Obama Hears it from Jack Webb

Obama Hears it from Jack Webb

What is wrong with America?

What is wrong with America?

Drew Klavan gets it, and explains it to us.

Style Over Substance, Obama and Iran

In yet another show of cluelessness in the realm of foreign policy, Barry Obama has lofted a meaningless video into Iran. Of course, consistent with the amateurish debacle of Obama's gift of DVDs to Britain's Prime Minister Brown, the color blindness of Obama and his state department are again on display, and breathtaking in their naivete. Obama decided to broadcast a video message into Iran with no cooperation from Iran's government, just as he goes over the heads of the media establishment here with his appearance on The Tonight Show. But the Persian Empire and its government is not the equivalent of the American media establishment, and a beamed propaganda channel is not the equivalent of a guest spot on the most popular show on late night TV.

To compound the problem, the piece was broadcast during the Persian New Year, Nowruz, so it is unlikely that many people saw it anyway. You Tube is banned in Iran, but the Iranian government did see it, and Ahmadinejad commented on the broadcast. Predictably, he said that words with no change in policy will avail Obama naught. And since the change in policy that Iran seeks can not be delivered by an elected American leader, Amadinejad may have to wait for either his ascent to Mahdi, or Obama's ascent to dictator, for him to get the American foreign policy he likes. Neither outcome appears likely to happen, but we live in interesting times, so we will have to see how this plays out.

Taxes Going Up

Taxes Going Up

Rare honesty from the New York Times. As they conclude:

Americans have made it clear that they want a certain kind of government, one that can field a strong military and also maintain popular programs like Medicare. Yet we are not paying nearly enough taxes to maintain those programs. Even major changes to the health care system — the single most important step for closing the budget gap — will not close it entirely. Taxes must rise, too.

They make a weak excuse:

Think of it this way: A tax increase isn’t so much a barrier to a society becoming richer as it is a result of a society becoming richer.

So there it is. Your taxes will definitely go up because democrats and their leader, Barry Obama, will make it happen, and they blame US for wanting the things they will push upon us. That simple.

Stimulate This

Stimulate This

Now that the stimulus bill is moving into final form, details are leaking out. Since most of the money will not be spent until the second and third year, it is not really a stimulus bill. It is rather more a Trojan horse bill, since it will contain quite a few special passengers. In the words of the president's chief of staff, “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.”

Now reports are beginning to emerge, and one of the most insidious little bombs is the "decoupling" provision for utility rates. What this means is there will be no further link between electric rates, say, and the amount of electricity you use. That means that, as we are forced (or choose) to use more efficient appliances and our electrical use goes down, the rates will go up to compensate. Then, when or if we buy electric vehicles, the rates will remain high. Or presumably we can ask our legislators (nicely) to pass a new law setting special rates for electrical vehicle use. But even that is dependent on the utilities installing new electric meters, so that the "special" use can be rated on the lower, politically correct rate for electric vehicles. But then the gasoline tax and road use taxes will be piled on the electric rates.

While we are on this subject of Obama "calling for forty million meters to be installed" it might be interesting to look into the Federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, which directed state utility commissions to install the new meters. But since Bush signed that legislation, Obama has "called" for exactly the same thing, so as to get the credit. "Utilities are planning to deploy more than 40 million smart meters throughout the country from 2007 through 2010, according to a report published by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission." But now that Obama wants it, and money has no real value any more, it is now for the government to pay for them, with their usual crack efficiency and timeliness.

This is pretty clear, we are getting screwed by this stimulus plan. It is the un-stimulus screw - no stimulation, no kisses, no lube.

If you have a head for details, or you think I'm kidding, you can read the report (.pdf) summarizing the bill. Not to worry, it is a mere 76 pages.

Intellectual?

Intellectual?

I have no idea where this "Obama is an intellectual" trope came from, but it is absolutely untrue. An intellectual is a person who exercises his creative and mental powers over all else. He writes, he may teach. He is surely not a pol. Let's get this trope off the table. A pol is a person who bends others to his will, his quest for power, not a man who convinces others with his ideas. Name a single new or unique idea our new leader has had, I dare you. Not an intellectual by a long shot.

While we are at it, how are we to know that this guy is so smart? I have not seen any testing on him that impresses me more than the work done to quantify the IQs of Bush and Kerry. If he is smarter than either of those, I have not seen any evidence of it - just unsubstantiated statements. And he clearly has no intellectual achievements to compare to Bill Clinton's.

Not that this means anything. Great leaders are men such as Reagan and FDR. Oliver Wendell Holmes admiringly and famously said of FDR that he had a "first rate attitude, second rate temperament." (Churchill said about the same thing substituting "attitude" for "temperament") Few would call Reagan a deep thinker, but his thinking had clarity. This nuanced thinking we get from pretenders like Kerry, and now maybe we will get much of the same from "The One," drives me to distraction. It may be possible that Obama is capable of clear thinking, but as Rush and others say, liberals will never tell you what they believe, because you would then reject them.

It is the liberal propensity to call republicans idiots. Remember, Kerry was supposed to be some sort of a genius too. Only when he lost did the Left admit that he was a dork who ran an incompetent campaign, and research revealed his IQ to be about the same as G.W.Bush's. They said that Clinton was a genius, but at least they had a leg to stand on with that one, Rhodes Scholar and all. But he did too much of his thinking with his little head. Then they called G.H.W.Bush an idiot and a tool, Reagan an idiot and a fool, but before that Carter was called a genius nuclear engineer! All he ever did in that line was to grease the machinery in a nuclear submarine, but to the leftist media in this country, they do not need much to get off and running. Leftist guys are smart, righties are dumb. Don't you get it? This is a universal truth of the Left. Read Trotsky or Goebbels.

No. I believe that the guy who becomes president is always the guy who is an absolute genius at utilizing the tools that exist to claim power over others. That makes them smart enough to be our rulers, that's all. Any claim to higher intelligence on broader matters requires evidence - evidence that is lacking on all our presidents since Jefferson, sadly.

I rather think that Obama is a pragmatist, and when his liberalism fails him, he will change horses rather than becoming irrelevant like Carter. Time will tell. We are in deep trouble if he is an intellectual, who has pondered and decided to go all ideological on us. If so, we might just have a revolution on our hands real soon. Remember, if one and a half percent had voted the other way, we would be making fun of president McCain right now. There is scant support for another bailout, government health care for everybody and much higher taxes. Keep piling it on, and we the people will push back come election day next.

Caught in the Act

Caught in the Act

This kerfluffle over Obama's remarks in San Francisco is a very big deal. It may signal the end of Obama's candidacy as a viable chance for the first Black man to be nominated to be president. It has assured that he will never be President. For the record, his remarks were:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

This is a classic instance where a candidate does what they all do - tailor their message to a single audience. Clearly Obama was feeling safe in the bosom of one of America's wealthiest households. But one of the attendees had the temerity to make a tape of his remarks, and then the gall to release it to the public.

Wake up Obama, this is the new world, the you-tube world, where you can no longer assume that you have any privacy at all. Now blue-collar, working class whites, a group you despise, one you feel completely separate from, but need for election, has heard you, in your own voice admit that you have no respect for them. They now know that you will be no champion for issues they can relate to. Obama, you work in the house now, and have turned your back on the field workers. But turnabout is fair play. They can not be counted upon to support you now.

As Newt Gingrich has noted elsewhere:

If you go to the most expensive private school in Hawaii and then move on to Colombia University and Harvard Law School, you may not understand normal Americans -- that's the impression created by Senator Barack Obama's recent comments.

For Obama, it seems, the beliefs of normal Americans are so alien to his leftwing viewpoint that he has to seek some psychological explanation for what he thinks are weird ideas. They can't really believe in the right to bear arms. They can't really believe in traditional marriage. They can't really believe in their faith in God. They can't really want to enforce the law on immigration. And because ordinary Americans can't really believe these things, they must just be bitter and frustrated.

This is the closest Senator Obama has come to openly sharing his wife's view that "America is a mean country." Not since 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Mike Dukakis have we seen anyone so out of touch with normal Americans. It makes perfect sense that it was at a fundraiser in San Francisco that he would have shared the views he has so carefully kept hidden for the entire campaign.

Obama has not done well with blue-collars against Hillary before. He will look back at those poor showings wistfully when he sees how badly he does in Pennsylvania.

He may have managed to lose Pennsylvania with this one. He may even have done the impossible - let the nomination get away.

He has assured himself that he can never win the general election. And it will be HIS racism, not ours, that brings him down.

Obama's Pastor Disaster

Obama's Pastor Disaster

[When I find stuff this good, I just have to reprint it. This guest post, by Mark Steyn, syndicated columnist of renown, now fallen on hard times by a ludicrous law suit, is a classic, and at only three weeks old, that's near-record time for attainment of classic status.]

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright thinks that, given their treatment by white America, black Americans have no reason to sing "God Bless America." "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America," he told his congregation. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human."

I'm not a believer in guilt by association, or the campaign vaudeville of rival politicians insisting this or that candidate dissociate himself from remarks by some fellow he had a 30-second grip'n'greet with a decade ago. But Jeremiah Wright is not exactly peripheral to Barack Obama's life. He married the Obamas and baptized their children. Those of us who made the mistake of buying the senator's latest book, "The Audacity Of Hope," and assumed the title was an ingeniously parodic distillation of the great sonorous banality of an entire genre of blandly uplifting political writing discovered circa page 127 that in fact the phrase comes from one of the Rev. Wright's sermons. Jeremiah Wright has been Barack Obama's pastor for 20 years – in other words, pretty much the senator's entire adult life. Did Obama consider "God Damn America" as a title for his book but it didn't focus-group so well?

Ah, well, no, the senator told ABC News. The Rev. Wright is like "an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with." So did he agree with goofy old Uncle Jeremiah on Sept. 16, 2001? That Sunday morning, Uncle told his congregation that the United States brought the death and destruction of 9/11 on itself. "We nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," said the Rev. Wright. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards."

Is that one of those "things I don't always agree with"? Well, Sen. Obama isn't saying, responding merely that he wasn't in church that morning. OK, fair enough, but what would he have done had he happened to have shown up on Sept. 16? Cried "Shame on you!" and stormed out? Or, if that's a little dramatic, whispered to Michelle that he didn't want their daughters hearing this kind of drivel while rescue workers were still sifting through the rubble and risen from his pew in a dignified manner and led his family to the exit? Or would he have just sat there with an inscrutable look on his face as those around him nodded?

All Sen. Obama will say is that "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." And in that he may be correct. There are many preachers who would be happy to tell their congregations "God damn America." But Barack Obama is not supposed to be the candidate of the America-damners: He's not the Rev. Al Sharpton or the Rev. Jesse Jackson or the rest of the racial grievance-mongers. Obama is meant to be the man who transcends the divisions of race, the candidate who doesn't damn America but "heals" it – if you believe, as many Democrats do, that America needs healing.

Yet since his early twenties he's sat week after week, listening to the ravings of just another cookie-cutter race-huckster.

What is Barack Obama for? It's not his "policies," such as they are. Rather, Sen. Obama embodies an idea: He's a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don't boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do. I assume that's what Geraldine Ferraro was getting at when she said Obama wouldn't be where he was today (i.e., leading the race for the Democratic nomination) if he was white. For her infelicity, the first woman on a presidential ticket got bounced from the Clinton campaign and denounced by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann for her "insidious racism" indistinguishable from "the vocabulary of David Duke."

Oh, for cryin' out loud. Enjoyable as it is to watch previously expert tossers of identity-politics hand grenades blow their own fingers off, if Geraldine Ferraro's an "insidious racist", who isn't?

The song the Rev. Wright won't sing is by Irving Berlin, a contemporary of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart, all the sophisticated rhymesters. But only Berlin could have written without embarrassment "God Bless America." He said it directly, unaffectedly, unashamedly – in seven words:

"God Bless America

Land that I love."

Berlin was a Jew, and he suffered slights: He grew up in the poverty of New York's Lower East Side. When he made his name and fortune, his marriage to a Park Avenue heiress resulted in her expulsion from the Social Register. In the Thirties, her sister moved in with a Nazi diplomat and proudly flaunted her diamond swastika to Irving. But Berlin spent his infancy in Temun, Siberia (until the Cossacks rode in and razed his village), and he understood the great gift he'd been given:

"God Bless America

Land that I love."

The Rev. Wright can't say those words. His shtick is:

"God damn America

Land that I loathe."

I understand the Ellis Island experience of Russian Jews was denied to blacks. But not to Obama. His experience surely isn't so different to Berlin's – except that Barack got to go to Harvard. Obama's father was a Kenyan, he spent his childhood in Indonesia, and he ought to thank his lucky stars that he's running for office in Washington rather than Nairobi or Jakarta.

Instead, his whiny wife, Michelle, says that her husband's election as president would be the first reason to have "pride" in America, and complains that this country is "downright mean" and that she's having difficulty finding money for their daughters' piano lessons and summer camp. Between them, Mr. and Mrs. Obama earn $480,000 a year (not including book royalties from "The Audacity Of Hype," but they're whining about how tough they have it to couples who earn 48 grand – or less. Yes, we can. But not on a lousy half-million bucks a year.

God has blessed America, and blessed the Obamas in America, and even blessed the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose bashing of his own country would be far less lucrative anywhere else on the planet. The "racist" here is not Geraldine Ferraro but the Rev. Wright, whose appeals to racial bitterness are supposed to be everything President Obama will transcend. Right now, it sounds more like the same-old same-old.

"God Bless America

Land that I love."

Take it away, Michelle.

Guest post, ©MARK STEYN