Tag Archives: Obama

I think she’s trying to say he’s not very bright

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From Peggy Noonan, and you have to go through the whole 800 words before you come to this:

Commentators like to decry low-information voters—the stupid are picking our leaders. I think the real problem is low-information leaders. They have so little experience of life and have so much faith in magic — in media, in words — that they don’t understand people will get angry at you when you mislead them, and never see you the same way again.

From Instapundit whose entire post reads, “PEGGY NOONAN BEGINNING TO WONDER if Obama’s as smart as he was cracked up to be.” For myself, I don’t think being smart is all that it’s cracked to be either but that’s something else again.

In the meantime, for some further sense of the extent to which the President is a fraud, you should also read Jack Cashill’s latest on How Author Obama Foreshadowed President Obama. If you don’t know this story already, it’s really time you did. And more here.

Time and ill will

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An earlier take of my own on Obama’s character. Now this, titled The Schizophrenia of Barack Obama, which begins:

Barack Obama is a man with only one core conviction. He has, as the basic foundation of his otherwise disorganized and uncertain belief system, the irrefutable tenet that the United States, because of its European roots, has been the epitome of oppression and arrogance throughout its history. Therefore, he is able to rationalize the need to say or do anything as the transformation of American society and the end of the pre-eminent status of the United States are his sole objectives. He has, thus, adopted a pre-meditated schizophrenic personality wherein he comports himself as an apologist and appeaser on the international stage and a narcissistic autocrat at home.

The autocrats that ran roughshod throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century were determined to aggregate power in a central authority and to achieve an exalted position for their countries. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is determined to denigrate and diminish the stature of his nation as he otherwise emulates the tactics of these despots.

Beyond his one immutable and core tenet, Obama wavers between acceptance of hybrid fascism with its emphasis on crony capitalism and inflexible government dominance of the individual and the economy on the one hand, and on the other post-World War II European-style socialism rather than rigid socialist/Marxist ideology. This may be anathema to the hard core left from whence he came, but little do they understand that Barack Obama is driven by retribution not ideology.

That it is so little recognised that Obama is driven by hatred for the country that made him President is one of the mysteries of the modern world. The left in the US shares the same hatreds – in the media and across the academic world. If you’re so stupid, why are you rich; if I’m so smart, why do you have more money than me? The unfairness because those fellow students who never could work out quadratic equations are now wealthy while all those guys at the top of the honour roll are still driving Fords. And they are going to ruin this civilisation if they can. And they can so they are going to. Time and ill will is all it needs.

A bitter, poisonous worm-eaten man

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Worse than Munich from Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal. It is hard to fathom just how poisonous Obama is, a bitter, poisonous worm-eaten man aiming to inflict as much pain on the successful as he can. But whatever drives him to do what he does, his potential to cause major catastrophe is unrelenting:

In 1938, Chamberlain bought time to rearm. In 2013, Obama gives Iran time to go nuclear.

The rest of the story just fills in some detail.

A very long list of Obama’s descent

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A list of all the steps towards the far left taken by Obama dated 24 November 2013. It comes under the heading, “Why Obama thought He Could Get Away with Obamacare”. That is, a list of all of the actions taken by the Obama administration that did not cause him problems. Both the American public but especially the American media have sabotaged the West. There is little likelihood of retrieval now even assuming anyone could even be elected who would want to try. The first six items on the list just to give you are start. There are apparently 77 on the list.

• $6 trillion in new national debt under Obama…after he promised to decrease the deficit.

• Obamacare — A massive and incredibly convoluted bill which exponentially increases the federal government’s control over our personal lives…which neither Obama nor a single Democrat even read before passing, and which will likely bankrupt the nation.

• In both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, the Obama campaign purposely disabled the credit card verification system for its Web site donations, allowing anyone from any foreign country to donate with no limit and no proof of identity; in both elections it was demonstrated that people overseas and people with obviously false identities were able to donate to Obama campaign, in direct violation of several laws. To this day it is not known what percentage of Obama’s campaign funds are illegally obtained, since there is no documentation.

• Billions of taxpayer dollars gambled on “green” companies like Solyndra, NextEra, Ener1, Solar Trust and many others — all of which went bankrupt.

• An intentional refusal to enforce federal immigration laws.

• Unemployment at or above 8% for almost his entire term in office (which was actually closer to 15% actual unemployment).

[From John MacHaffie at infowars.com via Alfonso.]

Where from here?

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The new Middle East:

Tehran boasted at home that the accord recognised its ‘right’ to enrich uranium – which it says is for peaceful purposes – but Western leaders said the deal made no such reference.

Hassan Rowhani, whose election as Iran’s president in June raised hopes of a thaw with the West, insisted ‘Iran’s right to uranium enrichment on its soil was accepted in this nuclear deal by world powers’.

But US Secretary of State John Kerry was adamant: ‘This first step does not say that Iran has the right of enrichment, no matter what interpretative comments are made.’

I would say that Obama and Kerry are fools except that this is exactly what they want. The Iranian President is merely letting cats out of bags. No one is in any doubt about the troubles this is intended to cause.

The thing about being on the left when I was young was that there were adults still in charge who took a sober view of our interests and tried to act on them. We could go off to protest but it wouldn’t matter, and we knew it wouldn’t matter, because there were people at the top who paid no attention to us. Now there are no protests and the people at the top, if they are not opposed to our success and our way of life, certainly have an odd way of showing it.

If you are a nation dependent on American support, you would be wise to look for other kinds of friends and alliances. That Israel and Saudi Arabia may now make common cause is one more example of my enemy’s enemy is my friend. All this from Drudge today.

Netanyahu: ‘Historic Mistake’…
Appeasement…
Deal leaves Israel few options…
Obama calls…
BOLTON: Abject Surrender…
Six-Month Freeze, but Enrichment Issues Remain…
Iranians hail ‘smiling’ FM…
A STEP…
GOP sour…
Secret US-Iran talks…
Anger, jitters in Mideast…
Disagreements emerge…
‘Iran got what it wanted’…
Relief sweeps Tehran…
REPORT: Israelis inspect Saudi bases for possible strike…

Where from here? Two out of three of the “axis of evil” to have nuclear weapons. And it is American foreign policy to do nothing to stop it.

UPDATE: I hadn’t seen this but was sent to me by a friend. This is from Obama’s second inaugural:

And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice–not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.

The phase is possibly not accidental but intended as directly in your eye to everyone who would like to maintain our way if life. But if just there by the force of words and concepts, then in itself in betrays the cast of mind and the personal beliefs that lie behind it. It’s not even si vis pacem, para bellum. The President may himself be a fifth column. We give up our freedoms so that a bunch of layabouts can have free phones.

Obama grasps for climate legacy

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I should stop reading Drudge. The main story, “Obama grasps for climate legacy as second-term agenda crumbles”. The most momentous and most calamitous president is not actually seeing his agenda brought to a halt but the media like to pretend. Which part of his agenda is not going forward even in the teeth of massive opposition? But that’s the meme from which we find this:

But there’s one thing that’s going right for Obama: Executive action on climate change is moving full-speed ahead at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

‘He may be able to do more through climate change [rules] because the EPA has the authority,’ Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told The Hill on Thursday.

The most far-reaching piece of Obama’s climate plan is carbon emission standards for the nation’s fleet of existing power plants, by far the largest single source of industrial carbon emissions. The EPA is also writing standards for new plants.

The story indicates there are still obstacles – such as common sense – but as his agenda moves forward on the Middle East, health care, unilateral arms reduction, the economy, here is one more area in which he can leave his lasting legacy.

The media’s favourite Republican

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This post is about Chris Christie but let me start with these items from Drudge:

‘THIS IS A VERY, VERY BAD DEAL’…
Furious Israel confronts USA…
Obama secretly lifted Iran sanctions months ago…
IRAN: Will Not Give Up Right to Enrich Uranium…
Israel abandoned…
‘Deal of the century’…

And then this:

OCT. UNEMPLOYMENT: 7.3%…
+204,000 JOBS
720,000 Americans leave work force…
Record low for women…

And then across the top of the page there’s this:

GALLUP: UNINSURED REJECT OBAMACARE

Everything related to the United States is falling apart and for much of this disintegration the problem is the American president. The 2008 presidential election was pivotal but the damage could still have been contained. 2012 was the disaster and it is a disaster for which there is little evidence that it can be or will be contained.

The US did not elect Mitt Romney and while the look at the electoral college might make you think it was a runaway, it was a very close election. Pivotal in that last week was “Superstorm Sandy” during which a number of events occurred, the most significant one being the over-the-top support given to Barack Obama by Chris Christie in that crucial last week of the election. Let me take you back to this which is a quote taken from an article I did in Quadrant on the US election:

A week before the election, the in-the-tank-for-Obama MSM was deeply worried that Romney was going to beat their guy, so they played up Superstorm Sandy and the game-changing effect it was having on the election for all it was worth … the MSM would prefer that Americans forget that a freak storm probably averted an Obama loss. Obviously, such a loss would entirely pre-empt ‘Operation Demoralize’, and the only thing the MSM enjoys more than helping elect Democrats is predicting doom and despair for Republicans.

‘Operation Demoralize’ completely falls apart if one considers just how close the margin of victory was for Obama in the four swing states that decided the election, and how Superstorm Sandy almost certainly moved enough votes from Romney to Obama to provide the election victory. In Florida, with nearly 8.3 million ballots cast, the margin of victory was a mere 52,000 votes. Because this US presidential election was a two-person race, a takeaway by one candidate from another represents a two-vote swing. Accordingly, if somewhere in the order of 26,000 Floridians, out of 8.3 million, decided that they were changing their vote from Romney to Obama based on his supposed ‘heckuva job’ in relation to the storm response, those voters alone decided Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Given the AP exit poll and its 42% figure for those who claimed the storm influenced their decision to vote for Obama, it’s safe to say that Superstorm Sandy threw far more than 26,000 voters into Obama’s column and out of Romney’s.

The same argument can be made in Ohio. 5.3 million votes cast, margin of victory: 103,000. If the storm flipped about 52,000 votes or more from Romney to Obama, then no storm meant Ohio would have been a Romney win on election day.

In Virginia, 3.7 million votes cast, margin of victory: 107,000. If the storm influenced 54,000 voters or more to abandon Romney for Obama, the storm was decisive in converting a Romney win in Virginia to an Obama win.

In Colorado, nearly 2.4 million votes cast, margin of victory: 113,000. If 57,000 voters or more moved from the Romney camp to the Obama camp based on the storm, then Obama doesn’t win the state if the storm never happens.

A Romney win in these four states would have given him the election.

With this in mind, here is a quote from a contemporary account dated 30 October 2012:

Christie told news outlets that the president’s response had been ‘outstanding,’ said that coordinating with the administration had been ‘wonderful,’ and remarked that ‘the president has been all over this and he deserves great credit.’ He even told Fox News the president had done a ‘great job for New Jersey’ while staying above the fray about politics: ‘I’ve got a job to do here in New Jersey that’s much bigger than presidential politics, and I could care less about any of that stuff. I have a job to do. I’ve got 2.4 million people out of power. I’ve got devastation on the Shore. I’ve got floods in the northern part of my state. If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.’

I do know Christie and he does give a damn about presidential politics. If Romney had won in 2012 he could not run in 2016. You can argue about whether Sandy or Christie made the difference but you can’t argue about which candidate Christie’s words and deeds were of assistance to.

The media’s favourite Republican. Is there anything else you need to know?

The fog of scandal

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It’s a mid-sized story on Drudge, the video is with Glenn Beck who couldn’t even hold his job at Fox, and it is obviously a zero story across the media in the US or here, but still this does have to make you think. The article title is, “Obama Secret Service Agent: ‘It’s Worse Than People Know… and I’m Not Trying to Scare You Either'”. C’mon, who’d be scared by this:

Dan Bongino has protected numerous Presidents over his career, including President Obama. He has been within ear-shot of many a discussion in the Oval Office, but up until this administration has stayed out of the lime light. Apparently, however, the activities of this administration are so abhorrent that he could no longer keep quiet.

There is a movie I’m going to miss about a White House butler who served across a number of administrations but now it is a secret service agent who has served in a number of administrations who is trying to tell us something no one wants to hear. He’s apparently written a book for which no one is seeking the movie rights and intends to run for Congress, so immediately it will be possible to ignore it all as a self-interested account to get a bit of traction. But still, he does say what he says, and I am still conscious that the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court changed his vote in the middle of writing a decision to bring the Affordable Care Act down. Think about that as you read the following:

You give the government information and it will be abused. It is not a matter of if it’ll be abused, it’s only a matter of when…

When the line between the personal self and the public self… when that line is determined by the government that keeps your information in a trove for release any time they need it, how are you free?

..the bottom line is, having worked inside the government, it will be abused. It is only a matter of time.
…

We are all doing something wrong. The catch is not ‘if’ we’re doing something wrong. It is ‘are your private wrongs impacting on my civil liberties?’ If not, the government has no business in your life… it’s a red herring…

If you’re not doing something wrong? The question is only whether your private wrongs that have no effect on anyone else become exposed for the government’s benefit.

…It’s only a matter of time before someone slaps an email on your desk from fifteen years ago… and says ‘look what we got against you.’

He describes the fantastic array of impeachable offenses by the Obama administration as a “fog of scandal”. It’s like Stalin’s line about one death is a tragedy but a million deaths are a statistic. The number of scandals is now so large each seems to push the others from the front page and limit our ability to focus on the totality of what is being done.

Savages with cell phones

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This is from Sultan Knish and the modern world of Government by Magical Thinking. People without a single technical skill trying to manage a modern economy is the disaster we have visited upon ourselves. Presidents until recent times actually had done something complicated before they took office. This article is definitely onto something about the incompetence of those we have now put in charge of our political fortunes where none of them have ever done anything themselves in their entire life.

Healthcare.gov, like ObamaCare, was going to work because it was ‘good’. Its goodness was by some measure other than result. It was morally good. It was progressive. And so the deity of liberal causes, perhaps Karl Marx or Progressia, the Goddess of Soup and Economic Dysfunction, would see to it that it would work. Karma would kick in and everything would work out because it had to.

This brand of magical thinking was once commonplace. It still is. And it’s why things so rarely work out in some of the more messed up parts of the world. But the sort of attitude that would once have made anthropologists shake their heads is now commonplace here. Savages in suits, barbarians with iPads are certain that things will work because they have appeased the gods of modernity with their fonts, they have made a website that looks like a functioning website. And like the cargo culters who built fake control towers expecting planes to land, they thought that their website would work.

Competence is built on the unhappy understanding that things won’t work because you want them to, they won’t work if you go through the motions, they will only work if you understand how a thing works and then make it work by building it, by testing it and by expecting failure every step of the way and wrestling with the problem until you get it right.

That’s modernity. It isn’t glamorous. You can see it in black and white photos of men working on old planes. You can see it in the eyes of the astronauts who first went to the moon. You can read it in the workings of the men who built the longest suspension bridges, laid undersea cables and watched their world change. They were moderns and their time is done. They have left behind savages with cell phones who make decent tinkerers, but whose ability to collaborate falls apart in large groups.