President Barack Obama's delusional perspective on fiscal issues is only surpassed by his surreal approach to the war on terror, which he doesn't even consistently recognize as a war. The ideological extremism of his policies is only surpassed by his flailing incompetence in administering them.
During his presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly denounced President George W. Bush's "unilateralist" and "imperialistic" foreign policy.
Obama carefully cultivated an image as a domestic and global healer who could leverage his personal background to rise above internal and foreign bickering and address the root causes of this conflict en route to a peaceful resolution. Frighteningly enough, he obviously believed his own hype.
What about those root causes? Well, Obama's entire approach to the war (he seems to prefer "law enforcement issue") is driven by his belief that Muslim extremists didn't become terrorists because of their ideology but because we have mistreated them. He thinks we have goaded potential terrorists into becoming terrorists and given existing terrorists further cause to hate us. "Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al-Qaida recruit terrorists to its cause," he said. "Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained."
Well, he was going to turn all that around with euphemisms ("man-caused disaster," "overseas contingency operations"), a flurry of lofty rhetoric (his world apology tour), a few symbolic steps (closing Gitmo) and certain policy reversals (Mirandizing terrorists and trying enemy combatants in civilian courts).
The result -- his posture of relaxation and retreat -- has been an unmitigated disaster. He went out of his way to avoid identifying the Fort Hood jihadist as a terrorist; he admonished us not to jump to any conclusions about the Christmas underwear bomber; he promised to close Gitmo with no plan to relocate the prisoners; he moved the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to ground zero with utterly no consideration for the local or national security implications involved; and his Justice Department allowed the Christmas bomber to lawyer up after only 50 minutes of interrogation.
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After the public outcry over his reckless and foolish policies, he's backtracking like an indecisive neophyte, sort of like the time when he endlessly vacillated over whether to crank up our operations in Afghanistan.
He just can't seem to grasp that the real world involves more than street organizing, speechmaking, symbolic gestures and his grand appearance on the world stage as a veritable messiah. His miscalculations are disturbingly naive.
Remember his interview on Al-Arabiya, in January 2009, when he assured the Muslim world that things would be much different under his regime? He said that if we would "listen (and) set aside some of the preconceptions that have existed and have built up over the last several years ... there's a possibility at least of achieving some breakthroughs." Is it me, or did he sound as if he was patronizing all Muslims as potential terrorists there?
By "preconceptions" Obama seemed to be suggesting that the Bush administration had been promoting the idea that all of Islam was our enemy and the religion had contributed nothing constructive to the world.
Indeed, Obama agreed when his interviewer said, "President Bush framed the war on terror conceptually in a way that was very broad." Obama responded: "We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name. ... The language we use has to be a language of respect. ... My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy."
But maybe it was a preconception-ridden Obama who hadn't been listening to Bush's statements on Islam and the war. Perhaps Obama ought to treat Mr. Bush's words with more respect, such as in not flagrantly misquoting him.
Time and time again, President Bush hailed Islam as a peaceful religion and made clear that the United States was not at war with Islam, only with the extremists who distort the religion. He also said, "America treasures the relationship we have with our many Muslim friends, and we respect the vibrant faith of Islam, which inspires countless individuals to lead lives of honesty, integrity and morality."
Shouldn't Obama have gotten a clue that sweet-talking the Muslim world -- or promising to close Gitmo (which President Bush also did, regrettably) -- doesn't deter terrorists.
In fact, the verdict on Obama's messianic approach is already in. Despite his overtures, his own CIA director, Leon Panetta, just testified that al-Qaida is growing and gearing for an attack in the United States in the next three to six months.
No worries. If it happens, he can blame Bush for that, too.
The reverberations from Republican Senator Scott Brown's Massachusetts election had barely subsided when an even greater shockwave was sent throughout the liberal world. On Thursday January 21, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that overturned major pillars of the McCain/Feingold campaign finance 'reform' act, thereby reestablishing the ability of the people to express themselves freely during election time, and thus to publicly hold Washington accountable for its actions.
Of course such an outrage against the Ruling Class can never be allowed to stand, if its dreams of imposing the liberal agenda on the American people are ever to be realized. The most crucial component of any liberal program is a monopoly on the dissemination of information, and the success of every tinhorn dictator throughout history has hinged on controlling the voice of the opposition. So it comes as absolutely no surprise that Barack Obama is leading an attack against the Court, abetted by such leftists as Senator Charles Schumer (D.-NY)
High on the Democrat list of objectives in the wake of Obama's inauguration last January was a reinstatement of the so-called 'Fairness Doctrine,' which would ultimately subjugate the entire radio broadcast spectrum to the biases of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as the final arbiter of who gets to say what over the 'public' airwaves.' It is not difficult to envision how this administration would wield such power against its critics in talk-radio. The ferocity of liberal reactions to the January 21 Court ruling tell the whole story.
Initially, the battle plan appears to be to discredit the Court's decision. During his State of the Union speech, Obama specifically attacked the decision, making alarmist claims that it would result in a great infusion of 'corporate cash' to influence American elections. Not surprisingly, this charge has been echoed by Schumer, who hysterically asserted that the 'floodgates of special interest money,' meaning the unfettered voice of the conservative opposition, will henceforth 'undermine our democracy.'
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Also, during his State of the Union speech, Obama stoked phony concerns over the threat of foreign cash subverting the American electoral process. If the liberals were to be believed, this single court ruling casts doubts on the entire future of the nation. Yet once again, even a cursory examination of the historical facts proves quite the opposite.
Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton Administration engaged in obscene fundraising activities in which corruption, even including the obvious influence of foreign dollars, was rampant. The names Johnnie Chung, John Huang, James Riady were regularly heard in relation to dubious White House 'coffees,' in which literal bags of laundered money were delivered in exchange for access to Bill Clinton.
During that same period, U.S. intelligence concluded that Chinese espionage had completely penetrated this nation's security. Yet the Justice Department, under Attorney General Janet Reno, was deliberately slow to respond, and by its indifference, clearly telegraphed that it had no intention of getting to the truth.
Barack Obama's shrill alarmism regarding the corrupting influence of corporate involvement in the electoral process would be comical, were his flagrant hypocrisy not so recognizable as evidence of complete contempt for the American people. Here is the man who, joined at the hip with ACORN, worked to construct a veritable revolving door for government funds to be amassed from taxpayer dollars and disseminated among the 'community organizers' where they could yield the greatest advantage for Democrats.
The election season of 2008 was a time of relentless efforts by ACORN to work the streets and neighborhoods on behalf of liberal candidates, and 2009 was the payoff. Under the bogus premise of a 'stimulus' to jump start the lagging economy, ACORN was slated to receive funding in excess of four billion dollars from the very political machine that now cries 'foul' at the prospect of legitimate campaigning from the rest of America.
Given the fraudulent manner in which the left, led by Obama, is attempting to create panic over the decision, it is no wonder that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, when attending the State of the Union speech, silently annunciated the words 'Not true' in response to Obama's accusations against the Court. Though Alito did not generate the disruption and controversy of South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson with his 'You lie!' outburst during Obama's joint-session 'healthcare' pitch, it was clear that his regard for Obama's integrity parallels of Wilson.
In truth, America is never threatened by the proliferation of political speech from Americans, but from its selective suppression. Clearly Obama and his minions are not bothered by enormous infusions of cash from liberal banks and lending institutions, and are even willing to accept overtly dubious home financing deals in return for access to the seats of power. Nor will Eric Holder, the thoroughly corrupted Attorney General, be any more likely to root out malfeasance in this realm than he was predisposed to go after those Black Panthers who, in the 2008 election, prevented citizens from voting in Pennsylvania.
A Supreme Court decision that moves America in the direction of the constitutional principles on which it was founded will revive and invigorate political debate from a conservative opposition that has been hamstrung by disproportionate and unequal government regulation. As a result, barring more dirty liberal tricks, the upcoming campaign cycle can take place on a loud but level playing field.
The rules have changed. The Massachusetts elections proved the vulnerability of the liberal/Democrat political machine in the face of an informed and vocal public. And it is this possibility that the left finds wholly unacceptable.
In a "Special Report" on the president's question-and-answer session with Republicans last Friday, MSNBC's jock-sniffers Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow produced a museum-quality show:
MATTHEWS: Everybody agrees he could handle everything today. ...
OLBERMANN: It almost felt like watching the stories of John L. Sullivan, the 19th-century boxer, who would volunteer to fight anybody and everybody in the house and knock them all out. ...
MADDOW (imagining Obama thinking): You've brought a pet issue here, congressman, who is the ranking member of the Budget Committee, let me tell you 400,000 things about it, and invite you to continue the discussion with me later. ...
MATTHEWS: (T)oday showed me that we do produce probably the best candidate and best president we can in this system you can imagine in the world. ...
OLBERMANN: They had 140 players on the field and the other team had one guy and they lost to him. ...
MATTHEWS: You were so unbelievably hot, Mr. President! You blew away the other team!
OBAMA: Beat it.
MATTHEWS: OK, I'll go stand in my locker now.
Unlike the jock-sniffers, normal people watching the president's tete-a-tete with the Republicans only wondered why Obama always responds to imaginary arguments no one made, rather than the questions actually being asked.
That is Obama's signature move: Invent "people" who are "saying" ridiculous things and then encourage the audience to laugh at these made-up buffoons.
Since Obama's reformulations of Republican arguments are always absurd, no further response from him is necessary -- and none is ever forthcoming.
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Thus, for example, Obama's description of Republican criticism of his plan to nationalize health care was that "this thing was some Bolshevik plot."
No. No one said it was a "plot," Bolshevik or otherwise.
Republicans' objection to national health care could be more accurately portrayed as follows: Obama's plan to nationalize health care was a terrible idea because it would turn over one-sixth of the American economy to Washington bureaucrats, who would run the system as competently as the federal government runs everything else, from airport security to the post office to FEMA.
How about responding to that argument? (And as long as Obama brought it up, can he explain which part of national health care the Bolsheviks would have objected to most strongly?)
This isn't how adults conduct serious political debates; it's how children argue with their parents. Don't have a cow! Liberals hide conservative arguments from the public like teenagers hide contraband from mother under the bed.
Repeatedly positing imaginary attacks by Republicans accusing him of a "plot," Obama said that "the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives."
Again, not a "plot" and certainly not "wild-eyed." The only person accusing anyone of "plotting" here is Obama accusing the GOP of plotting against him. I guess they don't teach irony at Harvard Law School.
If Obama is going to keep imagining others accusing him of "plots," could he provide just one example?
Republicans also did not accuse Obama of trying to "impose huge government in every aspect of our lives." Just the part of it that determines how long we get to live.
Continuing his fantasy battle with imaginary opponents, Obama said, "What you've been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America."
I gather Obama is incapable of responding to his opponents' actual argument, which is that he is proposing all sorts of things that would be very bad for America.
Since he pleads innocence only on the claim that he is doing "crazy stuff that's going to destroy America" -- an argument no one made -- apparently he's guilty as charged on the claim that he's merely doing very bad things to America.
Adopting the pose of limpid nonpartisanship, Obama repeatedly accused Republicans of horrible things using his peculiar straw-man technique.
He told Republicans he was "absolutely committed" to working with them, "but it can't just be political assertions that aren't substantiated."
Can Obama please name a single "unsubstantiated" political assertion by a Republican before wasting everyone's time by instructing Republicans to stop making them?
I can name a few from Obama!
How about the whopper he told about national health care not covering illegal aliens? Or the one about it not covering abortions?
Weeks after Obama made those unsubstantiated political assertions before a joint session of Congress, Democrats were in death-match battles with Republicans (and some moderate Democrats) who tried to exclude coverage for illegals and abortion from the very bills Obama said never contained such coverage in the first place.
How about Obama's claim in his State of the Union address last week that a recent Supreme Court ruling would allow "foreign corporations to spend without limit in our elections"?
In the case Obama mentioned, the court overruled section 441a of the campaign-finance law, which had banned all corporate spending on elections. The case did not concern, nor did the court address, section 441e, which prohibits foreign corporations from making any "contribution or donation of money or other thing of value ... in connection with a Federal, State or local election."
History will record that these remarks from his State of the Union address were the only case legendary barrister Barack Obama ever argued before the Supreme Court. And he lost.
Even when presented with a short, straightforward, simply stated question by Rep. Mike Pence, Obama couldn't help but to formulate a different question.
Pence asked: "Mr. President, will you consider supporting across-the-board tax relief, as President Kennedy did?"
The question Obama wanted Pence to ask was: Mr. President, will you join Republicans in cutting taxes of billionaires?
Luckily, Obama's reformulation gave him an opening for a killer answer: "What you may consider across-the-board tax cuts could be, for example, greater tax cuts for people who are making a billion dollars. I may not agree to a tax cut for Warren Buffett."
Republicans should take that answer and run like a thief in the night! OK, let's cut taxes on everyone except billionaires. I'd even support a specific tax expressly on Warren Buffett. Now, son, how much will you give us for these magic beans?
If only Republicans could maneuver Obama into answering a question on abortion, we could probably get him to agree to ban all abortions '"-- except in the case of teenage girls who have been raped by their fathers. (This is how I assume Obama would rephrase the question.)
No conservative argues like this. To the contrary, we're morose that Nexis archives are not more complete, so we can't quote liberals directly more often.
Former Sen. Bob Kerrey famously said that Bill Clinton was "an unusually good liar. Unusually good." Well, then, President Barack Obama is an unusually bad liar. Unusually bad.
Obama said in his State of the Union speech (and similar statements several times since): "By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door."
Though it's true that the deficit for President George W. Bush's final year in office was close to $1.3 trillion, it must be noted that Obama and his fellow Democratic-controlled Congress members approved the TARP bailouts and are largely responsible for the other budget expenditures leading to that record deficit.
Plus, The Heritage Foundation's blog, "The Foundry," says that Obama's claims concerning the causes for that deficit are "clearly misleading." Despite those factors, "the budget deficit still stood at just $162 billion when the recession began in late 2007. The larger subsequent deficits have been driven by the recession (which Obama did acknowledge), the financial bailouts, the President's stimulus bill, and large discretionary spending hikes enacted by a Democratic Congress."
Also, there is major disagreement over Obama's assertion that Bush's projected deficits over the next 10 years were $8 trillion. But even if you let Obama slide on that claim, the more relevant comparison, as pointed out by Rep. Jeb Hensarling, is the annual average deficit for the 12 years that Republicans most recently controlled Congress -- $104 billion -- versus that of the past three years under the Democratic-controlled Congress -- $1.1 trillion.
Indeed, before the financial meltdown -- which was mostly caused by liberal mortgaging and housing policies -- Bush's deficits had been significantly reduced, even cut in half before he predicted they would be. In addition, Bill Clinton would never have been able to co-opt credit for those deficits or "his" surplus if not for the Republican Revolution and Contract with America.
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Granted, a major portion of the high deficits under the Democratic Congress can be attributed to TARP, which the Bush administration proposed (and Democrats approved). But that was -- to borrow a Dick Cheney phrase -- a one-off event. Neither Bush nor his would-be successor John McCain had any intention of repeating TARP (which I'm not defending), and their goal was that the TARP monies be repaid -- and much of them reportedly have been. Republicans had no plans to impose an $800 billion "stimulus" package.
When Obama took office, he used that extraordinary, one-off deficit of $1.3 trillion as the new base line from which all future deficits would be measured, and he planned to treat any future annual deficit less than $1.3 trillion as a triumphant reduction. This isn't even sophisticated deception, but some people are still apparently buying it.
Obama, then, has used the extraordinary budget year as an excuse to spend even more wastefully -- with trillion-dollar-plus budgets in perpetuity -- and then disguise his profligacy with duplicitous rhetoric and such illusory policies as his anemic fractional discretionary spending freeze.
It's incredibly childish for Obama to blame his reckless spending on Bush, but have you considered how preposterous it also is? It is substantively untrue: Bush's extraordinary deficit year doesn't require Obama to continue on that path, converting a one-off event into a permanent, unsustainable affair. But more importantly, the issue is not who should be blamed for spending too much in the past, whether Bush or Obama. It's what we plan to do going forward to stop this hemorrhaging that will -- not might, but will -- destroy this nation if not turned around ASAP.
Even if Obama's misleading depiction were true -- that Bush, er, I mean Obama and the Democratic Congress, bequeathed him with annual $1 trillion deficits -- that would still not justify his intention to give us more of the same. Falsely blaming it on Bush -- or even accurately blaming it on Bush, if that were justified -- wouldn't add one dollar to retire the exploding federal deficit.
Bush has no control over what Obama is doing now. He is not making Obama implement bankrupting "stimulus" packages and soaring expenditures across the board (excluding the paltry, dishonest 17 percent discretionary spending freeze delayed until 2011).
It's as if your wife controlled your household finances the year before and ran up enormous debt, threatening your family's solvency, and when you took over the following year, you said: "Well, I'm going to spend more than she did even though it's my money, too, because she did it, so I can, too. We'll go bankrupt, but it will only be partially my fault."
Too bad we have to wait until 2012 to get a divorce.
Watching President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech makes me wonder whether the reason he tells so many fibs is that he believes them himself. Either that or he is an even better actor than he is a teleprompter reader.
Obama not only wasn't contrite about his broken promises and disastrous record; he was on the attack, daring anyone to oppose his agenda -- even in the face of the Massachusetts rebuke. But let's see how some of his statements match up with reality.
On health care, he taunted congressmen to "let me know" if any of them have "a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses," as if his own plan would do those things.
Even the Congressional Budget Office has said most of the Democratic plans would increase the budget. Besides, you can't reduce overall costs when government forces an increase in demand, even if it caps insurance premiums and shifts costs elsewhere and/or imposes rationing. The CBO has also reported that with Obamacare, millions would remain uninsured. So under his plan, costs would rise, quality and choice would decrease, care would be rationed, millions would remain uninsured and, worst of all, the government would acquire an unprecedented level of control over all aspects of our lives.
Do conservatives have better ideas? Of course. Restore market forces through tort reform, strengthening health savings accounts, abolishing government coverage mandates, allowing consumers to purchase policies across state lines and eliminating the tax laws incentivizing employer-provided health care, which unnecessarily increase demand by making prices invisible to consumers.
A candid Obama would have said, "If any of you have a plan that does not involve restoring market forces and reducing government's role in the health care industry, I'll at least pretend to look at it." "Make no mistake," neither Obama nor his Democratic colleagues will support genuine health care reform, because to reduce costs, we must reduce government control, and they can't abide that. Period.
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As for spending, Obama didn't once apologize for his reckless expenditures. Instead, he blamed his soaring deficits on his predecessor, completely misrepresenting the projected deficits under President Bush and ignoring his own deliberate doubling of the national debt over the next 10 years. That's the issue Americans are losing sleep over, and he offers only Band-Aids and smoke and mirrors.
He says he will freeze a portion of the discretionary budget, but as Cato Institute reports, 83 percent of the budget will be off-limits. Other than his "stimulus" insanity, the real explosion in spending is occurring in the entitlements that he refuses to touch. Even his mini-freeze wouldn't begin until 2011 (why wait?), and it would be dwarfed by his planned spending increases for other socialistic projects, including a new "stimulus plan." And how about that assault on personal and fiscal responsibility with his promise to forgive student loans after 20 years?
How Obama can stand before the nation and insist on spending more borrowed money to accomplish something his first "stimulus plan" didn't achieve (job creation), but exacerbated, is beyond me. How he can blame President Bush for his own broken promise that unemployment wouldn't exceed 8 percent if his "stimulus" bill were implemented is jaw-dropping. He even said he saved 2 million jobs. Scary delusional! Or scary sinister!
Speaking of chutzpah, did he actually dare to utter the words "transparent" and "accountable"? How about those phantom legislative districts receiving stimulus monies, Mr. President? How about that promise to televise the health care debates on C-SPAN?
He said he hadn't raised income taxes "a single dime" on 95 percent of the people. Yet in almost the same breath, he promised to redouble his efforts on cap and tax, which would increase the average family's energy costs by almost $3,000 per year. I don't believe his campaign promise was limited to income taxes, by the way.
How about his righteous ranting on earmark reform? Sorry, we've been down that twisted road with you before, Mr. President.
Then there was his audacious riff on lobbyists. Been there, done that, too, Mr. President, with your phony promise to keep lobbyists out of the White House.
Obama also railed against "partisanship, shouting and pettiness" as he filled most of his speech with just those things, even castigating the Supreme Court, erroneously, for opening the door to foreign corporations' campaign contributions.
How about his statement that "America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity"? Hmm. Tell that to the Iranian and Honduran peoples. He must have meant once he's out of office.
Then there was his bizarre out-of-body pivot, when he blamed Washington for our problems.
All of this, especially Obama's obvious incapacity for self-doubt, is disturbingly surreal.
In the wake of the Massachusetts Miracle last week ("The other Boston Massacre"), President Obama adopted a populist mantle, claiming he was going to "fight" Wall Street. It was either that or win another Nobel Peace Prize.
Now the only question is which Goldman Sachs crony he'll put in charge of this task.
If Obama plans to hold Wall Street accountable for its own bad decisions, it will be a first for the Democrats.
For the past two decades, Democrats have specialized in insulating financial giants from the consequences of their own high-risk bets. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs alone have been rescued from their risky bets by unwitting taxpayers four times in the last 15 years.
Bankers get all the profits, glory and bonuses when their flimflam bets pay off, but the taxpayers foot the bill when Wall Street firms' bets go bad on -- to name just three examples -- Mexican bonds (1995), Thai, Indonesian and South Korean bonds (1997), and Russian bonds (1998).
As Peter Schweizer writes in his magnificent book "Architects of Ruin": "Wall Street is a very far cry from the arena of freewheeling capitalism most people recall from their history books." With their reverse-Midas touch, the execrable baby boom generation turned Wall Street into what Schweizer dubs "risk-free Clintonian state capitalism."
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Apropos of the Clintonian No-Responsibility Era, Goldman Sachs and Citibank became heavily invested in Mexican bonds after a two-day bender in Tijuana in the early '90s. Any half-wit could see that "investing" in the dog track would be safer than investing in a corrupt Third World government controlled by drug lords.
But precisely because the bonds were so risky, bankers made money hand-over-fist on the scheme -- at least until Mexico defaulted.
With Mexico unable to pay the $25 billion it owed the big financial houses, Clinton's White House decided the banks shouldn't be on the hook for their own bad bets.
Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, former chairman of Goldman, demanded that the U.S. bail out Mexico to save his friends at Goldman. He said a failure to bail out Mexico would affect "everyone," by which I take it he meant "everyone in my building."
Larry Summers, currently Obama's National Economic Council director, warned that a failure to rescue Mexico would lead to another Great Depression. (Ironically, Summers' current position in the Obama administration is "Great Depression czar.")
Republicans in Congress said "no" to Clinton's Welfare-for-Wall-Street plan.
It's not as if this hadn't happened before: In 1981, Reagan allowed Mexico to default on tens of billions of dollars in debt -- Mexico claimed the money was "in my other pair of pants" -- leaving Wall Street to deal with its own bad bets.
As Larry Summers expected, this led like night into day to the Great Depression we experienced during the Reagan years ... Wait, that never happened.
At congressional hearings on Clinton's proposed Mexico bailout a decade later, Republicans Larry Kudlow, Bill Seidman and Steve Forbes all denounced the plan to save Goldman Sachs via a Mexican bailout.
So the Clinton administration did an end run around the Republicans in Congress and rescued improvident Wall Street bankers by giving Mexico a $20 billion line of credit directly from the Treasury's Exchange Stabilization Fund.
Relieved of any responsibility for their losing bets, Wall Street firms leapt into buying other shaky foreign bonds. Soon the U.S. taxpayer, through the International Monetary Fund, was propping up bonds out of South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, then Russia -- all to save Goldman Sachs.
The IMF could have saved itself a lot of paperwork by just sending taxpayer money directly to Goldman, but I think they're saving that for Obama's second term.
Throughout every bailout, congressional Republicans were screaming from the rooftops that this wasn't capitalism. It was "Government Sachs." As Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) put it, the same rules that apply to welfare mothers "ought to apply to rich Greenwich, Conn., investors who are multimillionaires."
But Wall Street raised a lot of money for the Democrats, so Clinton bailed them out, over and over again.
Before you knew it, once-respectable Wall Street institutions were buying investment products even more ludicrous than Mexican bonds: They were buying the mortgages of Mexican strawberry-pickers.
Why shouldn't Wall Street trust in suicidal loans no sane person would ever imagine could be paid back? Time after time, when their bets paid off, they pocketed huge fees; when their bets failed, they sent the bill to the taxpayers.
With nothing to fear, the big financial houses bought, repackaged and resold investment products that included loans like the one issued by Washington Mutual to non-English-speaking strawberry pickers earning a combined $14,000 a year to purchase a $720,000 house.
But the financial wizards on Wall Street were trading these preposterous loans as if they were bars of gold. They may as well have bet the entire U.S. economy on a dice game in an alley off 44th Street.
Every mortgage-backed security bundle was infected with suicidal, politically correct loans that had been demanded by community organizers such as Barack Obama -- as is thoroughly documented in Schweizer's book.
On the off chance that mammoth mortgages to people who could barely afford food somehow went bad, Wall Street firms could be confident that their Democrat friends would bail them out.
Even the Republicans would have to bail them out this time: They had strapped the dynamite of toxic loans onto the entire economy and were threatening to pull the clip. Wall Street had infected every financial institution in the country, including completely innocent banks.
But now Obama says he's going to "fight" Wall Street, which is as plausible as claiming he'll "fight" the trial lawyers.
As Schweizer demonstrates, whenever the Democrats "regulate" Wall Street, the innocent pay through the nose, while Wall Street swine lower than drug dealers and pornographers end up with multimillion-dollar bonuses so they can run for governor of New Jersey and fund lavish Democratic fundraisers in the Hamptons.
Republicans should respond the way they always have: Support the free market, not looters and welfare recipients on Wall Street, especially the Democrats' friends at Goldman.
The more painful exposure we have to Barack Obama -- and we're talking hyper-exposure at this point -- the more we realize how narcissistic he is. Indeed, we are treated to this overexposure precisely because of his narcissistic impulses. He can't keep himself out of the spotlight.
So it was that on the heels of his crushing personal defeat in the Massachusetts senatorial election last week, Obama's principal reaction was, "This isn't about me."
When someone says that one time or a few times, you might believe him. But when he says it repeatedly (see below), you have to conclude he is protesting too much and means just the opposite.
Given what we've learned about Obama's self-absorption, it's not a stretch to infer that when he says "it's not about me," he wants to project an air of humility while receiving personal credit for that which he denies seeking credit. What he really means is, "The causes I am working on are greater than self, but -- wink, wink -- I darn well expect you to applaud me anyway, not just for my transcendent accomplishments but also for my being humble and selfless about it."
The context of his "not about me" statement following the Massachusetts election bears this out. After the obligatory disclaimer, he added: "This isn't about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America's families, breaking America's businesses and breaking America's economy."
Forget the distortions for now. But notice that he is seeking plaudits for his important work, which he's willing to do even if it damages him in the polls. He also gets the added benefit here of deflecting blame for the defeat by implying the election results weren't about him.
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But make no mistake -- to borrow another Obama phrase -- health care is all about him (everything he says and does is about him); it's not about the Democratic Congress, though it's complicit. He's the one driving this train, even if not in the policy particulars.
His entire domestic and foreign policy agenda is so much about him that he insists on cramming it down our throats even though the polls overwhelmingly indicate that we Americans do not want it and, more importantly, that it is bankrupting this nation and making us less safe. That's not selflessness. It's self-indulgence and conceit to an obscene degree. He is so brainwashed in Marxist and appeasement ideologies that he continues to believe in their maxims in the face of their historical failure and of the miserable failure of his own agenda in the here and now. He is so convinced he knows better than we do what is in our best interests that he must thwart our ignorant will.
If it weren't all about Obama, why would he say, "We (meaning I) are the ones we've been waiting for"? Why would he cultivate a messianic image, replete with echo-enhanced microphones, a grandiose Greek temple backdrop at Invesco Field, and that far-off and high-above look he has mastered for his ethereal orations?
Obama's effort to present himself as otherworldly, of which the rhetorical device "it's not about me" is but a part, is not something he just contrived in the past year. It's part of a deliberate pattern he established long ago and has continued with consistency, as my research has confirmed in spades.
Consider this sampling:
--On Feb. 15, 1990, after becoming "the first black president of the influential Harvard Law Review," Obama said, "I realized my election was not about me, but it was about us, about what we could do and what we could accomplish."
--On Nov. 2, 2004, when Obama visited the campus of the University of Illinois during his campaign for U.S. senator, he said: "Ultimately, this election is not about me. ... It's about the willingness of our citizens to get engaged and get involved."
--On Dec. 11, 2006, in a speech in New Hampshire, Obama said, "It's not about me." But, according to an NPR reporter, "it really is all about him."
--On Dec. 10, 2007, Obama said, "This campaign is not about me; it is about the hundreds of volunteers ... in Rhode Island ... and the millions of people across the country who want change we can believe in."
--On Dec. 14, 2007, when asked about a New Year's resolution, Obama said he needed to keep reminding himself, "This is not about me."
--On Aug. 28, 2008, Obama said in his acceptance speech, "This election has never been about me; it's about you."
--On July 20, 2009, Obama said (exactly as he repeated following the Massachusetts election): "This isn't about me. This isn't about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America's families, breaking America's businesses and breaking America's economy."
Reading excerpts of President Barack Obama's interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos underscores how tone-deaf and self-absorbed Obama is -- and that his tone-deafness is a function of his self-absorption and rigid ideology.
Obama said: "One thing that I regret this year is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values. And that I do think is a mistake of mine. I think the assumption was, if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or are we making a good, rational decision here ... people will get it."
Let's unpack that mouthful. It's all about him; in almost every line, he is bragging or excusing himself. No wonder he can't see any farther than his navel.
Note in the opening sentence his umpteenth gratuitous reference to "crises" he inherited; he doesn't use the word "inherited" there, but his meaning is clear.
In the next sentence, he pretends to criticize himself (for not speaking directly to the American people) as a backdrop for patting himself on the back for "just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises." Even if he hadn't immediately turned the phony self-deprecation into a boast, we'd know he wasn't sincere because the substance of his statement is flat-out false.
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If he hasn't spoken "directly" to the American people more than any politician in modern history, then I'm a politically correct progressive who idolizes Al Gore -- unless, of course, by "directly," he meant "truthfully." But I'm sure that's not what he meant. Has any president gone "directly" to the American people more than he has, desperately trying to convince them that this or that proposal is in their urgent self-interest?
In fact, one could argue that all this guy does is give speeches. Only rarely does he engage in the nitty-gritty of policymaking, which is not quite glamorous enough for him. Don't get me wrong; I'm convinced he's the driving force behind the socialist hellfire being inflicted on this country, but he leaves the "details" to his minions.
But notice also what he says he didn't talk to the American people directly enough about: "what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values."
Is it just me, or is this psychobabble? What institutions? I can find no antecedent in his statement to indicate what he's referring to.
Could he mean that he needs to do a better job of conforming his policy agenda to the people's values? If so, he's not going to learn those values by giving speeches all the time and never listening. He's not going to learn them by listening, either, though, if he doesn't remove his ideological earplugs.
Tea Party after Tea Party, poll after poll, legislative obstacle after legislative obstacle -- they all indicate that his policy agenda couldn't be more out of phase with the values of the American people, who are literally beside themselves over his reckless fiscal and national security policies.
And just in case you think I'm drawing unwarranted inferences, look at how he ends the statement. He says that if he had spent more time explaining himself -- not listening, but talking -- to the American people instead of nobly grinding through the slog of public policy decisions, the people, thickheaded as they are, would "get it."
What? The correct formulation is that if he had spent less time dictating a policy agenda with total disregard for the values and will of the American people -- not to mention the best interests of the nation -- he might "get" that his values are completely at odds with an overwhelming majority of Americans.
Besides, the problem is not the "crises" Obama inherited. It's the ones he's creating. He has lived in such a socialist policy shell all his life that he doesn't have a clue that he's on a different planet than most of us. If he were just slightly less narcissistic, he might be able to figure this out.
But in the meantime, if you take away anything from his statement, let it be that no matter what adjustments he promises to make following the Boston Massacre, he still intends to govern like a socialist. He only wants to do a better job of figuring out how to do it less visibly, hoping we won't "get it" before it's too late.
Once again, the people have spoken, and this time they quoted what Dick Cheney said to Pat Leahy.
Less than two weeks ago, The New York Times said that so much as a "tighter-than-expected" victory for Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley would incite "soul-searching among Democrats nationally," which sent Times readers scurrying to their dictionaries to look up this strange new word, "soul."
A close win for Coakley, the Times said, would constitute "the first real barometer of whether problems facing the party" will affect the 2010 elections.
But when Coakley actually lost the election by an astounding 5 points, the Chicago boys in the White House decided it was the chick's fault.
Democratic candidate Martha Coakley may be a moral monster, but it's ridiculous to blame her for losing the election. She lost because of the Democrats' obsession with forcing national health care down the nation's throat.
Coakley campaigned exactly the way she should have.
As a Democrat running in a special election for a seat that had been held by a Democratic icon (and another moral monster) for the past 46 years in a state with only 12 percent registered Republicans, Coakley's objective was to have voters reading the paper on Friday, saying: "Hey, honey, did you know there was a special election four days ago? Yeah, apparently Coakley won, though it was a pretty low turnout."
Ideally, no one except members of government unions and Coakley's immediate family would have even been aware of the election.
And until Matt Drudge began covering it like a presidential election a week ago, it might have turned out that way.
Coakley had already won two statewide elections, while her Republican opponent, Scott Brown, had only won elections in his district. She had endorsements from the Kennedy family and the current appointed Democratic senator, Paul Kirk -- as well as endless glowing profiles in The Boston Globe.
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And by the way, as of Jan. 1, Brown had spent $642,000 on the race, while Coakley had spent $2 million.
On Jan. 8, just 11 days before the election, The New York Times reported: "A Brown win remains improbable, given that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1 in the state and that Ms. Coakley, the state's attorney general, has far more name recognition, money and organizational support."
It was in that article that the Times said a narrow Coakley win would be an augury for the entire Democratic Party. But now she's being hung out to dry so that Democrats don't have to face the possibility that Obama's left-wing policies are to blame.
Alternatively, Democrats are trying to write off Brown's colossal victory as the standard seesawing of public sentiment that hits both Republicans and Democrats from time to time. As MSNBC's Chris Matthews explained, it was just the voters saying "no" generally, but not to anything in particular.
Except when Republicans win political power, they hold onto it long enough to govern. The Democrats keep being smacked down by the voters immediately after being elected and revealing their heinous agenda.
As a result, for the past four decades, American politics has consisted of Republicans controlling Washington for eight to 14 years -- either from the White House or Capitol Hill -- thus allowing Americans to forget what it was they didn't like about Democrats, whom they then carelessly vote back in. The Democrats immediately remind Americans what they didn't like about Democrats, and their power is revoked at the voters' first possible opportunity.
Obama has cut the remembering-what-we-don't-like-about-Democrats stage of this process down from two to four years to about 10 months. Folks, I'm convinced that if we all work really hard, we can get it down to three months.
Four years of Jimmy Carter gave us two titanic Reagan landslides, peace and prosperity for eight blessed years -- and even a third term for his feckless vice president, George H.W. Bush.
Two years of Bill Clinton gave us a historic Republican sweep of Congress, which killed the entire Clinton agenda (with the exception of partial-birth abortion and felony obstruction of justice) -- and also gave us two terms for George W. Bush.
And now, merely one year of Obama and a Democratic Congress has given us the first Republican senator from Massachusetts in 31 years.
In other recent news, last November, New Jersey voters, who haven't voted for a Republican for president since 1988, threw out their incumbent Democratic governor, Jon Corzine. In Virginia, which Obama carried by 6 points a year earlier, a religious-right Republican won the governor's office by 17 points.
Sen. Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, won his last election in 2006 by 28 points -- the largest margin for a Democratic Senate candidate in that state in a quarter-century.
Since voting for the Senate health care bill last Christmas, the once-bulletproof Sen. Nelson not only gets booed out of Omaha pizzerias, but he has also seen his job approval rating fall to 42 percent and his disapproval rating soar to 48 percent. (Meanwhile, the junior senator from Nebraska, Mike Johanns, who voted against the bill, has a job approval rating of 63 percent.)
The Democrats have no natural majority because they have no fundamental principles -- at least none that they are willing to state out loud. They are like a drunken vagrant who emerges from the alley to cause havoc every few years. They are the perpetual toothache of American politics.
To be sure, the fact that 52 percent of Massachusetts voters are racist, sexist tea-baggers -- i.e., voted for a Republican -- means only that the Democrats just went from having the largest congressional majority in a generation to the second largest. But this was "Teddy Kennedy's seat." And it was in Massachusetts.
This past Sunday marked the first time President Barack Obama graced a Washington, D.C., church with his presence since Oct. 11, but apparently it was not to sit in a pew and worship. Instead, he was doing the sermonizing and politicking -- gloriously intermingling church and state as only liberals are allowed to do in this country.
Don't get me wrong; I'm no scold when it comes to the church-state separation mania, which I think has been grossly expanded by liberals not to preserve the constitutional protection of religious liberty, but to selectively suppress it. But here I am digressing before I've even gotten started on the main focus of today's rant.
Instead of quibbling over the propriety of Obama's turning the church service into a political rally for health care, let's focus on the outrageous substance of his message.
He told the congregants at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church that Obamacare would help more than 30 million Americans -- "men and women and children, mothers and fathers" -- to get health insurance. "This will be a victory not for Democrats," he said. (He's got that one right.) "This'll be a victory for the United States of America." (Yes, once he and his party get thrown out on their ears for this monstrosity.)
But it's another one of his statements that really sticks in the craw: "This'll be a victory for dignity and decency, for our common humanity."
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Oh? How dignified is it for Obama to cram this extraordinarily unpopular scheme, replete with backroom deals and political payoffs, down Americans' throats? How decent of him is it to have made (and broken) an insincere pledge to televise these health care negotiations on C-SPAN, only to have his arrogant press secretary, Robert Gibbs, glibly duck all questions about it?
How common does Obama think our humanity is, when he's always abusing the power of his office to select certain categories of that humanity as winners and others as losers?
Does he think union members are more common, say, than nonunion members? Or are some workers, in the words of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" -- a fitting analogy for this socialist administration -- more equal than others?
I think that goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, because some people remain too stubborn to hear.
Obama first proposed a "Cadillac tax" on health plans whose benefits were more generous than he, in his dictatorial discretion, could tolerate. This tax was un-American enough in its own right, as well as a breach of his promise not to interfere with patient choice and the quality of health care, because it would use the tax code to encourage uniform coverage and prevent employers and individuals from operating in a free market.
But even this good socialist couldn't apply his principle of equal treatment for the entire proletariat. It seems the other Marxist imperative of glorifying union workers had to trump the principle of equality.
Just outside the reach of C-SPAN's video cameras, Obama agreed to exempt union workers from this Cadillac tax until at least 2018 -- at the estimated cost of $60 billion. What possible justification does he offer for this unjustifiable act? None; he doesn't have to justify himself. He is the flawless post-partisan, post-racial, post-George W. Bush president.
It's a good thing for him that he has exempted himself from scrutiny just as he is exempting unions from his Cadillac tax. For there is no rationale to set unions aside for special beneficial treatment any more than there was for the bribes to Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana -- other than that Obama is in bed with unions and wants to reward them and swell their ranks with our money.
How's he going to make up for that $60 billion shortfall? No problem. Just applying his "common humanity" principle again, he'll extend the 2.9 percent Medicare payroll tax to capital gains, and according to The Washington Times, he'll extract $15 billion more from hospitals and $10 billion more from pharmaceuticals. There must be no rush in the world that compares with transferring billions from certain groups to others with a flick of the presidential pen.
To borrow another word from the Obama vernacular, can you imagine the audacity of this guy's lecturing us about decency, dignity, common humanity and health coverage for the "uninsured," when he has turned this entire health care issue into a poster child for Chicago-style political corruption and payoffs?
Oh, the sweet irony of an overdue comeuppance courtesy of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
