Views on the News
December 31, 2011
Views on the News*
Obama continues to do things, say things, and direct things that are harmful to this country and also to his deteriorating reputation. Yes, there are many things that could be listed as his worst mistakes this year. Here are nine that stand out as particularly egregious:
·
Sending a budget to Capitol Hill that
didn’t get one vote: Nothing better represents the
disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country as Obama’s
attitude towards passing a budget, that did not even earn a single vote of
confidence.
· Predicting the economic recovery: This administration likes to brag about accomplishments in an
economy that has underachieved bay every measure. Dodd-Frank, ObamaCare, MACT
and the Keystone Pipeline show an administration that will pick narrow, special
interests every time over real results.
· Spiking the “football” on Osama bin Laden:
· Obama claims too much credit for “getting” Osama bin
Laden, since the US Intelligence Community along with our armed forces deserved
all of the credit. Soldiers,
sailors, airmen and marines have gone to war, while the rest of the country and
its political leadership has gone to the mall.
· Solyndra: The economic futility of the regime in
Washington was best displayed by the decision to “invest” US
taxpayers’ money in Solyndra, even knowing that the company would fail.
Even after getting caught, then lying and getting caught in the lie about the
decisions surrounding the DOE program that made the Solyndra investment
possible.
· Fast and Furious: The breathtaking cynicism shown by our top law-enforcement administration
officials as they lied to Congress about what they knew and when they knew it regarding Fast and Furious.
· Vacations 1, 2 & 3: $4 million dollars for a Christmas vacation
is a bit much. The money part isn’t the worst of it, because this year
Obama was notably absent during the start up to the war in Libya, the aftermath
of the debt ceiling negotiations, the S&P downgrade, and the Japanese
tsunami.
· Keystone Pipeline: The dilemma that all Democrat Presidents
face is how to govern while keeping your whack-job coalition together. He has
had to punt on making a decision on the Keystone Pipeline to satisfy the progressives
and the American people who want jobs.
· Libya: Nothing cried hypocrisy more than
Obama’s decision to start a war (time-limited, scope-limited kinetic
military activity) in Libya over European oil. He only succeeded in confusing
everyone on his goals, objectives, and tactics.
· Debt Ceiling: In February, Obama presented a budget
that called for more deficit spending, more borrowing, more
debt while pretending to be concerned about the deficit. He wasn’t and
isn’t, and is just trying to raise taxes.
Incomprehensible, aimless, and ineffective are three
words to describe Obama’s actions this year. Now he is
back on the campaign trail selling bankrupt ideas to a rapidly bankrupting
nation and surprised that the country is not embracing his failed ideas.
(“Obama’s Top Boners of 2011” by John Ransom dated
December 24, 2011 published by Town Hall at http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2011/12/24/obamas_top_boners_of_2011
)
The relationship between Barack Obama and his media
continues to flourish with the same ardor as it has from the opening days
of the 2008 campaign. The latest example is private sessions the White House
has held with certain favorites not for the purpose of imparting news but for
advising how to spin it. An
all-star list of progressive and liberal media folks was invited to the White
House to chat with President Obama over coffee in the Roosevelt Room. This session was all
about "messaging," how to smear the President's political opponents,
both in the Congress and on the campaign trail, with a single coordinated voice
to maximize the impact. This
is the stuff Public Relations flaks do. If these participants aren't about to
disclose what the White House has told them to report, why should the public
believe anything they say? Such
bar-lowering events are why an increasingly savvy public finds the mainstream
media increasingly irrelevant. It
may be fun for these reporters to get invited to the White House and then bounce
party-line blog posts at each other and call it news, but the reading and
listening public is getting stiffed, with no way of knowing what's coordinated
from above and what isn't. This
kind of partisan dishonesty can influence elections and should be seen as an
outrage to the concept of a free press in a democracy. The mainstream
media is in the pocket of President Obama and the Democrat Party, but as
more people realize this incestuous relationship, the more they abandon these
media outlets and their businesses continue to deteriorate.
(“Obama’s Media Flying Monkeys Get Their Marching Orders, Gear Up
to Do Battle” dated December 21, 2011 published by Investor’s
Business Daily at http://news.investors.com/Article/595569/201112211859/media-bias-rears-its-pro-obama-head-once-again.htm
)
Republican hopes in the 2012 election are based on a
belief that there is a resurgence of American pride and a feeling of
exceptionalism that resonates outside the Washington beltway and beyond the
hearing of the political Ruling Elite.
Republicans nurture old-fashioned goals like saving America from
fiscal bankruptcy, economic stagnation and a European-style entitlement state. This country is yearning for someone
who can reclaim its founding principles of economic freedom and free markets to
preserve the American Idea. Paul
Ryan’s “A Roadmap for
America’s Future,” was a serious step in the right direction
that got under President Obama’s skin.
The comprehensive budget of deep spending cuts, entitlement reform, and
tax simplification was designed to limit government and unleash growth at the
same time. This effort marked Ryan
as the most influential thinker in today’s GOP. The Ryan “Path to Prosperity”
budget was passed by the House this past spring. In effect, it became
Republican policy, but unfortunately, things went downhill after that. Congress was then unable to leverage this
blueprint into legislative successes.
Tea Party enthusiasm hasn’t yet translated into the kind of
reforms we need because only one-third of the government has only limited
political power. The belief is that
there is a shift to the right in the country,
“toward free-market approval.” Ryan says, “The
country will not accept a permanent class of technocrats that will diminish
freedom, enhance crony capitalism and allow the economy to enter some sort of
managed decline.” Ryan talks about “reclaiming
founding principles,” and about “fighting paternalistic,
arrogant, and condescending government elites who want to equalize outcomes,
create new entitlement rights and promote less self-government by the citizenry.” Republicans are offering a completely
different vision from the one Obama outlined in his Osawatomie, Kansas campaign
speech. The objectives are to stop
Obama’s attempt to add to the New Deal / Great Society with the statist
universal-healthcare program called ObamaCare and an effective nationalization
of the energy and financial sectors. Republicans
completely reject Obama’s divisive, big-government, tax-the-rich leftist
populism which reinforces what Ronald Reagan always said, “Government
works for the people, the people don’t work for government. “
(“Paul Ryan’s Old-Fashioned American Vision” by Lawrence
Kudlow dated December 22, 2011 published by Human Events at http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=48293
)
Despite what President Obama believes, we are not one nation among many, we are the United States of America, the greatest nation on earth, and the last best hope for humanity. The only thing standing between the United States and continued exceptionalism is the dreary delirium of Barack Obama, whose dismal socialist policies have been a spectacular disaster for the nation.
· First, we were
told that the Russians were going to bury us. Exposed as a nation of
hundreds of millions of impoverished people, desperate to escape, communism
floundered and failed, finding its true place on the ash heap of history,
except to progressives of course, who repackaged the failed ideology as a means
to win the future. With a negative birthrate, an aging
population and a society that will soon be majority Islamic, in a few decades,
they will be lucky if they can bury themselves.
· Then, it was the
Japanese who were going to bury us. 30 years ago, we were told they would
overtake us in 20 years, but their economy has barely grown in 2 decades. With a negative birth rate they are on track to become
the oldest society the world has ever seen.
· Now they say, the
Chinese that will bury us. China has almost a half a billion people, 35% of
their population, living on less than 2 dollars a day, 40 million people still
living in caves. If you
think Barack Obama spent a lot of money on stimulus, you don't know the
Chinese. Unlike in America, this was mostly done through increased bank
lending, instead of government expenditures. They now have entire empty cities, roads to nowhere and
gleaming airports with no travelers.
America, because of immigration and a birthrate near replacement level, will not be
aging the way Russia, Japan, Europe and China are. Despite Barack Obama's best
effort, we have comparatively little racial, religious and economic strife, a
moderately free press, and the most economic freedom and mobility the world has
ever known. We have a dynamic economy and are still the world's largest manufacturer. America is blessed with an abundance of natural resources. Due to
improvements in technology, we now have potential fossil fuel resources to last
us 200 years or more. Since much of it is on
federal lands, some have said the royalties to the Treasury have the potential
to pay off the national debt.
Four more years of this President will leave the nation miserable and divided,
with high unemployment, a moribund economy and a bloated bureaucracy.
With another term, Barack Obama will continue his transformation of America
into a land of perpetual trillion dollar deficits and a national debt measured
in the tens of trillions of dollars. We will be weak militarily, morally
and economically. Lesser nations, like those discussed here, would not
survive 8 years of hope and change, but we will not be defeated. The only thing standing between America and continued preeminence is
Barack Obama, and the sooner we realize that, and rid the nation of the
abomination of his Presidency, the better.
(“America’s Greatness Will Defeat Obama” by William L.
Gensert dated December 28, 2011 published by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/americas_greatness_will_defeat_obama.html
)
Time magazine calls 2011 the year of the protestor since Time imagines a global revolt against
capitalism, but in reality this is really the year of socialism’s implosion.
It took 22 years for the news to travel from
Eastern Europe to the Mediterranean that Marx was a fool. The means changed from fax machines to
Facebook, but the ends remained the same: toppling socialist
governments. It’s true that
2011 has happened before with 1989 being the most recent instance, but
Santayana’s words aren’t the cliché; it’s the people
who keep repeating the past who are. It’s also true that 2011 is
the year that the media redacted socialism as the object of objections. Writing about unrest around the
Mediterranean without mentioning “socialism”
is like talking about Occupy Wall Street without saying
“capitalism.” One can
only link the very different demonstrators by ignoring why they demonstrate. Greeks learned that George Papandreou,
prime minister of Greece and president of the Socialist International (SI),
couldn’t effectively perform both jobs simultaneously, but his
destruction of Greece hasn’t disqualified him as the head of the SI,
though. The Western media
didn’t call Muammar Gaddafi’s country the Socialist
People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, but he did. In Syria, the Arab Socialist
Ba’ath Party, whose motto is “unity, liberty, socialism,”
upheld the last of these principles by firing upon its own citizens. Hosni Mubarak’s Egyptian government
was a member in good standing of the Socialist International for
thirty years. Mohamed Bouazizi, the
Tunisian merchant whose self-immolation sparked 2011’s Middle Eastern
wildfire, protested, in Time’s words, the state “making him jump
through bureaucratic hoops” because he was fighting against the big
government that Occupy Wall Street is fighting for. In Tahir Square, they changed the world,
but in Zuccotti Park they didn’t even change their clothes. Western protestors wanted the government
to give them things, while Middle Eastern protestors wanted their governments
to leave them alone. Halfway around the world this may be the
“year of the protestor,”
but closer to home it is just the year
of the fauxtestor.
(“The Year of the Fauxtestor” by Daniel J. Flynn dated December
26, 2011 published by Human Events at http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=48368
)
Three years after the financial crisis and the bailouts,
and we’re not much better off:
“Too Big To Fail” remains, banking
profits are sinking and those big, overregulated banks can’t manage to
lend to small businesses. Maybe it’s
time to stop protecting this failed business model, and finally begin to break
up the nation’s largest banks.
Making them smaller and less “systemically”
important may be the only way to get them to lend more. If they hold less capital, they can start
taking some risks without a chance of
blowing up the whole financial system.
The obvious way to force the banks to get small and
fast is to again split commercial from investment banking making it so that no
bank can roll the dice in the securities markets if it wants its deposits
backed up by federal insurance. In 1999,
President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress drove a stake through the
1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which had officially divided those activities. The megabank rapidly became the order of
the day, as mergers and acquisitions built such behemoths as Bank of America,
while old-line investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley felt
compelled to snap up commercial-banking units to better compete. The sales job from Wall Street told us
that being big had competitive advantages - it let US banks go toe to toe with
huge foreign players. However
as profits exploded, the big banks’ fatal flaw was largely ignored: They
were too big to manage. It only became
obvious when the banking crisis hit, and the guys managing the megabanks
suddenly found out they were basically insolvent and sitting on countless
billions in toxic loans and investments, and that without a taxpayer bailout,
the collapse of such large and interconnected banks threatened to bring down
the global financial system. Somehow,
that experience failed to convince the banks’ overseers that “bigger isn’t better,” after all, far from it. From the Dodd-Frank law to the new Basel
global-banking standards, the trend is just the opposite. The result: Fewer than a dozen US banks
now hold about 75% of all bank assets, but because they’re so big,
regulators force them to hold mountains of capital, lest they crater the global
financial system with a single screw-up.
With all the new rules and regulations, the nation’s big banks still aren’t doing what most
Americans believed the bailouts were designed get them to do: lending to
small- and mid-sized businesses that are the engines of post-recession economic
growth.
(“Break up the banks” by Charles Gasparino dated December 22,
2011 published by New York Post at http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/break_up_the_banks_j3vm2GlC4JIbIKmcH2sT0H
)
Economists have been living in a fantasy land since
the 1930s, hoping
that the next implementation of Keynesian economics will be successful despite
a history of failure. Many of the basic precepts taught today are wrong:
Governments can stabilize economies; government spending stimulates economic
growth, ditto easy money from a central bank; free markets are inherently
unstable. John Maynard Keynes even
propagated the pernicious notion that wasteful spending was better than no
spending, when he talked about the virtue of paying people to dig holes and
then fill them up. Most governments
still cling to the Keynesian fantasy, but reality is upending this deadening
dogma. The western European debt
crisis, led by feckless Greece, is continuing to have a profound and positive
policy impact here in the U.S., to the point that even President Obama pays
occasional lip service to restraining spending. We’ll still suffer from the
prevailing yet wrongheaded economic theology, but profound reform is in the
air. The question for 2012 is
whether we can survive another year of nonsensical economic policies before
salvation comes with a new President in 2013. Twelve months from now we’ll be
able to relish the prospect of dramatically lower tax rates on both business
and personal incomes via a flat tax or, at the least, a dramatic simplification
of the current tax horror. All GOP
candidates favor repealing the ObamaCare abomination. At a time when the Internet is giving us
more access to information and personalized services than ever before,
it’s obscenely preposterous that the world’s mightiest nation
would, in effect, nationalize its health care system, one-sixth of the economy.
The notion that bureaucrats can manage any part of the economy better
than free markets has always been false, and never
more so than in the age of the Internet. GOP
presidential aspirants are beginning to understand the fundamental need to stabilize
the dollar, beginning with an overhaul of the Federal Reserve. All these hopefuls, to varying degrees,
are also rallying around the basic precepts of reforming entitlements, first
espoused by Representative Paul Ryan.
What could wreck the year is another crisis in the banking system
à la 2008–09, 1933 or the panic of 1907. The U.S. needs to get its banking act
together. To have the federal and
state governments wage war on banks for mortgage mistakes that emanated from
the last decade’s binge undermines today’s economy. Since they don’t know their
liabilities, banks aren’t lending to private businesses the way they
normally do. The 2012 elections will replace (unrealistic) Hope
and (regressive) Change with
a Restoration
of a Free Market Economy and Unleashing our Entrepreneurial Spirit.
(“To Save the Economy Scrap the Keynesian Fantasy” by Steve
Forbes dated December 21, 2011 published by Forbes Magazine at http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2011/12/21/to-save-the-economy-scrap-the-keynesian-fantasy/
)
Isolation is one fundamental element
that is absolutely necessary for an isolationist foreign policy, but
unfortunately the world does not allow such isolation. That
is the most important part of the equation that isolationists fail to include
in their calculations. Regardless
of our foreign policy, we are still a target. Whatever our calculations are, potential
enemies may have calculations entirely different from our own. They don’t just react to what we do, they have their own plans and agendas. Passivity isn’t a defense for the
ostrich or for a nation. With
the jet plane and the intercontinental ballistic missile, isolationism became
completely unworkable without strong deterrence. It’s not impossible to have an
isolationist foreign policy today, to cut any alliances with the rest of the
world, but there’s a fundamental difference between a responsible and an
irresponsible isolationist policy. A responsible isolationist policy recognizes that we have
enemies who will act regardless of what we do and prepares against the
possibility of war without actively seeking it out. An
irresponsible isolationist foreign policy however acts as if we have no enemies
and that any talk that we have enemies is a conspiracy to bring us into a war. It accepts every bit of enemy
propaganda as gospel and assumes that if we just “stop bothering them,”
they’ll “stop bothering us”. It assumes that the enemy is entirely
motivated by our actions, that any conflict we are in is the result of our
foreign policy and that isolationism will avert any such conflicts. Rather than recognizing that a military
buildup is an important deterrent to war, it attacks military buildups as
provocative. It assumes that the
only possible reason why we might be attacked are
foreign entanglements and if we just tuck our heads in then there will be no
conflict. The absurdity of this
approach when it comes to the current clash of civilizations with Islam is
obvious enough. This isn’t a
conflict that dates back from 1991 or 1948 or even the First Barbary War in
1805, but rather a war that predates the United States and modern day Europe. It is a conflict that goes back over a
thousand years to the decline and fall of the eastern remains of the Roman
Empire and the rise of Islam as a militant unification ideology to fill that
void. American foreign policy
can’t turn back the clock on that history. It can affect events in the present day,
but it can’t undo the roots of a conflict that it has inherited. American foreign
policy had a good deal to do with the rise of Islamic states built on
petrodollars, but isolationism is certainly not going to make them go away. Islamic
attacks against the United States may emerge from various micro-events, but the
macro-event from which they originate is the shared history of the Western
world and the ongoing conflict between the Muslim world and the West. To Islam, America is not an island, it is another outpost of an enemy civilization that
must be subdued so that the way of Mohammed will triumph around the world. Rationalism
isolationism accepts that war may be inevitable but chooses to meet it on our
terms. Irrational isolationism, which often carries with it
defeatist and treasonous overtones, accepts the enemy’s justifications
for the conflicts and assumes that if we modify our behavior accordingly that
there will be no need for war. Technological development means
that the old boundaries are all but gone. Immigration means that the enemy
population is already here. The rise of Islam means that war is inevitable, all that
remains are the details, which battle, on
what terms and in what form, and the larger detail of who will win.
(“Between Responsible and Irresponsible Isolationism” by Daniel
Greenfield dated December 22, 2011 published by Canada Free Press at http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/43419
)
The more things change, the more they stay the same and
nothing could attest to that fact more than the Israel-Arab conflict, which in
reality is the Israel-Islamist conflict.
This is not a territorial dispute between Israel and those Arabs
who call themselves Palestinians, though it is framed as such. No, the
stark reality of the Muslim war against the Jewish state is rooted in one
fundamental fact: namely, the unchangeable refusal by Muslims to ever accept a
non-Islamic nation in territory once conquered in the name of Allah, even if
that nation, the Jewish nation, precedes Islam by millennia. Peace overtures and endless territorial
concessions by tiny Israel to the giant Muslim and Arab world have been, and
are, as worthless as a thirsty soul in the desert seeking to survive by
staggering towards an inviting mirage.
The world is fast succumbing to a veritable anti-Israel propaganda blitzkrieg,
believed by legions of the confused and gullible who worship at the altar of
moral equivalence and liberal kumbaya.
Those still willing to see clearly have to accept that Israel's Muslim
neighbors will never be able to reconcile themselves with a non-Muslim state
unless Islam reforms itself, and Islam cannot do that without self-imploding. Even now, Iran's mullahs and the
devil-clown Mahmoud Ahmadinejad call not only for the destruction of the
embattled Jewish state, but also for the extermination of Jews worldwide.
In this they echo the same call by Gaza's Hamas rulers, who are the junior
partner of the Muslim Brotherhood. That such words are not condemned utterly by nation-states
reveals the moral decay so prevalent in the world today, just 66 years since
the Holocaust ended. Entire books
have been written about the basic facts of Israel's place in the family of
nations as both a state and a people. Their purpose has been to explain
why Israel and its people claim the right to an independent state in a small
corner of the Middle East, roughly one quarter of the geographical area known
as Palestine. It is Judea and
Samaria (known by its Jordanian name, the West Bank) which now a hostile world
wishes to snatch from Israel and give to the Arabs who call themselves
Palestinians. This will create an anti-Israel terror-state within the
ancient Jewish patrimony and biblical heartland. How strange that the
more than 3,000-year-old names, Judea and Samaria, can so easily be supplanted
by a name, the "West Bank," employed by the occupying Jordanian
Legion, which existed for a mere nineteen years, from 1948 to 1967. The
basic facts, which should be self-evident, need to be repeated again and again,
as Golda Meir urged nearly forty years ago. The Jews maintained a
continuous presence in their homeland, and it is this continuity which gives
them an absolute, inalienable right of self-determination, historically,
spiritually, and politically, in the reconstituted Jewish state. Throughout the dark centuries of exile,
Jewish pilgrims and refugees returned again and again to restore the ancestral
Jewish homeland. Jewish prayers and festivals recited and celebrated in
synagogues throughout the Diaspora, then as now, are based in large part upon
the agricultural cycle of ancient Israel attesting yet again to the
inextricable spiritual and aboriginal links with the ancestral homeland. Jewish ties have remained unbroken since
Abraham, the first Jew, came to Hebron, the other Jewish holy city, and
purchased a burial plot for his wife Sarah, his son Isaac, his grandson Jacob,
and some of their wives. These are the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the
Jewish people, who are buried in Hebron.
The truth is that Jews always maintained a continuous presence in their
own land despite the depredations of a succession of alien occupiers. There is an absolute continuity between
the Israel of the Bible and the Israel of today. It is the same land, the same people,
the same language, the same God, the same prophets, the same holy Book.
There has never been a time in the last 35 centuries when there haven't
been Jews living in Israel, sometimes as a sovereign nation, sometimes as
isolated enclaves occupied by an enemy power. The Israel Big
Lie of today is to deny that Jews have a right to this land and they forfeited
that right with their exile 2,000 years ago, since it ignores the continuity
of the Jewish people in Israel and tries to replace them with invented
“Palistinians” as historic heirs.
(“Israel: Some Basic Facts” by Victor Sharpe dated December 23,
2011 published by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/israel_some_basic_facts.html
)
*
There is so much published each week that unless you search for it, you will
miss important breaking news. I try
to package the best of this information into my “Views on the News” each Saturday morning. Updates have been made this week to the
following issue sections:
· Civil Rights
at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/culture/civilrights.php
· Election at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/dp/election.php
· Employment
at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/dp/employment.php
· Terrorism at
http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/fp/terrorism.php
David Coughlin
Hawthorne, NY