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Obama’s “W.” Fixation

by Mojambo ( 113 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, George W. Bush at November 22nd, 2010 - 8:30 am

Besides being politically stupid, blaming Bush is foolish because Bush would inevitably rise in public esteem based on his demeanor, generosity of spirit, and basic decency. Obama completely misread the election results of 2008 and his refusal to entertain any dissenting ideas and opinions shows him to be a first rate second rate man.

by Victor Davis Hanson

Barack Obama remains fixated on George W. Bush. For nearly two years, President Obama and his team have prefaced their explanations for the tough economy, the tough finances, and the tough situation abroad with a “Bush did it” chorus. Apparently, they believed that most of our problems, here and abroad, either started with George W. Bush, or at least would not transcend him.

[…]

Recent polls reflect that Bush and Obama are now just about even in popularity. Obama’s supporters in the House have suffered the worst shellacking since 1938. The president got out of Washington on a foreign tour immediately after the election — only to be cold-shouldered by fair-weather foreign leaders who sensed weakness. Bush, meanwhile, is basking in endless media exposure as he expounds on his best-selling memoir — appearing above the partisan fray, past and present.

Voters two years ago elected Obama for a variety of reasons — from unhappiness with Bush and Iraq to the landmark novelty of seeing our first black president. The financial meltdown of September 2008 ended for good John McCain’s small lead in the polls. That panic also reminded voters of their unease with the Bush deficits and his expansion of government.

Unfortunately, Obama misread all that, and ended up trumping many of the things that Bush did to alienate voters.

Deficits of $500 billion soared to $1.4 trillion. Vast but unfunded Bush programs like Medicare prescription-drug benefits and No Child Left Behind soon were overshadowed by even bigger ones like Obamacare. An initial Bush bailout evolved into a gargantuan stimulus and serial government takeovers.

The result, fair or not, was that Bush’s financial felonies began to look like misdemeanors in comparison. Tea Party voters saw the Obama medicine as worse than the original Bush disease.

There was the same obsession with — and misreading of — Bush in foreign affairs. The public was turned off by the violence and costs in Iraq — but otherwise not especially concerned about Bush’s largely traditional foreign policy or his anti-terrorism protocols. Too bad a Bush-obsessed Obama was again blind to that simple fact. So when Iraq became largely quiet as Obama entered office, the entire “Bush did it” refrain was rendered obsolete and should have been dropped.

The anti-war Obama had campaigned on closing Guantanamo, ending tribunals and renditions, and critiquing the Patriot Act and Predator-drone attacks. But once Iraq was taken out of the equation, Obama quickly discovered that these old bogeymen Bush policies were both useful and relatively popular. So he was forced to keep or expand them. Obama’s flip-flop only confused Americans: Why, in hypocritical fashion, was he now embracing the Bush legacy that he used to demonize constantly?

When Obama tried to chart a new and much-heralded “reset-button” foreign policy in loud opposition to Bush’s, the irony continued. Most Americans did not want to try the accused architect of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in a civilian court replete with legal gymnastics. They did not think that announcing artificial deadlines for troop withdrawals in wartime was an especially bright idea.

[…]

Read the rest here: The George W. Bush Fixation

Tags: Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Barack Obama, George W. Bush | 113 Comments »

America: The economic sick man of the Global economy

by Phantom Ace ( 113 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Economy, Politics, Progressives, Socialism at November 10th, 2010 - 11:30 am

The United States of America was once a dynamic flourishing nation with economic opportunities for those who came here to strive hard. However over time, various Progressive Presidents of both parties began to implement the government redistribution policies. These policies have culminated under Barack Hussein Obama and the result is a stagnant anemic economy. Nations like China, India, Chile, Russia, Israel, Colombia, Panama and Germany are currently cleaning our clocks economically. These nation’s economies are dong good, while we are struggling. When you have a nation like Germany, who once had a stagnant economy and now has embrace free market reforms lecturing us, you know the world is upside down. China which is set to overtake us economically now lectures us about our fiscal policies, which they help support by buying our debt. In short, America has become the economic sick man of the Industrial world.

What worries me about President Obama is really one general issue: his very concrete enjoyment of the good life as evidenced by his golf outings, Martha’s Vineyard vacations, and imperial entourages that accompany him abroad, and yet his obvious distrust of the private sector and the success of the wealthy. Yet my discomfort here is not even one that arises from an obvious hypocrisy of, say, a Michelle on the 2008 campaign trail lecturing the nation about its meanness or her own previous lack of pride in her country, juxtaposed with her taste for the publicly provided rarefied enjoyments of a Costa del Sol hideaway at a time of recession

[…]

We all accept, of course, that the question is not one of a laissez-faire, unchecked robber baron arena, versus a Marxist-Leninist closed economy, but rather in a modern Western liberal state the finer line between a Greece and a Switzerland, or a California and a Texas.

In the former examples, the desire to achieve an equality of result through high taxes, generous public employment, and lavish entitlements destroys incentive in two directions — creating dependency on the part of the more numerous recipients of government largess, and despair among the smaller but more productive sector that sees the fruits of its labor redistributed to others — with all the obligatory state rhetoric about greed and social justice that legitimizes such transfers.

In the latter examples, an equality of opportunity allows citizens to create wealth and capital on the assurances that the incentives for personal gain and retention of profits will result in greater riches for all.

Read the rest: Stay Worried

My Generation (Generation X) really got screwed over. We entered the workforce in the late 90’s when the economic was on booming. Great starting salaries, bonuses and raises. In the 2000’s, the job market became stagnant and although unemployment was low, wages were lower than they were in the 80’s and 90’s. Raises were not keeping up with cost of living and due to outsourcing, we couldn’t demand better wages. Then the economic collapse hit in 2008 and then Obama’s fiscal recklessness has screwed over any opportunity we had to advance. When compared to the Boomers ate a similar age, Generation X is nowhere near their living standards. What we see happening occurred in Argentina. A once great vibrant nation, turned into a 3rd World economic basket case.

America needs massive economic reform in order to attract capital which leads to job creation and upward mobility. If this doesn’t occur, expect to see talented young Americans immigrate to other nations that will provide economic opportunity. The American dream is rapidly turning into the American nightmare.

Update: MacDuff has aa great comment that needs to be added to this post.

As a Boomer, life was great in the 80s and 90s, now I look back on it as if it were a dream, wondering “how did it all go so badly, so quickly?”. Alas, the 90′s were a mirage. Everyone (including myself) were trading stocks online finding that you could actually make some money with little effort. It seemed that it would never end, but we didn’t know that we were building on sand; not only individuals, but businesses as well. All it would eventually take was a tremor to bring it all down.

On 9/11, the tremor came. The ripples that went through the economy revealed the shallow, and speculative nature of our “bubble economy” and those ripples became waves that toppled the castles of sand that we thought was a stable economy. The upshot for me was that a 30 year career was ended by downsizing in 2004 and, at 50, I had to compete with much younger people who had not yet built a “lifestyle” based upon the “arc of continued success”. The arc, unfortunately, was an assumption based upon what proved to be a flawed vision of the American Dream.

Yeah, I made it for a few years, starting over in a new industry and using what I had left of my youthful ambition, combined with a bit of wisdom and experience. Nothing turned out as planned and, in the end, due to having saved some and resisted the urge to indebt myself, I’ll be OK.

I curse those politicians, of both parties, and latter-day robber barons who chose expediency and unrealistic growth projections, funded by debt, over long-term solidity. Their dream has been realized by way of exhorbitant salaries paid for trashing the companies that paid them. I curse the boards of directors who paid these scallywags, and the politicians that put the good of their own career ahead of that of the American economic system. There’s a lot of cursing to go around, and it goes back for more than a half a century.

We need only look to places like Allentown, PA, Detroit and Lansing, MI, to see the ruins of a once great industrial power laid to waste by incompetence and greed.

Internationally, the once grat leader is no more than a follower, being lectured by nations who, just 70 years ago, we decimated in war, then rebuilt. The irony is that their lectures are sound and the message is correct.

WE, and our insatiable thirst for “easy money” has done what no nation has been able to do in our history; it has reduced us to our knees. Many, such as myself, were raised by parents who weathered the Great depression as well as World War II. They told us there was “no free lunch” They told us that the quest for “easy money” was a fool’s errand. But we didn’t listen, we just didn’t listen.

We’re listening now.

This was spot on!

Tags: Economic Collapse, Economic Conservatism, Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Economy, Politics, Progressives, Socialism | 113 Comments »

The Great Divider

by Mojambo ( 103 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2010 at October 31st, 2010 - 9:00 am

VDH in pointing out the emotional immaturity and hypocrisy of Obama, reminds us that elections actually do have consequences. The consequences of even a one-term Obama administration will be with us a very longtime. The fact that after being written off for dead 23 months ago, the Republican Party (despite the lame Rove/McCain/Steele/Graham appeasers as well as some lame tea party candidates in Connecticut and Delaware, as well as a massive media cover up for the failures of The One’s policies), is on the verge of a massive victory on Tuesday, is a testimony to just how inept this administration really is. In (admittedly) my own opinion, the salient point of Obama is how ungracious a man he is.

by Victor Davis Hanson

Pillars of Sand

The faux-Greek columns of 2008 have turned into pillars of sand, as the president’s Gallup ratings hit 43-2%, and his congressional majorities are on the verge of melting away — just two years after grand talk of a 50-year liberal regnum.*

Obama has turned manic in his efforts to save his sinking presidency. Every divisive tactic has been tried — and yet so far found wanting. We have gone through, in creepy Alinskyite fashion, all the bogeymen, JournoList enemies — Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Justice Roberts, the Tea Party, John Boehner, Karl Rove, and Ed Gillespie. We have witnessed the furor over the voters’ purported stupidity — the dopey clingers who do not understand science or logic, but are driven by their “fears” to reject the hope and change salvation. Obama hammers that condescension home; everyone from Jimmy Carter to John Kerry in similar exasperation joins that chorus that we know not what we do.

Pots and Kettles

We have also witnessed the blatant hypocrisy of damning opponents for raising money from Wall Street and undisclosed donors. Has the president no shame? He introduced to American political life a number of fundraising firsts — the first presidential candidate in modern history to refuse public financing of presidential general elections; the first to raise more than $1 billion; and the first Democrat to capture roughly 70% of Wall Street money, making him inter alia the biggest recipient of BP and Goldman Sachs money.

[…]

Rev. Wrightism

Now we are left with cheap racial polarization, and this from the great healer. Rudy Giuliani at the 2008 Republican convention posed the rhetorical question of what exactly is “community organizing.” I think Obama is now answering that clearly enough.

So the president of all these United States now appeals to Mexican-American voters to get back at the polls at their “enemies.” He lists groups that supposedly the Republicans do not want to vote at all, emphasizing in particular African-Americans and Hispanics. Yesterday, in a thinly disguised racial simile, he said that the Republicans would have to sit in the back seat of the car. When all that is collated with the Skip Gates mess, the Arizona lawsuit and cheap demagoguery of Arizonans supposedly going after children on their way to get ice cream, and Van Jones, the picture is clear enough.

We have come full circle. The carefully applied veneer of the 2008 campaign is slowly being stripped away under the surprise and pique that the American people are rejecting his effort to turn the U.S. into a European-like, 40-50% government-controlled economy. Before this is over, I think we will come to see that we are back to Obama 1.0, the confidant of Bill Ayers who lamented the failure of the Supreme Court to enact “redistributive change,” the ACORN contingency lawyer, and the intimate of Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger, and Rashid Khalidi. Those are old and perhaps tired tropes, but they become touchstones to explain the increasingly erratic Barack Obama lashing out that he came so close and yet is still so far.

Independents resent this, and a good number of Democrats will stay home in embarrassment as well. (Note Obama’s petulance and his anger at liberals who supposedly want to take their ball home when they don’t get their way, or the warning to “Latinos” that they will get what they deserve if they don’t realize Obama is not a king, and don’t punish their enemies by staying home.)

[….]

The Great Make-over

Note again, nowhere is there the courage to admit the simple truth: the American people did not wish or vote for European socialism. Under the duress of the financial meltdown, angry at Bush/Iraq, underwhelmed by McCain, captivated by the notion of electing the first African-American president, swarmed by a singularly partisan media, and assured of a centrist Bill Clinton-like Democrat, Obama won the election and with it a golden opportunity to refurbish the Democratic brand and unite the country. That idea proved not merely impossible but simply distasteful. Somehow he assumed that his own godhead could lead us, kicking and screaming, to a socialist nirvana. When that did not happen, he serially blamed the bogeymen, then our ingratitude, then our stupidity, then tried to scare and divide us into accepting his agenda.

Not Take It Anymore?

So why are people angry? I’ll end with a brief list of twenty-one months of examples in no particular order. Each incident in itself was perhaps explicable by Obama supporters given the exigencies of the time or perhaps could be contextualized by the liberal media and political establishment. But in the aggregate they confirm an overwhelmingly damning pattern of ideological extremism, polarization, and basic incompetence — to such a degree that dozens of politicians are not running on the very Obama agenda that they once voted for.

Here We Go…

A vast new healthcare monstrosity that will send private insurance rates through the ceiling. The Machiavellian way in which it was slammed through. Failed stimulus. Wasteful pork-barrel spending of hundreds of billions in borrowed money. Persistent near 10% unemployment. Three trillion dollars in new debt in just two years. Record levels of federal spending. The vast increase in the size of government and its share of GDP. Eight years of projected $1 trillion annual budget deficits. Record high foreclosures. Record high usage of food stamps. The Keynesian zeal of Romer/Summers/Orzag followed by their sudden resignations in the wake of failure. Constant talk of higher taxes on “them” — the promised new healthcare surcharge taxes, the promised return to the Clinton income tax rates, talk of a VAT, talk of lifting the caps on income subject to FICA taxes, new capital gains taxes, new inheritance taxes on the horizon.

The use of extra-cabinet czars to avoid confirmation and audit. The neglect of the law, from reversing the order of Chrysler creditors to announcing a BP $20 billion shakedown and punishments for health insurers who don’t toe the line. The ascendance of ACORN and SEIU. The months-long shutdown of Gulf drilling. The failure to encourage coal, nuclear, and oil and gas new production. The Black Panther voting intimidation mess. The bowing abroad. The apologies. The outreach to enemies, and the snubbing of allies. The unnecessary humiliation of Great Britain and Israel. The Iran serial “deadline” charade. The unnecessary announcement of Afghan troop withdrawal deadlines. “Overseas contingency operations” and “man-made disasters.” The proposed civilian trial of KSM. The Ground Zero mosque mess. The beer summit mess. NASA’s new main mission of Muslim outreach. Stopping the border fence. Suing Arizona and demonizing the state. The apologies to the Chinese over the Arizona law, which was trashed from the White House lawn by the president of Mexico, and sued by foreign governments to the apparent approval of the administration.

The constant “Bush did it” refrain. The gratuitous slurs against limb-lopping doctors. The thrashing of the “rich” going to the Super Bowl and Las Vegas. The artificial divide of them/us based on $250,000 of annual income. The racial divisiveness from a sad cast of characters that gave us “cowards,” “stupidly,” “wise Latina,” and whites polluting the ghetto. Unhinged appointees like Van Jones and Anita Dunn. The occasional unguarded admissions like “never waste a crisis” and “at some point I do think you’ve made enough money.” The wacky behavior from the whining of “like a dog” to the sudden junketing to Copenhagen to lobby for the Chicago Olympics. The Orwellian cheap damning of the Bush anti-terrorism protocols only to accept or expand tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, Predators, Iraq, and intercepts and wiretaps. The golf obsession and Costa del Sol while trashing the indulgent rich.

[….]

Read the rest here: The Great Divider – Or “Elections Have Consequences”

Tags: Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Barack Obama, Elections 2010 | 103 Comments »

Revisiting the Strange Summer of 2008

by Mojambo ( 116 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Elections 2010, Politics, Progressives at October 20th, 2010 - 6:30 pm

Voters may be rebelling as VDH writes because they feel they have been “had” – yet 47 – 48% of the voters who seemed to be able to engage in critical thinking were not “had”. If one factors in that maybe 1/3rd of the voters who pulled the lever for the Radical-in-Chief were automatic Democrats who would vote for a tuna sandwich if it ran on the Democratic line, then maybe there were fewer people fooled by Obama then we think. Nevertheless there was little evidence of any sort of “moderation” or “centrism” in Obama’s politics or philosophy, on the contrary his associations and his meager legistlative record gave us a preview of what to expect. “Rocker” Mick Jagger will always be a rocker and “Leftist” Barack Obama will always be a left wing ideologue. By the way a big **** you to Meghan McCain’s dad for falling into the MSM’s role of being the “noblest of losers”.

by Victor Davis Hanson

Historians will look back at the 2008 campaign in the light of the 2010 midterm elections. Almost everything the president has done in the last two years is simply a continuance of that now strangely distant summer.

The only disconnects are (1) that the media are now embarrassed by Obama’s rapid decline in the polls and so suddenly, in catch-up fashion, have chosen to highlight his inexperience and hypocrisy in a way they did not in 2008. And (2) that governance requires concrete action in a way campaign rhetoric does not, and thus the American public can evaluate the consequences of deeds rather than the implications of mellifluent hope-and-change rhetoric.

Remember the 2008 claims of bipartisanship and an end to the old style of politics? Yet there was nothing in Obama’s prior career to substantiate those idealistic claims. In his first race, for the Illinois state senate in 1996, he sued to remove opponents from the ballot, and in his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004, the divorce records of both his primary- and general-election opponents were mysteriously leaked. Subsequently, Obama compiled the most partisan record in the entire Senate, proving that he was the least willing senator to veer from a doctrinaire ideology. So if we are surprised that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News, John Roberts, the tea parties, John Boehner, the Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove, and Ed Gillespie have later become bogeymen of the week, we must remember that this is merely the logical continuance of Obama’s earlier hardball modus operandi.

Remember Obama’s praise for public campaign financing, with its attendant restrictions? Yet Obama was the first candidate in the history of publicly financed presidential campaigns to renounce such funding (after promising that he would accept it). His renunciation of the Carter-era program has probably wrecked the idea that presidential candidates will ever again be bound by public-financing protocols. In fact, Obama raised the largest pile of campaign cash in history, much of it from Wall Street, some of it from unnamed donors. So if we are surprised that he is now ritually attacking Wall Street financiers and alleging that his opponents are raising funds from unnamed sources, it is simply because he knows such landscapes firsthand only too well.

Remember the serial attacks on the Bush anti-terrorism protocols — questioning intercepts, wiretaps, and the Patriot Act, and decrying predator attacks in Afghanistan/Pakistan — and the promises to exit Iraq, close down Guantanamo, and end renditions and tribunals? Other than introducing some creative euphemisms (e.g., “man-made disasters,” “overseas contingency operations”), Obama either kept or vastly expanded the Bush protocols, apparently on the assumptions that (a) they were always needed and his prior opposition was simply acceptable campaign demagoguery, and (b) the Left’s opposition to the anti-terrorism efforts was always disingenuous and aimed only at sullying Bush, and therefore it would dissipate once Obama took them over intact.

[…]

Remember all the right-wing furor over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, Rashid Khalidi, and a host of other Obama associates that suggested in 2008 he was well out of the American mainstream? In that context, the appointment of a Van Jones or an Anita Dunn made perfect sense. Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina,” Eric Holder’s “cowards, ” and Van Jones’s white students engaging in mass murder and “white polluters . . . steering poison into the people of color’s communities”; the president’s own putdowns of the police, the Arizona law, and the opponents of the Ground Zero mosque; the apology tour, the bowing abroad, the snubbing of the British, and on and on were only elaborations of the same Chicago/Ivy League view of America as a largely racist, unfair, and deeply flawed society.

[…]

The left wing is rebelling because a postracial, postnational Obama deceived them into thinking that his non-traditional heritage, his glibness, and his own godhead would carry through their ultra-liberal agenda that historically the American people did not want — only to discover that it was impossible, and that he would now sermonize to them that it was in fact impossible.

Yet they were all warned — in that strange summer of 2008.