It’s Monday, April 30th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up on the last edition of the month, James Taranto relates why B. Hussein should be considered:

Obama the Unseemly

A more aggressive press corps might have motivated him to preserve his dignity.

There’s been a lot of talk of late about how “cool” Barack Obama supposedly is. But people are starting to notice the man has no class.

“Blue collar Democratic voters, stuck taking depressing ‘staycations’ because they can’t afford gas and hotels, are resentful of the first family’s 17 lavish vacations around the world and don’t want their tax dollars paying for the Obamas’ holidays, according to a new analysis of swing voters,” reports the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard.

The Obamas have plenty of class….all of it third!

A group of Republican pollsters conducted focus groups of swing-state swing voters, mostly Democrats and independents, and John McLaughlin “handled blue collar and Catholic voters” in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. He found that they tend to think Mitt Romney is “too rich,” but “there is a start of resentment of the government.” In Bedard’s words, “voters were also lumping in the president’s vacation spending in with the General Services Administration’s Las Vegas scandal and federal spending for those who aren’t looking for work.”

Obama is also notorious for his golf outings. Blogress Ann Althouse, another swing voter (she has admitted supporting Obama in 2008), notes that George W. Bush was “savaged” for going golfing “when Americans were fighting and dying.” Michael Moore made hay of it in his 2004 agitprop film “Fahrenheit 9/11,” notwithstanding that Bush had given up golf in 2003 on the ground that it was unseemly: “I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong message.” Althouse opens her post with a story about the latest casualties in Afghanistan.

Althouse further criticizes Obama for his appearance earlier this week on the NBC show “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” in which, as Althouse notes, “Obama performs 5 minutes of a musically sexualized speech about students. . . . It’s wearing down my sense of the outlandish.” We watched part of the Fallon video and found it to be a head-scratcher. The president seems to be making a serious policy argument (in favor of extending subsidies for college debt), Fallon is sucking up to him, and somehow it’s supposed to be a comedy routine. We guess you had to be there.

The student-debt debate has underscored another unattractive aspect of Obama’s presidential style: his tendency to be always and indiscriminately on the attack. The Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman notes that the president not only personally attacked two Republican congressmen, Missouri’s Todd Akin and North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, but grievously misquoted both of them.

Helderman dryly notes that “it is somewhat unusual for a sitting president to single out individual rank-and-file members of the opposition party for criticism and scorn in public speeches.” She quotes Speaker John Boehner: “Frankly, I think this is beneath the dignity of the White House.”

But is anything beneath the dignity of the Obama White House? This, after all, is the same president who has ignorantly blasted the Supreme Court and Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee. The only difference in his attacks on Akin and Foxx is that he is manifestly punching down. What next? Will he go after private citizens?

Oh ha ha, he’s doing that already, as our colleague Kim Strassel notes:

This past week, one of his campaign websites posted an item entitled “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors.” In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having “less-than-reputable records,” the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that “quite a few” have also been “on the wrong side of the law” and profiting at “the expense of so many Americans.”

Strassel likens Obama’s demonization to Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” which “appalled the country for the simple reason that presidents hold a unique trust.” It’s an apt comparison, but even Nixon delegated much of his attack-doggery to his vice president, Spiro Agnew. We guess Joe Biden is too goofy for that role so Obama has to do it himself.

It seems to us that Althouse is on to something in suggesting that part of the reason Obama conducts himself in such an unseemly way is that the mainstream media are largely Democratic partisans, inclined to give their man a pass. True, there are plenty of alternative media voices now, but it’s relatively easy for a leftist president to dismiss them and continue to enjoy the adulation of the so-called mainstreamers, who have also been suggesting lately that Obama is a shoo-in for re-election because he is so likable.

The McLaughlin findings point to the risk that that isn’t the case. Obama could end up losing because sycophantic media encouraged him to act in such an unseemly way.

There’s a parallel in the way the media have strained to play down bad economic news. A couple of hilarious examples come from NPR’s website today: A homepage title asked: “Is Slow Growth Actually Good for the Economy?” (The actual story, which has a less risible title, pretty much answers in the negative.) And an NPR “Special Series” is titled “Looking Up: Pockets of Economic Strength.”

Remember when the economy was strong and there were pockets of poverty? In November, it is possible the voters will.

Unseemly, undignified, unbecoming; take your pick.  But whatever term you choose to describe what is an increasingly coarse and indecorous presidency, you can add unqualified as well.

This White House is looking more and more like a cross between the Beverly Hillbillies and The Jeffersons….all on the taxpayer’s nickel!

Speaking of the taxpayer’s nickel, as John Lehman details in the WSJ, at the same time the First Marxette is spending millions on luxury vacations and Tick-Tock is tossing hundreds of billions at college students, union workers, “Palestinians” and any other special interest group he thinks can better his odds for re-election, America’s national defense is suffering purposeful neglect:

The Seas Are Great but the Navy Is Small

The Obama administration says it wants 300 ships, but it is reducing the number now while promising to build more far into the future, most after a second Obama term.

In recent weeks, the Pentagon leadership has been defending the indefensible before Congress. Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently on record deploring last year’s budget cuts are now claiming that the Obama administration’s latest—and still lower—defense budget is adequate. Really?

Undersecretary of the Navy Robert Work, an experienced veteran, defended the president’s goal of a 300-ship Navy in an interview last week with the website AOL Defense. He claimed it was equivalent to the Reagan administration’s goal of a 600-ship Navy, on the grounds that newer ships are better than the ones they replace.

That is true in some cases, such as submarines. But it is not true for other ships such as the new LCS (littoral combat ship), which does not have the firepower of the older frigates. Moreover, our potential adversaries, from pirates to the Iranian Navy, have improved their ships as well.

But most important, numbers still count: The seas are great and our Navy is small. Mr. Work’s statement to AOL Defense that “the United States Navy will be everywhere in the world that it has been, and it will be as much [present] as the 600-ship navy” is not persuasive.

The size of the Navy in the Reagan administration (it reached 594 ships in 1987) reflected a strategy to deter the Soviet Union’s world-wide naval force. Today we face no such powerful naval adversary, but the world is just as large, and there is now greater American dependence on global trade and many more disturbers of the peace.

While we do not need 600 ships today, no naval experts believe a 300-ship Navy is large enough to guarantee freedom of the seas for American and allied trade, for supporting threatened allies, for deterring rogue states like Iran from closing vital straits, and for maintaining stability in areas like the western Pacific. For example, the bipartisan Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel led by Stephen Hadley and William Perry last year concluded that the Navy should have at least 346 vessels.

Last week, members of the House Armed Services Committee challenged the president’s plan. In response to a question about whether the Navy was changing how it counts ships to prop up the size of the fleet, Mr. Work insisted that he was following the same rules for counting ships I established 30 years ago as President Reagan’s secretary of the Navy. He is correct; while there are some differences, they are minor. The Navy has not fudged the numbers.

The more troubling problem is that the administration is counting ships that won’t be built at all. Last year, the president’s budget called for cuts of $487 billion over the next decade. Mr. Obama also supports the additional cuts growing out of the sequester that went into effect after last year’s super committee failed to agree on savings in the overall budget. Unless the law is changed, this means an additional half-trillion dollars in mandatory defense reductions over the next decade—cuts that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said would be “devastating.”

Naval readiness is already highly fragile. In order to meet current operational requirements, the shrunken fleet stays deployed longer and gets repaired less. There is now a serious shortage of Navy combat aircraft, and for the first time since World War II there are essentially no combat attrition reserves. But the biggest effect of budget cuts will be on naval shipbuilding.

Currently the Navy has 286 ships. In order to pay for current operations, Mr. Obama is retiring 11 modern combat ships (seven cruisers and four amphibious vessels) well before their useful life. In order to reach a 350-ship fleet in our lifetime, we will need to increase shipbuilding to an average of 15 ships every year. The latest budget the administration has advanced proposes buying just 41 ships over five years. It is anything but certain that the administration’s budgets will sustain even that rate of only eight ships per year, but even if they do, the United States is headed for a Navy of 240-250 ships at best.

So how is the Obama administration getting to a 300-ship Navy? It projects a huge increase in naval shipbuilding beginning years down the road, most of which would come after a second Obama term. In other words, the administration is radically cutting the size and strength of the Navy now, while trying to avoid accountability by assuming that a future president will find the means to fix the problem in the future.

This compromises our national security. The Navy is the foundation of America’s economic and political presence in the world. Other nations, like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, are watching what we do—and on the basis of the evidence, they are undoubtedly concluding that under Mr. Obama America is declining in power and resolution. Russia and China have each embarked on ambitious and enormously expensive naval buildups with weapons designed specifically against American carriers and submarines.

Under Ronald Reagan, the U.S. increased its naval strength to the point that it was a major factor in the decision of Soviet leaders to abandon the Cold War without firing a shot. The Navy under Mr. Obama is heading in the opposite direction.

This is not the fault of the senior Navy leadership, (If you’ll excuse our French, bullSH*T!!!) which has to operate within the limits set by the White House. During the Reagan years, those of us in leadership positions served a commander in chief who understood, completely and instinctively, the relationship between American strength and the protection of peace and freedom in an unstable world. Current Pentagon leaders do not have that advantage. And that is a compelling reason why a change at the top is vital for the future safety of the American people.

We disagree with Lehman on only one point, and that most strenuously; the continuing evisceration of the United States Navy in particular, and America’s Armed Forces in general, is most definitely the fault of our senior military leaders.  Military officers always have a choice: obey the orders passed down by the Commander-in-Chief through the chain of command….or resign.

And despite The Obamao undertaking what anyone with half a clue can see as the purposeful decimation of American military supremacy, the powers-that-be in the Pentagon, the Navy’s senior leadership included, have behaved like eunuchs, sacrificing a once-proud Military on the altar of political correctness in the interests of career advancement and personal gain.

We cannot recall a single senior officer speaking out, let alone resigning in protest over budget cuts and policies decision which plainly run contrary to our national defense.  And though there’s no question The Obamao’s giving the orders, it’s equally certain the mass resignation of the nation’s senior brass in protest of Tick-Tock’s defense policies would sink this Administration like a stone.  Unfortunately, stones are just what the Military’s senior leadership lacks.

And all this in the face of….

Chinese Hackers Stole Plans for Newest US Fighters

….and increasingly hostile and dangerous world.

And since we’re on the subject of lacking stones, as this next item, courtesy of Bill Meisen and Breitbart.com reports, in what has become his trademark, an absence of cajones is the reality behind The Obamao’s actual involvement in the bin Laden mission:

What ‘Gutsy Call’?: CIA Memo Reveals Admiral Controlled bin Laden Mission

Today, Time magazine got hold of a memo written by then-CIA head Leon Panetta after he received orders from Barack Obama’s team to greenlight the bin Laden mission. Here’s the text, which summarized the situation:

Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault.

The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at approximately 10:45 am.

This, of course, was the famed “gutsy call.” Here’s what Tom Hanks narrated in Obama’s campaign film, “The Road We’ve Traveled”:

HANKS: Intelligence reports locating Osama Bin Laden were promising, but inconclusive, and there was internal debate as to what the President should do.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: We sat down in the Situation Room, the entire national security apparatus was in that room, and the President turns to every principal in the room, every secretary, “What do you recommend I do?” And they say, “Well, forty-nine percent chance he’s there, fifty-one … it’s a close call, Mr. President.” As he walked out the room, it dawned on me, he’s all alone. This is his decision. If he was wrong, his Presidency was done. Over. (Yeah….like America would have ever HEARD about it!)

Only the memo doesn’t show a gutsy call. It doesn’t show a president willing to take the blame for a mission gone wrong. It shows a CYA maneuver by the White House.

The memo puts all control in the hands of Admiral McRaven – the “timing, operational decision making and control” are all up to McRaven. So the notion that Obama and his team were walking through every stage of the operation is incorrect. The hero here was McRaven, not Obama. And had the mission gone wrong, McRaven surely would have been thrown under the bus.

The memo is crystal clear on that point. It says that the decision has been made based solely on the “risk profile presented to the President.” If any other risks – no matter how minute – arose, they were “to be brought back to the President for his consideration.” This is ludicrous. It is wiggle room. It was Obama’s way of carving out space for himself in case the mission went bad. If it did, he’d say that there were additional risks of which he hadn’t been informed; he’d been kept in the dark by his military leaders.

Finally, the memo is unclear on just what the mission is. Was it to capture Bin Laden or to kill him? The White House itself was unable to decide what the mission was in the hours after the Bin Laden kill, and actually switched its language. The memo shows why: McRaven was instructed to “get” Bin Laden, whatever that meant.

President Obama made the right call to give the green light to the mission. But he did it in a way that he could shift the blame if things went wrong. Typical Obama. And typical of him to claim full credit for it, when he didn’t do anything but give a vague nod, while putting his top military officials at risk of taking the hit in case of a bad turn.

In other words, the Commander-in-Chief yet again voted “present”.  And in bagging bin Laden is the basis for The Dear Misleader’s 2012 campaign….

….good luck!

In another Campaign 2012-related item from the Washington Examiner….

Vacation backlash: Blue collar Dems jealous, angry at Obamas

Blue collar Democratic voters, stuck taking depressing “staycations” because they can’t afford gas and hotels, are resentful of the first family’s 17 lavish vacations around the world and don’t want their tax dollars paying for the Obamas’ holidays, according to a new analysis of swing voters.

During the focus group discussions about debt and spending cuts, many in his group volunteered criticism of the presidential vacations as something that should be cut. Among the lines McLaughlin wrote down was one from a Democratic woman who said, “Michelle Obama spends $1 million to take the kids to Hawaii,” and another who said, “President Obama was the only president to take so many trips.”

The theme, said McLaughlin, is that the first family “is out of touch” with working class voters. He added that the president’s attack on the rich and GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney’s wealth is working, but the voters were also lumping in the president’s vacation spending in with the General Services Administration’s Las Vegas scandal and federal spending for those who aren’t looking for work.

“There really wasn’t a real dislike for Romney. It was just that he is too rich. But on the other hand there is a start of resentment of the government,” he said. “What surprised me is that these were Democrats back biting on their own president,” added McLaughlin.

Think about it: the most vacations ever taken by a First Family, 17 in all, all to luxury destinations, all at taxpayer expense and not a single one to Camp David, a retreat far less expensive to reach, reserved for Presidents 24/7 and which is already funded by our tax dollars.  So why isn’t this the fodder of constant GOP campaign ads?!?

And in today’s Money Quote, we offer Hairball Harry’s pithy reply when asked what should be done if the hiring of hookers is revealed to be a recurring problem with the Secret Service:

“Hire more females.“

 Yeah….sure; after all, Reid’s recommended remedy certainly solved all the problems over at the….

Disgraced former GSA Administrator Martha Johnson

….GSA!

And in the “Desperate Times Call For Desperate Denunciations” segment, brought to us today by Best of the Web, we learn….

Recently CounterPunch.org published a bizarre hit piece by John Dean:

In my last column, I asked if Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker might be a conservative without conscience. Stated a bit differently, my question is whether the Governor is what social science describes as a “double high authoritarian,” an outlook that has proven itself not to be particularly well-suited for governing in a democratic fashion.

Dean answers the question at great length and in the affirmative. Our favorite section is the one in which he explains that Walker is “submissive to authority”:

News accounts reveal that Scott Walker was a “good boy” growing up. Clearly, he worked to please his parents, and his Boy Scout and Eagle Scout superiors, and he accepted the authority of his church elders. Since becoming involved in politics, he has accepted the leaders of the Republican Party, particularly those with the most right-wing of views, as he has worked his way up through the ranks. While Scott Walker plays by the rules of the authorities he accepts, because he is a dominator, it is not surprising that his resume shows that he has constantly sought to become an authority himself.

OK, so Walker was a “good boy” and an Eagle Scout–and these are cited in a hit piece! CounterPunch is a crackpot lefty site, and Dean was an adviser to President Nixon. Put them together and you end up with some kind of new species of paranoiac.

Then there’s this inestimable bit of insight from Peter Wallison and Edward Pinto, courtesy of the AEI:  It’s a bit lengthy, but well worth the read, as it provides an incredibly accurate assessment of what the authors term….

Free fall: How government policies brought down the housing market

http://www.aei.org/outlook/economics/financial-services/housing-finance/free-fall-how-government-policies-brought-down-the-housing-market/

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll wrap up the month with the Wide, Wild World of Sports, and another reason we agree with Dan Henninger we are indeed living in the Age of Indiscretion:

Nike: Comments were ‘inappropriate’

The man behind LeBron James’ Nike sneakers apologized Sunday after he sparked outrage by mocking Adidas rival Derrick Rose over his season-ending ACL tear, saying the Chicago Bulls star chose the wrong shoe. Senior footwear designer Jason Petrie tweeted Rose “#shouldasignedwithNIKE” after the reigning MVP suffered the knee injury in the Bulls’ playoff series opener against the Philadelphia 76ers in Chicago on Saturday.

Rose signed a career deal with Adidas in February worth a minimum of $185 million over 13 years.

Petrie, who designed the sneakers worn and endorsed by Heat star James, made a comparison between his man and Rose, who he referred to by his family nickname, “Pooh.” “You got one guy only getting stronger, and one guy breaking down before our very eyes. You chose poorly Pooh… #shouldasignedwithNIKE #GWS [get well soon],” he tweeted.

Petrie received an angry response for his comments, which followers branded in “bad taste” and “classless.” Another tweeted, “Damn, you’re an embarrassment to Nike tweeting that.”

The designer attempted to draw back from the criticism, tweeting, “Y’all take sh#t too serious! Never want to see anyone get hurt- I hope DRose comes back stronger than ever, he’s too good…” More and more people expressed their disgust at his original ill-judged comment, and on Sunday he said he was sorry. “Wow! Twitterverse I do apologize. It was really just tongue n cheek! Never meant any harm or disrespect!”

Nike released a statement on the issue, describing Petrie’s comments as “inappropriate.”

We’re certainly no fan of the NBA; in fact, we haven’t watched a game since MJ closed out his career with the Bullets….er,….Wizards; but it would seem only poetic justice were Petrie to suffer an injury as painful and damaging as Rose’s.  Unfortunately, as with so many sports peripherites these days, we doubt he ever participates in anything more risky than Pilates.

Magoo