Valkyrie1981

Pundits, including perceptive conservative opponents like Charles Krauthammer, have noted the consummate political skill of Barack Obama.  There is not much doubt that Obama was able to wage a very effective campaign for the Democrat nomination and then for the presidency in the general election.

Bill Clinton was a masterful campaigner too (I had the opportunity to watch some of that first hand.)  Ronald Reagan, because in part of his long career in Hollywood, could give "The Speech" a thousand times and each time it was electrifying.  The word "charisma" entered our popular political language to describe John Kennedy, whose beautiful wife and boyish good looks created the myth of Camelot.  Franklin Roosevelt had the same gift for making people feeling comfortable and winning elections.

But there is a huge difference between Obama, on the one hand, those other presidents on the other hand - and the difference transcends ideology. FDR, Clinton, and Obama had the same Leftist agenda.  JFK was what today would be called a moderate, and the Gipper, of course, was overtly conservative.  But JFK, FDR, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton had the ability to govern once they had won their elections.

FDR, by the time he became president, he had served as Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, Governor of New York, and Vice Presidential Candidate of his party in 1928.  Forget the rightness or the wrongness of his policies:  Franklin Roosevelt understood governance.

John Kennedy had been a war hero, a member of Congress, and the real author of some important books (like Why England Slept, in which JFK describes the dangers of appeasing evil.)   The Roosevelt and Kennedy clans also grew up with a sense of aristocratic responsibility and a backdoors familiarity with power which may not have been moral, but certainly was valuable.

Ronald Reagan, in addition to being a movie star, a union president, and an ambassador for General Electric, served eight years as Governor of California and was twice an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination before finally winning the nomination in 1980.

Even Bill Clinton had been a congressional candidate, then attorney general of Arkansas, then for many years governor of Arkansas before he ran for president. Clinton served a term as Chair of the National Governors Association.  He was a leading member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group considered, wrongly, to be moderate but which was influential.  

Obama, while possessing many of the campaigning gifts of these presidents, has shown no ability to govern at all.  This is a very dangerous situation for our nation.  Our leader is a man whose ignorance, in many areas of history and policy, is simply appalling.  He is rather like the "President in the Plastic Bubble."  Obama's entire life has been insulated from any sense of reality of the nation he governs.

When a black Marxist professor obviously blinded by intense racial rage has to be taken to a police station by a police officer nursed in all the nuances of political correctness, Obama cannot see his friend as the wailing bigot and the white policemen as the reasonable figure.  At best, Obama calls it a moral draw.

When millions of Americans spontaneously protest at Tea Parties and Town Meetings proposals for massive federal changes, Obama instructs his satrapies in government, the Democratic Party, and the media that the voters are simply uninformed.  When citizens cite specific sections of federal bills, how serious does Obama expect to be taken?

When polls show his support dropping steadily as well as support for his specific policies and his party, Obama seems to think that his cronies and he have simply not repeated the same unbelievable statements often, clearly, or loudly enough.  It is as if John Edwards had taken the position, when his infidelity was exposed, that he simply needed to get in front of the television camera as often as possible repeating his lies as persuasively as he could.

His pals from Chicago seem unable to help him.  His partisan handlers fancy that they can simply ram whatever they want.  Men like Axelrod and Emmanuel seem to think that it should be simple to push radical Leftist programs through a nation in which conservatives outnumber liberals in virtually all of the fifty states.  Obama and his clique appear certain that in a modern culture in which celebrity means everything to many, that just remaining on the cover of glamour magazines will assure political support -- when actually the immature voter is the most feckless and unreliable source of muscle around.

President Obama seemingly has no clue about what he is doing, and, increasingly, it shows.  What will happen when things start to go sour in Afghanistan?  Our Commander-in-Chief simply will not be able to blame President Bush.  After Obama has effectively destroyed the CIA, what will he do when terrorists strike?  War is a nasty business in which lawyers should have little role. Has Obama noticed that Islamic terrorists are now threatening him?   Does he understand that these vicious men are still threatening America?

Looking smooth on television and wowing those fawning socialites and film directors who want to be wowed brings a sort of ephemeral "popularity," but great nations are not governed on such spun sugar.  Winning elections and running superpowers are very different tasks.  Now, we have a president who is every second still just a candidate.  As the world grows more dangerous by the day, we are "led" by the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time-President.

The Obama administration on Tuesday acknowledged that Obamanomics, the dismal science of spending other people's money as fast as possible, honed with ward bosses and union kingpins on Chicago's South Side, has failed.

They did so, not in so many words and probably without knowing it, while hammering Americans with a devastating and demoralizing one-two blow -- one a sucker punch, the other below the belt.

With the sycophants in the Obama press corps distracted while rubbing elbows with the Obamas and other rich folk on the Vineyard, the O Team threw their sucker punch: officially announcing that the federal budget deficit next year will be nearly 20% more than in their first forecast made just last May, and over the next ten years will be two trillion dollars more than they had predicted.

That's two million million dollars more than Obama had forecast. Just 90 days ago.

Oops.

Even ballpark hunches should be closer than that.

Obama's estimate of the ten-year federal deficit has increased almost 30% from his first quarterly forecast to his second. How much further off will it be in six months? In a year? By the end of his term?

Yet, this is the same genius who is now promising that Obamacare will be revenue neutral, that Medicare won't be raided, and that seniors needn't worry about how end-of-life care under a government imposed plan will be affected by Washington's ability to pay.

The O Team's media wing immediately spun into damage control, with the AP Tuesday quoting Budget Director Peter Orszag's contention that another trillion dollars spent on health care would somehow help balance the budget. "I know there are going to be some who say that this report proves that we can't afford health reform; I think that has it backwards."

The below the belt punch landed shortly afterwards. The U.S. economy, under Obama's stewardship, will contract at 2.8% this year, more than doubling what Obama had predicted in May. The Obamaconomists predict that the recession will end next year, projecting that the economy will grow by 2% in 2010, down nearly 40% from their projection made 90 days ago.

They're beginning to look like the gang that couldn't add straight.

Especially when they make their specious argument, as they did Tuesday, that the economy would be worse off without Obama's porkulus package. Always without evidence. They must use the same Ouija board -- or maybe it's a crystal ball -- that they use to figure out how many jobs Obama has 'saved.'

What makes this such a low blow is that they assume, while the Obamas holiday with the likes of Meg Ryan, Ted Danson, Reese Witherspoon and other celebrities, that we, the hoi polloi, can't figure out that there is evidence which actually disproves their contention.

There is a baseline, of sorts, with which to compare Obamanomics.

Last spring Obama implored other countries to implement their own budget-busting, Obamanomics-style stimulus packages -- a would-be Europorkulus, if you will.

Fortunately for them, these countries didn't listen.

Despite being harder hit, Europe has shown signs of already coming out of the global recession, revising their economic numbers upward, while Team Obama marks U.S. figures downward.

France and Germany actually exited the recession last quarter. The leaders of both nations specifically and publicly rejected Obama's cries for Europorkulus. "It would be irresponsible to chose another policy, which would increase our country's indebtedness without having more infrastructure and increased competitiveness in the end," French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said at the time.

Yes, even the French have been more fiscally responsible in dealing with the recession than the Obama administration and the Democrat directorate in Congress.

And even though "Germany, with its heavy exports dependence, has been particularly badly hit by the global recession," its economy, too has turned the corner. Citizens of Germany should be glad that Chancellor Merkel didn't heed the call to resort to Obamanomics.

Dow Jones notes:

    "The rebound of Europe's economic engine suggests the region is joining the recovery under way in China and increasingly elsewhere in Asia, exemplified by India's announcement on Wednesday that industrial production in June rose nearly 8 percent from a year earlier...

    'We're used to the U.S. leading the way to recovery, but this time we're having to look eastwards to Asia and to a homegrown recovery in Europe,' said Julian Callow, chief European economist at Barclays Capital in London."


Earlier this year, Callow told UPI, "While the magnitude of stimulus has been much less in Europe's case, the stimulus has been getting much better traction in Europe than in the United States."

Obama's apologists in the media will no doubt note that European economies differ from that of the United States in a number of ways. If so, this leaves them with a horrifying Hobson's choice of their own making. Either:

*Barack Obama showed alarming ignorance of economics when he suggested that other nations adopt his budget-busting stimulus measures despite those differences,

*or Barack Obama showed alarming ignorance of economics in ramming through his budget-busting, economic-recovery-stalling porkulus package here,

*or both.

Either way, Obamanomics has failed. Countries that rejected it have turned the economic corner, even ended the recession, while the U.S. economy continues to contract.

And these people now want to 'fix' the health care system?

Could someone, please, hand me an aspirin?

In response to an ill-framed question - one of only two that were not from Obama supporters - asked of him at the Potemkin Village-style health care "town hall" in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on August 11, President Obama said this:

    "I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter, because, frankly, we historically have had a employer-based system in this country, with private insurers, and for us to transition to a system like that, I believe would be too disruptive."


Tracking the misrepresentations and lies that are told when Obama speaks can keep one busy for hours, but the one about not supporting single payer really stood out.

On June 30, 2003, speaking to an AFL-CIO Civil, Women's, and Human Rights Conference, Obama said:

    "I happen to be a proponent of single payer universal health care plans. . . A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that's what I'd like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House."


As recently as August 18, 2008, according to the Wall Street Journal article titled "Obama Touts Single-Payer System for Health Care," published on August 19, 2008, "Barack Obama said he would consider embracing a single-payer health-care system, beloved by liberals, as his plan for broader coverage evolves over time."

The WSJ article quotes Obama speaking at "a town-hall style meeting on the economy" the day before:

    "If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system."


The WSJ quoted Obama as saying further that, although he didn't think a single payer system was feasible initially:

    "They [Americans] need relief now. So my attitude is let's build up the system we got, let's make it more efficient, we may be over time-as we make the system more efficient and everybody's covered-decide that there are other ways [single payer?] for us to provide care more effectively."

Obama Failed to Master Alinsky's Rule #12

    Alinsky's 12th Rule of Tactics:  The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

    You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying, 'You're right - we don't know what to do about this issue.  Now you tell us.'

Why is President Barack Obama suddenly drowning in a sea of widespread resistance to his centerpiece legislation?  Because it has now become quite clear to Harry & Louise Q Citizen that this was a man without a "constructive alternative" to the out-of-control healthcare system he has badgered and rhetorically beaten bloody to a pulp.

Obama himself, Organizer in Chief, had no plan.  He proposed no plan to Congress.  He has let committee after committee of witless tax-and-spend, haggard old liberals write the convoluted mess they're calling healthcare reform, and has virtually done nothing for own his part but bash the insurance companies, the doctors and even the patients, who ask for individual control over their own life-and-death choices.

This, dear readers, is the fundamental difference between an empty-suited celebrity and a nuts-and-bolts executive:  flim-flam artistry vs. substance and real results.

Barack Obama, the eternal campaigner, held a healthcare townhall, which even Helen Thomas and her just-as-liberal cohort, Chip Reid of CBS, called "orchestrated," "tightly-controlled," and seemingly "less transparent" than any previous White House occupants had ever dared.  The questions posed to the President, it's now quite obvious, must indeed be orchestrated because he is tasked with selling legislation that he himself has neither read nor understands.  And the worst of this becoming-nastier-by-the-day conundrum is that the whole cockamamie plan is built upon a disastrously failed European-socialist model, which has proven again and again and again to raise costs, lower quality and ration care.  The only real difference seems to be that the Democrats' plan will allow those already at the table to reap even more profits than before, and we will be the ones footing the outrageous tab.

The President trips over his explanations with one real gaffe after another because he utterly failed to master Alinsky #12 before we allowed his ascension to the power-perch in the highest office in the land.

This Obama failure to form workable solutions to gigantic problems should come as no surprise to any American.  When a supposedly literate public elects a man to the most powerful position in the universe upon a resume that would fit neatly upon the back of a postage stamp, the result is easily predicted long before Inaugural Day.   

Honey, even a nitwit knows that when a president must hire out his real job to 32 czars, he was never CEO material.

When Saul Alinsky's early observers voiced the concern that he was building a host of agitated mobs, who could be overtaken and controlled by a skillful "fascist demagogue," those fears were well-founded.

What happens when a stranger to one's community comes in from nowhere and begins to ingratiate himself with the locals, with the sole intention of forming a political body of disgruntled folks, ready to demand from their government whatever the organizer tells them they really need?

The result of such a deceitful maneuver is a lot of very angry people, making demands without a single clue that the organizer knows what he's talking about.  If he were truly one of them, if they had known him all his life, if he lived down the street and had grown up among them, they would know whether his words could be trusted, whether his intentions were truly good and whether he had the real smarts to lead them.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a perfect example of a true leader, and the antithesis of an Alinskyite community organizer.  Dr. King wasn't leading a movement of complete strangers.  Nor was he dropped into Atlanta by a gang of professional troublemakers, intent on gaining political power.  Dr. King, and his father before him, were echelons of the black, upper-middle-class community in Atlanta.  They had lifelong friends in every black community south of the Mason-Dixon.  They were so well-known, so utterly respected by all, that when Martin spoke, people - black and white alike - knew there was absolute substance behind his thunderous voice.  Even the Democratic Party racists who opposed him, gave him grudging private respect.

King had no need of deceptive Alinsky tactics; he had moral authority steeped in roots going back generations in the same home town.

Such is not at all the case with what Alinsky euphemistically called the "community organizer."  A community organizer is by definition an outsider, someone hired not by the community itself, but by outside political operatives attempting to gain a foothold in the community.

Precisely the way a young Barack Obama was hired by outsiders to infiltrate a Southside Chicago community in the late 1980s.

Barack Obama dropped in for a few years on the Southside of Chicago.  Rather than actually doing anything to improve the community where he was sent to "work," he made political friends and established a political base from which to launch his Organizer in Chief presidential campaign.  His chief liaison from those days was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., a very influential friend of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington.

By the time Barack Obama returned from his sojourn at Harvard Law to his adopted home base of Chicago, he was no longer a man who wasn't sent by anyone.  He was a political somebody, about to launch a meteoric rise to a job for which he is utterly unprepared.  And this sad fact shows itself more apparent with every passing day.

When Bill Clinton put forth the notion of Barack Obama as a "fairytale" and was trounced for it, Democrats should have listened.  They now have a man in the office of the presidency, for whom they must provide cover every single day.  Why?  It's simple.  Barack Obama mastered Alinsky tactics of campaigning for power and working the crowds down to the last little letter, but he absolutely has no plan of governance, no workable solutions, and can't even talk about such things without a live-feed teleprompter glued to each hip.

Leaders don't fall from the sky without proof they ever made friends and dated girlfriends and earned grades and had businesses and wrote papers, folks.  Leaders have visible trails; they have made a record of their successes and proudly show them whenever asked.  Barack Obama resides in the White House without ever showing a shred of genuine evidence that he is the greatly-gifted man he and his media sycophants say he is.  And 52% of the American electorate has bought this faster than they would buy a used car from a slick-suited salesman on a shady lot.

Suckers United for Change.  Wow.  I'm impressed.

Dr. Obama?  I would sooner trust Dr. Frankenstein.

Let the Communism begin!

In 1930's Germany, the new socialist government of Adolf Hitler (NAZI National Socialist Workers' Party) began indoctrinating children in the quasi-military organization, the Hitler Youth, to inform on their parents should they overhear discussions subversive to the policies of the Leader. As the noose was tightened, local community organizers were appointed to watch their neighbors and were told to report subversive comments to the bureaucrats above them. Neighbors informed on neighbors, some for reasons of patriotism or loyalty, some from fear. A modern inquisition ensued; a terror to free thought and expression. Increasingly harsh penalties were meted out to those who dared to dissent.

The socialist governments of the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, N. Korea, Cuba, Yugoslavia, and the People's Republic of China employed the same citizen informer techniques. Citizens of those societies were reduced to either silence or whispered discussion only among those they trusted the most. Of course none of those things would ever occur here in the land of the free. But wait...

Now on the White House website posted by Macon Phillips comes an eerily similar request for citizens to inform on their neighbors. It states,

    "There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to the end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."


Read this again carefully. The government of the United States is openly asking citizens to report rumors, the contents of casual conversation, and the contents of emails. They decry the fact that they are unable to "keep track" of the communication between citizens effectively and are asking for help from informers. Of course forwarded emails would contain the electronic addresses of the sender.

Does this sound like the country you know (knew)? Are these the words of people who think of themselves as public servants, or is this something darker? Does a constitutional government tasked with protecting the rights of its citizens ask them to inform on each other to the White House?

Are we now like one of those totalitarian states? No. But we have become more collectivist. Is the move toward appointing unaccountable Czars with enormous authority, the takeover of multiple industries (corporatism), the restructuring of the economy on a socialist-command model, and the request for citizens to inform on their fellows a step closer to that ugly place? Unquestionably, the answer has to be yes. We must be concerned with the direction in which we are headed as well as the breathtaking speed.

Forty years ago, a philosopher named Leonard Peikoff wrote a book (still in print) called The Ominous Parallels. In it he shows the parallels (then scarcely noticeable) between the rise of Hitler's socialism and the trends in the United States. At the time, the book could have been dismissed as the ranting of an over-zealous, though erudite and articulate, conspiracy nut. In retrospect, Peikoff appears to have been quite prescient. Reading it today, it appears like a roadmap of the last half century and how we got to this point. The implications are clear. If the direction of the nation and the philosophic perspective of the populace isn't brought back to the founding principles, the end point is predetermined. Unfortunately, the premises underlying the agenda are shared by both major parties. The opposition party is neutered in that it has accepted the premises of the socialists, a strategy doomed to failure.

My grandfather and several uncles risked their lives in World War II to bring down the socialist threat of the German and Italian Axis powers. They survived. Many of their buddies were maimed or killed in that struggle. That generation successfully destroyed the military threat, but their efforts were blunted by the persistence of the altruist-collectivist philosophical virus which animated those socialists and which has infected the USA. Aside from the anti-Semitism of that time, both Western Europe and the USA are thoroughly imbued with the language and programs of the National Socialist program including its major platforms of National Health care, National Retirement benefits, National business plans, National agricultural plans, social safety nets, politically correct expression expectations, national ministers or Czars who answer only to the Leader, and the endless "we" talk so characteristic of collectivist societies.

Our forebears sacrificed so much to pass on the blessings of liberty. The least that we can do in the shadow of those heroes is to exercise our right to speak, and to do so out loud, not in whispers fearing that someone will forward our thoughts to the Watchers. These intimidating tactics must end.

As I noted four weeks ago, Scott Rasmussen's daily presidential tracking poll has shown a very steady increase in the number of Americans who have a "very unfavorable" view of Obama's presidency and a corresponding, though less dramatic, decline in the number of Americans who have a "very favorable" view of his presidency.  As of July 27, the negative gap between these two groups of highly motivated voters was ten percentage points.  Polls which focus only on softer "favorable" and unfavorable" opinion still appear to keep the Obama Presidency in safe political water, but that is misleading for several reasons.

First, while Republicans were playing dead and the Leftist media were presenting Barack and Michelle on every magazine cover, buying a pet, and all the other oh-so-loveable things that a young family with cute children moving into a new home, no one had given Americans a reason to doubt that the president was a pleasant, well spoken, sensible man.  He followed the script well.  His conscious attempt to enact an FDR style "One Hundred Days" of change simply overwhelmed all political opposition by a combination of political muscle, timid voices of opposition, and the perception of dramatic popular support.

Now following his umpteenth address to the nation and his frequent press conferences, his pretense of bipartisanship is gone.  In short, Obama has descended rapidly from the Magnificent to the Monotonous.  He says the same sorts of things over and over again, but there is really nothing new in Obama at all.  Throwing vast amounts of tax dollars into the economy, more or less willy-nilly, in an effort to "stimulate" growth is an old, failed policy.  His solemn assurances that reforms will not take away, for example, a patient's right to choose his physician, when there are several conflicting versions of health care reform floating around which seem to indicate otherwise, increasingly look like political grease to slide legislation through Congress.

Second, no presidency can be completely scripted.   When Iranian people revolt against a truly revolting government, one that lies to its own Moslem voters about election results and shoots women protesters in the streets, what can a man like Obama do?  Americans expect leadership, but Obama is in no sense of the word a leader.  When a police force that is probably as politically correct and racially sensitive as any in the nation arrests a black professor, Obama makes a sincere, and profoundly silly and dangerous, comment.  Inviting the policeman and the professor to the White House for a beer stops the bleeding but does not hide the scar.  The more helpless and hopeless Obama appears, the more unhappy Americans will be with him as a leader (his personal popularity, though, will probably remain high much longer.)

Third, as I have noted often in the past, Americans are conservative.  The Battleground Poll has put the percentage of Americans who are conservative at around sixty percent.  Pointedly, when Ed Goeas after the last Battleground Poll, last November, broke the numbers down even more precisely --What percentage are social conservatives? What percentage are "fiscal conservatives?  What percentages of Republicans or independents or Democrats were conservative? -- nothing changed.  However the data are examined, Americans are, overwhelmingly, conservative:  not moderate, not liberal, not unsure, but conservative.  See page 12 and page 13 of the post-election survey.

Fourth, Barack Obama is simply not very knowledgeable, and it increasingly shows.  This is not a rap on his intelligence or his efforts in school.  Prestigious schools have become, in areas like law and social sciences, little more than re-education camps.   His gaffes were ignored by the Leftist media during the campaign.  If Dan Quayle had talked about our fifty-seven states, it would have been fodder for late night jokes forever.  But the more Obama talks, the more obvious it becomes that he simply knows very little.  As an example, he recently said that winning the war on terrorism would not be like World War Two, when Emperor Hirohito signed articles of surrender.  Yet as even an amateur student of history knows, Hirohito did not sign the articles of surrender. The famous event on the Battleship Missouri was watched by the whole world.  It was recorded on film.  The Emperor was conspicuous by his absence.  It was rather like last year when Obama talked about "the bomb" that fell on Pearl Harbor or his May 2009 comment about his uncle who helped liberate Auschwitz.

The more Americans see of Obama as president, the more they see a plastic ideologue who is utterly out of step with their vision of America and who lacks the basic knowledge to govern a nation.  Republicans have won nothing yet (they must first decide to stand for something and then articulate that position clearly.)  It is encouraging that a number of Republican senators have announced they will vote against Judge Sotomayor, taking a principled stand in a losing battle.

It is vital to keep the lines between the parties bright and clear.  Our champion, our leader, will come if conservatives show gumption.  Few, if any, presidents have been as truly vulnerable as the man in the White House now.