Consistent At Least

We are about to take a week off. (OK, ok, we can almost hear the sigh of relief out there as computers are freed up to go about their business.)

How will the political landscape be altered upon our return? Will Obama knuckle under and ape a 1994 Clinton? Will Rahm be reined in? Will foreign policy - BO’s key responsibility - undergo a major re-sculpting or simply continue on with apology, kowtowing, serially trashing of the prior administration, reaching out to thugs (thanks, but we’re gonna kill you anyway), neglecting allies and sucking up to the U.N.?

Will BO continue to lie about fiscal sobriety, lobbyists, and transparency?

That is, can we expect anything other that political promiscuity from BO?

The answer is no, nothing will change. And it is for the same reason that we have never called BO a "phony." No once, because he is not. He is acting 100% in character. We have already examined the chronic lassitude, the lack of scholarship at the voting booth that got us here. No use kicking these folk any further.

BO’s past is a precise mirror image of his present - simply on a different stage.

Hansen put it very succinctly: "We have in Obama & Co. an almost boring, traditional statist bent on redistribution (Obama’s words), updated with the belief that almost everything requires gov’t affirmative reactions (explaining why abroad we shun our allies and serenade our enemies) and frosted with the Chicago ends justifies the means approach."

Still, I can hear you lefties out there - he will see the light, he will move right to just left of center; he listens and cares about all of us. This is a crock. He cares not one iota about the "rest of us" as has been made crystal clear in his cynical comments of late, some highlighted in this blog. And he has/does live in a highly rarified atmosphere where his pals remind each other, daily, just how smart they are (ignoring the track record of past decades). None of them have a clue.

We said a year ago that Obama does not understand America. That, compouned by his notion that the majority of Americans, those who disagree with him, are flawed, guarantees the further implosion of his presidency.

Robert Craven

Obama Act Like Clinton?

Obama’s been lectured recently by the just-left-of-center media to act like Clinton. He’s been warned that if he does not, he’s a one-termer.

Clinton was no dummy. After the disaster of the 1994 mid-term elections Clinton immediately switched gears, re-making himself as more the president of the US than the leader of the Democratic party and in the process staying as far away from far-lefty types as possible, including many of those who came over from his campaign.

Thus, by 1996 Clinton had become a fan of limited government. He ditched his wife’s1993 health plan and went on to work with Republicans in Congress on several moderate reforms, not the least of which were free trade and welfare.

Can BO do this, does he have the sense to rid the WH of extremists, and if so, will it save his presidency? "No" on all counts.

Robert Craven

Praise For Obama

It’s been easy past weeks to respond to Obama’s many failures, domestic and international. It’s been fun too, even satisfying as most of these were predicted in this and accompanying blogs.

But it’s just as easy to acknowledge his successes. We want to do that. Certainly his response to the Haiti tragedy is commendable. Nothing wrong with today’s National Angel Island Day proclamation either (in honor of those immigrants who disembarked there). What else? Oh, and his decision to send the very minimum number of troops requested to Afg.; he’s still endangering my son-in-law, but it could have been worse.

However, although certainly not what he intended, his single key contribution to the welfare of this country - race relations. We are ahead of most observers on this one. Let us explain.

Coming into Obama’s election, race had pretty much settled down in this country. Rice and Powell were both 100% black; it was incidental to most of us. Who cares? Not a big deal for most folk, for members of either party.

We can be proud of Democrats who felt that way, especially given their heritage. Slavery was part of their party platform up to and through the Civil War. Still, they carried the curse - Truman’s mom, when offered Lincoln’s bed in the White House, said she’d prefer the floor. But these folk continued to improve, or at least forget (even though Dem party policy itself continues to this day to use blacks as a lever).

So as I say, we were getting along pretty well. Then Obama appeared on the scene. He cleverly used his half race to further his ends, an unspoken bargain of sorts with guilty whites, a skill honed in the grievance industry. This was not the crude "in your face" variety of Jackson or Sharpton, but a new, refined, nuanced approach. And he used race repeatedly in the primary, in Berlin; he used race in the Bates controversy, always keeping it just sub-surface for instant retrieval.

The result - an upheaval, a final regurgitation, a final sickening of the very subject by most Americans, including blacks. Obama, without intending it, has made most of us feel that we are decent people, we are not racists, and dog gone it, it’s an insult to blacks to continue to treat these people like cripples. Enough is enough.

Obama - We’re sick of hearing about this nonsense, unending, especially from you. You lied to us. Now you’ve done it. Now we’re moving on; we’re leaving you and your kind to gather dust.

Oh, and thanks for the gift.

Robert Craven

Enlightenment

From the Boston Herald - "A shot heard round the world, a second time... and that’s the message....Democrats can no longer ignore." But we know it represents something more than just the rejection of national health care, or acknowledging policy mistakes like the failed stimulus.

It represents an enlightenment for the followers of this party.

The roots of this event were detailed in this very blog. Today’s Democratic party would be unrecognizable by FDR, Truman, Kennedy or even Johnson. That party was highjacked years ago. Because Clinton governed from just left-of-center, the radical types running the new version were hidden from view, frustrated. Finally, in Obama they found their man. They got traction folks. Policy which to most of us seems extremist - the daily fare for these types. We had been in the guts of their own little revolution, until that is, American caught on.

As it turns out, most registered Democrats did not understand, nor control, their own party. This must be a tad embarrassing for them. It proved to be a near disaster for the rest of us.

Robert Craven

Obama - An Anchor

A friend of ours noted the following: "...What is taking Obama down below 50% approval is mostly a public awareness that they elected a deeply cynical man, who either cannot or will not speak the truth or keep his promises."

If it were that easy.

Americas are generous with their leaders. They will forgive simple gaffs - 57 states, the "Austrian" language; they will even forgive outright lies - jobs "saved or created," Muslims inventing both the printing press and the Renaissance, "no more lobbyists in government," guaranteed transparency (yet no news conference since last summer), Iran in compliance by the UN summit, the lie of airing the healthcare debate on C-SPAN, the phony deadlines on Gitmo, BO’s bribing of senators with taxpayers funds, making a lie of his promises to the contrary. Still, many folks simply looked the other way.

And apparently Americans will even forgive, for a while anyway, being treated as Vic Hansen noted, "like children in need of Ivy-League guardians."

Americans will not forgive however Obama’s attempt to steam-roll their liberties, that drastic change in life style - the major insertion of government control of their lives, BO’s plans to remake the US using health, education and energy as vehicles - the unprecedented federal intrusion into American industry and commerce. That is something you just do not try on Americans. It will not work.

This my friends explains Obama's decline.

Most of us understand it was all there. All folks had to do was inquire. After all, some scholarship is required for the companion responsibility in the voting booth.

Because so many Americans are derelict in their homework, because so many know so little of historical events, because they don't know that there is nothing really new under the sun, because of this most of us have to suffer as they, once again, re-learn their lessons. Many of these individuals were simply deluded, gullible, voting for Obama on promises of a new kinder, gentler politics, falling for his irenic message. Come on. They got instead the most partisan, nasty Chicago politicking in memory.

You'd think that most past 30 would understand that slick delivery is nothing but a disguise for lack of substance. Yet as BO spoke in mellifluous tones and the media was instantly enraptured, lefties everywhere followed suit.

But then we all knew his radical leftist past didn’t we, his spectacular lack of demonstrated judgement in associations with convicted terrorists and hate mongers? And we all knew his voting record. Or did white guilt trump all of this?

Still, it would have been easy for Obama to make a success of things, at least for his party. If he were given to good judgement (we identified that fatal flaw early in the campaign) he would have known that his election was not a mandate to sacrifice private enterprise for statism.

Robert Craven

The Disconnect

Observers have begun to highlight what Peggy Noonan calls a "disconnect" between Obama and normal Americans, between his preoccupations and their concerns. But she and most others, while they understand the result, really have yet to isolate the cause.

We put the spotlight on this phenomena early on. Because it explains the implosion of this presidency, it’s key to review it once more.

As our neighbor Vic Hansen so ably puts it, asking why BO could be so self-destructive, ignoring the masses and thereby tanking his own party is like asking "if multimillion-dollar-earning, Sarah Palin-interviewing Katie Couric is worried about her sinking ratings, or whether the New York Times columnists are upset that their mother paper is broke with subscription and readership down, and laying off thousands of blue-collar employees."

We have in Obama & Co. an almost boring, traditional statist bent on redistribution (Obama’s words), updated with the belief that almost everything requires gov’t affirmative reactions (explaining why abroad we shun our allies and serenade our enemies) and frosted with the Chicago ends justifies the means approach.

The easiest way we know to come to an understanding of this phenomena is to read Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle. Try it. You’ll see that just like Steinbeck’s Mac, the communist labor organizer, these true believers don’t care if they take out the Blue Dogs, if Reid bites the dust, or if Obama takes himself out. There is a cause larger than all of them. As we wrote Jan/1, in Health Care - A Means to an End, Obama & Co are rigidly programmed, as was Mac, to institutionalize an agenda that will affect America for generations, move it sharply to the left. They hope to become heroes or martyrs in the process.

And what is Obama’s agenda? Progressive statism (Webster: statism - a concentration of ...planning in the hands of a highly centralized gov’t). BO & Co’s core belief is that the state exists to level the playing field; obtaining that goal justifies any means.

Aside from this near-militant, core cadre - most of the rest of the left have simply been taken for a ride.

Robert Craven

Obama, You've Been a Bad, Bad Boy

A Columbia and Harvard education. The New Republic, the press, the NYT’s, they all loved you. You talked like them.

Your extremist voting record was there for all to see, so were the various sordid associations in your past. But chiefly due to your half color you got a pass. The chattering class went wild, mistaking your victory for a mandate, as you did. Big mistake.

It only took Americans a year of seeing you in action, and whamo, your approval ratings are in the sewer. All the stuff you dissed, the population now increasingly supports - more pro-life, more free market, less statist, and, the jig is up on the climate fraud, as well as socialized medicine. You don’t even believe terror is much of a problem; most of them do.

You did not listen to me BO. You pushed, or allowed surrogates to push a far-left agenda on health, climate, energy and the economy. In so doing you and other elitists parted ways with average Americans who now intend to hold you and your entire party responsible. You fooled them BO, you took them in. They don’t like that. So they’ve moved right and you and the rest of your kind are left holding hands, shouting out together in the dark.

You’ve been a very bad boy. You’ve sunk your party.

Robert Craven

Phony Republicans

Most GOP operatives think that tapping Michael Steel as chair of the party was a mistake. Why? Because as J. Martin of Politico put it, "Just in the past month, he’s drawn fire for giving paid speeches, not calling major donors, writing a book that criticizes the GOP, not alerting members of Congress about the book, promoting the book and, worst of all, saying in a national television interview that his party couldn’t re-take the House this fall." Fine. Get rid of him. Nope. Because the guy’s black, the GOP feels stuck - can’t fire a black guy. Noted one party strategist,
"You’re not going to dump the first African-American chairman. That’s the only reason. Otherwise, he’d be gone."

What phonies! What back-handed racists! What an insult to blacks! We expect the same from the left who use blacks and race as a lever (but then sometimes get caught) - Reid described Sen. Barack Obama as "light skinned" and "with no Negro dialect." Clinton tells the murderer Ted Kennedy that, referring to Obama, "A few years ago this guy would have been getting us coffee." Too much.

We’re all made of the same stuff. Color is incidental to us and to most folks we know.

The sooner Republicans and Democrats stop treating blacks like cripples, the sooner our so-called "race problem" will be seen for the invention it is.

Robert Craven

Sobriety

The panty bomber slips by Obama and suddenly critics emerge from everywhere, lemming-like, all targeting BO’s back side, even some Democrats, as if they have suddenly come upon something birthed by original insight, a first. Hardly. They’re the last to catch on, obviously failing to read this blog.

This latest lapse in security is a surprise? The masses elected a community organizer as president. What did they expect? Oh, we forgot, that wars would end when he wants them to, including the one on terror. That’s what he told everybody who would listen. As one observer put it, "The electorate voted in effect to repudiate the previous eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion ....that war is all a bit of a bore, and they’d rather the gov’t spend the next eight years doing to health care and the economy what they were previously doing to jihadist camps in Waziristan."

Unlike the Rebel guerilla Nathan Bedford Forest, BO doesn’t "put the skeer in them fellas". Our enemies know this guy is a push over. Muslim thugs know this guy is madder at his predecessors, his allies, than he is at them. His feckless apologies for great statesmen of the recent past, including Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, and Eisenhower, have dismayed America’s allies and delighted its rivals (and turned our stomach). It has been a year of naive amateurism, exactly as we warned it would be. And at the end of it, as Mark Steyn puts it, "The jihad sent America a thank-you note by way of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear: Hey, thanks for all the outreach! But we’re still gonna kill you."

What is US foreign policy? I know, I know. It has been a fiasco. A big joke. But what is it in the minds of its makers? Let’s take a look.

Fact: BO’s core assumption re foreign policy is that the great powers today share common interests. Relations among them need "no longer be seen as a zero sum game," Obama has argued. The Obama Doctrine is about "win-win" and "getting to "yes." The new "mission" of the United States according to Sect of State Hillary is to be the great convener of nations, gathering the powers to further common interests and seek common solutions to the world’s problems. Right. It is on this basis that the administration has sought to "reset" relations with Russia, embark on a new policy of "strategic reassurance" with China, and in general seek what Clinton has called a "new era of engagement based on common interests, shared values, and mutual respect." Begin to connect the dots?

Have a 7-Up, settle your stomach. We’re not done.

The problem naturally is that throughout the world’s contested regions, an American tilt toward former adversaries unavoidably comes at the expense of its friends. From Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "‘As it happens, the vast majority of those allies happen to be democracies, while the great powers being accommodated happen to be autocracies. The Obama administration’s apparent eschewing of the democracy agenda is not just a matter of abandoning the allegedly idealistic notion of democracy promotion in failed or transition states. It is not choosing not to promote democracy in Egypt or Pakistan or Afghanistan. And it is not just about whether to continue to press Russia and China for reform—which was part of the old post–World War II strategy, continued under post–Cold War administrations. The Obama administration’s new approach raises the question of whether the United States will continue to favor democracies, including allied democracies, in their disputes with the great-power autocracies, or whether the United States will now begin to adopt a more neutral posture in an effort to get to ‘yes’ with the great autocratic powers. In this new mode, the United States may be unhinging itself from the alliance structures it had erected in the post–World War II strategy.’" Connect the dots?

OK. From the outreach to Iran and the Muslim world, to the call for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, to the desire for a "reset" in relations with Russia, the central point of Obama’s diplomacy is that America is now different. It is no longer choosing sides. And, therefore, it is time for other nations to cooperate.

Are you kidding me?

I recall a comment from our nurseryman friend here in Marin, taken in by this cult figure. Obama, he gushed, "is a dreamer."

Truer words were never spoken.

Robert Craven

Cooking The Books

Folks are gradually waking up to a key tactic used by the far left - "Never waste a crisis." We might add however - invent one if there’s nothing handy.

We know that the "stimulus" package, health "reform" and weather are all convenient conduits for this group of nefarious misfits. Readers understand just why that is so with the economy, and just lately, as we explained, with health. What about weather?

We threw four darts at the weather services this early pm. Here is what came up: 1) "New Delhi - At least 17 people died as towns and cities in India's northern states were hit by cold weather, officials said on Friday." 2) "Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned." 3) "Forecasters say the coldest stretch of weather in years if not decades could be heading for North Carolina." 4) "A man whose body was found in a park on Chicago's South Side is Cook County's fourth confirmed cold-related death." Some hot flash, huh?

Of course most of those duped by the machinery of the far left maintain these events are but a fluke. But the instigators of this fraud know better. Their time is about up and they know it. Even the German publication Der Spiegel, "the house organ for climate hysteria" as the IBD put it the other day, weighing in again with the sad news that the earth does not have a fever after all. In an article titled, "Climatologists Baffled By Global Warming Time-Out," author Gerald Traufetter leads off with the observation: "Climatologists are baffled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years." They better figure it out, Der Spiegel warns, because "billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations." Ahhh! Money. Connect the dots for goodness sake.

And then of course, that little bit about hacking the other day at the Hadley Climate Research Unit. Oops! Seems these "scientists" aren’t all that, should we day, objective (reserving the word liars for later use). They boasted of twisting data to fit the favorite flavor, even gloated over the death of a warmer skeptic. My. My.

In fact, any slob (not compromised by grant $) can take a look at the closest stump to know the earth regularly experiences change. Really. Trees don’t lie. Gary Sutton in Forbes put it this way: "Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales. Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg. Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans."

The far left counts of the lack of scholarship and the general amnesia of the masses to ply their trade. In this instance, the guy shivering in India doesn’t have to read or remember anything to know this global warming bit is just another instance of cooking the books.

Robert Craven

Health Care - A Means To An End

Our country, its institutions, its heritage and spirit - all are in peril. To understand why we need only reflect on the process of securing health "reform." Such an exercise proves to be instructive, the perfect classroom:

National polls show strong opposition to the health bills that have passed the House and Senate. Perhaps 45% support the bills, maybe less. A Rasmussen poll conducted recently shows that Americans are opposed to the Democratic reforms by 55 percent to 40 percent, and think by a 54 percent to 24 percent margin that its enactment would make the quality of medical care worse. What? Something about to become law and most Americans oppose it? Do we not own, as Americans, a representative form of government?

We used to. But as Vic Hansen observed recently, to wonder how the administration "could be so self-destructive to push through an array of proposals that have no more than 45% of the public’s support is like asking whether the English Prof who teaches incomprehensible Foucauldian theory worries whether he has only 2 students."

Better yet, dust off Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle as we just did. In that book Mac didn’t care one iota for the migrants/fruit pickers he supposedly fought for; he was steeled for a greater cause; they were merely tools. Similarly, Obama and his kind, true believers, don’t really care for health reform any more than for the Blue Dogs who will be sacrificed on the alter, just as poor, stupid Jim was shotgunned to death on Mac’s alter. Obama & Co are rigidly programmed, as was Mac, to institutionalize an agenda that will affect America for generations, move it sharply to the left. They hope to become heroes or martyrs in the process.

And what is Obama’s agenda? Progressive statism (Webster: statism - a concentration of ...planning in the hands of a highly centralized gov’t). BO & Co’s core belief is that the state exists to level the playing field; obtaining that goal justifies any means.

The process we have witnessed certainly has sent Andrew Jackson spinning in his grave; it must also have moved most of those who voted for Obama to regret, wondering how they were taken in by a man who ran as a bipartisan but who is the most partisan we’ve seen, a "healer" whose even flippant comments are designed to offend, a statist who assumes that the masses are ignorant, a "reformer" who knows his rhetoric will disguise Daley-style corruption.

The original hope behind the 17th Amendment - the direct election of senators - was to get the upper chamber out of the pocket of those that could buy and sell senators. But we all know now that health passage has been one of the biggest giveaways to corporate interests in the nation's history. As one observer noted, "The Axelrod/Jarrett clique ensures that the government channels stimuli to blue-states, that key Congress people are bought off with tens of millions of government largess." No wonder these politicians "know better" what is good for us than we do.

Finally, all but the willfully blind understand now that every Obama campaign promise — from no lobbyists and airing on C-Span healthcare debates to posting impending legislation on the Internet for set durations and "reaching across the aisle" — was garbage.

Mac and his kind and their method were finally understood - that even murder was an acceptable tool just as field workers were the acceptable vehicle. The rule of law was threatened then, but not extinguished. So too, at least we hope, will the masses in this country finally throw up Obama and his kind and come to their senses, just as most of California’s labor did in Mac’s time, and return to a more thoughtful and balanced process linked to the anchor of limited government, and the preservation of liberty and freedom.

Perhaps we needed this after all; perhaps this is the cake that had to be baked. Thus it is imperative that all of us see in this the warning which we feel it was meant to convey, the positive flip side of such excess.

Let us recall that which Jefferson knew all along, our Lesson #1 for 2010, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

Happy New Year

Robert Craven