It’s Thursday, October 4th, 2012….and we promised ourselves rather than watch the entire debate, we would only view Mitt’s opening statement and predict the outcome accordingly.

Between telling Jim Lehrer what an honor it is to be with him and congratulating the greatest enemy the Republic’s ever faced on his anniversary, we cannot shake the image of John McCain losing the 2008 debates the moment he opened his mouth.  We’ll be checking in with an impromptu focus group after the conclusion, but that’s our initial impression.

We’d have dispensed with the chit-chat and opened by informing Lehrer the country’s dire condition demands dispensing with meaningless pleasantries, as well as remarking the only anniversary wish we have for The Obamaos was that they’d be observing their next one in Chicago.

Then again, initial impressions can be deceiving….as these observations from our focus group proves:

AW in MD:

“Obama was stuck on his talking points; he was given certain figures and facts beforehand and couldn’t think on his feet beyond them.  Romney expressed his confidence with his face, while Obama could be observed more than once looking down and guilty….like a dog caught at something he oughtn’t have been doing.”

CR in VA:

“All in all, if it were a fight, Romney won by a KO.  His comment about Big Government and the Constitution was spot on.  Obama was lost without his teleprompter, rambling on over the time limit repeatedly to the continued embarrassment and consternation of Jim Lehrer.  Romney was confident without overconfidence, aggressive without being overaggressive.  Obama was at times angry (5 second comment), and often lacked confidence.  If any viewers were undecided, Romney took it to the hoop.”

GTV in MD:

“It was a total knock-out.  Everything Obama said, I’d heard before.  Romney’s mastery of the issues was magnificent; it wasn’t even close.  Reagan wasn’t blaming Jimmy Carter when running against Fritz Mondale.“

JG in TN:

“Romney answered the critics (I was among them) who begged for a dramatic departure from the Caspar Milquetoast attitude with a measured, informative aggressiveness; he somehow maintained a civil demeanor while shouting “I can lead!”  The Obamao appeared nervous from the git-go.  He provided little if any information which was new, let alone imaginative or coherent.  As Bill Maher tweeted (Bill Maher?!?), “Maybe he DOES need a teleprompter!””

DF in TX:

“Lehrer was a joke, completely inept; he couldn’t keep either candidate in his time, yet the only guy he attempted to contain was Romney.  He was fawning over the President (who was awful), which probably hurt The Obamao.  During the exchange on the deficit, Obama attempted to interrupt Romney, whereupon Romney “bitch-slapped” him, using the interruption to make his points even more forcefully.  The President would have been better off to have remained silent, which was generally true of the entire debate.  Mitt did three things: energized his base, solidified his standing with Independents and may have either pulled in some fence-sitting Dimocrats or convinced them to stay home.  Then again, he could be benefiting from my low expectations.”

JF in TX:

“Obama’s low was his constant looking-down; he looked absolutely out of it some times.  His high was the usual meaningless platitudes where he’s good at orating at a broad, high level of BS.  But a lot of people fall for it. Romney had great command of the facts, dug in, always looked confident and always faced the moderator.  His low was being oftentimes overanxious to answer, sometimes appearing almost sophomoric; but I was glad he was acting aggressively.  I think it’s a little out of character, but it needed to be seen by the idiot undecided.  Too aggressive will turn them off, but in-command turns them on.  It’s a fine line, but I think Romney handled it really well.”

GL in NY:

“That was a TKO.  If he had said, “I was Governor of Massachusetts; I have shown I can govern in a bi-partisan way.  You on, on the other hand, have not!”  THAT would have been a KO!  Most of the people in the Luntz group afterwards said that’s what they were looking for.  However, 90% said they were now going to vote for Romney.  One down, three to go!”

SB in CA:

“Romney made his points, but there were other things I would have said he omitted.  I wish he would have added that if we go Obama’s way, even taxing the rich 100%, we still won’t eliminate the deficit, let alone decrease the debt.  I loved the trickle-down government references.  Obama seemed a little jumpy at the end….a little nervous.  He shook his head a few times, and I always look for those off-camera expressions.  He seemed more than a little agitated, “poked-in-the-ribs”, by the end.”

We stand corrected; the difference was dramatic.  As disparate as the contrast between night….

….and day:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger details the definite losers, regardless of who wins the debate:

2012’s Sure Losers—Young People

Hi, I’m Marty and I’ll be your waiter for the next 40 years.

 

Let’s revise the old saw about how people are politically liberal when they’re young and conservative as they grow older. It’s beginning to seem truer to say that when you’re young, you are basically nothing.

Yes, it’s true that opinion polls show Barack Obama holds a strong lead over Mitt Romney among voters under 30. Does this mean they all cleared time to watch the presidential debates? I doubt it. More likely a lot of young “voters” had something better to do, such as using that 90 minutes to re-watch re-runs of “Everybody Loves Raymond” on the TV Land channel.

The Pew Research Center released a survey last weekend that had some startling data about young voters’ level of interest in the 2012 election and in politics generally. The enthusiasm that inflated the Obama hope-and-change bubble is leaking. The share of voters under 30 who are paying very close attention to this election is 18%. At this time four years ago, high interest was twice that. This time, most may not even qualify as voters: Only about 50% are certain they are registered to vote, the lowest such number Pew has measured in 16 years.

Needless to say, Mitt Romney is not picking up what Barack Obama has lost. Four years ago, about 75% of under-30s calling themselves McCain supporters had given a lot of thought to that election. This year’s Romney leaners have a focus rate of about 60%.

What these numbers show is a process of political disconnection among under-30s. And why not? This is the bitter fruit of a reality familiar across low-growth Western Europe: Youth unemployment is breeding youth disengagement. Over the past four years, the unemployment rate for Americans age 16 to 24 has been twice the rate for the general population. Currently it’s about 17%. For young blacks it’s 28%.

Some might say employment data can’t be driving political disengagement because 80% of them are working. Well, they’re sort of working. A detailed study of job status earlier this year by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University found that more than 53% of college graduates under 25 last year were underemployed—working in jobs unequal to their college or post-graduate attainment.

The depressive effects of having no job or a junk job for a long time have been well documented. As an economic proposition, it means also that many in this generation are falling way off the curve for lifetime earnings, savings and debt pay-downs. Call it Generation Jobbed.

Western Europe is about a decade ahead of the U.S. in showing the path downward once a low economic-growth rate gets locked in, as may be happening here. Where we could be headed politically was suggested by a small but telling story this week from France, where chronically high youth unemployment sits at about 22%.

Recently, three 30-something Frenchmen—an entrepreneur, a TV journalist and a rap singer—began a campaign called “Barrez-Vous,” which means “beat it.” Emigration is the only answer, they said, because France is in the grip of a “sclerotic gerontocracy that is collapsing a little more every day.” (Website: http://barrez-vo2.us/site/)

“Sclerotic gerontocracy”? Who might that be? If you’re 30, it’s the brain-dead class in possession of your politics. The French “Beat It” movement is onto something. Whether in Europe or the U.S., the air is filled with cries to solve various debt calamities. Look closely, though, and you’ll notice that virtually any political “solution” on offer to the euro crisis or U.S. debt will essentially force people age zero to 35—jobs or no jobs—to spend their lifetimes paying off the rolled-over debt that bails out the politicians and guarantees benefit flows to the older half of the population, which will escape to worry-free graves before the crisis returns.

It may be true that what’s left of the 2012 youth vote is largely left-leaning remnants that will fall in behind Barack Obama. Still, they should ask the French “barrez-vous” people about Mr. Obama’s campaign offer of cut-rate interest on tuition loans.

With virtually free higher education, Europe’s low-growth utopias have the world’s largest, best-educated population of jobless young people. With four more years of below-average growth under Barack Obama almost a certainty, cheaper tuition will mainly send more graduates into a desert of unemployment or underemployment. Hi, I’m Marty and I’ll be your waiter for the next 40 years.

I’m always struck when Barack Obama says that no matter what system we choose, he personally is going to be fine. That’s true.

And one of the few truths he’s ever actually uttered.  Sure he’s going to be fine; but like his wife’s suspiciously lucrative University of Chicago Hospital job, he’s done nothing, absolutely nothing, to deserve anything he’s got….excepting of course lying repeatedly and often.

And since we’re on the subject of the Boy Blunder, in his latest column, Jonah Goldberg details….

Obama’s Foreign Policy Follies

 

We’re now entering the fourth week of the “CSI: Benghazi” hostage crisis. That’s how long an FBI forensic team has been trying to gain access in Libya to what the State Department still calls a crime scene — the Obama administration’s preferred term for the location of the first assassination of a U.S. ambassador since 1979 and the first successful al-Qaeda-backed attack on U.S. soil since the 9/11 strikes. (Our embassies and consulates are sovereign U.S. territory.)

It is perhaps not accidental that the State Department cites the need to complete the investigation as an excuse to stay silent on the whole matter. “You’re not going to hear anything from here unless my guidance changes,” explained Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman. “When we open a criminal investigation in the United States, generally, we don’t brief out in pieces until the investigation is complete so we don’t prejudice the outcome. I have to respect their process, obviously.”

Obviously.

There’s more helpful news for an administration that doesn’t want to say anything about terrorism or the Middle East other than “Osama bin Laden’s dead” and “the Iraq war is over.” “There’s a chance we never make it in there,” a source described as “a senior law enforcement official” told The New York Times.

“Never” may be unacceptable even to this White House, but anything past Nov. 6 will do just fine.

Unfortunately, the rest of the administration’s PR operation isn’t going nearly as well. It’s not clear whether U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice lied or made a fool of herself — and the administration — when she unequivocally blamed a YouTube video for the Sept. 11 Libya attack and denied that the administration’s security precautions were scandalously insufficient.

On a slew of Sunday shows on Sept. 16, Rice said the two former Navy Seals who were also killed were providing security for Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Former Navy SEAL bodyguards do not die in safe houses far from the person they’re protecting, just as spontaneous mobs do not orchestrate a sophisticated ground assault complete with rocket-propelled grenades. Stevens was not, in the words of columnist Mark Steyn, “asphyxiated by a spontaneous class-action movie review.”

The Libya follies are merely the most visible flashpoint of the larger unraveling of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. The U.S.-Israel relationship has become a bad soap opera. Afghanistan is slipping away, as our troops are being killed by the men they’re supposed to be training for the handover. Egypt is now run by the Muslim Brotherhood. Russia casually mocks and defies us. China is rapidly replacing us as an Asian hegemon and rattling sabers at our ally Japan.

Most troubling, as Fred and Kimberly Kagan document in the current issue of National Review, Iraq is rapidly becoming an Iranian vassal state. When President Obama entered office, we had nearly 150,000 troops in Iraq and much sway over the course that nation took. Now we have 150 and almost no sway. Sectarian violence is up, and al-Qaeda in Iraq is resurgent.

Meanwhile, note the Kagans (the intellectuals who helped craft the Iraq surge strategy), Iraqi airspace has become a “critical lifeline for the vicious regime of Bashar Assad,” as he kills thousands of his own people in Syria. They also note that Iraq has become an essential pathway for Iran to circumvent the sanctions intended to prevent it from pursuing a nuclear bomb.

There’s a dark irony to all of this. At least until the killing of bin Laden, Obama kept foreign policy out of the headlines so he could concentrate on domestic policy. Even after bin Laden’s death, when Obama started to tout foreign policy to compensate for a sputtering economy, the message was that under Obama, there’s no drama.

The quiet yet massive increase in drone-strike killings, the reluctance to support democratic regime change in Iran, saying yes to the Afghan surge while insisting on an expiration date, his unwillingness to push for a continued presence in Iraq, his capitulation to Bush policies on Guantanamo Bay and domestic terror trials, the administration’s reflexive spinning of thwarted and actual terrorism attacks (the Times Square and “underwear” bombers, the Fort Hood shooting) as “isolated incidents” — all gave the impression there was nothing to worry about with Obama at the helm.

But making problems easy to ignore isn’t the same thing as solving them. How fitting, then, that the game of kick-the-can faltered just five weeks from Election Day.

Which is just another way of saying the only solution B. Hussein can offer is….

Final destination not only known, but unavoidably certain given four more years of the same.

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of Jeff Foutch, we learn….

Matt Damon fracking film backed by big OPEC member

 

Frack you, Matt!

Matt Damon’s new film on fracking, “Promised Land”, is generating some buzz — though probably not the kind studio execs were hoping for. Last week, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation pointed out that in the trailer for film, one of the financial backers listed is Image Nation Abu Dhabi.

Image Nation Abu Dhabi is, in turn, owned by Abu Dhabi Media – a state media company for the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, an OPEC member, is the world’s third-largest oil exporter. For a film that highlights the dangers of fracking — the controversial process that has unleashed an energy boom in the United States — this may be problematic….

Fracking: only controversial if your oblivious to science and facts….like Damon.  And only problematic for a country with a vested interest in seeing the Middle East monopoly on energy production maintained.

But what American leader could ever favor Muslim Middle-Eastern oil producers over domestic sources of energy?!?

Oh….never mind!

On the Lighter Side….

And in News of the Bizarre….

Nebraska man accused of attacking wife with sandwich

 

“….According to the arrest affidavit, Spurling’s wife called 911 and reported he pushed her down during an argument and rubbed a sandwich in her face. The woman told deputies that Spurling had become irate for “making him live in the county” and “being bored since there is no place for him to walk.” She said that the argument went on for some time, during which Spurling drank three 24-oz cans of Natty Daddy, a malt liquor with 8 percent alcohol content. The woman told deputies that she “got tired” of the argument and made herself a sandwich and went to a bedroom. Spurling followed her, according to the affidavit, pulled her hair, pushed her onto the bed and rubbed the sandwich on her face. (What a douchebag!) A deputy said he found several pieces of lunch meat on the carpet outside a bedroom and some pieces of bread in the bedroom. The woman said she had mayonnaise in her hair and on her face as a result of the attack, but she cleaned herself up before deputies arrived.“

Sandwich….douchebag?

In a related item, courtesy of Bill Meisen and WTSP.com in Florida:

Woman seen riding on manatee turns herself in

 

The woman wanted by police for harassing and riding on a manatee at Fort DeSoto Park has turned herself in. Ana Gloria Garcia Gutierrez, 52, called the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office shortly after 4 p.m. to turn herself in. Deputies say she admitted to riding on the manatee. Gutierrez told deputies she’s new to the area and didn’t realize it was against the law to touch or harass the creature.

According to the Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act, “It is unlawful for any person at any time, by any means, or in any manner, intentionally or negligently to annoy, molest, harass, or disturb or attempt to molest, harass, or disturb any Manatee.”

Police say while no manatees appear to have been injured, violating the Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act is a second degree misdemeanor.

Forget about prosecuting Gutierrez; how about ticketing the manatee for failure to display a proper placard while….

….hauling a wide load?!?

Magoo