Obama’s phony spending freeze–a drop in the bucket of cynicism and incompetence that has so far defined this administration–provides the perfect backdrop for the lip service our President will pay to job creation tonight. How do we know it’s all hot air? Because unemployment is over 10 percent, and the President’s team of propagandists continue to claim the stimulus package worked beautifully. They make up so many different numbers they can’t keep them straight. This past Sunday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was on Fox News Sunday claiming the spending boondoggle saved or created 1.5 million jobs at the same time David Axelrod was touting “more than 2 million” on CNN. Valerie Jarrett was on NBC hopelessly behind the curve, only claiming “thousands and thousands” of jobs saved by the Recovery Act they all said would cap unemployment at 8 percent. (The Heritage Foundation has kept track of Obama’s “jobs deficit“–check out their great graphic.) What numbers will Obama pull out of his hat tonight?
Americans need jobs. Democrats are running scared after voters in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts rejected their wild spending and ill-timed health care reform detour. So, look for Obama to play the populist tonight, shifting blame to Wall Street and the Bush administration for our economic woes. But the President should suck it up. He’s been in office for a year and his party has controlled all of Congress since 2007.
If Obama is serious about fostering job growth he will abandon his party’s plans for passing amnesty and cap and trade. Amnesty for illegal immigrants would ensure that those who shouldn’t even be in our country are drawing paychecks that could be going to actual citizens. Cap and trade–a nanny state scheme if there ever was one–would raise energy costs for households by thousands and dollars and kill even more jobs. These two initiatives combined would serve as a lethal cocktail to the American economy, so they are probably exactly what the power-drunk politicians of the Democratic Party will prescribe.
“One of the things I think the next President has to do is to stop fanning people’s fears. If we spend all of our time feeding the American people fear, and conflict, and division, then they become fearful, and conflicted, and divided. And if we feed them hope and if we feed them reason and tolerance then they will become tolerant and reasonable and hopeful.” Thus said then-Senator Obama in a Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire on September 26, 2007. His campaign titled the YouTube clip highlighting this declaration “A President of Hope.”
He’s come a long way since then, hasn’t he? A recent Politico piece highlighted his administration’s penchant for describing his every signature, speech, and executive move as “unprecedented” despite the fact that most of it has been done before. In truth, the only unprecedented thing about Obama’s reign is its current trajectory and how quickly it sped past the “Washington-as-usual” sign. Lobbyists? Check. Closed-door meetings? Check. Wasteful spending? Double check.
How about divisive demonization of opponents? The White House’s rhetoric aimed at insurance companies, Fox News, tea party attendees, “stupid” cops, and the Chamber of Commerce is a giant check. Fear mongering? You got it:
“The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’”
“Right now, if a family care physician works with his or her patient to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they are taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance. But, if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that’s thirty thousand, forty, fifty thousand dollars immediately the surgeon is reimbursed.”
“Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing. Our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it the most. And more will die as a result.”
The hope is gone, no question. But the more striking yet subtle implication in Obama’s expressed “feed them” belief, however, is the assumption that the public can be fed and grown, cultivated and pruned and programmed. Obama described his formula for effective leadership and it resembles a light switch. “Feed them X, and they will be X,” he said. Is there a simpler or more degrading way to view the American people? Is there a more least-effective method of leadership?
The Left criticized George W. Bush for being immoveable and uncompromising, for having a tin ear and being fatally steadfast. They characterized his confidence in his own opinion, his going with his gut, as a type of “cowboy diplomacy.” Now they have their own president who takes this attitude, albeit towards his own constituents and with more whining.
What Obama revealed in 2007 is directly reflected in his presidential swagger today. His administration has the President, feeding the American public a truly unprecedented number of interviews and speeches. Spoonful after spoonful, the message is inflexible, unchanging, and repetitive. It’s a Mary Poppins administration: if those being fed start to gag, add some sugar. Obama is the sugar, and as we all know that’s what makes the medicine go down.
But more exposure has not helped the public swallow the President’s agenda. Support for his health reform has continued its freefall. Obama has truly lost his magical qualities. The sugar is no longer sweet. If something is repeated often enough, it does not become true.
The administration that believes it can simply talk and have people believe is a dangerous one. It’s the same one that believes it can bow and have foreign leaders capitulate or simply spend money and have jobs created.
Effective leadership is more than the sum of its parts. So far, when this administration has fallen short, its panicked reaction is to increase the parts.
What’s missing is the reasoning and fair-mindedness that Obama exulted as a candidate. It is the luster that accompanies every candidate for office and promptly dissipates once he assumes it. Nothing draws out a politician’s true character and demands the ideal of leadership more than a legislative dogfight, and the tendency for the high-minded rhetoric to devolve into the petty not only has precedent, it is the definition of Washington as usual.
CNN reportedly gave Lou Dobbs $8 million to leave. “They wanted him out,” according to a source, because of the ideological tilt of some of his stories.
So … CNN pushes the meme that the angry right is purging the Republican party … and then turns around and purges its newsroom?
Remember the first time? President Obama just dropped something. Or rather, he was just so tall that he had to bend over to shake hands with the Saudi King. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a bow.
PHOENIX — A young Iraqi woman whose father allegedly hit her with his car because she had become too Westernized died from her injuries Monday after laying in a coma for nearly two weeks.
Noor Faleh Almaleki, 20, underwent spinal surgery and had been in a hospital since Oct. 20, when police say her father ran down her and her boyfriend’s mother with his Jeep as the women were walking across a parking lot in the west Phoenix suburb of Peoria.
The other woman, Amal Khalaf, is expected to survive.
Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, fled after the attack but was arrested Thursday when he arrived at Atlanta’s airport, where he was sent from the United Kingdom after authorities denied him entrance.
Peoria police interviewed him and brought him back to Arizona over the weekend, but have declined to release what Almaleki said to them.
At a court hearing over the weekend in Phoenix, county prosecutor Stephanie Low told a judge that Almaleki admitted to committing the crime.
“By his own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter had brought shame on him and his family,” Low said. “This was an attempt at an honor killing.”
Family members had told police that Almaleki attacked his daughter because he believed she had become too Westernized and was not living according to his traditional Iraqi values.
I didn’t know it was a specific country’s practice to murder family members when they don’t respect the country’s values. How much would you like to bet the weak knees at the AP substituted “Iraqi” for “Islamic”?
When President Obama’s “green jobs” czar was outed as a self-avowed, committed communist by bloggers armed with search engines, he resigned. While this did satisfy those intolerant bigots who wish to see our government stocked with people who at least pretend to be remotely committed to traditional American values, there were still questions as to how someone who had made so many radical, racist statements, and who had a criminal record, could make it into the bowels of the White House without so much as a background check or Google search done on their name by Obama administration officials.
That question still remains. And the appointment of Kevin Jennings as Obama’s “safe schools czar” is only going to make it more pressing.
Imagine a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore here in Loudoun confesses to his teacher, your neighbor, that he had gone home with an older man he met in a public restroom and slept with him. The teacher shrugs off the fact that a pedophile is roaming a public restroom somewhere, picking up children for sex, and reminds the teen to use protection.
Is that a safe school for your child? Would you question your neighbor’s sense?
“High school sophomore, 15 years old. That was the only way he knew how to meet gay people,” Jennings lamented at a Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) rally in 2000, as he told the story of the young teen, “Brewster,” who had confided to him one day at school. He also wrote about Brewster in his book One Teacher in Ten.
What would have been considered statutory rape in most states, Jennings dismissed without so much of a thought. His only concern, it seems, was that the youngster couldn’t meet adult sex partners in a more gay-friendly environment. Like at school.
Jennings, himself the author of a handful of gay advocacy and education books, wrote the forward for a book entitled Queering Elementary Education, because apparently fifteen was just too old of an age for children to learn about homosexual sex acts. The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) would no doubt be proud.
In Always My Child, Jennings calls for a “diversity policy that mandates including LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] themes in the curriculum.” His devout adherence to LGBT indoctrination in America’s education system runs deep–he once declared, “Ex-gay messages have no place in our nation’s public schools. A line has been drawn. There is no ‘other side’ when you’re talking about lesbian, gay and bisexual students.” So a child confused about gender issues can’t go back? Isn’t that a little–dare I suggest it–intolerant?
Jennings founded GSLEN. Its conference in 2000, co-sponsored with the Massachusetts Department of Education, featured an educational seminar for kids where a state official told teens that “Fisting often gets a bad rap….[It's] an experience of letting s omebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with…[and] to put you into an exploratory mode.” At the time, Jennings could only explain that “GLSEN believes that children do have a right to accurate, safer sex education, but this needs to be delivered in an age-appropriate and sensitive manner.” Like describing how to insert your entire hand into another person’s nether regions is ever “sensitive.”
The Bush administration created the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, which Jennings’ now officially oversees as Director for Obama. Is it wrong that the person charged with ensuring our schools are drug free has admitted using illegal substances? His 2007 autobiography, Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son, discusses his high school days in Hawaii: “I got stoned more often and went out to the beach at Bellows, overlooking Honolulu Harbor and the lights of the city, to drink with my buddies on Friday and Saturday nights, spending hours watching the planes take off and land at the airport, which is actually quite fascinating when you are drunk and stoned.”
Critics of Van Jones, the resigned African-American “green jobs” czar, were smeared as racists by the Left. No doubt critics of Jennings will be labeled homophobes. It’s the modus operandi of liberals, to attack the messenger with the laziest of ad hominem arguments. But such a strategy never answers the facts. There is a radical in charge in our Department of Education. He is not radical because of his sexual orientation. Such a personal attribute is boring and inconsequential on its own. Kevin Jennings is a radical because he has a history of intolerance towards those who are religious or straight, and he has spent a lifetime attempting to force his views on not just parents and teachers, but their children too.
At a speech in a New York church in 2000, Jennings allegedly said “We have to quit being afraid of the religious right. . . . I’m trying not to say, ‘F–k ‘em!’ which is what I want to say, because I don’t care what they think! Drop dead!” In his memoir, he wrote that ”for many years, [I] reacted violently to anyone who professed any kind of religion.”
In 1997, Jennings remarked that promoting homosexuality in schools with the public’s approval is the ultimate goal of his line of activism. “Being finished might someday mean that most straight people, when they would hear that someone was promoting homosexuality, would say ‘Yeah, who cares?’ because they wouldn’t necessarily equate homosexuality with something bad that you would not want to promote.” Let’s accept that for a moment. Would Jennings be alright with some balance in our educational system, if it really must promote sexuality at all? His past comments don’t seem to indicate he would. Would Jennings be offended if our schools promoted heterosexuality? Of course.
In his opinion, “There is no other side.” So far, the Obama administration’s nonexistent response has been the attitude of “Yeah, who cares?”
Somewhere, an abused 15-year-old student named Brewster just might.
UPDATE (10/07/09): My foresight last week is shockingly awesome even to me. A couple days after I posted this article on Jennings with a cheeky NAMBLA barb, it was revealed that he praised and was familiar with Harry Hay, a hardcore NAMBLA advocate. Then my rhetorical question translated into reality, with this audio out yesterday/today:
President Obama vowed to “fundamentally transform” America. Venezuela’s thuggish dictator has long advocated just that, so now he wants to lend a hand.
“[Obama] has good intentions,” Hugo Chavez winked recently. “We have to help him.”
American foreign policy has always been marked by resolved opposition to freedom’s enemies. We’ve stood strong for human dignity against those who debase it in pursuit of utopian experiments and iron political grips.
Until now.
Financier of Colombian terrorist guerrillas and supporter of all things socialist, Chavez is pushing for Manuel Zelaya’s reinstatement as president of Honduras. Zelaya was constitutionally deposed by the Honduran supreme court, a ruling his own party backed after he attempted to hold an illegal, fixed referendum giving him the green light to rule for life. Also standing with Zelaya is the Castro regime and Nicaragua’s little tyrant, Daniel Ortega. And the new regulator of a few state-owned industries himself, Barack Obama.
It gets worse. Chavez is allied with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. No doubt their play dates include exchanging election-rigging techniques and discussing the finer points of beating and imprisoning political competitors. At the United Nations, Cuba and uranium-rich Venezuela are reliable votes for Iran.
Obama’s administration recently relaxed restrictions with Cuba that had stood for nearly fifty years. On the same day, it suspended financial aid to democratic Honduras in retaliation for its refusal to ignore its own constitution. At Zelaya’s request, the State Department revoked the diplomatic visas of certain Honduran officials.
When Obama becomes the first American president to chair the United Nations’ Security Council later this month, he’ll most likely share the table with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, himself only a month removed from his warm embrace of the freed Lockerbie bomber. Gaddafi held a celebratory welcome party on the tarmac for the murderer of 270 people, many of them Americans.
Obama’s fundamentally changed America now palls around with and takes cues from criminals and terrorist-supporters posing as heads of state. This week, Obama encouraged students to defy peer pressure, do the right thing, and not let their country down. The President should heed his own advice.
If there is one thing congressional Republicans, party leaders, and conservative bloggers are in near-universal agreement with Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden on, it’s that Representative Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) was wrong last night to shout “You lie!” at President Obama during his speech before a joint session of Congress. Decorum, they say, is of utmost importance.
Baloney.
There are four reasons why Representative Joe Wilson’s comment was right and justified.
Obama is lying outright and hiding the truth. Everyone from conservative bloggers to members of Congress to independent fact checkers agree that Democrats and Obama are lying when they say non-citizens accessing government-run health care will not happen. Sure, the bill says it won’t, but the truth is that Democrats voted down more than one measure that would have closed the loophole that still exists–no enforcement mechanism is provided in the bill. What Obama said last night (“There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”) is utterly false. It’s a lie. Obama said that these “bogus claims” are being spread by “those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost.” The President thus implied that conservative bloggers, members of Congress, and independent fact checkers themselves are purposefully being dishonest. He accused them of being malicious in their actions. It’s utterly Orwellian, and the arrogance of it all is staggering.
What’s more, conservatives’ and Republicans’ central reason for opposing Obama’s brand of health care reform is because of how disastrous it is for the country. It’s irreversible. It will hand control of a large sector of our economy over to government bureaucrats. It will decrease the supply of care. It will lead to a single payer system. It will increase costs. It will swell already-catastrophic deficits to new, mind-boggling proportions. It will cover abortions. It will bankrupt our country. It will require a permanent tax increase. If all these things are true and the consequences of Obamacare really are that bad, how is breaching a little decorum not justified? If we really believe we lose our country if this bill passes, why worry about how civil our legislative chambers will be in the new Socialist States of America? Is this one of freedom’s last stands or not?
The Democrats have done far worse, and the respect due the office of the President–a valid principle–does not and should not apply here. In 2005, Democrats shouted down President George W. Bush during the State of the Union address when he was citing statistics on the insolvency of Social Security. Let me be clear: they grossly violated the standard they are demanding Wilson be held to now simply because they didn’t like the facts Bush related in his speech. Then they rejoiced when he was assaulted with flying shoes.
As a candidate, Obama ordered his minions to “argue with [neighbors], get in their face.” Last night, minutes after being called out by Wilson, the President threatened those who “misrepresent what’s in this plan,” saying, “we will call you out.” Over the summer, Democrat leaders demonized ordinary Americans who attended town halls as racists, evil-mongers, Nazis, mobsters, terrorists, and the like.
Respect is due the highest office in the land, just as it was when Bush was in office and dissent became the highest form of patriotism in Democrat minds. But when the President has lowered himself already, telling political opponents to shut up and get out of the way and is now trying to blatantly lie a bill through Congress, the madness must stop. If our criticisms of this president are actually true, having the courage to point out that the emporer has no clothes in the middle of his speech is the bare minimum that Republican voters should be requiring of their candidates in 2010.
This created political firestorm helps Republicans, no matter what kind of garbage NBC spits out. Senator Jim DeMint’s Waterloo comment was an essential turning point for Republicans this summer. It brought the true nature of the health care debate to light, exposing Obama’s hurry-up offense and empty rhetoric for what it was. It thrust one of the strongest defenders of conservative health care solutions in the Senate into the national spotlight and it got people talking. Without that comment, it is much more likely that Obamacare would have made it through Congress before recess as this administration originally intended it to. It would not have been studied, picked apart, or even read. August’s town halls would have never happened. Obama’s approval numbers would have remained healthy. And he would be looking to sign cap-and-trade legislation by December.
Joe Wilson is now at the top of the Drudge Report. He is in a relatively safe seat, and he only said what millions of Americans were already shouting at their televisions. The country isn’t buying his voodoo economics, that we can increase the quality and quantity of care, have the government administer it, and still cut costs any more than they believe the president who wants to grant amnesty in 2010 won’t hand out health care in 2009. Wilson has singlehandedly positioned the GOP to capitalize on the illegal alien issue. It’s one of the most politically solid things to stand on, and there are so many ways we can win with it. Americans will find it curious that the President is claiming his plan won’t cover illegals while his party is voting that very measure down repeatedly.
What did Wilson gain by apologizing? Not much. The Left is still in a tizzy and Democrats in Congress will still push for censure. They may even get it, the way Republicans have been tripping over themselves to hang Wilson out to dry since last night. They did the same to DeMint in July. Obamacare isn’t dead yet, but if Wilson is willing to wage war like his fellow South Carolinian did earlier this summer, conservatives stand a better chance of driving a stake through this nightmare of a proposal for good.
As Allah Pundit points out, lazy David Schuster is in his usual cover-Democrat-ass mode in this panel discussion of Van Jones’ Truther creds. But I want to point out a pretty obvious crack in Jane Hamsher’s liberal boilerplate. Apparently, asking questions like whether Bush “deliberately allowed” the September 11th attacks to occur is completely innocent and a sign of an intelligent, curious mind. If, on the other hand, you inquire about the birth origins of your president, well, you’re obviously a mentally challenged racist crackpot. Really.
HAMSHER: …Michelle Bachman and others have tried to suggest that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. I mean, that’s rediculous and it’s crazy that [the Obama administration] should back down to something that was actually not that bad.
[...]
SCHUSTER: If [the petition that Van Jones signed said that] President Bush knew about the attacks, didn’t do anything to stop it, it was part of some conspiracy, then [Philip Klein's] right, he should have been fired. But do you know exactly [what the petition said]?
KLEIN: The petition called for an investigation into whether government officials had prior knowledge of 9/11…
HAMSHER: It asked a question! Is that OK? Is it acceptable to ask a question?…
I think both conspiracy theories are equally credible. Both of them are lunacy. It’s fun to recognize Hamsher’s double standards as the empty-headed knee-jerks they are.
President Obama intends on keeping three things alive and well. Grandma doesn’t make the cut and our retired military veterans don’t either–the Veterans Administration “Your Life, Your Choices” program makes that clear. The careening national debt, economic dependency on and military entanglements in the Middle East, and racial divisiveness at home all take precedence.
The Pelosi-Reid Congress is consumed by a corrupt agenda that spends our grandchildren’s paychecks to ensure our own comfort. If each American household “got patriotic” and pitched in five dollars a month to pay off the national debt (assuming we froze it immediately and began requiring half the country to start paying anything at all), we wouldn’t finish contributing our fair share until after the year 3740. The amended Obama budget predictions, unfortunately, have the nearly $12 trillion debt doubling by 2020. Redeploy that debt-free target date back another 1,731 years, stat.
This August saw the most casualties of the 106 months American soldiers have fought in Afghanistan. Cindy Sheehan may be crashing Obama’s vacation, but his party let nuisances like “exit strategies” and photos of flag-draped caskets slip their collective mind in Chicago’s Grant Park last November 4th. And that little promise about ending our addiction to enemy-produced oil? Eh, let’s let the Russians, Norwegians, Spanish, Indians, Chinese, and Brazilians drill off our coast instead and call it day. They could probably use the new jobs in this global limp of an economy anyway.
Sadly, transcending race apparently means interpreting everything in its shadow. Whites are acting so stupidly these days even black town hall attendees are getting into the racist spirit and joining armed mobs. MSNBC anchors are so scared of black men legally carrying guns they’ve resorted to manipulating footage of conservative rallies. To be considered Caucasian, simply oppose the largest, fastest expansion of the federal government in history. If you aren’t non-white and swallowing whole the community organizer-in-chief’s change, you are a specter of America’s dark past and a physical threat to America’s first dark president.
Grandma might just have the best ticket out of this mess after all.
Michael Barone asked earlier this week if the Washington Post is trying to “macaca” Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell over what he wrote in a 1989 thesis at Regent University.
…the Sunday front page story [in the Washington Post] on the thesis … sends the culturally liberal voters of Northern Virginia in the Post’s local circulation area a pretty clear message: you better not vote for this guy. He went to an “evangelical” school (Regent University Law School), described feminists as “detrimental” and “said government policy should favor married couples over ‘cohabitors, homosexuals or fornicators.’”
With the total number of stories the Washington Post has run on this subject this week preparing to break into the double digits, the answer to Barone’s question is clear.
WaPo having a liberal agenda is no surprise. Liberals having conniptions over traditional conservative beliefs, however phrased, isn’t new either. Neglecting to locate a radical liberal president’s important college work is par for the course. What’s interesting, though, is that the Post is a member of the gang of media outlets who have enforced a gag order on the Van Jones firestorm, as Byron York noted today.
From a Nexis search a few moments ago:
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the New York Times: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the Washington Post: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on NBC Nightly News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on ABC World News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on CBS Evening News: 0.
This means that if your range of news consumption is limited within these five sources, and if Van Jones is actually fired this afternoon, a high-level government official will have been removed amid immense controversy and you wouldn’t have heard a lick about it, if the Washington Post had any say in the matter. But you can’t turn a page in the Post without reading about how Bob McDonnell wants to chain our mothers and sisters up in the basement and make them do laundry for the rest of their lives.
Van Jones called Republicans “assholes” and laughed about it. He’s a self-avowed communist. He admitted that he signed a 9/11 Truther petition, indicating he believes the Bush administration allowed or encouraged the attacks of September 11, 2001 to occur. He was a presenter of a 2002 war protest in California alongside other 9/11 Truthers. Jake Tapper reveals that he was on the organization committee of a tabloid newspaper that promoted 9/11 Truther protests, which Van Jones also worked to organize.
His excuse that he didn’t read the petition carefully enough before signing it is ludicrous. And his apology that explained away his partisan words and radical activity as things he did before he joined Barack Obama’s elite team of advisory czars doesn’t mean they don’t matter. Apparently, the Washington Post disagrees.
The 1989 thesis paper of a then-private citizen deserves wall-to-wall coverage. A communist Truther in the White House? Covering that wouldn’t result in a Republican losing an election, now would it?
UPDATE: Information is coming out so quickly on this creep it’s hard to keep up. I forgot to list the fact that Van Jones organized a 1999 protest in support of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. He also is fond of t-shirts that read “Kanye was right,” presumably meaning he agrees that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Didn’t someone recently get in hot water with Van Jones’ ColorOfChange.org for claiming the president is racist?
Posted by wolkingsworld 
