It’s Thursday, October 9th, 2014…and here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of the WSJ, this snippet from Ronald Reagan’s August 1980 address to the VFW convention provides a quick reminder how far the quality of American leadership has fallen since his days in the Oval Office:
Soviet leaders talk arrogantly of a so-called “correlation of forces” that has moved in their favor, opening up opportunities for them to extend their influence. The response from the administration in Washington has been one of weakness, inconsistency, vacillation and bluff. A Soviet combat brigade is discovered in Cuba; the Carter Administration declares its presence 90 miles off our shore as “unacceptable.” The brigade is still there. Soviet troops mass on the border of Afghanistan. The President issues a stern warning against any move by those troops to cross the border. They cross the border, execute the puppet President they themselves installed in 1978, and carry out a savage attack on the people of Afghanistan. Our credibility in the world slumps further. The President proclaims we’ll protect the Middle East by force of arms and two weeks later admits we don’t have the force.
Is it only Jimmy Carter’s lack of coherent policy that is the source of our difficulty? Is it his vacillation and indecision? Or is there another, more frightening possibility—the possibility that this administration is being very consistent, that it is still guided by that same old doctrine that we have nothing to fear from the Soviets—if we just don’t provoke them.
Well, World War II came about without provocation. It came because nations were weak, not strong, in the face of aggression. Those same lessons of the past surely apply today. Firmness based on a strong defense capability is not provocative. But weakness can be provocative simply because it is tempting to a nation whose imperialist ambitions are virtually unlimited.
We find ourselves increasingly in a position of dangerous isolation. Our allies are losing confidence in us, and our adversaries no longer respect us.
Barack Hussein Obama isn’t fit to sit in the same room with The Gipper, let alone occupy what once was his desk.
In a related item demonstrating the utter hypocrisy of Dimocrats, the latest from the Party of Transparency:
Since we’re on the subject of the political movement which has made lying the central plank of its party platform, submitted for your approval…
The first case of Ebola transmission outside of West Africa has raised questions about how a nurse at a Spanish hospital contracted the virus and whether sufficient protocols were in place to protect health workers there. The nurse became infected at Madrid’s Carlos III hospital while treating Manuel Garcia Viejo, a priest who contracted the virus in West Africa. The woman, a “sanitary technician,” entered Garcia Viejo’s room only twice, according to Spanish officials.
In one case, she entered the room to change his diaper; another time, after he had died, she entered to collect his belongings, according to Mercedes Vinuesa Sebastian, Spain’s public health director. Both times, the nurse wore personal protective equipment. Spanish officials said they do not know what went wrong and are investigating.
The logic of Ockham’s Razor (i.e., all things being equal, the simplest explanation is most often correct) certainly suggests the nurse likely overlooked some relatively minor yet vitally important aspect of the protection protocol. But William of Ockham never came in contact with a Progressive movement hell-bent on furthering their political agenda, no matter what the cost. Nor could he have foreseen an American President who would, or could, lie with the reckless abandon of The Obamao; not just about certain things, but about everything!
Ask yourself honestly: after giving America this dubious assurance of safety…
…would it really surprise you to learn he was lying to your face?!? And is there any doubt in your mind had George W. Bush provided America a similarly suspect assertion, the MSM would have been on him like ugly on an…
In a related item, brought to you by Townhall.com, Mark Davis suggests this Administrations…er,…”lack of candor”…is largely responsible for…
“…This is not a complete collapse of faith in our institutions; it is a bad moment in history for government’s protection batting average, compounded by just enough local bewilderment to elevate public nervousness.
Begin with the backdrop as Thomas Eric Duncan arrived in our nation and my town, having lied about his plentiful exposure to Ebola back in Liberia. Officials from Washington to the Dallas County Courthouse told us everything was just fine and completely under control.
Really? As under control as our borders? As reliable as our battle against terror for the last few years? As secure as the White House perimeter?…“
In a similar vein, the great Thomas Sowell offers a more sinister, and in our mind far more accurate explanation of the connection between two equally-malignant maladies:
Why not send Lois Lerner so she can actually earn her pension?!?
“The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is both a danger in itself and a wake-up call for Americans — about President Obama, about the institutions of this country and, most important, about ourselves.
There was a time when an outbreak of a deadly disease overseas would bring virtually unanimous agreement that our top priority should be to keep it overseas. Yet Barack Obama has refused to bar entry to the United States by people from countries where the Ebola epidemic rages, as Britain has done.
The reason? Refusing to let people with Ebola enter the United States would conflict with the goal of fighting the disease. In other words, the safety of the American people takes second place to the goal of helping people overseas. As if to emphasize his priorities, President Obama has ordered thousands of American troops to go into Ebola-stricken Liberia, disregarding the dangers to those troops and to other Americans when the troops return.
What does this say about Obama? At a minimum, it suggests that he takes his conception of himself as a citizen of the world more seriously than he takes his role as President of the United States. At worst, he may consider Americans’ interests expendable in the grand scheme of things internationally. (We’ll go with “at worst”!) If so, this would explain a lot of his foreign policy disasters around the world, which seem inexplicable otherwise.
Those critics who have been citing Barack Obama’s foreign policy fiascoes and disasters as evidence that he is incompetent may be overlooking the possibility that he has different priorities than the protection of the American people and America’s interests as a nation.
This is a monstrous possibility. But no one familiar with the history of the twentieth century should consider monstrous possibilities as things to dismiss automatically. Nor should anyone who has followed Barack Obama’s behavior over his lifetime, and the values that behavior reveals…“
“Monstrous”? Yes. “Possibility”? No; more like a certainty!
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, as Commentary Magazine‘s Michael Rubin reveals, like the Left’s hopelessly ineffective War on Poverty, The Dear Misleader’s belated intercession against Islamic terror is…
“…What’s curious is what was not targeted. Over the past couple weeks; the Islamic State has been on the offensive against the Kurdish-held town of Kobane (‘Ain al-Arab). The Islamic State has been as brutal as it was in Sinjar, and recently even beheaded a group of captured Kurds, including women. Kurds may govern Kobane but the Kurdish administration has given shelter and protection to tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs and Christians.
…And yet, despite the heat of the battle around Kobane the United States and its Gulf allies did nothing to strike at Islamic State forces besieging the Kurds. It would be as if Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the United States would enter the war against Japan, and then proceeded to bomb Argentina. Given that President Obama has insisted that he approve every strike inside Syria, the only logical conclusion is that Obama does not want to protect Kobane, perhaps out of deference to Turkey, which is suspicious of any Kurdish entity…“
All of which is part and parcel to why, as Jonathan Tobin reports, The Great Prevaricator’s latest admission might as well mean…
“…But rather than attempting to estimate the carnage this foolish remark will cause for his supporters, perhaps the better question to ask is why he did it. About that there doesn’t seem much room for debate.
The defining characteristic of this presidency remains the arrogance of Barack Obama. Having come into office on the strength of a campaign that presented him as not merely a breath of fresh air but as a messiah who could turn back the oceans and renew American society, the president’s inflated opinion of his abilities and his appeal is hardly surprising. Nor after two elections won on the strength of his personal appeal is it at all astonishing that he would think injecting himself into the midterms would be to his party’s advantage.
But along with the self-assurance that comes with two presidential victories is the reality that the Obama White House remains an echo chamber where bad news or telling the truth about the president’s mistakes are not welcome. In the same bubble where it is OK for Obama to blame the intelligence community for underestimating ISIS when it was he who would make that error despite his advisors warning him of the danger, the news about the president’s staggering unpopularity in his second term has also not penetrated the commander-in-chief’s inner sanctum.
But even if some are telling our emperor–who believes he can govern without the consent of Congress on issues like immigration and is arrogant enough to warn the voters he will do just that after they are done casting their ballots—that he has no clothes, this is not a man who is likely to listen to such advice. If he has lengthened what was almost certainly going to be a longer than average lame duck period of his presidency with last week’s statement, it is in a way fitting that this should happen as a result of his outsized ego rather than anything else.“
It’s worth noting the gatekeeper of the Narcissist-in-Chief’s inner sanctum, the otherwise-unqualified Communist Valerie Jarrett, once famously observed:
“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
The scary part isn’t she said it, but rather he believes it!
Speaking of things it’s scary Liberals continue to believe, we present John Stossel’s thoughts on…
“…Despite spending an astonishing $22 trillion dollars, despite 92 different government welfare programs, poverty stopped declining. Government’s answer? Spend more!
…On my TV show this week, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) says that people like Paul Ryan and I “just want to cut the size of government. And trust the private sector to do everything.” Well … yes. The private sector does just about everything better.
McDermott says, “This whole business about somehow raising the minimum wage causes a loss of jobs — if that’s true, why don’t we just drop the minimum wage altogether and let people work for a dollar a day or $1 an hour?” OK, let’s do it! It’s not as if wages are set by the minimum wage.
That is a great conceit of the central planners: thinking that only government prevents employers from paying workers nearly nothing. But the reason Americans don’t work for $1 an hour is competition, not government minimums. Competition is what forces companies to pay workers more. It doesn’t much matter that the law says they can pay as low as $7.25. Only 4 percent of American workers now make that little. Ninety-five percent make more.
The free market will sort this out, if politicians would just let it. Left free, the market will provide the greatest benefit to workers, employers and consumers, while allowing charity as well. It would all happen faster if politicians stopped imagining that they are the cause of everything.“
To which we can only add a heart “AMEN“! As The Gipper so eloquently put it:
And in today’s edition of the Environmental Moment, writing at Best of the Web, James Taranto details one more example of Climatescammers moving the goal posts upon realizing they can’t score under the rules they themselves established:
When in Doubt, Change the Subject
A piece in Nature from David Victor and Charles Kennel urges global warm-mongers to “Ditch the 2 °C Warming Goal.” Here’s how they put the argument:
For nearly a decade, international diplomacy has focused on stopping global warming at 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. This goal–bold and easy to grasp–has been accepted uncritically and has proved influential. . . .
Bold simplicity must now face reality. Politically and scientifically, the 2 °C goal is wrong-headed. Politically, it has allowed some governments to pretend that they are taking serious action to mitigate global warming, when in reality they have achieved almost nothing. Scientifically, there are better ways to measure the stress that humans are placing on the climate system than the growth of average global surface temperature–which has stalled since 1998 and is poorly coupled to entities that governments and companies can control directly.
Failure to set scientifically meaningful goals makes it hard for scientists and politicians to explain how big investments in climate protection will deliver tangible results. Some of the backlash from ‘denialists’ is partly rooted in policy-makers’ obsession with global temperatures that do not actually move in lockstep with the real dangers of climate change.
To put it more concisely: Those predictions of global warming turned out to be wrong, so now we need to predict some other alarming outcome that’s too vague to falsify, but trust us, it’s alarming.
On the Lighter Side…
Then there’s this depiction of our new favorite t-shirt courtesy of Fielding Cocke…
…the latest redefinition from the Dimocratic Party’s Department of Newspeak sent by George Lawlor…
…and finally, these five beauties forwarded by Wink Martindale:
Any questions?!?
Magoo
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