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