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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 »

As our economic freedom declines, we must not follow the path of the European Union

by Mojambo ( 108 Comments › )
Filed under Economy, Europe, Regulation, Socialism at March 3rd, 2011 - 6:30 pm

As Daniel Hannan says in his quoted book – the difference between the American constitution and the European Union constitution is that that the United States is about the freedom of the individual, while the European Union is about the power of the state. We all know that Obama’s goal is to follow the European socialist path of economics and social welfare. Give Obama a second term, and this nation will be so entrenched in E.U. style government controls and regulations that it might take decades (if ever) to undo the damage he has done.

by Nile Gardiner

Since the Greek financial debacle last year, there has been a great deal of interest across the Atlantic in Europe’s debt crisis and the lessons that can be learned for America. Not least because the United States may face its own Greek-style economic meltdown in a few years time unless it gets its own house in order.

Fortunately, there is a new wave of political leaders on Capitol Hill who are serious about cutting spending, reining in the deficit, and challenging the Big Government culture that has dominated Washington in recent years. Principled leaders such as Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan for example, who have pledged to take an axe rather than a scalpel to public expenditure.

If any Congressman, Republican or Democrat, is looking for a succinct guide to Europe’s economic and political failure as the EU heads down the path of “ever closer union”, I would strongly recommend my fellow Telegraph blogger Daniel Hannan’s important new pamphlet, “Why America Must Not Follow Europe.”

I’ve just finished reading Dan’s latest publication, which is released this week by Encounter as part of its excellent Broadside series, and to say it is a damning indictment of the European Project would be an understatement.

[…..]

As he points out, there is a reason why Americans have for decades been richer and more economically productive than their European counterparts – less bureaucracy, lower spending, lower taxes, faster growth, and fewer people out of work. Between 1980 and 1992, excluding the UK, “the EU failed to produce a single net private sector job,” a staggering statistic. In addition, as Dan notes, Western Europe’s share of world GDP fell from 36 percent in 1974 to just 26 percent in 2011, with a projected fall to 15 percent by 2020. In contrast, the US share has remained steady at about 26 percent of world GDP.

But America’s long-term economic success is under threat from a towering federal debt, increasing government intervention in the economy, and a significantly more expensive and regulated health care system. In short, economic freedom is declining in America as Washington increasingly turns to European-style solutions. As Hannan argues, President Obama’s vision for America is quintessentially European:

My guess is that if anything, Obama would verbalize his ideology using the same vocabulary that Eurocrats do. He would say he wants a fairer America, a more tolerant America, a less arrogant America, a more engaged America. When you prize away the cliché, what these phrases amount to are higher taxes, less patriotism, a bigger role for state bureaucracies, and a transfer of sovereignty to global institutions. In other words, President Obama wants to make the U.S. more like the EU.

He is not pursuing a set of random initiatives lashed arbitrarily together but a program of comprehensive Europeanization: European health care, European welfare, European carbon taxes, European day care, European college education, even a European foreign policy, based engagement with supranational technocracies, nuclear disarmament, and a reluctance to deploy forces overseas.

[….]

Simply put, the steady Europeanisation of the United States is a huge threat to America’s long-term prosperity, international leadership and freedom, and goes against the US tradition of individual liberty. If Americans wish to avoid EU-style decline, they should avoid European-style policies as well as the supranational world view that drives them.

Read the rest: America must escape the doomed path of E.U. decline

Tags: Debt Crisi, Nile Gardiner
Posted in Economy, Europe, Regulation, Socialism | 108 Comments »

The anti-Reagan; and Islamic Rage Boy sings Christmas songs just for you!

by Mojambo ( 145 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Humor, World at December 22nd, 2010 - 4:30 pm

Barack Obama is The Bizarro Reagan – anything that Reagan would have done, he will do the opposite. The sense of U.S. floundering, confusion, and lack of spirit has done nothing but embolden our enemies. Obama seems to have a special gift for antagonizing friends.

Check out the comments on the article – a great example of the appeasement mentality sweeping Western Europe.

by Nile Gardiner

As 2010 draws to a close, the United States faces a world that is ever more dangerous, with the looming spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran in the Middle East, a resurgent and increasingly aggressive Russia in Europe, a rising totalitarian power in the East in the form of China, a malevolent rogue state in North Korea, and the global threat of Islamist terrorism. Yet Washington seems almost passive in the face of these huge challenges, with an administration whose focus is overwhelmingly upon domestic politics, and lacking any coherent long-term vision in maintaining America’s place as the world’s superpower.

Last week The Times of London summed up the fears of many US allies in an editorial on the passing of veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, when it lamented America’s lack of leadership in the face of its competitors:

America today is arguably less convinced in its moral mission than at any time in the past century. This unease spreads to its natural allies worldwide. As global power shifts, and other growing economic powers learn to flex their might, the West appears increasingly uncertain in its occasional role as the world’s policeman.

The Times makes a strong point. With Ronald Reagan you knew clearly where America stood, and it what it stood for, with the key goal of building up America’s military might, and defeating the Soviet Empire. More recently under George W. Bush, the presidency had a twin strategy in foreign policy of advancing liberty across the world, while waging war against al-Qaeda and its backers.

With Barack Obama there appears to be no great moral cause which drives his foreign policy, no overarching strategy for enhancing American global power, no concept of a global war against Islamist militants, and no desire to strengthen America’s defences. In fact Obama’s approach to international affairs is the exact opposite of Reagan’s. It is based upon a naïve belief that America’s enemies can be won over through “engagement” rather than confronted with maximum strength, and that US security can be advanced by making major concessions. Obama’s extending the hand of friendship to Iran, and his drive to sign a New START Treaty with Moscow which gives the Russians a say over America’s missile defence plans are perfect examples.

[…]

Read the rest here: Barack Obama is the anti-Reagan of U.S. global leadership: the president lacks true grit in the face of America’s enemies

On a lighter note – enjoy these two Islamic Rage Boy videos

hat tip- The Nose on Your Face

“Violent Night”

Watch this video on YouTube.

Islamic Rage Boy sings “Infidels” (Jingle Bells)

Watch this video on YouTube.

Tags: Nile Gardiner
Posted in Barack Obama, Humor, World | 145 Comments »

Forgive us, Barack Obama, for we know not what we do

by Mojambo ( 231 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2010, Progressives, Republican Party at September 8th, 2010 - 6:00 pm

It is unbelievably funny to watch our “betters” dismiss the public’s disillusions ( we here on this blog could not be disillusioned since we were never had any illusions of competence from Obama from the beginning) with Barack Obama. Recall Peter Jennings “The American voters threw a temper tantrum like a 2-year old” when the GOP took over the House and Senate in 1994 as a classic example of political/media disconnect. Obama is so tone deaf that even the Stupid Party (aka the GOP) may not be able to blow a huge victory in November.

by Victor Davis Hanson

In just 20 months, President Obama’s polls have crashed. From near 70 percent approval, they have fallen to well below 50 percent. Over 70 percent of the public disapproves of the Democratically controlled Congress. Hundreds of thousands of angry voters flocked to hear Glenn Beck & Co. on the Washington Mall. Indeed, things have gotten so bad that the cherubic Mormon Beck might outdraw Barack Obama himself on any given Sunday.

All this was not supposed to be — and it has evoked a lot of anger.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson thunders, “The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.”

You see, hoi polloi want “easy solutions” — like trying to close an open border, cut federal spending, and balance the budget. Instead, they should be manning up to pay more for gas, more in taxes, and more for entitlements for more to come across the border.

Worse still, the uninformed voter cannot seem to appreciate the brilliance of Barack Obama, who has deigned to suffer on our behalf, in offering only unpopular but necessary solutions. Obama has tried his best to prepare an immature nation for amnesty, borrowing at record levels, cap and trade, and additional trillions of national debt — the castor oil that the obese and now constipated public for some reason just won’t swallow.

Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution chimes in with the thought that Neanderthal Americans can’t really distinguish between cause and effect. So in clueless fashion, they blame big deficits, big spending, and high unemployment on Obama, when what they’re really afraid of is the “browning of America.” In other words, we remain a nation of primitives resisting the future. “Successful black and brown professionals have had to learn to be comfortable in a sea of white faces, but most white Americans have not experienced the reverse. And many are not eager to have that experience. While some prognosticators were naïve enough to believe that Obama’s election signaled the beginning of a post-racial era, it prompted something altogether different: a backlash against the browning of America.”

Vanity Fair just ran yet another hit piece on the now-worn subject of the ogre Sarah Palin. Uppity Sarah, you see, is still on her hind legs — even after the 2008 swat from the Katie Couric set, the jogging-suit photos, and the true-story revelations from the philosopher Levi Johnston.

Worse still, Sarah is no longer quite the white-trash yokel with the snowmobiling husband and pregnant teenage daughter that so appealed to Cynthia Tucker’s backlash America. Instead, Palin has had the gall to have devolved into a fake yokel, with Michelle Obama–like fashion pretensions. So Vanity Fair shocks us with the dirt that the now-clothes-hungry former mayor of Wasilla is making some money speaking. She is not the sandwich-making mom of five that she used to be. And she doesn’t really do the moose-and-fish thing any more.

[…]

The president himself is grieved by these polls and the Beck-led protests. Indeed, he derides it all as the “silly season.” He does not mean “silly” as in Michelle Obama’s Marbella–to–Martha’s Vineyard odyssey, or his own mini-recession summits on the golf links. Instead, like Robinson and Tucker, he is bewildered that millions don’t appreciate that our godhead is “making decisions that are not necessarily good for the nightly news and not good for the next election, but for the next generations.” I suppose here the president means that he is on schedule to add more debt than all previous presidents combined — just the sort of bravery that the “next generations” who will pay for it will appreciate.

In the case of Obama worship, the tone is always set at the top.

Read the rest here: Our waning Obama Worship

Nile Gardiner points out the obvious, that even the Left knows that Obama’s presidency is folding like a cheap camera. Of course Chris “Tingles” Matthews and a certain husky pony-tailed blogger will disagree but that is what alcohol (at least in the case of Matthews) can do to you.

by Nile Gardiner

Democrats in Congress are no longer asking themselves whether this is going to be a bad election year for them and their party. They are asking whether it is going to be a disaster. The GOP pushed deep into Democratic-held territory over the summer, to the point where the party is well within range of picking up the 39 seats it would need to take control of the House. Overall, as many as 80 House seats could be at risk, and fewer than a dozen of these are held by Republicans.

Political handicappers now say it is conceivable that the Republicans could also win the 10 seats they need to take back the Senate. Not since 1930 has the House changed hands without the Senate following suit.

Is this a piece from National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal or Fox News.com, all major conservative news outlets in the United States? No. It’s a direct quote from yesterday’s Washington Post, usually viewed by conservatives as a flagship of the liberal establishment inside the Beltway. The fact The Post is reporting that not only could Republicans sweep the House of Representatives this November, but may even take the Senate as well, is a reflection of just how far the mainstream, overwhelmingly left-of-centre US media has moved in the last month towards acknowledging the scale of the crisis facing the White House.

To its credit, The Washington Post has generally been ahead of the curve compared to its main competitors such as The New York Times in reporting President Obama’s travails, but its striking front page coverage of the “Democrats’ plight” and talk of a possible GOP Senate win (regarded as fantasy just a fortnight ago) was a bold step for a publication that is probably read in every office of the Obama administration.

[…]

For most of the year, America’s political and media elites, including the Obama team itself, have touted the notion of an economic recovery (which never materialised), significantly underestimated the rise of the Tea Party movement, and questioned the notion that conservatism was sweeping America. It is only now hitting home just how close Washington is to experiencing a political revolution in November that will fundamentally change the political landscape on Capitol Hill, with huge implications for the Obama presidency. What was once a perspective confined largely to Fox News, online conservative news sites, or talk radio is now gaining ground in the liberal US print media as well – historic change is coming to America, though not quite the version promised by Barack Obama.