Superpower Once Lived Here

A truly spineless worm. To make Jimmy Cater look resolute by comparison...


On February 22, popular protests led to the fall of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev. On February 27, in response to this setback, President Vladimir Putin sent forces into Crimea to seize it from Ukraine. On March 19, President Barack Obama delivered his response. He reassured Putin, “We are not going to be getting into a military excursion in Ukraine.” Obama added, “What we are going to do is mobilize all of our diplomatic resources to make sure that we’ve got a strong international coalition that sends a clear message.”

The message is clear. The problem is its content. Obama certainly isn’t sending the message that Colin Powell, after the Cold War, wanted America to send: “Superpower lives here.” Obama’s message, by contrast, is: “Superpower once lived here. No forwarding address.”

Putin understands Obama’s message. He knows he’s won Crimea. The question is whether he’ll win Ukraine.

He thinks he will. He’s dealing with the Obama administration, after all. He looks at the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, he witnesses the failure to enforce the red line in Syria and the subsequent successes of his friend Assad, he chortles at the relaxation of the sanctions on Iran and the desperate desire to cut a nuclear deal, and he sees Obama’s defense cuts. And he reads the New York Times, where David Sanger reports, “Mr. Obama acknowledges, at least in private, that he is managing an era of American retrenchment.”

So Putin sees retrenchment. Putin sees retreat. And Putin sees that Obama is unlikely to reverse course.

In late 1979, with the seizure of American hostages by Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter was mugged by reality. Carter then tried, however haplessly, to change direction. But Barack Obama is no Jimmy Carter. Will Obama increase defense spending, as Carter did? Is he likely to launch a military excursion, as Carter did, over the objection—and then resignation—of his dovish secretary of state?

Carter, whatever his problems, was more hawkish than most in his party. In this he followed in the footsteps of every other Democratic president in the past century. Until Barack Obama.

It’s been a bit bewildering, even disorienting, to watch Obama get mugged by reality and refuse to press charges. But of course he doesn’t want to press charges. He doesn’t believe in an international system in which the American role is to lead. Former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal was asked by the Financial Times recently about Putin and Obama. He explained: “While the wolf is eating the sheep, there is no shepherd to come to the rescue of the pack. This is where we find ourselves today.”

Indeed it is. In the New York Times, Sanger comments, “History suggests that such eras [of retrenchment]—akin to what the United States went through after the two world wars and Vietnam—often look like weakness to the rest of the world.” Retrenchment looks like weakness because it is weakness. And the consequences of such eras of weakness aren’t happy.

What is to be done? Congress needs to push the administration in the right direction as much as possible. Foreign policy experts need to propose sound measures—to ensure, for example, that the loss of Crimea isn’t followed by the loss of Ukraine—in the hope that President Obama might be pressured to embrace them.

More broadly, though, the opposition—which one hopes will come to include some liberals and some Democrats—has to articulate a foreign and defense policy of resolve and strength. Allies and enemies around the world will read the American situation differently if they think the American collapse of will is bipartisan than they will if they see that it is not. Pro-Western forces around the world may be able to maneuver and to hang on if they receive a clear message that the cavalry is coming to the rescue on January 20, 2017.

So it’s important to mount a vigorous opposition to Obama’s foreign and defense policies. It’s important to propose serious alternatives. It’s important not just for the sake of intellectual honesty and political clarity. It’s important because what the opposition says now can make a difference in the world over the next three years.


It will still be a rough time. America can’t be strong with a president committed to weakness. But the prospects for a restoration of American strength will be brighter, the challenges of 2017 will be less daunting, if the opposition today stands clearly and unequivocally for American strength and leadership, and—dare one say it?—for American greatness.

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O'Bama? Oh puh-lease!

"I be wearin me lucky chains! (er, charms...)"

The only president to accomplish the impossible: Make Bill Clinton look ethical, and Jimmy Carter competent by comparison...T

Ah Bejaysus and Begorrah! Oi’ll be swearin’ boi the auld shrine to the Vorgin with the shamrocks growin’ round it next to the hill where Cuchullain slew the Great Leprechaun of Kildare on St Patrick’s Day that Barack Seamus O’Toole Flaherty Joyce O’Bama is the most Irish US president that ever set foot on the Emerald Oisle, so he is, so he is.

Except, when he’s in Africa, of course, when he disappears into the dry ice and re-emerges with a grass skirt and a bone through his nose and declares himself to be Mandingo, Prince of the Bloodline of the Bonga People, Drinker of Cattle Urine, Father of A Thousand Warrior Sons, Keeper of King Solomon’s Mines, Barehanded Slayer of Lions, Undaunted Victim of the Evil Colonial British Empire.

And in the Middle East, where he is Al-Barak Hussein Obama, Protector of the Holy Shrine, Smiter of the Kuffar, Lion of the Desert, Tent-Loving-Aficionado-of-the-Oversweetened-Coffee, Chomper of Sheeps’ Eyeballs, Restorer of the Caliphate.

Etc.

Tony Blair used to do this trick too, his accent mutating from broad Glaswegian to genteel Edinburgh to Mummerset to Estuary to Richard E Grant to Sarf London Grime – often in the course of one Downing Street reception – the better to persuade his target audience that he was their kind of guy. And it is, of course, the hallmark of an unutterable charlatan.

I’ve argued before that Tony Blair and Barack Obama have an awful lot in common. Both are lawyers; both are snake-oil-salesman; both claim to be post-partisan, and Third Way and consensual; both play the acceptable, moderate-seeming public face of a regime chock full of Communists, class warriors, single issue rabble rousers, malcontents, communitarians and eco-loons hell bent on destroying every last vestige of what once made their country great. And both do (or did) the things dodgy political leaders always do when the going gets tough at home and their domestic audience finally wises up to how totally useless they are: they hop on the plane and pose as international statesman instead.

My colleague Damian Thompson appears to be under the impression that Obama is a great guy because he said nice things about the Queen. Look, I think the Queen’s great too, but did it really not occur to my distinguished colleague (and editor) that there might have been a hint of an ulterior motive here? Obama can’t stand Britain (his wife likes us even less): he made that clear enough when he sent back Winston Churchill’s bust and dissed our Prime Minister with those dodgy DVDS. He blames us for what happened to his grandfather during Mau Mau. He doesn’t believe in the Special Relationship. Are we honestly supposed to believe in that during the subsequent year in office, Obama has since acquired such wisdom and insight that he suddenly realises how special we are?

Of course he hasn’t. Obama is just doing now what all bullies and losers start doing when they realise how unpopular they are and that everyone is abandoning them. They suck up to anybody and everybody. They whore themselves piteously before enemies they once considered beneath their contempt. Fain will they fill their bellies with husks that swine eat – but which no man will give them: and serve them jolly well right, too!

By all means let us enjoy watching Obama smarm and grovel and ingratiate himself like some presidential Uriah Heep. But for heaven’s sake let us never give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s a cold fish and would certainly never show any mercy towards us were the roles to be reversed
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NO WAY OBAMA WINS IN 2012

"As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said — outrageously and wrongly — about 9/11, “the chickens are coming home to roost.” The policies of this administration — the disastrous overspending, the irresponsible borrowing, the social experimentation — all are magnifying and amplifying the impact of the recession. Relief is not going to come anytime soon.

Instead, the true legacy of the Obama years is likely to be stagflation and an entire decade wiped out by his policies, budget and programs. Long after he is gone in 2013, we will still be repairing the damage of his terrible decisions."

More Jimmy Carter-esque comparisons keep rolling in. This one from Dick Morris flatly states that Obama has NO CHANCE of reelection in two years, and that "stagflation" (recession and inflation) will be Obama's legacy, as was it Jimmuh's in 1980...T

The combination of high oil and gasoline prices, rising food costs, higher health insurance premiums and the likelihood of future inflation has jarred consumer confidence, creating a major crisis for the Obama administration.

The collapse has been sudden and dramatic.

In December, the consumer confidence scale in the Rasmussen Poll stood at 81.7 percent. But in January, euphoria set in. Obama compromised on the George W. Bush tax cuts, the nation seemed to be coming together after the Giffords shooting and a Republican House sat poised to stop any new spending or social experimentation. On Jan. 11, the Rasmussen confidence index rose to 88.3.

Then reality dawned. Unemployment remained persistently high, economic growth was largely stagnant and partisan bickering resumed. The confidence level on Feb. 11 dropped to 84.5.

Then the bottom fell out. The daily Rasmussen polling reflected a drop day after day until, by March 11, the index had fallen to 73.1, its lowest level since it registered a 69 in July of 2009, in the depths of the recession.

The false dawn of January has faded and the hard, cold reality of a likely second recession is setting in. But this recession is accompanied by the likelihood of inflation, a stagflation syndrome that will probably grip America for years. And which will likely take a manmade recession, on the order of 1979-82, to counter it.

Will Obama get reelected? No way! In the teeth of the economic catastrophe that is shaping up, his chances are doomed.

The tsunami in Japan, perhaps the greatest tragedy since 9/11, will further impede any prospect for economic growth. There will be a demand for spending to repair the devastation of the quake. But Japan is tied with China as the world’s second largest economy, generating 12 percent of the global GDP. With Japan neither producing nor buying for the foreseeable future, the drag on the global economy will be profound.

Worse, the Fed and the administration are out of tools to help. Interest rates are already at zero. Fiscal stimulus — the deficit — already consumes 40 percent of our total government outlays. The Fed is printing money at a ferocious rate under its qualitative easing (QE-2) program. What is left to do?

Only dramatic cuts in the federal deficit, a rollback of regulations that cripple small and community banks, a cancellation of future tax increase plans, a big reduction in federal spending, repeal of ObamaCare, freeing manufacturing from the prospect of carbon taxation and unleashing our domestic energy potential can solve our problems. But Obama is not about to undo his legacy of disaster for the American people.

And then there is the longer-term oil and gasoline crisis. Instability in the Middle East is going to mount, not recede. The chances of disruption in Saudi oil supplies and the possibility of an overthrow of the regime (triggered by the best efforts of Iran) will continue to force prices upward. The drag on the economy and the rising consumer discontent in the United States spell further problems for the Obama presidency.

As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said — outrageously and wrongly — about 9/11, “the chickens are coming home to roost.” The policies of this administration — the disastrous overspending, the irresponsible borrowing, the social experimentation — all are magnifying and amplifying the impact of the recession. Relief is not going to come anytime soon.

Instead, the true legacy of the Obama years is likely to be stagflation and an entire decade wiped out by his policies, budget and programs. Long after he is gone in 2013, we will still be repairing the damage of his terrible decisions.
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The Whiniest President Ever

Image via Wikipedia "President Obama gives off a sense of world-weariness and exhaustion with America’s leadership — and has earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a result. He reflects the deep vein of declinism running through the country’s elite, the same class of people who pronounced the presidency uninhabitable just as Ronald Reagan arrived to prove them wrong.

Today, as in the late 1970s, the job isn’t too big, nor is the country too powerful: The man is too small."

As has been posted numerous times on this site, as elsewhere, the comparisons to the feebly inept Jimmy Carter presidency are too glaring to ignore. The only question remaining becomes: Who shall step forward as our new Reagan, and restore our nation from the devastation of his predecessor, as did his namesake?...T

It was fashionable at the end of the 1970s, after a dreary parade of presidential failures punctuated by Jimmy Carter, to say the presidency had grown too unwieldy. The historian Barbara Tuchman spoke for all the academic and journalistic believers in the theory of the impossible presidency when she mused, “Maybe some form of plural executive is needed, such as they have in Switzerland.”

Ah, yes, the wonders of the plural executive. Why didn’t that occur to James Madison?

Pres. Barack Obama has belatedly joined the ranks of presidential fatalists. The job isn’t too complex necessarily; it’s too damn influential. According to the New York Times, Obama has been telling aides that it’d be easier to be president of China. No one hangs on Hu Jintao’s every word, or expects global leadership from a grasping, one-party state that has never been a beacon to the world.

In the history of presidential lamentations, this has to rank among the most pathetic. It brings to mind the affecting scene from The King’s Speech when Colin Firth, playing the stammering monarch-to-be, breaks down and weeps at the prospect of the crown being thrust upon him: “I’m not a king.” Except Barack Obama campaigned for two years straight to be president of the United States — and doesn’t stutter.

The proximate cause of Obama’s angst is the crisis in Libya. Obama announced that Moammar Qaddafi must go, and proceeded to do nothing that might give his words any bite. The administration is still agonizing over the no-fly zone, even as Qaddafi routs the rebels. The no-fly zone isn’t a panacea — realistically, it’d only be a way station to more robust military action. Perhaps the administration wants to rule it out. Fine. But decide already. If Obama wasn’t going to aid the rebels in any way — not even recognize their provisional government, not even arm them — he should have modulated his words accordingly.

Obama lacks executive flair. Talk to New Jersey governor Chris Christie and he will tell you at length how much he loves making decisions. It’s hard to imagine a Chris Christie enjoying life as a legislator. Obama came to the presidency after a political career spent marinating in senates, first in Illinois, then in Washington.

Osama bin Laden famously talked of the weak horse and the strong horse. Obama is the show horse. As a U.S. senator, he distinguished himself more by saying things than by passing legislation. In the White House, he has replicated his role as the non-legislating legislator on a grand scale. His successes have been as the leader of the Democrats in Congress, although even here, the word “leader” applies only loosely. He set the broad goals and gave the speeches; otherwise, he let Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid run riot.

The stakes of Obama’s self-imposed passivity aren’t as dire as those of Pres. James Buchanan, who pleaded powerlessness as the country fell apart around him on the cusp of the Civil War. William Seward commented acerbically: “[He] shows conclusively that it is the duty of the president to execute the laws — unless somebody opposes him; and that no state has a right to go out of the Union — unless it wants to.” Nor has President Obama reached the depths of a Jimmy Carter, who literally disappeared in the run-up to his infamous 1979 “malaise” speech.

At the dawn of America’s global power, a bumptious Theodore Roosevelt raced to make America’s influence felt around the world — and earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a result. President Obama gives off a sense of world-weariness and exhaustion with America’s leadership — and has earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a result. He reflects the deep vein of declinism running through the country’s elite, the same class of people who pronounced the presidency uninhabitable just as Ronald Reagan arrived to prove them wrong.

Today, as in the late 1970s, the job isn’t too big, nor is the country too powerful: The man is too small.
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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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GINGRICH: 80% CHANCE OBAMA LOSES -- GOP COULD GAIN 70 HOUSE SEATS, TAKE SENATE

As I have been saying, this november will see the greatest sweep in modern electoral history. And again in 2012...T


Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich gives President Barack Obama only a 20 percent chance of being reelected — and says he might be the one to give Obama the boot.


Gingrich, who this week published a book called “To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine,” said he thinks Obama has “about one chance in five of getting reelected.” and called him “the closest thing to Jimmy Carter I’ve seen.”


“Because he’s so radical, you’re now going to have, I think, the most consequential campaign since 1932,” when Franklin D. Roosevelt clobbered President Herbert Hoover, Gingrich said.


Giving predictions for November’s midterms, Gingrich said House Republicans will pick up “somewhere between 40 and 65 or 70 seats” — enough to gain control of the House. “I believe John Boehner will be speaker in January,” he said.


Gingrich said he even sees a chance of Republican control of the Senate. “If they can beat Barbara Boxer [in California], I think that [Mitch] McConnell is going to be the Senate majority leader.”


The former speaker said there is “more of a possibility now” that he’ll run for president than when he was considering the idea ahead of the 2008 election. He said he’ll decide in February or March of next year and will base the decision partly on whether there is “a potential to raise the resources to be a serious, major candidate.”


Gingrich said he and his wife, Callista, will base the decision on two top factors: “Is the case for basic change clear enough, and powerful enough, that articulating it and carrying it is a legitimate part of my role as a citizen?” and “Is there a potential to raise the resources to be a serious, major candidate.”


“This is a decision that will change the entire rest of our lives, and I think we're taking it with our daughters and our son-in-laws and our grandchildren,” he said. “We're taking this very methodically and very seriously. It's very daunting. … The whole point of my book is to say: We have to have a decade of really profound, deep, change, and it has to be in the right direction to compete with China and India and to defeat terrorism. And if we don't get those, we are in deep trouble. …


“The movement that would achieve that can't just be the presidency—that's where Obama didn't get it. It can't even just be the Congress. It's got to be school boards, city council, state legislature, county commission, governorships. I mean, you have to have a wave of change in this country for us to be able to compete with China and India. … There are thousands of people around the country who walk up and say: ‘We have to have leadership that will get this done.’”
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Obama has ruined his presidency and his party

The worst president in US history with the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson. Osama has made Jimmy Carter look moderate and competent by comparison, and Bill Clinton look ethical...T

One of my favorite quotes about politics comes from Henry Kissinger in his book Years of Upheaval, his memoir of the Ford presidency: “A statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his vision and his nation’s experience. If his vision gets too far out ahead of his nation’s experience, he will lose his mandate. But if he hews too close to the conventional, he will lose control over events.”

Now, at once, we see both happening to President Barack Obama.

His healthcare proposals obviously ran afoul of the first of Kissinger’s warnings. By pushing for changes that conflicted with America’s values, common sense and experience, he lost his mandate. In that disastrous push for an elusive goal, he ruined his own presidency and his party. It may take decades for the Democratic Party to recover from his folly. Indeed, his push for health legislation, in the face of rapidly eroding public support, ranks with the Vietnam War, Watergate and, of course, Bill Clinton’s healthcare initiatives as the most costly to their respective political parties.

But now, as he faces threats from Iran, domestic terrorism, continually high unemployment and the swollen deficit, he is also violating the second half of the Kissinger warning — his politics are too passive and too conventional and, as a result, he is losing control over events.

In the phase of presidential dithering in the aftermath of the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts, there is no clear presidential message, no coherent strategy — not even an identifiable program. His budget cuts are far too tepid. His tax program is nothing new. Obama’s Stimulus 2 package seems like the same-old, same-old.

His short-lived bounce from the State of the Union speech is indicative of how limited a vision he has these days. It lasted a week and was never more than three points at its apogee.

And, as Kissinger would have predicted, he is losing control over events. Sen. Evan Bayh’s (D-Ind.) retirement, with its implied blast at Obama’s policies; the increasing recklessness of Iran; and the seemingly intractable unemployment all provide evidence that President Obama is no longer dictating the national agenda.

As a result, the negatives he incurred by moving too far out ahead of the nation’s experience are combining with those he is getting for being too conventional. He is experiencing both ends of the Kissinger prediction. Republicans and independents are still in shock from his headlong rush into socialism, while Democrats are increasingly restive and disillusioned by his failure to lead. The entire country is worried at his passivity in the face of domestic terror threats and the rapidly growing Iranian momentum toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

While his job rating has remained relatively steady in recent months, hovering just below 50 percent of likely voters, his ratings in specific areas — like holding down spending, cutting the deficit, creating jobs and managing the economy — are all eroding, presaging further drops in his overall ratings.

Seemingly paralyzed by adversity, President Obama and his advisers are showing a lack of resilience in the face of reversals that is perhaps the inevitable outcome of his smooth rise to the top in 2008. Never tried by bad outcomes (as Hillary has doubtless been), he and they seem unable to regain momentum and appear to be flailing without strategic or even tactical direction.

All this might be what happens when you elect a state Senator whose U.S. Senate career was consumed with his presidential campaign as president.
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Dick Morris:You Want a Prediction Now? We'll Win the House By 10 Seats and Win the Senate by 2

This fits nicely with Michael Barone's recent analysis that up to 155 house seats may be in play by November. Republicans take the house, the Senate, and Jimmy Carter becomes no longer the worst president in U.S. History (even including the now-not-taught-in-high-school years prior to 1877!)...T

Morris predicting the GOP picking up the House and the Senate...

Hannity: "Here's the last question, Micheal Barone pointed out that if we used Obama's numbers in 2008 and Scott Brown's numbers in the Senate election and we applied that to every district in the country, 155 Democratic seat would be up for grabs. You even figured out that the Republicans could even take back the Senate. If you had to make a prediction now, where are we in the House and Senate in November?"

Morris: "You want a prediction now? We'll win the House by 10 seats and win the Senate by 2"

From dickmorris.com,
Morris runs the numbers and tells us exactly what Obama inherited when he walked into the WH, (Obama claims a $1.3 Trillion dollar deficit)

Dick Morris:
In 2008, Bush ran a deficit of $485 billion. By the time the fiscal year started on October 1, 2008, it had gone up by another $100 billion due to increased recession-related spending and depressed revenues. So it was $600 billion. That was the real Bush deficit.

But when the fiscal crisis hit, Bush had to pass TARP in the final months of his presidency which cost $700 billion. The $700 billion was a short term loan. $500 billion of it has already been repaid.

So what was the real deficit Obama inherited? The $600 billion deficit Bush was running plus the $200 billion of TARP money that probably won’t be repaid (mainly AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). That totals $800 billion. That was the real deficit Obama inherited.
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Obama's answer for America: more of "me"

The most bitter, cynical, angry and arrogant State of the Union speech this observer of Washington politics has ever seen. It reminded my of a speech a communist dictator such as Castro or Chavez would have delivered to a captive audience (but, then, I am being redundant...)

It is over, politically, for this radical president. All that remains to be seen is whether his agenda will be rammed through congress, using budget reconciliation, against the wishes of the American people.

This bitter arrogant man-child has managed what I had previously though impossible: To make Bill Clinton appear honest by comparison, and Jimmy Carter competent...T


There's a story of an ex hausted tenor at La Scala who, facing repeated cries of "Encore," responded that he couldn't go on. A man rose in the audience to say, "You'll keep singing until you get it right."

That seems to be the defining principle of the Obama administration -- whose response to every problem, every setback, every hiccup and challenge has been, simply, "more Obama."

Indeed, for people who aren't sticklers for political jargon, it will be a shock that last night was Obama's first State of the Union Address, since it was his third formal address to a joint session of Congress. Yet for all of the political déjà vu, what was most surprising last night was the degree to which Obama delivered even more of the same.

Washington graybeards and pundits have been insisting that Obama needs to "start over," "reboot" and "tack to the middle" after Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts. But Obama's response last night was to recommit himself to the agenda that has gotten him in so much trouble.

In fairness, the president took a French-bath of Clintonism before he took to his beloved TelePrompTer. He doused himself with the scent of the deficit-fighter and trade-promoter. He unveiled a slew of small, easy, applause-gathering proposals and populist appeals that he knows will go nowhere.

He also indulged in a lot of feel-your-pain pathos, trying to connect with the real Americans suffering from the recession and the misdeeds of a "Washington" that Obama seems to think is run by someone other than him.

But the eau-de-Clinton couldn't mask the stench -- and Obama, in his supreme arrogance, didn't really seem to care.

There was no "pivot to the center," no serious accounting for the Massachusetts miracle or his misfortunes. Instead, there was an innumerate, inaccurate and distinctly unpresidential whine -- blaming George W. Bush for nearly all of his problems (leaving out, among other things, that the Democrats have been controlling Congress and crafting budgets since 2006).

The White House insists that the new wave of populism created by Democratic governance is, in fact, the same populist wave that carried Obama to victory in 2008. In other words, Obama was elected president by the backlash against his own presidency.

This novel theory allows Obama to stick to his view that there's nothing wrong with his health-care plan, and anyone who feels differently hasn't heard or understood the president's explanations.

So, he not only implored Democrats not to "run for the hills" on the health-reform bill, but insisted that as "temperatures cool," hot-tempered opponents will, of course, realize they were wrong about the bill.

Obama began his presidency insisting that government is the answer to our problems. A year later, he still believes that the era of big government is upon us.

In the same speech in which he preened over a gallingly gimmicky "spending freeze," the president promised more jobs bills, more "investments" in schools, roads, trains and factories. He even reaffirmed his support for his carbon-tax legislation -- which would send far more jobs overseas than it would create here at home.

But Obama has a bigger problem: Aside from a few throwaway lines of self-deprecation, whenever he grew passionate, it was to blame others.

His predecessor topped his list, of course. But also everyone else who disagrees with him.

Obama insists that Americans need to muster the courage to agree with him, to sign on to his agenda. Just as at Omaha Beach and Bull Run, Americans need to show their mettle. "Again, we are tested. And again, we must answer history's call." That "call" is the call of Obama.

"I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I can do it alone." So come on, you slackers, fall into line.

He decried the politicians who are in "permanent campaign" mode -- the same week he brought into the White House his campaign manager.

Other politicians are vain, cowardly and insubstantial. They need the courage to change. Meanwhile, Obama is great the way he is.

That is the attitude that has gotten the president in so much trouble. And last night's State of the Union speech showed us that change really isn't easy, particularly for the president.
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Gloomy Days for Obamacare, Silver Lining for America

As I watched Obama stumble, dissemble, and ramble through his prime time "State Media apparatchik public event" er, press conference, a powerful thought came to mind. OK, two thoughts: The 1st, of course, was the mental image of the Brezhnev era military parades featuring the Soviet Elite atop the Kremlin walls waving to the "adoring" masses. Ah yes, the power of a prescient double entendre!

The 2nd: Obama's poll numbers are falling faster than Jimmy Carters. Jimmy Carter. The democrats, the ones who still eat meat, are in open rebellion, rightly fearing an impending 1994 redux. This guy is a liar, like Bill Clinton was. Obama, though, unlike Mr. Lewinsky, is an ideologue. Obama has neither the political skills nor the inclinations of W.C. Clinton to sway with the prevailing political winds and put survival above ideology. He has, along with the most left-wing congress since 1917, shoved his progressive, fascistic agenda against the collective will of the American people, who have seen this scam before.

His presidency, to quote a real US president, is like "an Evil Empire, whose last pages are even now being written."

The Obama presidency is over. God bless America...T

Thursday is the day things tend to come to a boil on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress have been in town for three or four days; they're planning their exits on Friday to meet other commitments; they've had a chance to talk and meet with one another and sample the moods of their colleagues.

This month, Thursdays have been very bad days for the Obama administration's attempt to pass health care bills concocted by House and Senate committee chairmen.

On the first Thursday after Congress got back in session, July 9, 40 members of the Democratic Blue Dogs caucus sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter opposing any health care bill that would increase the federal deficit, fail to reform delivery systems, and not protect small businesses and rural health providers. Signers included two committee chairmen. The House bill, they wrote, "lacks a number of elements essential to preserving what works and fixing what is broken."

On the next Thursday, July 16, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf addressed those concerns in testimony on the Hill. He reiterated the CBO's conclusion that the Democratic bills would increase the federal deficit, by something on the order of a trillion dollars over 10 years. And, no, the Democratic bills would not "bend the cost curve" -- i.e., would not reform the delivery systems in ways that would cut costs. Pelosi and Barack Obama insisted, in foot-stamping mode, that their bills would really, really cut costs.

That same day, freshman Rep. Jared Polis of Boulder, Colo., sent Pelosi a letter signed by 21 House freshmen and one sophomore opposing the increased taxes on high earners imposed by the two House committee bills. "Especially in a recession," the letter read, "we need to make sure not to kill the goose that will lay the golden eggs of our recovery."

There are 256 Democrats in the House, with one vacant Democratic seat. Only five Democrats signed both the Blue Dogs' and Polis' letters. That means that 57 Democrats signed one letter or the other, pledging to oppose central features of the Democratic health care bills. Few, if any, Republicans are expected to support either bill. You do the math. The Democratic leadership seems well short of the 218 votes needed for a majority on the floor. No wonder House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said it's time "to go back to the drawing board."

Obama and congressional Democratic leaders are blaming Republicans for their problem. Obama noted that Republican Sen. Jim DeMint and Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol want to "kill" the Democratic bills. But the Blue Dogs' and Polis' letters showed that the mortal threat comes from elected Democrats. Twenty-nine of the 57 letter signers defeated or replaced Republicans in 2006 or 2008. Thirty-three of them represent districts carried by John McCain in 2008.

What we're seeing is the people speaking through their politicians. Obama and many Democrats assumed that the financial crisis would predispose most Americans to favor a larger and much more expensive government than we ever have had before.

A plausible hope for change, perhaps, but polling shows it hasn't happened. The prospect of huge federal deficits extending out as far as the eye can see is not appealing to most voters. The prospect of having the health care sector of the economy designed by the people who gave us the $787 billion stimulus package is even less appetizing.

But we should not cynically underrate the importance of a strong argument, which may prevail despite the transcendent aura of a new president. Some of the Blue Dogs' concerns may be parochial (rural health care), but they make a strong case, buttressed by Elmendorf's expert testimony, that Congress should not rush to transform the health care sector at huge cost and with little cost-cutting effect. And the Polis letter signers' concern about the negative macroeconomic effects of higher taxation of high earners can find support in the writings of Democratic, as well as Republican, economists.

What will this Thursday bring? We'll wait and see what comes from the buzzing on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, as I read the text of the Blue Dogs' and Polis' letters, I suddenly heard the voice of the late Jack Kemp proclaiming at the 1984 Republican National Convention that if you subsidize something, you get more of it and that if you tax something, you get less of it.
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A Little Bird Told Me

"It takes a village" - to shame a fascist...(oh, which one? both of them: Obama AND Ayatollah Khamenei )

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Obama's Stimulus: A Colossal Waste?

So now even liberal economists think spending a Quadrillion dollars of taxpayer money on pork and democrat party causes is a big waste of money? Now?! Where were they before it was passed into law?!

I have been watching with interest all these cable news shows, doing program after program speculating on a forthcoming depression, on how spending wildly leads to hyper inflation via 70's Argentina, on how tax increases in a steep recession are historically guaranteed to deepen and prolong the downturn...again I ask: "Where were they?" when this communistic clown, with zero public record, was running virtually unopposed for the presidency of the United States of America?!

And now, ladies and gentlemen, our Great Socialist leader is going to balance the budget...balance the budget?! Did you not just spend a trillion dollars sir?! a trillion dollars? Have you no shame? At long last, sir, have you no shame? none at all?! ;)

And doing so by raising taxes on business, on capital gains (goodbye Dow Jones!), on the incomes of those that produce jobs, and by radically cutting the military? Isn't this the same clown that said we needed more troops in Afghanistan? That we should invade Pakistan?!

No dear readers, this revenue will be used to spend, spend, spend even more on pork, on welfare, on Union causes, on recruitment of illegal immigration, on government activism, and on inflating the size of our bloated government bureaucracy, because you see, they do all vote democrat, don't they?

Joseph Goebbels once opined that for a lie to be successful, it must be brazen, bold, and colossal, so as to be immune from rational dismissal, by rational thinking people. The BIG LIE...

We have in office as President a liar, a thief, and a communist of Orwellian proportion. May our nation be strong enough to outlast him. Jimmy Carter was an amateur in his shadow...T

WASHINGTON -- Judged by his own standards, President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus program is deeply disappointing. For weeks, Obama has described the economy in grim terms. "This is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill recession," he said at his Feb. 9 news conference. It's "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression." Given these dire warnings, you'd expect the stimulus package to focus almost exclusively on reviving the economy. It doesn't, and for that, Obama bears much of the blame.

The case for a huge stimulus -- which I support -- is to prevent a devastating downward economic spiral. Spending is tumbling worldwide. In the fourth quarter of 2008, the U.S. economy contracted at a nearly 4 percent annual rate. In Japan, the economy fell at a nearly 13 percent rate; in Europe, the rate was about 6 percent. These are gruesome declines. If the economic outlook is as bleak as Obama says, there's no reason to dilute the upfront power of the stimulus. But that's what he's done.....
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An Insufficiency of Fear

- John McCain probably was eager to return to the Senate as an avatar of bipartisanship, a role he has enjoyed. It is, therefore, a measure of the recklessness of House Democrats that they caused the stimulus debate to revolve around a bill that McCain dismisses as "generational theft." -

"My Friends" as our feckless ex-presidential candidate would have prefaced: We are making the exact same mistake that LBJ and his fanatic leftist, Ivory tower dwelling, liberal control freaks made in the 60's, and for exactly the same wrongheaded reasons.

LBJ took advantage of the assassination of Kennedy to ram everything the left had wanted for a generation through congress. The direct result was 21% interest rates, 10% inflation, 10% unemployment, the "misery index", talk of amending the Constitution to provide for 2 presidents serving concurrently, gas lines as long as the eye could see because "the oil is all gone!", our enemies running rampant over U.S. interests worldwide, the Islamist revolution, surrender to Iran, and...Jimmy Carter...

Osama is using the current environment to foist the exact same socialist pap down our collective throats, and the result will be identical, if we are so lucky that it is not indeed even worse, to the point of a collective Waterloo that the author fears...T

WASHINGTON -- The president, convinced that the only thing America has to fear is an insufficiency of fear, has warned that "disaster" and "catastrophe" are the certain alternatives to swift passage of the stimulus legislation. One marvels at his certitude more than one envies his custody of this adventure.

Certitude of one flavor or another is never entirely out of fashion in Washington. Thirty years ago, some conservatives were certain that their tax cuts would be so stimulative that they would be completely self-financing. Today, some liberals are certain that the spending they favor -- on green jobs, infrastructure and everything else -- will completely pay for itself. For liberals, "stimulus spending" is a classification that no longer classifies: All spending is, they are certain, necessarily stimulative.

At Yale's 1962 commencement, President John Kennedy expressed Washington's recurring confidence in the ability to supplant politics with expertise. As is traditional, Kennedy deplored "traditional labels" and insisted that "differences today" involve not clashes of principles but only "matters of degree." Kennedy argued that "the practical management of a modern economy" is "basically an administrative or executive problem." Congress need not intrude. Because policy issues are "sophisticated and technical questions," demanding "technical answers, not political answers," laypersons could hardly participate in the debate.

In December 1965, John Maynard Keynes, although 19 years dead, was, as today, enjoying one of his recurring resurrections as vindicator of government management of the economy by manipulating "aggregate demand." Keynes' visage was on Time magazine's cover and the accompanying story said that happy days were here again and here to stay.

President Lyndon Johnson was embarked on building the Great Society, assisted by policymakers who, wrote Time, "have used Keynesian principles" to smooth the moderate business cycles and achieve price stability: "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes' central theme" that a modern economy can operate at "top efficiency" only with government "intervention and influence." So, "economists have descended in force from their ivory towers and now sit confidently at the elbow of almost every important leader in government and business, where they are increasingly called upon to forecast, plan and decide." Ten years later, the "misery index" -- the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate -- was 19.9, heading for 22 percent in 1980.

Today, again, we are told that "politics" has no place in the debate about the tripartite stimulus legislation, which is partly a stimulus, partly liberalism's agenda of social engineering, and partly the beginning of "remaking" the economy. Gary Wolfram of Hillsdale College notes that the size of the stimulus -- the House-Senate compromise bill is $789 billion -- is just slightly less than the amount of all U.S. currency in circulation, and is larger than the entire federal budget was until 1983. Yet it is said that in the debate about this encompassing legislation -- which concerns what government can and should do, and ultimately what kind of regime America shall have -- people should "transcend" (so says Larry Summers, the president's economic adviser) politics. What, then, would be left for political argument to be about?

It is said that the negligible Republican support for the stimulus legislation means that bipartisanship is dead. But what can "bipartisanship" mean concerning legislation that concerns almost everything?

John McCain probably was eager to return to the Senate as an avatar of bipartisanship, a role he has enjoyed. It is, therefore, a measure of the recklessness of House Democrats that they caused the stimulus debate to revolve around a bill that McCain dismisses as "generational theft."

The federal government, with its separation of powers and myriad blocking mechanisms, was not made for speed but for safety. This is particularly pertinent today because if $789 billion is spent ineffectively or destructively, government does not get to say "oops" and take a mulligan. Senate Republicans have slowed and altered the course of the "disaster! catastrophe!" stampede. Still, as Anthony Trollope wrote in one of his parliamentary novels, "The best carriage horses are those which can most steadily hold back against the coach as it trundles down the hill."

Not yet a third of the way through the president's "first 100 days," he and we should remember that it was not FDR's initial burst of activity in 1933 that put the phrase "100 days" into the Western lexicon. It was Napoleon's frenetic trajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from Elba and ended near the Belgian village of Waterloo.
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Hope He Can Change

"Ask President Carter"

The man's record is of a small time political hack, a crooked crony of Chicago ward politics, and an fanatically left-wing one at that. So why should we be surprised that he now is acting like one? The criminal malfeasance of the drive-by press in electing their messiah will soon be the biggest scandal in the modern history of the nation, once this clown is seen riding naked though the town square on his horse.

In short order Osama may make his role model look good by comparison. No, not Lincoln - Jimmy Carter, replete in his sweater, malaise, and defeatism...T

An Obamaplosion

I get loads of quasi-hate mail about questioning Obama’s candidacy and governance. But I am worried, not about Obama, or the politics of governance, but about the nation itself. The media has forsaken us. But after only two weeks we are in a crisis stage of confidence, and the story is spiraling by the hour out of control. I write here not to score points, but to warn readers that this is all very serious. Obama is our President, and we must hope he does something fast to save his administration from general ridicule that will incur real dangers for all of us abroad.

Again, anyone who cares about the US, at home and overseas, must be worried, very worried, about the disastrous last two weeks. Even the fawning media–that is responsible in some way for the crisis, given that they chose to be Pravda-like in encouraging the messianic style that got a haughty Obama in his present mess–will soon start bailing in efforts to restore their last fides. If a Dick Morris figure does not come to the rescue soon, Obama’s soaring rhetoric of hope and change will become the stuff of Leno/Letterman and general laughter. Bush was unfairly demonized, but no one abroad thought he was predictably soft and would be so-so about protecting US interests, or that his words and his deeds would be so often in direct antithesis.

What happened? Count the ways, and then let us see what might be done pronto!

I. Obama claimed a new moral high ground, and the media seconded that. But nothing in his career—his failed congressional race, the divorce disclosures of his two Senate primary and general rivals, Rezko, Wright, Blago advisor, Ayers, etc.—had ever suggested he had on a single occasion challenged prevailing norms in efforts to raise the ethical bar.

Instead he was allowed to blather on about heaven on earth, while he was by needs governing from the corrupt cesspool of DC lawyers and lobbyists. So we got the worst of both worlds: the most exalted ethical rhetoric ever, and the greatest ethical lapses of any incipient administration in memory. Over 10 lobbyists now appointed. Consider further: Richardson (nuff said), Holder (helped to pardon a most wanted fugitive), Lynn (Raytheon lobbyist now at Defense), Killefer (sloppy taxes; she’s gone), Geithner (tax dodger), Daschle (would have been a tax felon had he been one of us), Rangel (blank check both to write and break our tax laws), Dodd and Frank (exemptions for ethical lapses at the eye of the financial storm).

There are still the Blago tapes and the fears that Prosecutor Fitzgerald short-circuited the investigation in recognition that once Team Obama started turning up horse-trading on tape they had to be warned to desist. The full release of those transcripts will either confirm or belie that fear—and Blago is sinisterly brilliant and eager for revenge.

II. Then there were the inflated lectures on historic foreign policy to be made by the clumsy political novice who trashed his own country and his predecessor in the most ungracious manner overseas to a censured Saudi-run press organ (e.g., Bush is dictatorial, the Saudi king is courageous; Obama can mend bridges that America broke to aggrieved Muslims [apparently Teheran hostages, Rushdie, serial attacks in the 1990s, 9/11, Madrid, London never apparently occurred, and neither did feeding Somalis, saving Kuwait, protesting Chechnya, Bosnia/Kosovo, billions to Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians, help in two Afghan wars, and on and on]). It is always dangerous to suggest that ‘America then bad, America now good’—the former gives bad guys talking points, the latter reason to try something stupid.

III. Then there was the shrill, harsh campaign rhetoric of Bush shredding the Constitution–FISA, Guantanamo, Patriot Act, Iraq, renditions–followed by ‘all that for now staying the same’, inasmuch we haven’t been attacked in over seven years. This suggests either that Obama was disingenuous then or disingenuous now. Let us hope it was the former.

IV. The stimulus is an ungodly disaster–a trillion dollars to foster Democratic constituencies that will leave a generation to come with unsustainable debt. Listening to Reid/Pelosi has proven catastrophic. Necessary loan guarantees to stop meltdowns have morphed into a liberal wish list (cf. Emanuel’s ‘don’t let a crisis go to waste’) of a half century. Borrowing trillions to cure an economy that borrowed hundreds of billions and got itself into an abyss of debt makes no sense.

V Robert Gibbs, the new press secretary is, well, incompetent. He is a Scott McClellan nightmare that won’t go away—given his long McClellan-like relationship with the President (McClellan should have been fired on hour one on the job). When Davis now sorta blames Fox News for Obama’s calamities he is McClellan to the core. He is sounding as duplicitous, vague, and contradictory as Obama is supposedly transparent and bipartisan. The conflicting messages don’t mix. I think he is kind and a good person in a way McClellan was not (though not always so in the primaries), but Gibbs is not helping the President and absolutely exposing the press to ridicule, who otherwise would have ripped apart someone of his caliber long ago.

VI. True, Biden is just being Biden. But now he is Vice President Biden of our United States. Already, he’s ridiculed the Chief Justice. He has trashed the former VP. He has bragged on himself ad nauseam in very Bidenesque weird ways (best qualified VP in history he booms), and it has only been two weeks. He is as incompetent in foreign affairs as Gates, Jones, Holbrooke are skilled.

And the result of all this?At home our President is losing critical credibility—but at a geometrical rate in week 2 of a four-year term. He must for our sake improve—fast!

Abroad, some really creepy people are now lining up to test Obama’s world view of ‘Bush did it/but I am the world’: the North Koreans are readying their missiles; the Iranians are calling us passive, bragging on nukes and satellites; Russia is declaring missile defense is over and the vulnerable Euros in real need of iffy Russian gas; Pakistanis say no more drone attacks (and then our friends the Indians say “shut up” about Kashmir and the Euros order no more ‘buy American” and no to more troops in Afghanistan). Oddly, Iraq stays quiet, our homeland security measures are keeping us safe, and the initial bank guarantees stopped a greater meltdown–so not everything was ruined on January 20.

Here are some suggestions:

I. Drop all the talk about the best, the most, the greatest ethical, moral, legal etc. Just keep quiet and call in Senate leaders of both parties and show them the names of nominees and ask for pre-hearing advice. I think Geithner cannot now stay: not when Obama confesses that Daschle had to go to avoid two tax laws for elites and mass. But Geithner’s sin was far worse, since he was the nominal head of the IRS itself. He should step down, and Obama should likewise distance himself from Rangel. Advice: Keep quiet and carry a big ethical stick.

II. Never trash your predecessor or the US abroad. Defend it—always; America is better than the alternative; that it is not perfect does not mean that it is not great. Bush’s decision to surge was courageous, a Saudi royal calling for Israel to go back to the 1948 borders is just more of the same. Trust Billary, Gates, and Jones on foreign policy; ignore Biden. Send him to funerals (and that is risky).

III. Hush about the Bush homeland security measures. Just accept them as necessary evils. Express regret for the no-win choices, but insist that another 4 years of safety from 9/11 attacks is the primary consideration (and we will assume that ‘Bush shredded the Constitution’ was mere empty-headed Hollywood-imported campaign rhetoric.)

IV. Halve the stimulus. Insist on tax cuts rather than hand-outs. Include mandatory spending caps to come based on GDP performance; call for national unity to balance the budget when the storms pass. Do not listen to one word from Pelosi/Reid. The former is an extremist, the latter unhinged. Call in Lieberman for insider advice. Find some Senate Democratic moderates. We will endure this 1981-2-like Recession that is not the Great Depression, but increasingly an excuse for European socialism that has now imploded from Greece to the UK.

V. Replace Gibbs. Perhaps bump him upstairs to some sort of communications czar. But don’t unleash him on the public or press. Bring some old Democratic pro out from the past, either a liberal version of a TV vet like Tony Snow or some Clinton-era flak.

VI. Give Biden a key assignment: something like an Al Gore reforming government thing—anything other than commentary on foreign policy or ad hoc philosophizing. In thirty days Dick Cheney will be Rushmorean in comparison.

Let us hope that the world doesn’t try to test us this month. And if the outlaws do, let the sober and judicious people (and there are many) in Obama’s foreign policy team be allowed to react. In week three, we are light years from ‘hope and change’; now it is let us “hope he can change”.

Basic message: stop, halt, quit NOW the “I am the messiah” rhetoric before the fair-weather media bails.

So stop “Bush did it” refrains. And stop the trash Rush/Hannety/talk radio/Fox. Arguing with talk radio is not what Presidents do (did Bush diss Keith Olbermann?). Speak softly and kindly (and HUMBLY) in preparing for mega challenges against American interests. Do all that and the American people will rally to our President. They want their President to succeed and can forgive a lot, but again not hypocrisy cum self-righteousness.

Ask President Carter.
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