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Posts Tagged ‘obama’

We’ve Been PWNED!

by Iron Fist ( 48 Comments › )
Filed under Democratic Party, Economy, Patriotism, Politics, Regulation, Republican Party at April 14th, 2011 - 4:30 pm

Fox news keeps changing the underlying story, but the stark truth is we’ve been had by Obama and the GOP leadership over this budget deal. Consider the following:

To a fair degree, the lack of immediate budget-cutting is because the budget year is more than half over and cuts in new spending authority typically are slow to register on deficit tallies. About $8 billion in immediate cuts to domestic programs and foreign aid are offset by nearly equal increases in defense spending. When war funding is factored in the legislation would actually increase total federal outlays by $3.3 billion relative to current levels.

In addition, cuts to mandatory benefit programs, while producing no deficit savings, can be claimed under budget rules to pay for spending increases elsewhere in the legislation. All told, $17.8 billion in such savings is claimed but just a tiny portion of it would actually reduce the deficit.

That is right. Spending went up, It gets worse. CBS News reports this:

When President Obama and congressional leaders brokered a deal last week to keep the government funded for another six months, they hailed the “historic” spending cuts the deal included — $38.5 billion in cuts from this year’s budget alone.

A study from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirms that the legislation does indeed cut that much from what federal agencies are authorized to spend this year — but the study reveals that it will only amount to a reduction of $352 million in non-war government spending for the rest of this fiscal year. That’s in part because a significant portion of the cuts come from authorized funds that won’t be spent immediately, such as water-and-sewer grants.

$352 million of actual cuts. And the Democrats call this draconian? The Democrats want to bankrupt America. Make no mistake about that. They are anti-American, and have always sought the downfall of this nation. They must be stopped.

Essential VDH: Libya is Not Iraq

by Iron Fist ( 103 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Iraq, Libya, Military, Politics at April 13th, 2011 - 6:30 pm

The always important Victor Davis Hanson has an important article today in the National Review. It compares Libya tor Iraq, and really dissects the crucial differences behind the most disastrous of Obama’s foreign policy moves. For example:

The Left is terribly embarrassed about the U.S. intervention in Libya. We have preemptively attacked an Arab Muslim nation that posed little threat to the national-security interests of the United States. President Obama did not have majority support among the American people. Nor did he even attempt to gain approval from Congress — especially egregious because he seems to be the first president since Harry Truman who sought and obtained sanction for military action from the United Nations without gaining formal authorization from his own Congress.

The administration offered no rationale for judging, on humanitarian grounds, that Qaddafi was more egregiously murderous than, say, the killers in the Congo or Ivory Coast. Nor, in terms of national security, did the relatively sparsely populated and isolated Libya pose a threat comparable to those posed by either Iran or Syria — concerning which we carefully steered clear when similar domestic unrest threatened both regimes.

He goes on to list twelve good reasons why the intervention in Iraq was necessary and proper while the half-assed intervention in Libya is not. Read the whole article. It is quite damning of the President. He ends it by damning with the faintest of praise:

To be fair, in Obama’s defense, it perhaps soon may be said that we suffered greatly in victory in Iraq and, by comparison, far less in defeat in Libya.

Somehow, though, I don’t think that the Islamists, who will see Libya as simply another Mogadishu for the Paper Tiger America, will agree with this.

Essential VDH

by Iron Fist ( 3 Comments › )
Filed under Headlines at March 31st, 2011 - 2:32 pm

Go thou and read thereof, for it is good:

Libya: The Genesis of a Bad Idea
March 30, 2011 – 7:18 pm – by Victor Davis Hanson

The president spoke Monday night to clarify our intervention in Libya. Instead he made things worse, and could not explain the mission (are we/are we not after Qaddafi?), the methodology to achieve it (are we in a no-fly-zone or are we bombing ground targets essential to save the rebels?), and the desired outcome (who are the “rebels,” what do we wish from them, and are they better than Qaddafi?). Indeed, after almost two weeks, these questions still have not been asked much less answered.

So the omissions pose the question: how did Obama, the archetype war critic, find himself bombing—in optional and preemptive fashion, and without congressional authority — an Arab Muslim oil-exporting country, and one that posed no immediate threat to American national security, despite being governed by a monster who, nevertheless, had been recently courted by Western intellectuals, academics, universities, and diplomats?

Unfortunately, Obama has no principled or strategically logical foreign policy. So it is mostly loud declarations that he is not George Bush and making things up ad hoc as he goes along. Here, I think, is what happened with Libya.

Heh™. Very Heh™

Essential VDH

by Iron Fist ( 2 Comments › )
Filed under Headlines at March 29th, 2011 - 9:45 am

Read this for it is good. It is a masterful dissection of Obama’s speech last night, done in Hanson’s inimitable style. Exerpt:

His support for those “yearning for freedom all around the world” was the sort of interventionist foreign policy that a Senator Obama — if his past reaction to the removal of Saddam Hussein is any indication — would have objected to, especially in the case of sending bombers over an Arab Muslim oil-exporting country. Since Saddam was a far greater monster (gassing thousands is far worse than turning off the water to neighborhoods) than the monsters that Obama now wishes to slay, I think he has confused rather than enlightened his audience.

There was no mention of the Congress. Is he going to ever ask its approval? And if not, why the repeated emphasis on asking others such as the Arab League or the UN for their approval — given that their representatives, unlike ours, are largely not elected?

In a speech dedicated to clarifying our policy, it left it even more murky. What was our objective, and what is it now? Obama asserted that “We have stopped his deadly advance.” But is that the aim — the status quo, and a sort of permanent safe zone for rebels in accordance with UN directives? Or are we going beyond that to eliminate Qaddafi, who is the source of the problem?

As they say, read the whole thing.