It’s Tuesday, January 10th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens describes will result as….

Obama ‘Retrenches’—America Retreats

Spending less on defense means squandering the money elsewhere.

 

It’s never entirely easy to distinguish between retrenchment and retreat.

For three years, the Obama administration has followed what it believes is a strategy of retrenchment—withdrawing from Iraq, setting a deadline for Afghanistan, calling off further expansion of NATO, signing arms-control treaties, asking the Europeans to take the lead in Libya, preferring sanctions to military strikes, and now slicing into the Pentagon’s budget—all on the commendable theory that America must learn once again to pick its spots, match its ambitions to its means, and pursue a “sustainable” foreign policy.

The only problem is, the theory is wrong. What the administration would like to have you believe is a matter of vision is seen by others as a function of weakness.

Consider the Strait of Hormuz, 2012 edition. The administration kicks the year off by imposing sanctions on Iran’s oil trade and persuading the Europeans to follow suit. The Iranians conduct military drills and warn the U.S. not to send an aircraft carrier back to the Persian Gulf. Then a potential diplomatic deus ex machina appears in the form of the USS Kidd’s high-profile rescue of some Iranian sailors from their pirate captors. Iran repays the gesture by sentencing to death 28-year-old Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, an American citizen of Iranian descent.

The lesson of this parable is that you don’t get more by doing less. (Unless of course you’re an Obama supporter.) The administration’s policy toward Iran amounts to avoiding direct confrontation at all costs on the view that the last thing the U.S. needs is another war in the Middle East. But the result is that Iran is more truculent than ever (and much closer to a bomb), while our allies are more skittish than ever about the strength of U.S. commitments.

Sooner or later, the U.S. will have to prove the worth of those commitments in the face of an adversary that’s more likely to test them. How sustainable is that?

This scenario has been playing itself out with depressing regularity since Mr. Obama came to office. About Iraq, Hillary Clinton said in October that the U.S. would not tolerate Iranian meddling. Yet the likelihood that the promise will be tested is far greater now than when we had a residual force in the country, even as the prospective cost of honoring the promise has become almost unaffordable. About Afghanistan, we surged our forces but attached a deadline. The upshot is the U.S. expending itself on temporary triumphs over the Taliban as Pakistan waits and plans a pro-Taliban end game.

Or consider Mr. Obama’s favorite subject, nuclear proliferation. In April 2009, he gave a speech in Prague dreaming of a nuclear-free world. Almost immediately, North Korea tested a weapon, Pakistan expanded its arsenal, Iran moved ahead with its illicit programs, and China and Russia undertook extensive nuclear modernization schemes.

Now the president wants a retrenched military, on the three-part theory that “the tide of war is receding,” that America needs to get its financial house in order, and that the risk is minimal because the U.S. will continue to spend more on its military than the rest of the world combined.

Unfortunately for the president, the tide of war does not ebb or flow according to his wishes—unless he refuses to meet any provocation with force as a matter of principle. Our financial disorders are not the result of excess military spending but of entitlement programs Mr. Obama refuses to touch and has done much to expand.

And because we spend so much on personnel and weapons-development costs, our military budgets are heavier on tail than on tooth. Today’s military has half as many ships and nearly 600,000 fewer active duty troops than it did at the end of the Cold War. Whatever else he’s doing, Mr. Obama is not taking his budget knife to a bloated force.

In the history of any great power, there is always a point when the downward trend becomes unmistakable and irreversible. For France it was 1940; for Britain 1947; for the Soviet Union 1989. A case may soon be made that for the European Union the year was 2011.

It would be silly to suggest that the U.S. is anywhere near that type of inflection point. It has suffered no comparable military or economic disaster; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a sneeze compared to World War II. The current vogue in declinism confuses the failures of (and disappointments in) an administration with the health of the country as a whole.

But like yesteryear hypochondriacs who convinced themselves they had tuberculosis—then took themselves to sanitoriums where they got it—acting on a belief in decline ultimately produces decline. We will not husband our resources by spending less on defense: We’ll just squander the money elsewhere, probably less productively. We will not lessen tensions overseas by diminishing our military footprint: We’ll just create vacuums into which others rush and to which we’ll eventually return, at a cost.

That’s the Obama administration’s foreign policy legacy in a nutshell. Perhaps its failures don’t seem clear enough for the Republicans to run right against them. But they are becoming clearer by the day to U.S. allies and adversaries alike. Eventually Americans will get the picture, too.

As an officer in the Navy, we swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign AND domestic….not slavishly enact the policies of a Manchurian Commander-in-Chief anyone with an ounce of common sense knew to run counter to America’s interests.

So why, we continue to wonder, have we yet to see a single resignation from a senior officer?  It’s not like The Obamao, despite his delusions of dictatorship, can take away their birthdays, let alone their pensions.  B. Hussein is running our military into the ground, destroying its combat effectiveness in an increasingly dangerous world….and the Brass takes it all in stride.

Speaking of the man who would be king, Michael McConnell, a former federal judge and ACTUAL professor of law and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, opines on….

Democrats and Executive Overreach

It’s a mistake to excuse Obama’s disregard for the Constitution. Precedents set now will be exploited by the next administration.

 

One reason so many Americans entrusted Barack Obama with the presidency was his pledge to correct the prior administration’s tendency to push unilateral executive power beyond constitutional and customary limits.

Yet last week’s recess appointments of Richard Cordray as the first chief of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three new members to the President’s National Labor Relations Board—taken together with other aggressive and probably unconstitutional executive actions—suggest that this president lacks a proper respect for constitutional checks and balances.

The Obama administration has offered no considered legal defense for the recess appointments. It even appears that it got no opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel in advance of the action—a sure sign the administration understood it was on shaky legal ground.

It is hard to imagine a plausible constitutional basis for the appointments. The president has power to make recess appointments only when the Senate is in recess. Several years ago—under the leadership of Harry Reid and with the vote of then-Sen. Obama—the Senate adopted a practice of holding pro forma sessions every three days during its holidays with the expressed purpose of preventing President George W. Bush from making recess appointments during intrasession adjournments. This administration must think the rules made to hamstring President Bush do not apply to President Obama. But an essential bedrock of any functioning democratic republic is that the same rules apply regardless of who holds office.

It does not matter, constitutionally, that congressional Republicans have abused their authority by refusing to confirm qualified nominees—just as congressional Democrats did in the previous administration. Governance in a divided system is by nature frustrating. (Even more so for an individual who’s never earned or worked for anything.) But the president cannot use unconstitutional means to combat political shenanigans. If the filibuster is a problem, the Senate majority has power to eliminate or weaken it, by an amendment to Senate Rule 22. They just need to be aware that the same rules will apply to them if and when they return to minority status and wish to use the filibuster to obstruct Republican appointments and policies.

Moreover, in this case, two of the recess appointees to the National Labor Relations Board had just been nominated and sent to the Senate on Dec. 15—two days before the holiday. So it is simply not true that they were victims of Republican obstructionism, even if that mattered.

Some of the administration’s supporters have tried to argue that the pro forma sessions are a sham and thus that the Senate has been in recess since Dec. 17. Aside from the fact that these sessions are not, in fact, a sham—the Senate enacted the payroll tax holiday extension, President Obama’s leading legislative priority, on Dec. 23 during one of those pro forma sessions—the plain language of the Constitution precludes any such conclusion.

Article I, Section 5, Clause 4 requires the concurrence of the other house to any adjournment of more than three days. The Senate did not request, and the House did not agree to, any such adjournment. This means that the Senate was not in adjournment according to the Constitution (let alone in “recess,” which requires a longer break).

Others have argued that the president can make recess appointments during any adjournment, however brief, including the three days between pro forma sessions. That cannot be right, because it would allow the president free rein to avoid senatorial advice and consent, which is a major structural feature of the Constitution. He could, for example, make an appointment overnight, or during a lunch break. In a brief in the Supreme Court in 2004, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe dismissed as “absurd” any suggestion that a period of “a fortnight, or a weekend, or overnight” is a “recess” for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause.

This is not the first time this administration has asserted unilateral executive power beyond past presidential practice and the seeming letter of the Constitution. Its slender justification for going to war in Libya without a congressional declaration persuaded almost no one, and its evasion of the reporting requirements of the War Powers Resolution—over the legal objections of Justice Department lawyers—was even more brazen. According to the administration, not only was our involvement in Libya not a “war” for constitutional purposes; it did not even amount to “hostilities” that trigger a reporting requirement and a 60-day deadline for congressional authorization.

Indeed, the Obama administration has admitted to a strategy of governing by executive order when it cannot prevail through proper legislative channels. Rather than work with Congress to get reasonable changes to President Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law, it has used an aggressive interpretation of its waiver authority to substitute the president’s favored policies for the law passed by Congress. When the president’s preferred cap-and-trade legislation to limit carbon emissions failed in Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would proceed by regulation instead. And when Congress refused to enact “card check” legislation doing away with secret ballots in union elections, the president’s National Labor Relations Board announced plans to impose the change by administrative fiat—one of the reasons Senate Republicans have tried to block appointments.

The English philosopher John Locke, who so influenced our Founding Fathers, wrote that a “good prince” is more dangerous than a bad one because the people are less vigilant to protect against the aggrandizement of power when they perceive the ruler as beneficent.

I fear many Democrats are falling into this trap. They like President Obama and his policies, and they are willing to look the other way when it comes to constitutional niceties. The problem is that checks and balances are important, precedents created by one administration will be exploited by the next, and not all princes are good.

Unfortunately, The Obamao’s the polar opposite of good….and only fancies himself a prince.

In a related item, Team Tick-Tock announces another change in its starting line-up:

Daley Stepping Down as Obama Chief of Staff

Chief of Staff Bill Daley announces he will leave his post to spend more time with his family

 

Yeah….to spend more time with his family….rrrrighhhht!  So much for the highly-touted “bridge to business”!

In a related item, as USA Today reports….

U.S. debt is now equal to economy

 

And who, inquiring minds want to know, is taking Bill Daley’s position as Chief of Staff?

Yup; none other than the fool responsible for The Obamao’s last budget debacle; by the way, meet Jack Lew’s successor at OMB:

 

Thus we move from the prying pan into the fire.  And remember, just like those no longer making the effort to find work aren’t really unemployed, interest payments don’t count towards either the deficit or the debt!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with The Gang The Still Can’t Shoot Straight, the GOP equivalent of Miss Kitty had determined….

Palin: Democrats “Want to Face Romney In The General Election”

 

Yeah….as if they’re in mortal fear of running against any other candidate in the current field!

Then there’s this from Mr. “People Don’t Kill People; Guns Kill People”, Bride-of-Chucky Schumer:

Schumer Blames Pain Killers for Violent Crime Instead of Criminals

Following fatal shootings in two New York pharmacy robberies, a U.S. senator is warning that a new batch of “super painkillers” now under review could force repeats of recent violent robberies that left six people dead.

“It’s tremendously concerning that at the same time policymakers and law enforcement professionals are waging a war on the growing prescription drug crisis, new super-drugs could well be on their way, flooding the market,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. “The FDA needs to grab the reins and slow down the stampede to introduce these powerful narcotics.”

A New Year’s Eve robbery at a Long Island pharmacy netted prescription painkillers and cash and left the robber and a federal agent dead. In June, four died in another Long Island pharmacy robbery in which 11,000 hydrocodone pills were stolen.

Gee….this couldn’t have anything to do with the fact, thanks to Schumer and his ilk, the vast majority of New Yorkers….including pharmacists….are unarmed?!?  No….gotta be the pills!

Next up, a question: tell us again what brain-dead decided to permit the GOP’s mortal enemies to set the agenda in the Republican debates?

ABC’s GOP Debate Questions 6 to 1 Liberal, 25% on Contraception, Gay Rights

 

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2012/01/09/abcs-gop-debate-questions-6-1-liberal-25-contraception-gay-rights

For more on the subject of the MSM’s double standard, we turn to William McGurn in the WSJ, who details….

The Stephanopoulos Standard

Republicans can turn media bias to their advantage.

 

A funny thing happened on the way to the New Hampshire primary: ABC moderator George Stephanopoulos embarrassed himself on national television with questions plainly intended to embarrass the Republican candidates. Therein lies a lesson.

On Saturday night, Mr. Stephanopoulos stepped outside the role of honest interlocutor when he pursued Mitt Romney with the issue on nobody’s lips or legislative agenda: whether states have the right to ban contraception. Likewise, fellow moderator Diane Sawyer, who asked Republicans what they would say, “sitting in their living rooms,” to a gay couple.

As the audience appreciated—they booed after Mr. Stephanopolous’s sixth follow-up—these questions were designed less to illuminate than to paint Republicans as people who hate gays and are so crazy they might just ban contraception if elected.

For conservatives, this is nothing new. Conservatives are used to a world where the referees often seem to be playing for the other team. In this case, however, the responses from the candidates were revealing.

Rick Santorum essentially answered directly, opposing the Supreme Court’s definition of privacy and defending traditional marriage. On the question about gays, Newt Gingrich called marriage between a man and a woman a defining part of our civilization. He then turned the question back on Ms. Sawyer, wondering why the press never asks about how same-sex marriage is driving the Catholic Church out of the adoption business. As for state bans on contraception, Mr. Romney noted that no state was in fact proposing to do so, “and asking me whether they could do it or not is kind of a silly thing.”

If this were an academic exercise, Mr. Santorum might score highest. Even those who disagree with him would concede that his answers were on point. He knows what he believes and why, and he does not run away when asked to defend the hard position.

Mr. Gingrich’s answer showed why he remains popular among many Republican quarters despite his considerable baggage. Unlike those who strike conservative voters as too polite or deferential to lordly media figures, Mr. Gingrich calls bias by its name. And he was right to point out that there are serious consequences (such as adoption) to the legalization of same-sex marriage that the news media mostly choose to ignore.

Nevertheless, Mr. Romney trumped. He didn’t shy away from the substance, confirming that he favors repeal of Roe v. Wade and explaining the constitutional way to oppose court decisions when you believe one has been wrongly decided. But when he dismissed the whole line of questioning as “silly,” he made Mr. Stephanopoulos look ridiculous.

That’s something to remember going forward. Yes, it’s unfair that Democratic candidates such as President Obama can count on the media to amplify their biases against Republicans. Bias, however, is a fact of American political life. Merely complaining about it doesn’t move the ball.

No one appreciated this more than Ronald Reagan. Today we remember the Gipper as a popular and beloved American figure. That’s not the way he was presented to the American public when he was running against Jimmy Carter in 1980. Back then, Mr. Reagan was cast as a divisive, Neanderthal warmonger itching to push the nuclear button.

President Carter played to this image. A “MacNeil/Lehrer Report” after the single presidential debate that year noted that Mr. Carter had used the word “dangerous” six times. Another observer added that the president had also called Reagan “heartless,” “insensitive,” “misleading,” “disturbing” and “irresponsible.”

Mr. Reagan didn’t let it get to him. When Mr. Carter implied Mr. Reagan was against Medicare because he opposed all efforts to help provide decent health care for American citizens, Mr. Reagan smiled and shook his head. Then he issued four devastating words that have now entered the political lexicon: “There you go again.”

There’s a good lesson here. Whatever else we know about 2012, we know we will have many more Stephanopoulos moments ahead. Though it might be more satisfying to thunder against the injustice, there are other, possibly more effective ways to expose the bias.

On the social issues especially, the media narrative is that Republicans are obsessed. The truth is that at a time when millions of Americans can’t find work, when our Middle East policy is in turmoil, when the future of Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement—health care—is in question, every Republican in the running is itching for the opportunity to talk about how he would address these things.

In sharp contrast, it was Mr. Stephanopoulos and Ms. Sawyer who showed themselves consumed with nonexistent initiatives on contraception and what you might say to gay friends who are sitting in your living room. Saturday night on ABC, we saw this bias in its full, condescending form.

We also saw something less well appreciated: that a Republican candidate can turn it to his advantage.

And since we’re on the subject, here’s today’s installment of Educated Idiots on Parade, brought to us by James Taranto:

Those Who Can’t Do . . .

 

• “And, as we sit here today, the popular trend is not with the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, what makes the uprising here [in Egypt] so impressive–and in that sense so dangerous to other autocracies in the region–is precisely the fact that it is not owned by, and was not inspired by, the Muslim Brotherhood.”–Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Feb. 13, 2011

• “Someday I’d love to create a journalism course based on covering the uprising in Egypt, now approaching its first anniversary. Lesson No. 1 would be the following: Whenever you see elephants flying, shut up and take notes. The Egyptian uprising is the equivalent of elephants flying. No one predicted it, and no one had seen this before. If you didn’t see it coming, what makes you think you know where it’s going? That’s why the smartest thing now is to just shut up and take notes. If you do, the first thing you’ll write is that the Islamist parties–the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party–just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections.”–Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Jan. 8, 2012

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, in the Wide, Wild World of Sports….

Alabama shuts out LSU for BCS title

They lost 9-6 the first time with four missed field goals….and shut them out the 2nd 21-0.

As much as we hate to say this, and forgetting for the moment whether they should have ever had another chance in the first place, any question who’s #1?!?

OF COURSE THERE IS….WHICH IS WHY WE NEED A TOURNAMENT IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL, JUST LIKE EVERY SINGLE OTHER NCAA SPORT!!!

Magoo