The age old inquisitive conservative pundit asks, "Are liberals stupid, evil, smart or all three?" Why, yes! Some liberals do indeed surpass the intellectually challenged Alan Colmbs and Al Gore. Neither possess significant gray matter to speak of. Some liberals, of course, suffer from narcissistic tendencies to do or say whatever they must so others will like them. Evil no doubt. Few liberals, however, can and do break beneath the hormonal level into the ideological realm.
Enter Obama. Bret Stephens of the WSJ determines Obama embodies the great philosopher Forest Gump's wisdom when he opined, "Stupid is as stupid does." Stephens makes his case by referencing Obama's rhetoric vs. outcomes. (Liberals exonerate Obama crying, "unintended consequences")
Then there is Mr. Obama as political tactician. He makes predictions that prove false. He makes promises he cannot honor. He raises expectations he cannot meet. He reneges on commitments made in private. He surrenders positions staked in public. He is absent from issues in which he has a duty to be involved. He is overbearing when he ought to be absent. At the height of the financial panic of 1907, Teddy Roosevelt, who had done much to bring the panic about by inveighing against big business, at least had the good sense to stick to his bear hunt and let J.P. Morgan sort things out. Not so this president, who puts a new twist on an old put-down: Every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of financial capital.
Then there's his habit of never trimming his sails, much less tacking to the prevailing wind. When Bill Clinton got hammered on health care, he reverted to centrist course and passed welfare reform. When it looked like the Iraq war was going to be lost, George Bush fired Don Rumsfeld and ordered the surge.
Clinton fits the evil mode. He is narcissistic and concerned with himself. Obama on the other hand fits both the evil and intelligent mode. He cares little about "temporary" failures because he is an ideologue. He's made reference to his ideology on several occasions. Americans, however, pay little attention. Remember Joe the plumber? Obama assured old Joe he wants to share the wealth. Code talk for socialism. Perhaps we should recall his mentor, Rev. Wright's socialistic liberation theology.
Not all liberals live in the stupid is as stupid does realm. In this case one might infer that Obama's "stupid does" fits nicely with his long range ideological vision for America-a traditionally, historically aberrant vision at that.
People are frustrated, they're anxious, they're scared about the future. And they have a right to be impatient about the pace of change.
I'm impatient. But I also know this: Now is not the time quit. Now is not the time to give up. We've been through worse as a nation. We've come out stronger from war to depression to the great struggles for equal rights and civil rights.
It took time to free the slaves. It took time for women to get the vote. It took time for workers to get the right to organize.
But if we stay on focus, if we stay on course, then ultimately we will make progress. It takes time; progress takes sacrifice. Progress takes faith. But progress comes. And it will come for your generation.
The ever compelling cartoonist Michael Ramirez reads between the lines. (click on picture)
So far history seems to adjudge Obama incompetent. He's the great president who did nothing, historians may reasonably conclude. He eclipses important presidential matters with pop concerts. He spends lots of valuable time vacationing. Now this remarkable man/child wants to "kick someone's ass" over the BP oil crises. Obama remained curiously silent on the matter until the press flogged him, Republicans sought to avenge Bush's Katrina affair, and good old intellectual paragon Spike Lee insisted Obama "go off" on a righteous tirade. So, instead of displaying leadership aplomb by rising above the crowd, Obama stoops to mere mortal's level seeking to kick ass.
A new tone, hey? A light shining in the political fallout, huh? What happen to maturity? Gone are the glorious days when we commoners placed our faith in a true father figure; a sort of Andy Griffith/Gregory Peck if you will. No fathers exist out there. Scour this vast countryside of ours from sea to shining sea for mature adults and there are none to be found. Instead we see a mass of adolescent children in search of a real man's man or lady to give us a little parental advice; a Ward Cleaver perhaps. Remember Ward? He truly had his childish moments. Yet, when the youngsters Beaver and Wally stepped in it old Ward always came through with compelling wisdom handed down from his dad.
Indeed the issue in today's political environment may not be intellect. Obama certainly possesses as much gray matter as any president. The heart of the matter instead revolves around maturity. Smart people throw fits often succumbing to emotional irrationalism like many of us lower IQed dunces. If the hand of Providence graciously continues to rest upon our nation's shoulder, we might encounter this phenomenon through our trials and tribulations. For, righteous, mature leaders often emerge from the ashes. That is if the pagan leaders lose the race.
For more on Obama's "kick ass" policy and its implications read John Hinderaker's take on the matter..
Obama's surprising Nobel acceptance speech left conservatives scratching their perplexed leaderless heads wondering, "What gives?" Obama defended war to the peace-nick hippie-dippy dope smoking adult children in Oslo. His falling poll numbers may force him to move a little more center. Who knows. It happened to the philandering Bill Clinton. I'm a bit surprised Obama recognized the existence of evil. A fundamental flaw in liberalism is the naive denial of a character issue entitled evil. A profound strength of conservatism lies in the recognition that all men everywhere mysteriously possess the selfish desire to perform atrocious deeds. Our forefathers conceded to this universal fact by implementing checks and balances.
Furthermore, the sacrificial WWII generation believed in an incarnate evil and knew how to deal with it by totally and completely annihilating nations whose evil threatened our very existence. I doubt, however, Obama embraces the philosophy this dynamically. But, we look for any good we can arising from this seemingly socialistic administration.
Obama appears to embody the idealistic liberal man. He seeks to advance the notion of personal and public rights for everyone born under God. "When in, Rome do as the Romans do," goes his credo. Stand before the cadets at West Point and quote Eisenhower when making vital military decisions. Not a bad idea.
And, the call for a surge certainly seems like the most practical answer to a critical growing concern. Hat's off to our liberal man for a good and noble decision, however impassionately it may have been delivered. But, our soldiers remember the apologies on foreign soil and the subservient gestures made to foreign leaders. Indeed Obama wants have his cake and eat it to.
Yet, most Americans continue their quest for discovering Obama's core. What sort of principles does he embrace that make him predictable? We need an ideological pattern that says, "Here's what Obama will do." Right now we know that his moral pattern suggests he lives by liberalism's vicious circular openness to everything except transcendence. Does he believe in an authority above his own? Has he ever considered reason, tradition, and experience as a way of embracing some sort of transcendent absolutes?
To be sure, I applaud Obama's surge plan. I do, however, continue to wager on the notion that he will go on living as the prototypical liberal man, handing out his faux freedom candy to everyone he encounters while subtly and perhaps unknowingly destroying his idealism with the very relativism that shuts out life protecting absolutes.
Every freakin' time Obama stays the course of President Bush the driveling, snot-nosed media, falls into an orgasmic mood as though they are hearing a new and profound policy. Hot Air reports:
Expect Barack Obama to get a lot of flack for this statement, but I won’t be one of the critics. Instead, I’ll focus my criticism on the media that treats it as some sort of sea change for American statesmanship. We’ll start with Tom Raum of the AP:
Barack Obama, making his first visit to a Muslim nation as president, declared Monday the United States “is not and will never be at war with Islam.”
Calling for a greater partnership with the Islamic world in an address to the Turkish parliament, Obama called the country an important U.S. ally in many areas, including the fight against terrorism. He devoted much of his speech to urging a greater bond between Americans and Muslims, portraying terrorist groups such as al Qaida as extremists who did not represent the vast majority of Muslims.
“Let me say this as clearly as I can,” Obama said. “The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical … in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject.”
Here’s the objectionable part:
The U.S. president is trying to mend fences with a Muslim world that felt it had been blamed by America for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Yes, because George Bush spent the last seven years blaming the entire Muslim world for the 9/11 attacks, right? Right? Er, no, as this collection of Bush quotes regarding Islam makes excruciatingly clear. In fact, Bush emphasized friendship with Muslims from the very start of the war:
“I’ve made it clear, Madam President, that the war against terrorism is not a war against Muslims, nor is it a war against Arabs. It’s a war against evil people who conduct crimes against innocent people.” — Remarks by President George W. Bush and President Megawati of Indonesia The Oval Office, Washington, D.C. September 19, 2001
“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” — Remarks by the President at Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. September 17, 2001
“All of us here today understand this: We do not fight Islam, we fight against evil.” — Remarks by President George W. Bush to the Warsaw Conference on Combating Terrorism November 6, 2001
“I have assured His Majesty that our war is against evil, not against Islam. There are thousands of Muslims who proudly call themselves Americans, and they know what I know — that the Muslim faith is based upon peace and love and compassion. The exact opposite of the teachings of the al Qaeda organization, which is based upon evil and hate and destruction.” — Remarks by President George W. Bush and His Majesty King Abdullah of Jordan The Oval Office, Washington, D.C. September 28, 2001
“Islam is a vibrant faith. Millions of our fellow citizens are Muslim. We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion.” – Remarks by President George W. Bush on U.S. Humanitarian Aid to Afghanistan Presidential Hall, Dwight David Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C. October 11, 2002
And so on; there are plenty of examples to make the point. Obama spoke in the tradition established by Bush over the last seven-plus years of emphasizing that America did not declare war on Islam. That’s been obvious through our partnership with Islamic nations, such as Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, just to name a few. And he’s right; the last thing we would want to do would be to declare war on a billion people just on the basis of their religion. The more we can keep the Muslims on the sidelines, the better off we are in fighting against the radicals.
However, the AP wants to pretend that this is some new effort by the US to assure Muslims of our intentions. It decidedly is not, and perhaps a mention that Bush tried making these same assurances for almost his entire presidency would be in order here.
The liberal mindset has always been an enigma to me. I mean, I can't figure out what makes them tick. I think they get so passionate about what they believe, they fail to retain any sense of rationality when dealing with those who may oppose their view. They want a thing such as hatred of George Bush to be true so bad that they actually fall into a sort of delusional existence where their fairytale world becomes reality.
Religious, pseudo theologians throughout American history, often made apocalyptic predictions declaring theirs as the last generation on earth. I learned long ago, after the egg fell off my face, to run from doomsdayisms. Nevertheless, social prophets do indeed exist. They both warn and challenge us to a higher plane. In October of 2008 Dave, of AOL news posted this 2001 Public Radio interview with Barack Obama. The post has proved to be foreboding.
The Obama administration struck a gold mine with their inherited, but lingering economic crises. It may create a less daunting task in the fulfillment of their objectives. And they discovered the demons who stand in their way. Holman Jenkins of the W$J explains the reality behind Obama's new boogyman.
Yet the AIG bonus episode, the administration's one true disgrace so far, will not soon be forgotten.Tim Geithner is rightly on the hot seat for saying he didn't know about the bonuses until just weeks ago -- because he should have quelled this furor before it ever got started. Instead he played dumb and climbed aboard the outrage bandwagon -- and let Mr. Obama do the same. There is not a shred of justice in the hysteria that followed. As AIG chief Ed Liddy explained on the Hill last week, the people receiving retention bonuses were not the same people who launched AIG's unhedged housing bets that brought the company down. Those people were gone. Their pay is already being clawed back. Those who remained had been asked a year ago to stay and work themselves out of a job. In accepting the terms offered to them, they committed no offense (say, failing to pay taxes). Their only crime was possessing marketable knowledge -- all the more marketable because of the opportunity for hedge funds and other counterparties to profit from AIG's distress. Had the company submitted to Chapter 11 rather than a government takeover, a bankruptcy judge might well have authorized identical incentives to minimize losses and maximize recovery for legitimate stakeholders. The Washington Post, which has consistently distinguished itself with its reporting about the real antecedents of this "scandal," yesterday followed up by detailing "months of assurances to Financial Products employees that the insurance giant would honor those contracts, according to numerous internal AIG e-mails and memos . . . ." Whether Mr. Geithner knew the specifics is unimportant. The retention plan was known to his staff. The details had been disclosed over and over in public filings. As far back as October, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had summoned the Treasury-appointed Mr. Liddy to hammer out a deal on AIG's pay practices. Said Mr. Cuomo in a statement afterward: "These actions are not intended to jeopardize the hard-earned compensation of the vast majority of AIG's employees, including retention and severance arrangements, who are essential to rebuilding AIG and the economy of New York." The voluble Rep. Elijah Cummings had been railing about AIG retention bonuses almost continually, on air, in the print media, and in publicly released letters to Mr. Liddy, since Dec. 1. On March 3, Mr. Geithner himself was quizzed during a congressional hearing in detail about the AIGFP retention plan by Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley -- a week before Mr. Geithner now says he heard of the plan. It may be that the full picture was kicked up to him only when a political decision was needed, but by then his one decent choice was to insist on the bonuses' legality. However politically inopportune the bonuses may be, the president only dirtied himself by authorizing a feel-good, bipartisan hate storm aimed at innocent AIG employees. And it's hard to believe Mr. Obama would have done so, or the subsequent spectacle would have unfolded as it did, without Mr. Geithner's seminal prevarications (and we say this fully acknowledging that he's had a rough ride in an inhumanly difficult job). Barney Frank, who doesn't have the excuse of being stupid, was last seen bullying Mr. Liddy to do what on any other day Mr. Frank would flay Mr. Liddy for doing -- violating the privacy rights of his employees. Charles Grassley? His early bloviating about the duty of AIG executives to kill themselves almost begins to look like a grace note, since it alerted the public to the hyperbolic playacting about to come. Paul Kanjorski, before running off to host a hearing, proclaimed on CNBC that AIG's Mr. Liddy would be responsible if Congress now failed to summon the political courage to take necessary steps to address the financial crisis. Pause to let it sink in. Mr. Liddy, who is doing his job with grit and personal sacrifice, is blamed in advance if Congress proves too cowardly to do its own job. But the biggest lesson here is the old one that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance -- beginning with insistence on the rule of law. Americans clearly cannot trust their elected officials to defend their rights and interests, or care whether justice is served, when the slightest political risk might attach to doing so. Which brings us back to Mr. Cuomo, whose office has been implicitly threatening to publish names of AIG employees who don't relinquish pay they were contractually entitled to. Mr. Cuomo is a thug, but at least he reminds us: It can happen here
So here's the plan. Discover the point of culpability (we all possess one), trump it up a bit, stereotype the entire AIG and financial industry, gather a mob from less informed fellow citizens, and presto chango we have a government takeover of the private financial sector, i.e. redistribute the wealth.
I'm reminded once again of the haunting philosophical similarities between FDR and Obama. President Obama fancies himself another Abe Lincoln. Perhaps he ought to recall the New Deal by reading economist Amity Schlaes' best seller about the Great Depression entitled The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
. In her book she describes, antecedent to AIG, a very similar demonizing debacle that took place under Roosevelt's watch. She summerizes the event in a W$J op. ed. piece:
But like today's politicians, Roosevelt also used the downturn as a weapon to trash markets generally. The New Dealers even used the same mocking phrases Mr. Obama does today. The rich might think that wealth trickled down, Roosevelt's speechwriter Sam Rosenman would later note, but "Roosevelt believed that prosperity did not 'trickle' that way." In 1933 and 1934, Roosevelt went on the attack. The Sergey Brin of the 1920s was Samuel Insull, the Chicago utilities magnate who created the format for the modern electrical grid, taught housewives about refrigerators, employed thousands and proved it was possible for the private sector to raise the prodigious amounts of cash necessary for utilities, the most capital-hungry of industries. But the credit crunch killed off Insull's leveraged companies, rendering shareholder portfolios worthless. Insull was extradited from Greece and hauled back to Chicago. A jury refused to convict him of fraud. But federal or state prosecutors continued to harry him until he died of a heart attack or stroke in 1938. The deity of the markets, the Alan Greenspan of the 1929s, was Andrew Mellon. He served as Treasury secretary to Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. In 1932, while Mellon was still in office, a young Democratic Congressman from Texas -- Wright Patman -- launched a campaign to impeach him. The Roosevelt administration was more systematic. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau instructed a staff lawyer, Robert Jackson, to prosecute Mellon for tax evasion. Jackson hesitated. Morgenthau, anticipating New York's Eliot Spitzer, insisted, saying, "You can't be too tough in this trial to suit me." Jackson then jumped up, exclaiming, "Thank God I have that kind of boss," as Morgenthau recounted in his memoirs. A grand jury declined to indict Mellon. The government then began multiple actions against him. Exoneration came, but only after Mellon's death. Roosevelt put Jackson on the Supreme Court. In these years, the market was trying to recover, but prosecutors and tax collectors kept getting in the way. Mrs. Pelosi might note that even after the Pecora Commission finally completed its hearings, unemployment was still 20% rather than 10%.
Given President Obama's recent embarrassment with Prime minister Brown, one assumes he knows nothing about nor values history. Perhaps he needs to reevaluate failures of the New Deal, look in the mirror, and get off this damning horse called wealth redistribution.
I've heard of the cutting room floor before, but Scott Johnson's redaction of King David's masterpiece, following the Almighty's thunderous decree, certainly offers one much to ponder:
HE IS MY SHEPHERD I shall not want. He comforts the afflicted. He is a miracle worker. He promises to provide for Americans from cradle to grave, while lightening the load of government on the backs of ordinary Americans. He promises not to increase their taxes "one penny." He promises to reduce their taxes. He must be quite sure that the ordinary American owns no stock and thus will be untouched by the expiration of rate cuts on capital gains and dividends. Perhaps He counts on the stock market to assure that ordinary Americans will remain unaffected by an increase in the capital gains rate. He thinks that increasing tax rates on the most productive Americans who shoulder the lion's share of the income tax load will not retard economic growth. He does not count on Americans to respond to the incentives and disincentives he places on them. He does not account for them. He promises to cut the deficit which He has just massively increased while building in further increases. He promises to make us healthy, wealthy and wise. His wonders never cease. He will save Detroit. Though He omitted any promise of a life hereafter, He sought to expand the faith of Americans in things unseen far beyond anything asked of us in our pews each week. He does not forthrightly ask us to believe because the faith He peddles is absurd. Yet it is absurd. He holds out his faith as right reason. He trusts that that Americans will not notice the contradictory nature of the promises He holds out to them. He has confidence in His ability to peddle the faith. His confidence exceeds that of hucksters such as Father Divine, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammi Bakker, and Elmer Gantry combined. He says our day of reckoning has arrived. Yet it is a judgment from which He exempts Himself. His day of reckoning awaits.
. In her book she describes, antecedent to AIG, a very similar demonizing debacle that took place under Roosevelt's watch. She summerizes the event in a W$J 
