The Carter-Obama Comparisons Grow

These comparisons are being made by fellow liberal democrats! This on top of Bob Woodward's new book portraying an dysfunctional Obama administration... Well, a least ol' Jimmuh wasn't a fascist - just an incompetent. Perhaps the more apt comparison between Obama and another famed incompetent liberal socialist would be Benito Mussolini. Imam Obama as Il Duce redux?!...T

Comparisons between the Obama White House and the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter are increasingly being made—and by Democrats.

Walter Mondale, Mr. Carter's vice president, told The New Yorker this week that anxious and angry voters in the late 1970s "just turned against us—same as with Obama." As the polls turned against his administration, Mr. Mondale recalled that Mr. Carter "began to lose confidence in his ability to move the public." Democrats on Capitol Hill are now saying this is happening to Mr. Obama.

Mr. Mondale says it's time for the president "to get rid of those teleprompters and connect" with voters. Another of Mr. Obama's clear errors has been to turn over the drafting of key legislation to the Democratic Congress: "That doesn't work even when you own Congress," he said. "You have to ride 'em."

Mr. Carter himself is heightening comparisons with his own presidency by publishing his White House diaries this week. "I overburdened Congress with an array of controversial and politically costly requests," he said on Monday. The parallels to Mr. Obama's experience are clear.

Comparisons between the two men were made frequently during the 2008 campaign, but in a favorable way. Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, for instance, told Fox News in August 2008 that Mr. Obama's "rhetoric is more like Jimmy Carter's than any other Democratic president in recent memory." Syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg noted more recently that Mr. Obama, like Mr. Carter in his 1976 campaign, "promised a transformational presidency, a new accommodation with religion, a new centrism, a changed tone."

But within a few months, liberals were already finding fault with his rhetoric. "He's the great earnest bore at the dinner party," wrote Michael Wolff, a contributor to Vanity Fair. "He's cold; he's prickly; he's uncomfortable; he's not funny; and he's getting awfully tedious. He thinks it's all about him." That sounds like a critique of Mr. Carter.

Foreign policy experts are also picking up on similarities. Walter Russell Mead, then a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Economist magazine earlier this year that Mr. Obama is "avoiding the worst mistakes that plagued Carter." But he warns that presidents like Mr. Obama who emphasize "human rights" can fall prey to the temptation of picking on weak countries while ignoring more dire human rights issues in powerful countries (Russia, China, Iran). Over time that can "hollow out an administration's credibility and make a president look weak." Mr. Mead warned that Mr. Obama's foreign policy "to some degree makes him dependent on people who wish neither him nor America well. This doesn't have to end badly and I hope that it doesn't—but it's not an ideal position after one's first year in power."

Liberals increasingly can't avoid making connections between Mr. Carter's political troubles and those of Mr. Obama. In July, MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked his guests if Democrats up for re-election will "run away from President O'Carter." After much laughter, John Heileman of New York Magazine quipped "Calling Dr. Freud." To which Mr. Matthews, a former Carter speechwriter, sighed "I know."

Pat Caddell, who was Mr. Carter's pollster while he was in the White House, thinks some comparisons between the two men are overblown. But he notes that any White House that is sinking in the polls takes on a "bunker mentality" that leads the president to become isolated and consult with fewer and fewer people from the outside. Mr. Caddell told me that his Democratic friends think that's happening to Mr. Obama—and that the president's ability to pull himself out of a political tailspin is hampered by his resistance to seek out fresh thinking.

The Obama White House is clearly cognizant of the comparisons being made between the two presidents. This month, environmental activist Bill McKibben met with White House aides to convince them to reinstall a set of solar panels that Mr. Carter had placed on the White House roof. They were taken down in 1986 following roof repairs. Mr. McKibben said it was time to bring them back to demonstrate Mr. Obama's support for alternative energy.

But Mr. McKibben told reporters that the White House "refused to take the Carter-era panel that we brought with us" and only said that they would continue to ponder "what is appropriate" for the White House's energy needs. Britain's Guardian newspaper reported that the Obama aides were "twitchy perhaps about inviting any comparison (to Mr. Carter) in the run-up to the very difficult mid-term elections." Democrats need no reminding that Mr. Carter wound up costing them dearly in 1978 and 1980 as Republicans made major gains in Congress.
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Obama's thuggery is useless in fighting spill

Barone calls a spade a spade: Obama is a classic fascist totalitarian thug. More corrupt than FDR, and less competent than Jimmy Carter, he most closely resembles Mussolini, both in tactics, ineffectiveness, and in stature and looks, if you are willing watch this buffoon cock his head back in amateurish arrogance, Ala Il Duce...T


Thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to BP's Gulf oil spill.

Take Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's remark that he would keep his "boot on the neck" of BP, which brings to mind George Orwell's definition of totalitarianism as "a boot stamping on a human face -- forever." Except that Salazar's boot hasn't gotten much in the way of results yet.

Or consider Obama's undoubtedly carefully considered statement to Matt Lauer that he was consulting with experts "so I know whose ass to kick." Attacking others is a standard campaign tactic when you're in political trouble, and certainly BP, which appears to have taken unwise shortcuts in the Gulf, is an attractive target.

But you don't always win arguments that way. The Obama White House gleefully took on Dick Cheney on the issue of terrorist interrogations. It turned out that more Americans agreed with Cheney's stand, despite his low poll numbers, than Obama's.

Then there is Obama's decision to impose a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf. This penalizes companies with better safety records than BP's and will result in many advanced drilling rigs being sent to offshore oil fields abroad.

The justification offered was an Interior Department report supposedly "peer reviewed" by "experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." But it turned out the drafts the experts saw didn't include any recommendation for a moratorium. Eight of the cited experts have said they oppose the moratorium as more economically devastating than the oil spill and "counterproductive" to safety.

This was blatant dishonesty by the administration, on an Orwellian scale. In defense of a policy that has all the earmarks of mindless panic, that penalizes firms and individuals guilty of no wrongdoing and that will worsen rather than improve our energy situation. Ineffective thuggery.

And what about the decision not to waive the Jones Act, which bars foreign-flag vessels from coming to the aid of the Gulf cleanup? The Bush administration promptly waived it after Katrina in 2005. The Obama administration hasn't and claims unconvincingly that, gee, there aren't really any foreign vessels that could help.

The more plausible explanation is that this is a sop to the maritime unions, part of the union movement that gave Obama and other Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle. It's the Chicago way: Dance with the girl that brung ya.

Or the decision to deny Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's proposal to deploy barges to skim oil from the Gulf's surface. Can't do that until we see if they've got enough life preservers and fire equipment. That inspired blogger Rand Simberg to write a blog post he dated June 1, 1940: "The evacuation of British and French troops from the besieged French city of Dunkirk was halted today, over concerns that many of the private vessels that had been deployed for the task were unsafe for troop transport."

Finally, the $20 billion escrow fund that Obama pried out of the BP treasury at the White House when he talked for the first time, 57 days after the rig exploded, with BP Chairman Tony Hayward. It's pleasing to think that those injured by BP will be paid off speedily, but House Republican Joe Barton had a point, though an impolitic one, when he called this a "shakedown."

For there already are laws in place that insure that BP will be held responsible for damages and the company has said it will comply. So what we have is government transferring property from one party, an admittedly unattractive one, to others, not based on pre-existing laws but on decisions by one man, pay czar Kenneth Feinberg.

Feinberg gets good reviews from everyone. But the Constitution does not command "no person . . . shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law except by the decision of a person as wise and capable as Kenneth Feinberg." The Framers stopped at "due process of law."

Obama doesn't. "If he sees any impropriety in politicians ordering executives about, upstaging the courts and threatening confiscation, he has not said so," write the editors of the Economist, who then suggest that markets see Obama as "an American version of Vladimir Putin." Except that Putin is an effective thug.
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Osamalini

Welcome to Fascism, american style. Do a google serch of Woodrow Wilson, or Liberal Fascism, and see that what is going on today has happened before. Happy Halloween indeed! Truth is stranger than fiction: Heil Osama!...T

Liberal Fascism - A Conservative Slur no Longer

Separation of Powers - Federalism - Limited Government - The Rule of Law

These are the "Four Legs" upon which the pedestal of our liberties have stood these nearly 250 years. The rule of law is a concept dating all the way back to the edicts of the Roman Emperors, but enshrined in our modern world by English common law, informed and enlightened by natural law, and codified starting with the Magna Carta in 1215

The Constitution of the United States of America is the ultimate expression and synthesis of these four principles. It has indeed allowed for the sustenance of the greatest, most powerful, and freest nation in the history of this earth.

But what would happen if none cared any longer?

A good friend of mine opined today that Obama's health care proposals, among others, are fascist, and blatantly unconstitutional. Understanding fascism is complicated, but a lack of understanding the Constitution and our system of checks and balances is intellectual laziness, which I postulate is why we find ourselves in the situation of peril that exists today.

Constitution? Who the hell even cares that it exists anymore – certainly NOT when democrats are in power… Hell I wouldn't be surprised to see it “suspended” – after all, Woodrow Wilson did so! FDR did so!

Fascistic is exactly right: Jonah Goldberg (in "Liberal Fascism") explains, and I have added here that -

- Actually, the notion that fascism/Nazism and communism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. - Richard Pipes: “ Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism”. Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to recreate tribal (or feudal!) impulses. Communists champion class, Nazi’s race, Fascists the nation. All these ideologies, totalitarian impulses in the extreme, attract the same types of people! -

AND they are all of the same in another respect – they are all forms of IDENTITY politics. Get the rich, affirmative action, “save the planet” – all pseudonyms for fascistic, socialistic, Nazi, communist, totalitarian, Orwellian control

We are in deep trouble, and can only hope our founders were wiser even than we thought until now...T

The f-bomb of American politics is the word “fascist,” routinely hurled by the left at conservatives. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater were smeared as incipient fascists, and George W. Bush now receives the honor, along with practically anyone to the right of Rosie O’Donnell on a college campus.

The operational meaning of the word “fascism” for most liberals who invoke it is usually “shut up.” It’s meant to bludgeon conservatives into silence. But many on the left also genuinely believe that there is something fascistic in the DNA of contemporary conservatism, as if Republican Party conventions would get their rightful treatment only if they were worshipfully filmed by Leni Riefenstahl.

In his brilliant new book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg (a colleague of mine) demonstrates how the opposite is the case, that fascism was a movement of the left and that liberal heroes like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were products of what Goldberg calls “the fascist moment” in America early in the 20th century. How we think of the ideological spectrum — socialism to the left, fascism to the right — should be forever changed.

Benito Mussolini was a socialist and earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the socialists in Italy. When he founded the fascist party, its program called for implementing a minimum wage, expropriating property from landowners, repealing titles of nobility, creating state-run secular schools and imposing a progressive tax rate. Mussolini took socialism and turned it in a more populist and militaristic direction, but remained a modernizing, secular man of the left.

The Nazis too were socialists, “enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system,” in the words of the party’s ideologist Gregor Strasser. The party’s platform sounded a lot like that of the Italian fascists. The Nazis wanted to chase conventional Christianity from public life and overturn tradition, replacing them with an all-powerful state. Both Hitler and Mussolini were revolutionaries, bitterly opposed to “reactionary” forces in their societies.

By what standard, then, are they considered conservatives who took things to extremes? The left points to their anti-Semitism and militarism. But anti-Semitism isn’t an inherently right-wing phenomenon — Stalin’s Russia was anti-Semitic. As for militarism, these regimes looked to it as a way to mobilize and organize society, something deeply anathema to the anti-statist tradition of postwar American conservatism.

On the other hand, the progressive movement of the early 20th century looked to Mussolini as an inspiration and shared intellectual roots with European fascism, including an appreciation of the “top-down socialism” of Otto von Bismarck. Goldberg eviscerates Woodrow Wilson as the closest we have ever had to a fascist president. Wilson and his supporters welcomed World War I as an opportunity to expand the state, instituting “war socialism” and a far-reaching crackdown on dissent.

FDR picked up where Wilson left off. The crisis of the Great Depression was the occasion for reviving “war socialism.” The man who ran the National Recovery Administration was an open admirer of Mussolini, and the alphabet soup of New Deal agencies had their roots in World War I and the classic fascist impulse to mobilize society and put it on a war footing.

Goldberg sees the fascist exaltation of youth, glorification of violence, hatred of tradition and romance of “the street” in the New Left of the 1960s, still the subject of the fond memories for the liberal establishment in this country. Goldberg argues that “liberal fascism” — the phrase was coined by H. G. Wells, and he meant it positively — is a distant heir to European fascism. The liberal version is pacifist rather than militaristic and feminine rather than masculine in its orientation, but it also seeks to increase the power of the state and overcome tradition in sweeping crusades pursued with the moral fervor of war.

Goldberg’s keen intellectual history is, at bottom, a profound cautionary tale about the perils of state aggrandizement and of revolutionary movements. If nothing else, it should convince liberals that it’s time to find a new insult.
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