On September 6, 2012,
in Uncategorized,
by magoo1310
It’s Friday, September 7th, 2012….but before we begin, three quick reflections on the Dimocratic convention and one crass commercial plug.
First, shouldn’t a guy who claimed he could lower sea level and heal the planet be able to control the weather for one night?!?
Obama speech moving indoors due to 30% chance of rain; thousands of backers disappointed
“Thousands” disappointed….just not 74,000. As this photo from Paul Croisetiere so aptly observes:
By the way, as Bill Meisen informed us, not only does the forecast now call for mostly clear with a 10% chance of precipitation, but looking four years back, the weatherman was predicting….
Denver 08 Forecast: 30% Chance of Rain for Obama’s Speech
That was, of course, before Republicans robbed him of his superpowers!
Second, reporting from Charlotte, James Taranto offers these two rather insightful thoughts on the passing scene:
“Seriously, the party of Andrew Jackson and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman chose to showcase someone whose claim to fame is that she demands that somebody else pay for her birth control.“
“Warren opened her speech by previewing the night’s big event: “I sure never dreamed that I’d get to be the warm-up act for President Bill Clinton–an amazing man, who had the good sense to marry one of the coolest women on the planet.” Yeah, we thought, and to cheat on her repeatedly.“
Lastly, can anyone, ANYone, explain what speech these clowns watched, let alone what on earth they’re talking about?!?
Didn’t think so.
Now for the commercial; be sure to visit our home page at www.thedailygouge.com and check out today’s Cover Story and featured videos; they’re truly worth the time.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
Leading off the last edition of the week, Jennifer Rubin, writing at the WaPo, offers her impressions of what the swooners in the Chattering Class termed the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address:
Bill Clinton’s long, long speech about the meanie Republicans
Bill Clinton, don’t get me wrong, was the best speaker Wednesday night. But that is largely because the rest of the evening was atrocious. Clinton was hoarse, and he seemed to holler for no reason at all. He decried those meanie Republicans of today (the favorite ploy of partisan Democrats is to praise every Republican no longer in office), and he repeated the tropes that Republicans want you to be on your own, want a “winner-take-all” society and want to help only the rich. Yawn.
At times his defense of President Obama strained credulity: Obama, he said, is bipartisan because he hired Republicans in government jobs and he is willing to work “cooperatively.” The Obama record is so obviously at odds with that sentiment (unilateral action on immigration and on welfare and the refusal to make a deal entitlements or address the fiscal cliff) that Clinton’s argument seemed unserious.
At his most effective, Clinton said that no president could have fixed in four years the economy that Obama inherited. And he extolled the belief that America ”always comes back.” Unfortunately, Obama promised to fix the economy in his first term. And the Obama recovery is the weakest in history. The comparison between the two presidents’ records was obvious, leaving one to consider if Clinton’s mere presence was a reminder of Obama’s weaknesses.
Like every other Democratic speaker, Clinton ignored the appalling increase in poverty under this president , a cynical betrayal of liberals’ supposed concern for the poor. No empathy or bitten lip is shown for them, or for the more than 8 percent of unemployed Americans (and millions more underemployed or who have stopped looking for work). The actual results of Obama’s policies are a sticky matter, so better to let him defend that himself.
Clinton’s Medicare spiel was downright disingenuous, claiming that Obama’s $716 billion in Medicare cuts don’t affect benefits. But of course, payments to providers will be cut, making treatment less accessible, and a quarter of Medicare Advantage patients will be dropped from the program.
And his welfare explanation was, bluntly, incoherent. He claimed that governors wanted waivers to have recipients work more. When he said, ”Did I make myself clear?” honest listeners would surely have said, “No!”
Mostly, however, Clinton did what he always does: Get lost in the weeds of policies, mixing in facts with half-truths and downright goofy arguments. (Romney’s desire to restore Medicare cuts, he claimed, is giving money back to insurance companies. Umm. Actually it amounts to paying for services seniors want. Has the Democratic Party been defending insurance companies all these years?)
After listening to him march through endless policy details, the crowd in Charlotte seemed to tire, and as he continued well past 11 p.m., the TV audience certainly may have drifted off. The speech went on and on and on, likely sending all but the fawning media off to bed. Clinton, let it never be said, is a disciplined speaker. (Or any other aspect of his life, as Moncia Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey can all attest!)
Clinton certainly drubbed Republicans, and then — this is Clinton, of course — he bragged about his own deficit-balancing record. It was a pointed reminder that Obama simply isn’t Bill Clinton.
Toward the end of the speech, Clinton blew the race card whistle loudly, claiming voter ID laws (which have been blessed by the Supreme Court and in case after case have failed to produce a single minority voter who could not obtain an ID) intend to depress minority voting. This was Clinton the charlatan and the hyper-partisan. Given how popular voter ID laws are with voters at large, you understand how entirely dependent Obama is in this election on non-white voters.
Mostly, it seemed that Bill was paving the way for a potential Hillary presidential run. He talked fondly of her, of course, and gave a passing and remarkably vague defense of Obama’s foreign policy. He did not mention Israel.
Now, Clinton did sing the praises of lots of government spending. It was a reminder how wedded to big government the Democratic Party has become since Clinton declared the era of big government to be over. Alas, he did not explain why the economy is still so weak and what Obama would do differently in a second term.But that is not his fault.Obama hasn’t told us. Could it be that he doesn’t have any new policies? We will find out Thursday night.
Based on what we’ve heard to date….
….we strongly doubt it.
Then again, as the WSJ relates, given The Dear Misleader’s record, demonizing the opposition is really the only arrow he can borrow from Elizabeth Warren’s quiver:
Transformers 2
Obama was honest when he said he wanted to remake America.
For all the spin and deception of politics, sooner or later every politician reveals his true purposes. For Barack Obama, one of those moments came when he declared shortly before the 2008 election that “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Above all else, the President who asked voters for a second term Thursday night sees himself as destined to transform America according to his own progressive dreams.
For most of 2008, Mr. Obama was able to disguise this ambition behind his gauzy rhetoric of hope and post-partisanship. The fine print of his agenda betrayed his plans to expand and entrench the entitlement state, but most voters ignored that as they chose his cool confidence over John McCain’s manic intensity amid a financial panic.
Candidate Obama was eloquent and likable. His personal story echoed of America’s history as a land of opportunity. Voters put aside any worry about his ideology and took a chance on his promise of a better tomorrow.
Four years later the shooting liberal star, as we called him then, has come down to earth. What should have been a buoyant recovery coming out of a deep recession was lackluster to start and has grown weaker. The partisanship he claimed to want to dampen has become more fierce. The middle-class incomes he sought to lift have fallen. These results aren’t bad luck or the lingering effects of a crash four years ago. They flow directly from his “transforming” purposes.
To our mind, two events amid hundreds stand out as defining President Obama’s first term. The first is his go-for-broke pursuit of progressive social legislation instead of focusing on economic recovery. The second is his refusal to strike a budget deal with Speaker John Boehner in 2011.Both reveal a President more bent on transforming America than addressing the needs of our time.
Mr. Obama was elected first and foremost with a mandate to fix the economy. Yet when he found himself by rare confluence of luck with 60 votes in the Senate, he put nurturing a fragile recovery secondary to the pursuit of pent-up liberal social policies.
Consider the amazing course of ObamaCare. Rather than craft a White House proposal and draw in Republicans from the start, he let Pete Stark and the most liberal House Democrats write the bill. As public opposition built and the tea party rose in 2009, he doubled down with a September speech extolling the virtues of government.
Opposition continued to build. But when Rahm Emanuel and other advisers urged him to compromise on something smaller, he still pressed ahead. Even after Scott Brown’s January 2010 victory to replace Ted Kennedy gave the GOP 41 Senators, Mr. Obama endorsed an effort to abuse Congressional procedure to ram the bill through. (An end-run John Roberts deemed the fault of voters.)
The result is a monster that will transform a sixth of the U.S. economy, but at huge cost to growth, political comity and America’s long-term fiscal health. Never before has a new entitlement passed on such narrowly partisan lines. The new taxes and burdens on small business in particular have helped to slow job creation. Voters reacted by imposing historic losses on House Democrats.
After that 2010 “shellacking,” as Mr. Obama called it, he had another chance to steer a more moderate course. Believing that bipartisan cover offered a unique chance to control the deficit, House Speaker Boehner agreed to back-room talks to pursue a grand budget bargain. (An act of egotistical insanity for which we’ll always regard him as an idiot.)
The Republican put tax increases on the table that might have cost him his Speakership, even as Mr. Obama refused to consider any modifications to ObamaCare and would allow only tinkering around the edges of other entitlements. As the deadline neared for raising the national debt limit, Mr. Obama demanded $400 billion more in revenue, and Mr. Boehner had little choice but to walk away.
This episode is all the more remarkable because the deal Mr. Boehner was offering would have divided Republicans, helped Mr. Obama with independents, and probably guaranteed his re-election. Yet the President poisoned the deal for the sake of higher taxes.
So now Mr. Obama is seeking a second term by asking the voters to give him more time to finish the job he started. But what job is that?
The President tried to reprise the spirit of 2008 in his speech Thursday night, but the preoccupation of this week’s nominating convention has been to portray Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Republicans as mummies from the crypt.
His second-term agenda is more of the first: More government spending disguised as “investment,” more subsidies for green energy, more regulation for other parts of the economy, a renewed push for cap and trade or an energy tax, protecting ObamaCare at all costs, and one of the largest tax increases in history to pay for it all.
In recent interviews, Mr. Obama has said that if he wins he believes a chastened GOP will have no choice but to strike a grand fiscal bargain on his terms. This assumes that the same Republicans he has savaged for 18 months will want to become the tax collectors for his agenda.(John Boehner will be his first call!) We support immigration reform, but his executive branch actions have poisoned that prospect too.
The more likely forecast is for more gridlock and rancor. As an unnamed adviser recently told a Journal reporter, Mr. Obama thought he could work with Republicans but “he won’t make that mistake again.”
Yet by Mr. Obama’s transforming lights, his Presidency would still be a success. Re-election guarantees the implementation of ObamaCare, which means he would join FDR and LBJ in the pantheon of progressives who expanded the reach of government to “spread the wealth.” (Thank you, John Roberts!)Republicans may cavil, but over time they would have no choice but to agree to a value-added tax or some other tap on the middle class to finance a permanently larger, European-sized welfare state.
Were he a man of lesser ideological ambition, President Obama would now be presiding over a stronger economy and probably be cruising to re-election. He gambled instead that he could use the economic crisis as a political lever to achieve his progressive policy goals, and he now finds himself struggling to be re-elected with a campaign based almost entirely on savaging his opponents. Americans who are disappointed with Transformers 1 aren’t likely to enjoy the sequel any better.
Fortunately, that particular script has yet to be written. And as Kimberly Strassel observes, retaining the White House may be the only possible bright spot in the Dims future:
The Party that Obama Un-Built
Where is the next generation of Democrats?
One thing’s for certain; they’re not living in Maryland
Julian Castro is no Barack Obama. And for that, Democrats have themselves to blame.
The focus of this week’s Democratic convention was President Obama. Lost in the adulation was the diminished state to which he has brought his broader party. Today’s Democrats are a shadow of 2008—struggling for re-election, isolated to a handful of states, lacking reform ideas, bereft of a future political bench. It has been a stunning slide. (Yet not without its joys!)
The speech by Mr. Castro, the young and charismatic mayor of San Antonio, was the Democrats’ attempt to recapture the party optimism that then-Senate candidate Obama sparked at the 2004 convention. John Kerry didn’t win, but that year marked the start of an ambitious Democratic plan to revitalize the party.
In 2006, Nancy Pelosi muzzled her liberal inclinations to recruit and elect her “Majority Makers”—a crop of moderate and conservative Democrats who won Republican districts and delivered control of the House for the first time in 14 years. Democrats in 2006 also claimed the Senate, with savvy victories in states like Montana and Virginia. The party thumped Republicans in gubernatorial races, winning in the South (Arkansas), the Mountain West (Colorado), and in Ohio (for the first time since 1991). A vibrant candidate Obama further boosted Democratic ranks in 2008.
By 2009, President Obama presided over what could fairly be called a big-tent coalition.The Blue Dog caucus had swelled to 51 members, representing plenty of conservative America. Democrats held the majority of governorships. Mr. Obama had won historic victories in Virginia and North Carolina. The prediction of liberal demographers John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s 2004 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority”—lasting progressive dominance via a coalition of minorities, women, suburbanites and professionals—seemed to be coming true.
It took Mr. Obama two years to destroy this potential, (Along with much of America’s) with an agenda that forced his party to field vote after debilitating vote—stimulus, ObamaCare, spending, climate change. The public backlash, combined with the president’s mismanagement of the economy, has reversed Democrats’ electoral gains and left a party smaller than at any time since the mid-1990s.
Of the 21 Blue Dogs elected since 2006, five remain in office. The caucus is on the verge of extinction, as members have retired, been defeated in primaries waged by liberal activists, or face impossible re-elections. The GOP is set to take Senate seats in North Dakota and Nebraska, and maybe to overturn Democratic toeholds in states from Montana to Virginia. There is today a GOP senator in Massachusetts. Republicans claim 29 governorships and may gain two to four more this year.
As for the presidential race, Republicans are in sight of taking back Virginia and North Carolina and are competitive in supposedly new Democratic strongholds like Colorado and New Mexico. The GOP is also making unexpected inroads in Wisconsin and Iowa. The real story of the Obama presidency is the degree to which he has pushed his party back toward its coastal and urban strongholds.
All this was vividly on display in Charlotte this week. While the party’s most vulnerable members aren’t in outright mutiny against Mr. Obama, more than two dozen didn’t risk attending the convention. In contrast to last week’s GOP celebration of reformist GOP governors, the Charlotte podium was largely dominated by activists (Sandra Fluke, Lilly Ledbetter), the liberal congressional faithful (Mrs. Pelosi, Harry Reid), and urban mayors from failing states(Los Angeles’s Antonio Villaraigosa, Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel).
While the GOP has feted its upcoming stars—including minority governors like New Mexico’s Susana Martinez and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal—the president has done little to nurture his down-ballot partners. Where is the next generation of Democrats? (Tough to raise a new crop when you’re killing ’em off before they’re born!)
Which brings us to Mr. Castro. Mr. Obama lit up the political scene in 2004 with a lofty convention speech that told a heartfelt story, appealed to the best of America, and never once mentioned George W. Bush.
Mr. Castro, by contrast, was tasked by the Obama team with laying out the bitter Democratic themes of this election. His own eloquent story was weighed down by his job of ridiculing Mitt Romney, lauding government, and stoking class warfare. The comparisons of Mr. Castro in 2012 with Mr. Obama in 2004 are misplaced; Mr. Obama has made them impossible.Mr. Castro must be wondering what chance he has of higher office in Texas, which today has not one statewide elected Democrat. It’s a question for Democrats across wide sections of the country.
The liberals who supported Mr. Obama’s expansion of the entitlement state are pinning everything on Mr. Obama’s re-election, assuming it will cement their big-government gains and allow them to grind back congressional majorities in the future.
But contemplate the situation if he loses. Consider a Democratic Party that may hold neither the White House nor Congress, that has disappeared in parts of the country, and that has few future Obama-like stars. Compare that to 2008.This is the party Barack Obama un-built.
Lying and thuggery are the only options left. Unfortunately for us, the Dimocratic depth chart is deep in both positions. Many of the most prominent liars you know, as you hear them almost every day.
But we haven’t even begun to see what thuggery means….at least not Chicago-style, as this next item courtesy of tTheDaily Caller and George Lawlor:
Justice Dept. Gallup lawsuit came after Axelrod criticized pollsters
Internal emails between senior officials at The Gallup Organization, obtained by The Daily Caller, show senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod attempting to subtly intimidate the respected polling firm when its numbers were unfavorable to the president. After Gallup declined to change its polling methodology, Obama’s Department of Justice hit it with an unrelated lawsuit that appears damning on its face.
TheDC is withholding the identities of the Gallup officials to protect them from potential retaliation from Obama’s campaign and his administration.
We’re second to none in our admiration for the courage and fortitude John McCain showed during his years as a POW, but he ran as wimpy and craven a presidential campaign as we can remember.
This isn’t a Marquis of Queensbury boxing match, it’s a knife fight; and as Harvey Logan so famously observed….
….there aren’t any rules. We can only hope and pray the Romney campaign learns this far sooner than Harvey….or John McCain.
On the Lighter Side….
Finally, we’ll call it a week with the Newt Gingrich Memorial “Let’s Make A Big Deal Out Of Nothing” segment, as….
Glenn Beck boycotts American Airlines after claiming he was treated rudely
Glenn Beck is boycotting American Airlines after he says he was treated rudely on a recent flight because of his political views.
Beck, on his radio show on Tuesday, claimed that an attendant on a flight from New York City to Texas refused to open his drink for him or speak politely even though that courtesy was given to other passengers. “My flight attendant nearly ‑‑ merely barked the word “breakfast” when he came to me,”he said on his show. “When others were politely asked if they cared for anything to eat and given the choices, I was just barked at. When he delivered a soda, he slammed it down so hard, I hesitated to even open the can for fear that it would spray all over other passengers in the cabin. By the way, the other passengers, nobody else had to open their can. He opened it and poured it for them. Never once did he look me in the eye. Never once did he offer a kind or even a neutral word to me. I had service unlike I have never had ever before in my life, and I have had rude service before. I lived in New York City. I have never had service that was specifically designed to make me feel subhuman. Oh, I had it. He put on quite a show as he fawned over the other passengers proudly and loudly performing his life story about being a former Israeli soldier and how he was so proud of the very liberal cities in America.”
First, has Beck never flown US Airways? We’ve had entire cabin crews who must have held rudeness to be a virtue.
Second, one flight attendant is not an entire airline. Besides, we have an alternate theory; it wasn’t Beck’s politics his male flight attendant found objectionable, but his staunch stance against homosexual marriage and privilege.
All in all, this entire episode is reminiscent of the hissy fit Newt pitched on Air Force One after Clinton consigned him to coach. It’s one thing to take such a slight personally; it’s another to publicize your pique!
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