Posted on 11/28/2009 8:47:15 AM PST by Professor Pete
Our inept president's itinerary is rendered entirely inanimate by his incessant erring.
1. The movement of KSM to Manhattan.
AG Holder appeared before Senate completely unable to answer the simple questions of PRECEDENT, of Miranda, of rationale. The AG has clearly not applied the perspective one would think would be required before opting for so radical a diversion. He's transparently unprepared
Arguments abound against granting granny-killers the same rights enjoyed, employed and exploited by OJ---from Miranda, evidentiary objections, platforms for propaganda, opportunties for recruitment, political paybacks vs previous presidents and veeps, security risks to the city, the malformed message sent to the enemy---if you target little girls you get treated like Michael Jackson, but if you kill a soldier you go before tribunal.
These are warriors we're charging, not criminals who've violated some local or federal code. Indeed, these are the reasons WHY Holder was so taciturn in his testimony. What CAN he say?
Polls are universally overwhelmingly opposed to this mindless maneuver. A prodigious political loser.
2. The stimulus.
It's widely perceived to have failed in its stated goal, the growing of jobs. Unemployment is unfortunately empirical.
Reports of bogus jobs claims and phantom districts are wall-to-wall in the MSM, reported by independent sources as far afield as CNN, the AP, the Boston Globe, the Sacramento Bee, the Post, the Times, the LA Times, the Chicago Trib, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, the Las Vegas Sun, the Tampa Herald Trib, the Detroit Free Press, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel...
They all say the same thing---the president's reports of jobs "created or saved" are spurious. "Ludicrous," is what dem Chair of House Oversight David Obey called it.
3. The debt.
The NY Times published a frontpage piece Saturday which projected service on the debt, INTEREST ALONE, will SOON reach A TRILLION per year. SOON means sometime significantly ahead of 2019, the date the WHITE HOUSE ITSELF estimates INTEREST payments will reach 700 bil.
The current financing of the DEBT at unreal and unsustainably low interest rates is the foundational crack. When rates return to normal, service on debt will double. The president's predictions of continued low financing fees are rosey in full bloom, laments the Lady.
So influential are such leading voices of elite analysis like the Grey Lady, the entire national political landscape is altered by their proclamations. The DEFICIT has skyrocketed as focus of national political attention way ahead of cap and trade and Wall Street regulatory reform.
Indeed, the DEFICIT is beginning to overarch everything. Beneath that all-black rainbow, here, on the ground, it looks like this---all discussions of health care, for example, are morphing into meditations on the mortgage, in all its monstrous immensity. This phenomenon will grow in coming months. By January, you're not going to be able to say "health care" without people hearing, "national debt."
4. Cap and Trade.
The party has formally flown the white flag. Byrd, Brown, Lincoln, Conrad, Pryor, Dorgan and others have said as much. Boxer's chairmanship of that empty committee chamber said it all---on TV. And she's "rescheduled" til "next year" this killer TAX on ENERGY at both ends---both PRODUCTON and CONSUMPTION.
Axelrod himself, on September 30, the night he telegraphed the administration's new strategy for health care (no public option, is what he signaled), in a throwaway paragraph in Politico Obama's Brain also announced he was suddenly going to prioritize Regulatory Reform ahead of Cap and Trade.
The GLOBAL WARMING PROTECTION ACT, indeed, has been dead since the day it passed Pelosi's Place by 4 piddly votes, the palsied speakeress piping at her most piercing---"vote JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!"
5. Next up, financial regulatory reform, Obama's #2 domestic priority after health care since September.
The CBC, Congressional Black Caucus, killed it last Thursday in Barney Frank's Financial Services Committee, forcing its removal, as well, somewhere farther down the dem's datebook.
CBC's carp goes thus---the White House BAILED OUT the super rich and left everyone else to fend for themselves. Flip side of the same coin reads---Obama SOCIALIZED the LOSSES of the megacorps while PRIVATIZING their GAINS. The Black Caucus REBELLED. Frank submitted.
In the bullseye is Tim Geithner, Tax Cheat in Chief in Charge of the IRS. The Barofsky Report, named after the Special Inspector General charged with overseeing the 700 billion dollar bailout approved by Congress last October, charges that Geithner (as head of the NY Fed at the time) guaranteed in-full all obligations owed by AIG to Too-Bigs-To-Fail like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.
Ironically, the winner in Frank's committee was Ron Paul, whose amendment to ratchet up regulation of the Fed passed, 43 to 26. The White House was all-out against Paul, but with the CBC's backing, the eccentric independent prevailed comfortably.
6. The Asia trip.
By all accounts the president had no goals, got no results, and allowed himself to be used as a prop in some carefully stage managed kabuki directed by Hu.
Obama bungled currency negotiation, Iran, nukes, Korea, and the biggie, climate accords. The last Hu slapped down personally, over breakfast in Singapore, when the confident Chairman rose to define his country's delineation of climate control---you rich and developed nations need to subsidize us, to the tune of hundreds of billions.
Needless to say, Hu's perspective did not exactly jive with Obama's. That this stinging slap in the face was delivered in person before the assembled eminences of the Asian nations had to be particularly painful and personally embarrassing to our president.
Then he cheerily cooperated in a carefully choreographed "press conference" aside Hu who allowed no questions, a predicament Bush and Clinton managed manfully to avoid.
The outlook was so laughable SNL lampooned it broadly on late night.
The Communists then pulled the plug on our president's "Mandarin Townhall," after prepacking the proceeding with party apparatchiks.
Worse, Hu was overheard whispering in the president's oversized but underused ear---get your economic act in order, we cannot continue to underwrite your over-reaching ambitions.
To be lectured by Chinese Communists on fiscal responsibility...
Well, it doesn't LOOK good. And leading voices of elite opinion are loudly laying it out: the Council on Foreign Relations called Obama's Asia trip, "Amateur Hour at the White House." Der Spiegel: "Obama's Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage."
7. Afghanistan.
The Dean himself deemed the president a "ditherer." Obama disputes publicly with his pentagon, with his hand picked commander, with Secretary Gates. He leaks contrary resolutions every few days---for months.
He clearly doesn't want to be there, he's only in because he made the "right war" so central to his campaign.
Bob Woodward, Watergate wonderboy, exposed the prez as prevaricator by publishing General McChrystal's leaked assessment ONE DAY AFTER Obama blitzed FIVE Sunday talks to dissemble that he was still awaiting review, that he had never been asked for reinforcements.
Obama castigated Karzai, but that was before he congratulated the corrupt autocrat.
Furthermore, he's on the wrong side, politically, of his base on this one.
His chances of success, meanwhile, are rarefied in the mountains on the moon, which unmade Gorbachev (10 years, 200,000 troops, the WILL to win of a Hitler).
Afghanistan is killing this president, and it's gonna get a lot worse. Indeed, Obama fears it may garrote the gust out of the rest of his sagging agenda, just as Nam undid LBJ. He's got everyone reading Halberstam.
8. Global Warming.
It's a scam. Copenhagen is kaput. Cap and Trade is trodden on. Thus hale the HEADLINES.
9. Iran.
The president's pledge to pursue personal diplomacy with Persia's potentates appears now preposterous, tho it once played centerpiece on his placard.
He reasoned Iran has a right to nukes.
It took him a week to figure out how a president is supposed to react when the national election of a world power is blatantly ripped off by jihadists. Indeed, his initial reaction to the Streets of Tehran was---hey, I'm gonna meet with them, I'm brewing the coffee. It took the murder of a blameless maiden, captured on some witness' cell phone, for obtuse Obama to open his unseeing eyes.
Then, this summer, a day after chairing the UN's Security Council and winning unanimous approval of his pretty pledge for a nuke free planet, he was forced to fess up in Pittsburg to the existence of Qom, Iran's most recent secret nuclear bomb factory.
That very day Hu's foreign minister, We Hufei, declared manifestly China's intractable refusal to support sanctions vs the Shiites.
Putin speaks out of both sides of his mouth on the subject, hot one day, cold the next, which should tell you precisely where the Puppet Master will be when called upon. The cession of SDI in the East turned out to be all gratis.
Ahmedinejad treats Obama like a joke and the president has no comeback.
10. The president's polls are thru the floor, his personals, his issues.
11. The leaders of elite analysis are turning---Dean Broder, the CFR, the Lady, Der Spiegel, London's Financial Times today.
12. The rest of the MSM are, as always, following suit. MSNBC is all over President Obama. Except for Ed, Rachel and Keith, the network expresses extreme displeasure daily with how poorly things are going.
13. Health care.
So much poison contained therein---half a trillion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid; the forcing of folks (mostly the young) to finagle for themselves that which they can't afford, with criminalization and threats of jailtime if they refuse or can't; 10 years of taxes, versus only 6 of benefits; mandates on already bankrupt states to pick up hefty helpings of tithe; taxes on everyone, including the lower and middle classes, at every medical turn; the quarter trillion dollar doc fix, off budget; public funding of abortion; recommendations to reduce mammograms and other screenings...
The pragmatics---the immutablity of the schedule---makes matters impossible. Proceeding as promptly as is parliamentarily possible, this beast will still be subject to debate long after State of the Union.
And overarching all is THE DEFICIT.
It's becoming evident even to Mr Reid that he faces a Hobson's choice of horrible hue. If he wants passage, he's going to have to drop the PO. That's bedrock. But why pass on all the poison with no pot of PO at the end of that slippery slope? Without a PO, what's in it for the party, except pails and pails of purple pain?
The Prof
There has to be some way to impeach this abomination of a president and his cabinet, either for unconstitutionality, malfeasence , incompetence or just plain treason. Anyone a constitutional lawyer here?
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