Patriot Politics

Archive for September, 2009

Shockingly, President Obama is planning a trip abroad to lobby for America.  Oh, wait.  It’s with the Olympic Committee.  Sorry, I got a little excited thinking of the possibilities.  It’s just so cool to think that the Pres would be pumping our cred with potential allies or something kind of overtly political.

How about this, Barry?  Next time, why not save the taxpayers some stimulus and minimize your carbon footprint to boot?  How, you say?  Stand up in front a couple hundred nincompoops and terrorists (that would be the United Nations General Assembly, full of oxymorons) and root for the home team.  Somebody who’s in constant campaign mode shouldn’t find that so HARD.

Here we see an incredulous journo (how did they let her in the WH Press Corps?  I’ll bet we don’t ever see HER again) trying to get Gibbs to “close the logic loop” on all this at about 1:40 minutes in.

How did we get here?  What are we, idiots here?

Since when does a sitting President, with more important meetings – like those with his Generals who are on the ground in Afghanistan, where our kids are getting shot at, you know, those more important meetings – with a war and building nuclear crisis, not to mention the mother of all deficits and a socialist overhaul to sell go across the globe to beseech the Olympic Committee?

Are you kidding me?

Let’s see:  Support for domestic agenda plummeting?  Check.

Afghanistan strategy ineffective.  Check.

U.N. speech underwhelming with its annoying apologia.  Check.

Iran fires missiles in response to verbal rebuke.  Check .

Key adviser stands to gain financially from Chicago venue.  Check.

When you’ve lost Newsweek, you must really want to leave town.

Re: the Obama appearance on Letterman.  Was anyone else thinking Bill Clinton had been there, done a better job with Arsenio?  You’ve got to admit, at least Bill on the sax was entertaining strategy.

Even the All-Obama, All The Time lamestream media is starting to wonder about this guy.  You know, earlier this year we heard that the President was so busy working on domestic issues like the economy and such that he couldn’t be bothered with the niceties for Gordon Brown and others.  If that’s the case, why all the face time on the networks?

Seems like he can’t be bothered with the niceties for Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe either.  Stumblebum reveals his true colors with every foreign policy mis-step, and crafts the swan song for U.S. pre-eminence in the world theater.

What can our enemies be thinking if this is the thinking of our friends?

Regimes in Moscow, Pyongyang and Tehran simply pocket his concessions and carry on as before. The picture emerging from the White House is a disturbing one, of timidity, clumsiness and short-term calculation. Some say he is the weakest president since Jimmy Carter…

But for what? Mr Obama has tactics a plenty – calm and patient engagement with unpleasant regimes, finding common interests, appealing to shared values – but where is the strategy? What, exactly, did “Change you can believe in” – the hallmark slogan of his campaign – actually mean?[With all due respect, shouldn't that question have been asked prior to the election when the Telegraph endorsed him?  Just sayin' . . .]

. . .The man who has run nothing more demanding than the Harvard Law Review is beginning to look out of his depth in the world’s top job. His credibility is seeping away, and it will require concrete achievements rather than more soaring oratory to recover it.

Let’s not hold our breath.

One thing about Obama crony Valerie Jarrett:  in the fine tradition of community organizers everywhere, she is about getting things done!

Wondering who is responsible for quality appointments in the Obama Administration such as Van Jones, Mark Lloyd and Cass Sunstein?

Clueless as to why Obama would choose to cancel a meeting with the Dalai Lama, suspending a Presidential tradition since 1991?

Curious as to who is in charge of “cultural nuance” (codespeak for white staffers having to “get an issue” right) in the Obama Administration?

Interested in how restrictions against meeting with lobbyists were relaxed so that civil rights organization directors (registered lobbyists) could meet with officials despite Obama’s Executive Order?

Look no further, it’s Our Gal Val.

Valerie Jarrett heads up the shadow cabinet of Obama advisors, working behind the scenes as an alter-ego to both Barack and Michelle.  Lucky for us, Ben Johnson has been hard at work at Front Page Magazine and David Horowitz’s NewsReal Blog to give us the goods on the web of influence surrounding the Obamas.  That web of influence is spun by Valerie Jarrett.

Think you knew all you need to about the 60’s radicalism that is pervasive in this Administration?  Think again.  Realize that Valerie has a patron herself, in Marilyn Katz.  Marilyn tried to get Rod Blagojevich to seat Valerie in Barack’s Senate seat.  Marilyn doesn’t have any regrets about developing “guerilla nails” for use against police at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  This would be another “Friend of Bill.”  Ayers, that is.

But let’s get back to Valerie.  Mapping out her relationships is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.  Breathlessly, the New York Times tells us that Valerie is the “ultimate Obama advisor,” yet, strangely, her influence “leaves few fingerprints.”  Hmmm.  Secretive, much?

Michelle Malkin more accurately assesses Valerie: “Jarrett has a gift for rationalizing the increasing gap between what Obama promised and what he’s delivering.” Michelle further points out that “pay for play corruptocrat” Adolfo Carrion (no pun intended; he’s Latino and brought that vote in for Barack) is under Valerie’s oversight at the White House Office for Urban Affairs, in a summary of Obama Czars in the New York Post.  That would make Val some sort of Supernova Czarina, would it not?

Barack says he doesn’t make a single decision without Valerie.  That’s the reason there’s a “Chicago Sensibility” around D.C. these days.

“We shared a common history in that so many of us did have ties back to City Hall [yep, that would be Val and the Mayor, here] and had relationships that grew out of that experience, and we have grown up in a sense together,” Jarrett told me. “And then to come here together, it would have been much harder without each other.”

We’ll just bet it would, Val.

Attention Shoppers:  Clean up on Paragraph 2:

Today, The Montana Standard launches a new weekly columnist for its editorial page Byron York will serve as a conservative voice every Tuesday, just as Leonard Pitts gives the more liberal view on Mondays.

York, a staunch conservative, presents his arguments in a thoughtful, measured fashion, rather than resorting to cheap personal attacks on President Obama and others in the Democratic Party that seem to be the hallmark of the GOP these days, said Standard Editor Gerry O’Brien.

Previously the White House correspondent for the National Review, and a frequent guest on political talk shows, York is a columnist respected for his reporting skills, fine writing and analytical approach, O’Brien said.

Former President Carter, Maureen Dowd, Keith Olbermann, Jeanene Garofolo, Barbara Boxer, Rachel Maddow, and others, this is Earth calling:  A differing opinion is NOT racism.  And Lindsey?  Nice of you to wake up and smell the coffee. We’ve expected more out of you for a long time.

We’re fond of George Patton in our house.  We like the portrayal George C. Scott made of him, and we think it must have been thrilling to the nation and his colleagues in the military when he blasted through North Africa and Europe.  He’s just the kind of no-b.s. guy you want in a leader: decisive, blunt, quick to act, and then move on to the next task.

We first saw this video a couple of years ago when the anti-war movement was noisy.  The micro-managers in Washington were giving General Petraeus a hard time.  Suddenly Congressional Representatives who couldn’t recall specific briefings decided to cover their backsides by suggesting they’d been lied to and that a forceful surge wouldn’t solve any problems.  Now we’ve got no outside war protesters to speak of – after all,  it was their candidate who won the election.  Protesting his war policy would be loony, wouldn’t it, even though you’re carping about it amongst yourselves.  Besides, why go out of town to protest, unless you’re Cindy Sheehan, when you’ve got Congress to oppose the President’s war policy – such as it is – for you?

“In this time of nuclear weaponry we cannot afford to wait for the fight to come to us!  You need to understand that.  This political correctness stuff is just a bunch of crap!  This generation is so god-dammed spoiled and lazy, it wouldn’t know a real threat to their freedom until it interrupted the power source to their X-box and killed a half a million people. The complacency of fools will destroy them.”

Patton Returns

Cass Sunstein, another Obama czar, is poised to take the helm at the Office of Budget and Management as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  Is that title going to fit on a business card, or is it lifted from a list of acceptable socialist agencies?   We can all be relieved, though, that Cass must be eminently qualified.  He sure is an expert on a lot of stuff:

Cass thinks being an individual is too confusing and “pernicious” for most of us.  Of course the government is in a better position to decide what’s best:

Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust “government intervention” and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions. – Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More Than Ever, Basic Books, New York, 2004, p. 3

Cass doesn’t think our money is ours.  It’s only ours through divine-like distribution achieved with bureaucratic oversight.  Why, it’s only through the benevolence of the government that we have any personal money at all:

“In what sense in the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live?… Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public fisc. … There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day …” – Cass R. Sunstein, “Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes,” The Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1999

And of course, Cass is the better to decide what you see, hear, and speak, whether it’s on the internet, the radio, or perhaps even at your dinner table:

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.

–Cass Sunstein, arguing for a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet in his book, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton University Press, 2007), p.137

Cass thinks that unfettered access to the Internet can lead only to what he calls cyberbalkanization – by which groups of like-minded individuals self-restrict into their own private communications echo chambers.  So he wants to make sure everyone gets a balanced look at things by imposing the balance.

Cass wants us to know that

People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself. – from Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

In Nudge, a book he co-authored with Richard Thaler, Wikipedia reports he suggests it is better to attempt positive change by giving the choice of good behavior (nudging) rather than by sanctions against bad behavior.  We’re all toddlers now and the government is our mommy.

It’s getting so that we’ve got to look under the Cabinet’s Aubusson to get to the dirty tier of appointments underneath.

Did you know that Cass Sunstein is married to Samantha Power ?  Yep, that ole Samantha, who thinks Hillary Clinton is a “monster.”  Maybe it takes living with one to know one, eh?

It seems as though there’s a parody of everything set to this marvelous scene from Der Untergang.  The last one we saw was about Brett Favre coming over to the Vikings.  This one, entitled Barack’s Downfall, is better: