it his way — a massed frontal assault against a nearly impregnable position.”

hat tip to Powerline

Just about everyone who was on that battlefield July 3, 1863 knew that 12,000 men were going to be sent to their doom due to the stubbornness of their commander, the same as just about everyone in this country knows that Obamacare will lead to a disaster as well. At least Lee was man enough to say after the disaster “It is all my fault” – words that are alien to Obama. Dr. K. yesterday said that he thinks 2010 might not be the complete disaster for the Dems as 2006 was for the GOP because 1. Obama is still popular and, 2. Americans felt lied to about the war. I disagree. 1. Obama might be personally popular (primarily because too many naive people invested so much in him) but his policies are not, 2. in addition to the wildly unpopular Obamacare, we still have massive unemployment to worry about, and 3. voters are waking up to the dangers of having one party rule when the POTUS is an ideologue. I expect a Republican tidal wave in November.

by Charles Krauthammer

So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts’ devastatingly negative Jan. 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives.

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House “summit” with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans’ way.

Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of Obama’s health care bill.

[…]

Obama has chosen differently, however. The time for debate is over, declared the nation’s seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington’s wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of “budget reconciliation.” The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.

Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.

Read the rest here: Why the Health Care Bill is a Failure