Distractions

At the helm of the Hindenburg

Donald Trump apparently has made himself enough of a pest that after years of controversy, President Obama finally authorized the release of the Hawaiian record of his birth, calling the issue a "distraction." Obama took time out of his serious presidential work to hold a press conference to make the announcement. AP's circulating photo of the event shows a beaming Obama.

I believe this indicates two things about the White House view of this: first, that they've come to the end of being able to milk this controversy to their advantage, and second, that this has been a triumph for them politically. 

Well, maybe it is, within their own Democratic party echo chamber.  This all reminds me of nothing less than the Clinton/Lewisnky affair.  I remember Bill Clinton making a televised national address where he pointed his finger at us and denied his extra-marital bj, and subsequently let the country be dragged through a year-long constitutional crisis rather than simply admit the truth. Exactly what his motive was in all that only he really knows, but being that he was Bill Clinton, I doubt it included defending Monica Lewinsky's honor, such as a European politician might claim in a scandal. Being that he was also a politician, I assume that political considerations were never far from his mind, if in fact they weren't the primary consideration.

So President Obama & crew were likewise willing to let this controversy fester for years because they saw it being to their political advantage.  After that advantage dissipated when Trump latched on to the issue like a gila monster, it probably took some White House staffer about 20 minutes to arrange for the release of the certificate.  I think we'll see the release of Obama's academic records in a quicker fashion, assuming the administration realizes that it's best to feed the Donald monster quickly and hope he'll go elsewhere for his next meal.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is dealing with a few distracting problems like, um, rising food and gas prices, the falling dollar, high unemployment, the continuing collapse of the housing market, the approach of hyperinflation, terrorism, the developing Libyan quagmire, depression, suicide...

But rest easy, America, the President is happy today.  He thinks he scored some political points, and for a politician, that's what it's all about.

Palin & Otherwise

President Obama's administration has been such a juggernaut of disasters that it's difficult to for me to imagine that he will be reelected on merit. Public opinion polls have shown his approval ratings to be low compared to the numbers seen in many previous administrations, though I tend to think that given the liberal nature of some of the polling organizations, his actual approval among voters is lower than reported.  In polls where voters are asked to pick Obama against a generic Republican opponent, he generally runs even or slightly above, which can't be good news to the politicos in the White House.

Still, the problem in defeating the President is that he won't be running against a generic opponent--he'll be running against a living politician, who may or may not be skilled enough and lucky enough to beat him.  Whoever the Republicans nominate will have a tough campaign to run, given that the Democrats and the liberal media will spare no expense, and, if the last three years are any guide, do just about anything without shame to ensure that Obama is reelected.

We're beginning to see jockeying for advantage going on among possible candidates, including some very unlikely candidates. Charles Krauthammer and other journalists are beginning to seriously survey the field. I'm not going to go into that sort of thing here, but I think that what we're seeing shape up on the Republican side so far is a contest between establishment favorites and those who will be attempting to prevail without the aid of the Republican establishment, commonly called "outsiders."

In spite of being both a governor and vice presidential candidate as a Republican, Sarah Palin is clearly at odds with the Republican establishment and is probably the least likely of the top tier candidates to be supported by the likes of Karl Rove or the national GOP.  She also has been the most effective in throwing the White House off its stride and in general making the left nuts to the point where they engage in extreme and embarrassing behavior, whether they realize it looks that way or not.

In her "comeback" speech at the Wisconsin tea party rally on April 16, she clearly outlined her differences with not only the President, but the leaders of her own party in the Congress as well.  I found her raised voice in the speech a bit hard to listen to, but she was trying to be heard over hundreds of leftists in the crowd showing their civility and tolerance by screaming obscenities and making whatever other noise they could in hopes of silencing her, so she probably didn't have much choice in that.  Her speech was cheerfully combative, and she was clearly making a point in choosing to speak in Madison, site of the recent mob madness by union members and their leftist supporters.

Palin for some reason inspires strong opinions in many people.  No one really knows whether or not she intends to run for President, in spite of the tendency of some journalists and commenters to declare her unlikely to run, a case of wishful thinking if ever I've seen it.  I don't think the Republican primary campaign will really begin in earnest until she announces her decision.  It seems to me it will be difficult for the other candidates to map out an effective strategy without knowing her decision, and I think their efforts to raise money will also be stymied until her intentions are revealed.

I think that if Sarah Palin chooses to run, the other candidates and their allies in the party establishment will have a difficult time defeating her.  If she does manage to win the nomination, it will have been after a fierce fight, and she will come out of the nominating convention looking very strong indeed.  The White House will of course attempt to make her an object of ridicule, but I doubt they'll have much luck at that, and what they'll have on their hands instead is a serious battle in which Palin won't feel any of the reservations against attacking Obama that plagued the McCain campaign in 2008.

Folks

To me, one of President Obama's most annoying mannerisms is his frequent use of the word "folks" in his speeches, usually when he is referring to a group of people who hold some belief that he intends to refute.  There often isn't any such group or belief, but our President never lets reality get in the way of making straw man arguments in the pursuit of his agenda.

Yesterday, the President made yet another of his eye-glazing speeches that was so dull it even knocked out the Vice President for a spell.  The thrust of the speech was that Paul Ryan's budget plan is mean and vicious and will keep us from winning the future, and that only by following Obama's economic plan for the future will we be able to remain the glorious country that he and the First Lady want to completely change.  Except he doesn't really have a plan in so many words.  Oh yeah, I almost forgot -- he wants to raise income taxes and close off all those pesky tax deductions that keep the government down in the mouth and scrapping for spending cash all the time.  He's even coined a new phrase for that last bit:  eliminating tax deductions is now called spending reductions in the tax code.  The man is a poet.

In Obamaworld, everyone else is to blame for all the problems we have, and it's never Obama's fault.  In his speech he claimed that his "plan" will eventually cut $4 trillion from the national debt, not once acknowledging that he is the same fellow who in only two years (along with Pelosi & Co.) has added trillions to that very same debt, all in a knuckleheaded Keynesian attempt at stimulating the economy and creating or saving™ millions of jobs.  In case you haven't been following closely--it hasn't worked.

Meanwhile, down here in Air Force One's no-fly zone things aren't going so well.  Folks are having problems just making ends meet, much less prospering and laying store for the future.  Obama's pursuit of delusional economic ideas is causing all kinds of misery for folks.  Many still are losing their houses. Unemployment remains high, especially among young folks and minorities. Depression and suicide are on the rise.  In general, the bad economy is putting the lives of millions on hold as they wait for a sign that they'll finally have an even chance of successfully pursuing their dreams and plans.

I'm not very familiar with theories of divine punishment, but I hope there is a special place in hell for utopian fools like our President, people willing to impose their vision on the rest of us, against all evidence that their plans ever cause anything but destruction and poverty in the long run. Short of that, I'd like to see one Barack Obama suffer my vision of his presidency ending before he wants it to, followed by a long term as ex-President trying to convince the world that, no, he really wasn't the worst President in the history of the republic, no matter what folks keep saying.

The Boehner Expedition

For all the drama we've been witnessing in the past few weeks over the budget showdown, you might have thought there was a serious fight going on between the President & Republican leaders in the House. On hearing the news of the compromise that has been reached on the continuing resolution, it seems to me that what was most important to these negotiators was finding an agreement that would allow everyone involved to suffer the least amount of political damage possible.

Seriously, with all the momentum going against President Obama since the elections, and with monthly deficits running over $200 billion a month--all that Boehner & Co. can force the Democrats into agreeing to cut is an extra $6 billion dollars?  This is a victory, a triumph?

What has been shown here is that for Boehner there is a new third rail in politics--"shutting down" the government.  After seeing how Boehner has behaved in the past two budget fights, I have a lot of trouble imagining that he will be any tougher when the battle over the 2012 budget begins this summer.  I don't have any way of knowing what assurances Boehner has or hasn't given to Paul Ryan about how much support he can expect for his new budget plan, but for now it seems to me likely that Ryan is going to have to drag the Republican leadership kicking and screaming in pursuit of serious budget reform.

I think it's easy to predict that the Democrats are going to fight in every way they know how against Paul Ryan's proposal for next year.  Seeing the results of Boehner's past two budget negotiations has me worried he's already given the Democrats a winning strategy in that fight--all they need do in the end is threaten to shut down the government.  Faced with that threat, I'm afraid what we'll get from Boehner yet again is another "best deal we could get."

Maybe it will be the best deal he could get, but the way things look now, I doubt it will be the deal we need.

Off The Waterfront

Ah, 1980.  It was a time of shag haircuts and shag carpets, of disco on the wane, of unemployment and inflation, of gas lines and national humiliation.  It was also the final year of Jimmy Carter's presidency, a time when much of the country concluded that Jimmy Carter didn't know what the hell he was doing.

If a President is generally viewed as successful, he will probably be able to scare off serious challenges to his nomination for reelection. Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton are good examples of this. Not having a challenger in the primary gives a President more time to prepare for the general election, and to concentrate on that most important of all campaign functions, fundraising.

By the time 1980 rolled around, Jimmy Carter wasn't seen as having had a successful term as President.  He was presiding over an economy that is still the most vivid example of stagflation that the United States has so far experienced.  His foreign policy, after his success bringing Egypt and Israel to peace, had descended into disarray as it seemed aggressive foreign leaders had taken his measure and decided he was no obstacle to their plans.  The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and in Iran the Shah was deposed, after which it was quickly taken over by religious radicals, who eventually seized the U.S. Embassy and held the staff as hostages, and with them President Carter's political fortunes.

With Carter's public approval ratings hovering below 30 percent, it naturally became clear to ambitious Democrats that Carter might not be able to survive a primary fight.  The man who stepped up to the challenge was Sen. Ted Kennedy, a flawed candidate for sure but one who represented the left wing of the party more solidly than Carter did.  Jerry Brown also launched his own campaign, with an ideological stance that reflected the state of the weather as much as any deep-seated convictions.

Carter did win the nomination, after a bitter fight that was only settled on the convention floor, and after the failure of various White House campaign strategies, including the daintily named Rose Garden strategy.  The difficult primary, added to Carter's other troubles, finally led to his loss in the general election to the republican Ronald Reagan, a prospect many Democrats up until a month before found simply laughable.  Since that time, Reagan has inspired in Democrats considerable anger and frustration, but certainly not much laughter.

So now our current President has officially launched his reelection campaign, though of course anyone with eyes to see knows that campaign really started about two heartbeats after Obama said to Chief Justice Roberts "so help me God."  Even with all the angry opposition Obama has generated in the last two years, his how-low-can-it-go approval numbers, gloomy economic prospects, and his bizarre foreign policy, he is regarded as a shoe-in for being renominated by his fellow Democrats, and I haven't even heard a whisper of rumors of any Democrats seriously considering challenging Obama for the nomination.

Still, there is time for Obama's long march of catastrophes to finally taint his prospects enough that he might begin to look unelectable against even a Republican.  If that happens, who would oppose him? Hillary Clinton is clearly tired and seems to have finally satisfied her need for public humiliation.  The pool of Democratic governors, the usual source of presidential candidates, has been depleted since so many statehouses went Republican in last year's elections.  Most of the leading Democratic senators are unpalatable nationally, such as Harry Reid or Chuck Schumer.

The Democratic party has become so left-wing that it seems to me they face a serious problem in the future, that problem being a growing inability to field candidates who will appeal to the larger base of voters who aren't leftists. The sort of closed political culture that the Democratic party has evolved into tends to stunt imaginations and, ironically, to prevent a healthy diversity of opinions.  Given the lockstep performance of Democrats in Congress in the past four years, I wonder if they haven't crossed the line and become a party of lemmings.

So my question of the moment is, has the Democratic party become so monolithic that no one will dare challenge their president, weak and ineffective though he might be?  The last week has shown us that Obama's support is even diminishing among blacks and hispanics, in addition to his perceived loss among "independents" and other voters without strong ideological commitments.  I find myself a bit amazed that so far there doesn't seem to be any fear among Democrats that Obama is driving them off a cliff into a canyon of electoral oblivion.

If our current Democrats had been writing the script, Brando's Terry Malloy would never have found the courage to get up after Johnny Friendly and his gang pounded him into the pavement.  To me, that just doesn't make much sense.

The Man in the Mirror

I remember reading somewhere that back in the days when Michael Jackson was working on his follow up to Thriller, he wrote a message to himself on his bathroom mirror: 100 Million!  That was the number he wanted to sell of his new record.  The follow up he finally put out was called Bad, and though it did sell quite well, the sales weren't nearly as good as Michael had hoped for.

Watching President Obama prancing about the world stage in the past few weeks has me wondering if he doesn't have his own message on the mirror, maybe written with one of Michelle's very expensive tubes of lipstick.  What might his message say?  How about 6.1 billion!   If you haven't heard, that is the current estimate of our world's human population.  Obama has at times seemed as if he sees himself more as president of the world than merely of the United States, and I think it's an open question about whose approval he is most interested in receiving--the world's, or his own countrymen's.  However it is he actually regards himself, I doubt there are many in those billions who can clearly explain what exactly he has been up to in the past few weeks.

First there was the rather hollow sounding remarks he finally got around to making about the disasters in Japan--if he'd said something like bummer, dudes it might have come off as more sincere.  Concurrent with this was his swing through some of the countries of South America, including Brazil and Chile.  As we've come to expect, the family had a fine old time bouncing around the southern hemisphere on the taxpayer's dime.  Obama got to make some points with Brazilians by letting them know we're ready, willing and waiting to buy up a bunch of that oil they're going to get from offshore wells. He didn't go into the subject of where we're going to find the money to do that, but hey, he's the President, not an accountant.  In Chile, Michelle got to sip a little of the local wine while showing off her latest gown, but Obama was on the receiving end of a bit of unpleasantness when the Chilean president suggested that if Obama really wanted to help the economies down that way, he could throw his support behind free trade agreements with Columbia and Panama, something his administration and Democrats in Congress have been stalling for years, at the behest of American labor unions.

And while all this was going on the situation in Libya was rapidly spinning out of control.  Obama seemed to show little interest in the matter for weeks, during which time leading female political luminaries (Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton) led the charge along with some European leaders in calling for quick action to prevent M. Quadaffi from carrying out bloody retaliations against the Libyan rebels.  Obama first demanded that Quadaffi should just go away, which Quadaffi less than politely declined to do.  Since then Obama has cobbled together a strangely evolving coalition of United States and NATO forces that seems to be proceeding with little coherent instruction.

Obama's address on the subject earlier this week did little to illuminate his intentions.  The fact that he has essentially ignored the Congress and acted in a unilateral fashion that contradicts his previous opinions on the subject of presidential war powers is alarming and angering members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.

I have a nagging fear that as much as Obama's actions about Libya have been confusing so many of us, the person who is most confused about all this is President Obama himself.  And that ain't good.

Get On With It

I'm beginning to wonder if John Boehner actually isn't a politician, but instead a sly Zen master whose true purpose is to develop in us the arts of patience and persistence. 

As I see it, he's only been able to blaze his trail of tears as Speaker thanks to last year's voter revolt against the Democrats and Obamacare, yet at nearly every turn he seems by nature to seek out a "bipartisan" approach to settling political conflicts. This might be tolerable if liberals and Democrats were themselves willing to make serious concessions, but unfortunately these are people for whom "bipartisan" means "we get what we want, then you shut up!" Whenever Boehner does this, tea partiers, conservatives and even some libertarians erupt in protest, and then he usually backtracks to a tougher position to calm them down.  He and his House leadership have played this tune so often by now that I think it's a safe bet to say that if they continue this approach, they may well blow the opportunity the elections gave them to begin rolling back the Obama disaster.

The latest example of this has been the Continuing Resolution (CR) saga that's been going on since the majority Democrats in the last Congress refused to pass a full year budget, leaving the problem to the new Republican majority. This has been a nice little game for Obama since it keeps the Congress preoccupied with short term emergencies, stopping the Republicans from working on the big picture, the main part of which is defunding Obamacare and setting the stage for its ultimate repeal.

Today another CR went through that funds the government until April 8, and who knows what will happen after that.  The big fear that is driving Boehner & Associates is that if they pass another budget with spending cuts that Obama and the Democrats in the Senate find unacceptable, the latest resolution will expire with no further funding enacted, causing a "government shutdown." The conventional wisdom is that this same situation is what brought Bill Clinton back from the brink in 1995, and the Republican leadership  fears that replaying the Gingrich strategy will lead to a similar revival in Obama's political fortunes.

So as things stand now, all that Obama and Harry Reid have to do to forestall any serious budget cuts is to hint that the Republicans will only come to disaster if they actually try to do what so many of them were elected to do, cut spending and stop Obamacare. Apparently this is a strategy that takes very little energy, if Obama's social calendar is any indication, and I can imagine them going on this way for the rest of Obama's term if it keeps working.

There appears to be a growing revulsion among members of the House that their leadership has led them to this state of affairs, and I think that many of them are realizing that they are in serious danger of losing support from the voters who gave them such a whopping majority in the House to begin with. The Republican leadership may be willing to avoid a showdown on spending if they think it will keep them from a Gingrich-style political disaster, but I think if they take this path they will only be courting a much larger disaster by completely alienating most of the same voters who gave them the power they now seem so reticent to use.

Instead, I think they should take heart in how Gov. Walker in Wisconsin has so far been able to win out against extreme opposition in his quest to save his state from bankruptcy.  As has been shown in Wisconsin, even small requests for budgetary savings drive leftists to near savagery in their opposition.  What could they possibly say or do that would be much worse than what we've seen from them already?

It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing

Earlier on this blog I've stated my Article of Faith regarding Obama: No matter what Obama becomes involved in, he will make it worse. So I do have an idea of the small irony involved in now choosing to discuss the President's seeming detachment from important events and issues. You'd think I'd be glad for any instance where he'd have the grace to leave well enough alone, but somehow I find this aspect of his behavior to be disturbing, if not alarming.

For example, in the past two weeks or so we've had a number of events unfolding, including the budget controversy in Wisconsin; the ongoing battle between Quadaffi's government forces and the rebels in Libya; and the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, with the resulting destruction and loss of death.

I think it would be fair to say that of these three situations, the one the White House has been most focused on has been Wisconsin. The President and Sec. of State Clinton have essentially abdicated any leadership role regarding Libya, so on this question we've been witnessing the odd spectacle of the French president leading the charge in finding a way to stop Quadaffi from committing a massacre against his opponents, which clearly is what he will do if he reconsolidates his power. 

Obama did find it necessary to have a useless press conference addressing the problem of rising oil prices, but as far as I know he hasn't made anything more than a perfunctory statement about the disaster in Japan. I think the Japanese deserve better. Is it inconceivable that Obama could have given a short address restating our long and close relationship with Japan as partners in freedom, pledging our government's support, and calling for Americans to support charities that will help in the recovery? Just a thought.

Instead the President spent the best part of a Sunday playing golf, looking happy and unburdened as can be, then spent the evening (behind closed doors) at the annual Gridiron Dinner, where reporters and politicians engage in the fiction that they actually have a sense of humor and that they aren't all in on screwing the rest of us over.

What's been demonstrated here is that of all that has gone on in the world in the last two weeks (quite a lot, really), the event that the White House has found to be most important has been the one that most directly affects Obama's reelection prospects. Not surprising, I suppose, but it would be nice to have a president who doesn't think his main task as President is to get himself reelected.

Bully, You Say

Today the White House is hosting a conference on school bullying (they're against it, if you're wondering).  From President Obama's opening remarks:

As parents and students, teachers and communities, we can take steps that will help prevent bullying and create a climate in our schools in which all of our children can feel safe.

Well, sure, we can all agree with that.  Of course the devil is in the details, so who knows if the answers this conference comes up will actually be effective. Persistent problems are always easier to talk about than solve.

Meanwhile, at the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, teachers and their supporters have been busy giving us extra-curricular lessons in bullying as they continue their attempts at illegally obstructing the business of the Governor and state legislature, with the assistance (if not direction) of the Obama Administration. Anonymous death threats, property destruction, mob intimidation--they know how to do it all.  Is it going too far to go to a state Senator's residence at 6 am and bang on his windows, demanding he come out?  Apparently not.

I'll bet you a nickel we're not going to hear the President denouncing the bullying aspects we've seen from the demonstrators in Madison.  I'd bet you more, but I'm still paying off bills left over from "Recovery Summer."

Total Repeal: The Movie

There's an old saying that parents have long told their children, probably for centuries: If you can't say anything good about someone, don't say anything at all. 

Unfortunately, if I applied that rule to my thoughts on Obama, I'd be struck dumb. We're now almost 25 months into the Obama presidency, and I'll be damned if I can think of anything this administration and its allies in Congress have done that I can consider to be even remotely a step in the right direction. The Obama foreign policy has been a masterpiece of delusion, emboldening enemies and slighting allies to an extent not seen since Jimmy Carter sat in the big chair. The Obama economic agenda is a sort of Keynsianism on crack, its wrong-headedness exceeded only by the incompetence of its execution. Obamacare, as I see it, is probably the most destructive piece of legislation signed into law since the Civil War. Even the personal conduct of the President and his wife has been less than inspiring to anyone who thinks the antics and excess of ancient Rome might be a bad model for presidential behavior.

At this point, in the rare instance when I hear of something from this administration that actually makes sense, such as Timothy Geitner proposing dismantling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, my reaction is how will they screw this up? and which one of Obama's friends is going to make money off of it?

I think a new concept needs to be introduced into the debate among Obama's opposition:  total repeal.  Two years of Obama have done so much damage to the country and its people that we need to think beyond just stopping his re-election; we need to consider repealing as far as nature allows everything this administration has done, whether it was with the approval of Congress or by executive fiat.  This is a hideous project to contemplate, but the Obama presidency is turning out to be such a disaster that if we want to minimize any future damage Obama's policies might do, we're going to have little choice but to rip the whole thing out by the roots.