February 09, 2010
Lashing Out Beats Accountability
By: David Limbaugh
Conservatives understand that liberals often demonize their opponents rather than debate the merits of the issues because the tactic works. But you have to wonder whether another reason they lash out is that they are angry that reality doesn't cooperate with their ideologically driven solutions and it's easier to blame others than to face up to the unpleasant truth of their failed ideas.
It's not just the tirades of liberal talk show host Ed Schultz, who said he would cheat to keep Scott Brown from winning his Senate election, or Chris Matthews, who said Republicans indoctrinate their members in the same way Cambodian communists re-educated their subjects, or the nasty outbursts of presidential adviser Rahm Emanuel.
I was also reminded of this, on a subtler level, when reading a Washington Post piece on David Plouffe, Barack Obama's presidential campaign manager, who recently returned to the Obama camp to quarterback the Democrats' election efforts in 2010 and beyond.
Plouffe said: "Politics is a comparative exercise. This isn't just a referendum on Democrats. ... It's a choice. ... Republicans right now are just sitting back and slinging arrows. We need to ... shine some light over their side of the fence."
Plouffe said he would remind voters that Democrats have spent two years trying to fix problems, whereas Republicans want to wheel a "Trojan horse" into Washington and spill out bankers and health insurance executives. Sure, why not vilify bankers and insurers when it helps your guy avoid accountability for his policies?
It's shamelessly Machiavellian of Democrats to accuse the GOP of going negative, when Democrats use Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" (e.g., "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it") as an instruction manual. But hey, they're out of fresh ideas, so what other choice do they have?
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February 05, 2010
This 'Messiah' Isn't Delivering Peace
By: David Limbaugh
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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Constitutional Courts Are A Threat To Liberalism
By: Christopher G. Adamo
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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February 03, 2010
Matthews And Olbermann Now Openly Fighting Over Obama
By: Ann Coulter
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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February 01, 2010
An Unusually Bad Prevaricator, Unusually Bad
By: David Limbaugh
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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January 29, 2010
There Was the President's Speech, and There Is Reality
By: David Limbaugh
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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January 27, 2010
Can't We At Least Get A Toaster?
By: Ann Coulter
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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