In a Democratic fundraising speech in Iowa over the weekend, Vice President Joe Biden told party loyalists that opponents of the Obama administration's agenda "should be worried about us, for we are their worst nightmare." Duh.
Finally we can agree on something, Joe. Even the liberal New York Times reports that at the current level of federal spending, the annual interest on the national debt will exceed $700 billion by 2019 -- compared with $202 billion this year. Some forecasters predict it will be much higher. This additional half-trillion dollars a year in interest is more than our current combined expenditures on education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Oh, and the Times isn't even factoring in the cap-and-trade nightmare you and Barack have in store for us, Joe -- you know, that urgent legislation to catapult the nation back into Third World status based on hysteria generated by fraudulent science and corrupt zealots and politicians.
Nor is the Times including in its calculations the additional debt that would result from Obamacare.
Joe, when The New York Times is sounding the warnings over the exploding national debt, you and Barack insist not only on not reversing your disastrous course but also on making it worse. How can reasonable people assume anything other than that you are trying to run this nation into the ground financially?
Don't dare keep telling us your hyper-ambitious spending is a necessary evil required to deliver us from a financial crisis you inherited. Whatever crisis we face is debt-related, purely and simply. Everything else is manageable. Yet you all are deliberately increasing our indebtedness as far as the eye can see, without the slightest pretense of scaling back in this millennium. In fact, you are laboring to establish further entitlements and institutional changes that would generate exponential burdens on our debt and would be enormously difficult for any responsible and financially sane successor to undo, much less reverse.
It seems the mainstream media's favorite pastime is to ridicule Sarah Palin. Of all the screeds I've read, I don't think any are snarkier than The Washington Post's Sally Quinn's "On Faith" blog post "Sarah Palin's 'rogue' Christianity." Do we need further proof of the secular orientation of our dominant media culture than the fact that Quinn, an avowed atheist, pens the Post's "On Faith" blog? That would be like featuring a column by Fidel Castro on free enterprise and individual liberties. On her mini-bio, Quinn writes: "I announced to my parents when I was 13 that I was an atheist. And I was a committed atheist all of my life. My view was that more evil had been done in the name of religion than anything else in the world. I saw no redeeming value in it at all. Then I met Jon Meacham and we began talking. No, Jon didn't convert me, but he did convince me that religion was not a subject to be dismissed or disdained." If that's true, why did Quinn devote her entire blog post to dismissing and disdaining Sarah Palin's profession of faith in her book, "Going Rogue"? I must admit, though, it's difficult to tell whether Quinn is motivated more by her disdain for Sarah Palin, whom she has a history of berating, or mainstream Christianity. Quinn says: "Sarah Palin writes that one summer at Bible Camp she 'put my life in my creator's hands and trust Him as I sought my life's path.' For Palin, this grand divine plan was 'a natural progression.' She writes. And later, 'I don't believe in coincidences.'"
I can think of a number of motives President Barack Obama might have for his egregious decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other high-profile al-Qaida terrorists to New York for trial in our civil courts. Regardless of which motives apply, one thing is clear: Our enemy is at war against us while we are in a suicidal, 9/10 state of denial. I've heard at least three possible reasons for his decision, which fall into the categories of political, ideological and strategic, respectively. These motives are by no means mutually exclusive and are overlapping. My friend Andy McCarthy, at National Review Online, emphasizes: "The decision ... is one of the most irresponsible ever made by a presidential administration. That it is motivated by politics could not be more obvious." Andy surmises that these proceedings will put the Bush administration on trial, giving the anti-war left, Obama's base, "its promised feast." The left's "shock troops, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights," will add each new disclosure to "the purported war-crimes case they are urging foreign courts to bring against President Bush, his subordinates, and U.S. intelligence agents." Andy's analysis is difficult to refute. Another bright friend of mine doesn't dispute Obama's political motivations but calculates that in the end, though appeasing the hard left, his strategy will end up costing him dearly because of the national security nightmare (and public backlash) it will generate -- a scenario Andy McCarthy himself thoroughly lays out with foreboding. Given the inevitable and foreseeable blowback awaiting Obama, my other friend reasons that Obama has decided to do it because he is a true believer. That is, it's not just a matter of feeding his base. He is his base. He is a hard-left anti-war ideologue. Again, I would be hard-pressed to poke holes in this assessment. Then we also have to consider as a motivating factor Obama's stunningly naive belief that by being solicitous toward Islam and overly kind to terrorists, we can convince them that we are good people after all and not an enemy they should attack. That Obama harbors this belief is scarcely deniable. His various statements on American foreign and domestic policy reveal his conviction that America's past behavior and attitude, up until the precise nanosecond he was inaugurated, have contributed to our unpopularity in the world and served as a terrorist-recruiting impetus throughout the world.
Of the many thoughts I had watching President Barack Obama's umpteenth speech on the economy Thursday morning, the most troubling was his refusal to accept responsibility for his disastrous policies. With unemployment having soared to 10.2 percent, wouldn't it have been reasonable to expect that any Obama speech on the economy would at least acknowledge that his "stimulus" plan didn't come close to achieving the results he promised, starting with his claim that unemployment would peak at 8 percent? Even a fallible leader would be humbled by this failed performance, but enjoying messianic stature, the expectations bar is rightfully much higher for Obama. Yet instead of showing contrition, he took to the microphone in a surreal, boastful mode, as if calculating that assuming an offensive posture would fool people into ignoring reality. He bragged about the "bold steps" he had taken "to break the back of this recession." He said he'd prevented "responsible homeowners from losing their homes ... cut taxes for middle-class families ... and created and saved more than a million jobs." But, "We all know that there are limits to what government can and should do, even during such difficult times." Let's examine his claims. Bold actions to end the recession and "created and saved more than a million jobs"? Well, he has engineered massive spending and debt explosions, but many weren't even calculated to stimulate the economy, especially in the short run.
Even as more and more realize oppressive political correctness is damaging our nation and killing our people, we still hold ourselves hostage to it. We can't criticize Obama on his policy agenda without absurd accusations of racism, and now our authorities' first instinct after the mass murder at Fort Hood is to victimize the identified shooter -- Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan -- rather than to protect our soldiers. The military is the last place we should expect political correctness to flourish. We recognize, after all, that our armed forces exist primarily to safeguard our national security, not as a laboratory for social experimentation. Or do we? Forget "don't ask, don't tell" policy for now. I'm referring to the reaction of the Army's top brass to the Fort Hood slaughter in the news conference and television interviews following the shooting. The first question to Army chief of staff Gen. George Casey (and Army Secretary John McHugh) was whether he believed "this was a wake-up call to the nation that the Army is simply too small to carry out the tasks that it's been given." "You've been having suicide rates that are off the charts," the reporter went on. "Your soldiers are under great stress from multiple deployments." Our military manpower is a legitimate concern, but I think it would be more appropriate for this type of question to come up in the context of whether we have the troops necessary to perform our missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Instead, it surfaced in relation to whether an overly stretched Army might have contributed to causing this mass murder.
The White House arrogance on display in denying that Tuesday's election results were a repudiation of President Barack Obama's radical agenda is of a piece with its arrogance in attempting to advance this agenda against the people's will. One of the great ironies of this administration is its promise of returning power to the people but governing with an iron fist and its back turned to the expressed wishes of the voters. The White House claims a mandate for its extreme blueprint to restructure America, but the voters had no idea Obama would go this far, even if many of us listening closely to his statements and studying his relationships and voting record did. It's possible, given the relatively monolithic embryo in which Obama was politically incubated, that Obama believed the majority of Americans held the same contempt for America's political and economic system as he did. It should be clear to him now, though, that he's not on the same page with them -- perhaps not even in the same book. But if you're paying attention, you know that this cold, hard slap of reality hitting Obama in the face isn't slightly deterring him from pressing forward. If anything, it has strengthened his resolve to implement his agenda with increased urgency, before the public turns even more against him. Obama's attitude in over-reading his mandate and dismissing the significance of Tuesday's elections is, I believe, consistent with the liberal mindset that liberals know better than the people what is in their best interests. Sen. Jim Webb, whose fellow Virginia Democrat was soundly defeated Tuesday, said the election results indicate that "people up here on our side need to get their message straighter." Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., went even further, saying it is "nonsense" to suggest that the New Jersey and Virginia results represent a referendum on President Obama and that Democrats should try harder to make sure they "deliver on the promises of the last election."
I nearly fell out of my chair as I read this New York Times headline: "Democrats Push for Plan to Cut Deficit." From the headline alone, I couldn't tell whether this was before, during or after they supported President Barack Obama's intentional, exponential escalation of the deficit to $1.4 trillion.
That's simply immeasurable chutzpah. But just in case you're ready to be taken in yet again by these fair-weather deficit watchdogs, the first sentence of the Times article reveals their true -- and true to form -- motive. "Faced with anxiety in financial markets about the huge federal deficit and the potential for it to become an electoral liability for Democrats, the White House and Congressional leaders are weighing options for narrowing the gap, including a bipartisan commission that could force tax increases and spending cuts." Those elections have a stubborn habit of forcing even drunken sailor politicians to pretend to care about other people's money they otherwise have an unlimited appetite for squandering. But wait; I thought concern about runaway federal spending was the concern only of those "tea party" protestors the administration has dubbed "potential domestic terrorists" who were carrying "political paraphernalia" -- copies of the U.S. Constitution -- and engaging in "right-wing extremist chatter" focused "on the economy."
Can you imagine the brazenness of President Barack Obama and his cohorts in going so far as to ridicule opponents of Obamacare for rightly pointing out that its ultimate goal is single-payer socialized medicine? These people are propaganda virtuosos of the highest order. You might expect grand artists of deception just to silently dismiss such claims from critics or, at most, to summarily deny them. But they go further and mock the critics, trying to reduce them to acutely paranoid, tinfoil-hat-wearing, black-helicopter-hallucinating Cuckoo's Nest inpatients. What better way to distract attention from what is right in front of our faces? It's brilliant reverse jujitsu: using the outrageousness of your own plan to discredit as preposterous the allegations of your opponents about your truly outrageous plan. Shameless! Obama and his minions are indeed conspiring to foist socialized medicine on this nation through whatever means necessary -- including outright deception over the nature and purpose of the so-called public option. But before presenting proof of that, let me pose a few questions bearing on the likelihood Obama would be involved in such a deception in pursuit of this goal. Didn't Obama repeatedly threaten to "spread the wealth"? Isn't he deliberately indebting us through government expenditures of borrowed funds not remotely designed to appreciably increase employment? This "stimulus" monstrosity is a massive redistributive scheme not only in its direct transfer payments but also in the confiscatory tax increases it will necessitate to retire the debt it is generating.
Can you imagine the outrage that would have ensued had former President George W. Bush declared off-limits those media outlets he thought (correctly) treated him unfairly? Heck, the left declared him a dictator simply because he led a war on Iraq that Congress approved. He never tried to shut down his critics. He rarely even objected to their abuse. But liberal politicians have been spoiled with mainstream media favoritism for so long that they believe anything other than sycophancy is mistreatment. Their selective outrage is as hollow as it is risible. In fact, Fox News seems much more conservative than it is because no other television network over the past half-century has been anything but decidedly liberal. When the media norm is liberal, liberals equate liberalism with objectivity and deviations from it as bias, just as liberals preach tolerance toward all ideas -- except conservative ones. Their self-delusion is surreal. Thus, Fox News Channel -- which has a number of liberal hosts, scores of liberal contributors, and nonstop liberal guests -- is painted as conservative because it is the only network that has more than one token conservative host.
It's amazing that Barack Obama still has some fooled into believing he's a model of post-partisanship. Sure, he's as friendly and congenial as they come, as long as you agree with him -- 100 percent. When on-script, he is mostly measured, reasonable-sounding and -- being a good reader -- occasionally eloquent. But when he ventures off-script, he often sounds less sophisticated, petty and even mean-spirited. In those moments, there's no hiding the inner man. We see his inner man on renegade YouTube clips of his speeches to completely friendly audiences where he wasn't expecting to be heard outside the venue, as with his ridiculing of small-town Americans as bitter clingers. His unmasked face often reveals a marked contemptuousness for those who don't share his worldview. He not only doesn't practice bipartisanship but also refuses even to debate the issues, treating dissenters as ill-motivated, disingenuous obstructionists. I was reminded of this as I played a video posted on RealClearPolitics in which Obama -- candid, un-coached and bereft of his usual trappings of urbanity -- launched into opponents of Obamacare.
