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David Warren says Islamofacists are on the march because the West is beginning to look the part of bin Laden’s weak horse.
… The reasons for this resurgence are ready to hand. To the Islamist mind, the United States and her allies appear mortally wounded by a financial crisis that is metastasizing into an international depression. While they, too, suffer from the collapse of the oil price, and such funding as depends upon it, their war against the “Great Satan” remains asymmetrical, and material setbacks count harder against their enemy.
But there is a larger, though less tangible reason for their renewed confidence. “Bush and Blair” — the enemies Islamists most feared and detested — are now gone from the world stage, and the vision and determination with which they resisted Islamism has become suddenly a thing of the past.
The new American president, Barack Obama, has come to power with a promise to negotiate with America’s most deadly enemies; he signalled weakness unambiguously in a television interview to the Muslim world; he wants out of Iraq, and does not know what he is doing in Afghanistan. The very gloom and doom he is preaching on the home front, in order to get huge “progressive” spending measures through Congress, is the final confirmation that the United States is down and ready for the kicking. …
Looking at the collapsing markets, Roger Simon can follow the clues.
Jennifer Rubin learns from markets too.
… the president seems unconcerned with the private-sector slump. He’s out to expand government into new areas of regulation and control, inflict new taxes on investors, and remake the U.S. economy in the mold of its European counterparts so it will absorb more and more of the nation’s GDP than at any time since World War II.
Liberal pundits and other supporters of the president feign ignorance as to why the markets are crashing or they contend the downturn is unrelated to the Obama economic agenda. This is hogwash. CNBC analyst Charlie Gasparino, who spends his day with traders, investors, and other analysts, asks them why markets are in a downward spiral. Lo and behold, the administration’s policies and uncertainty have freaked them out. He describes their buyers’ remorse: …
Rubin says now Obama has lost David Brooks.
It’s not quite LBJ losing Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam War, but the president has lost David Brooks:
Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”
Well, well. First Chris Buckley and now Brooks. Usually it takes more than a month for presidents to disappoint those they have bamboozled during the campaign. But, as Brooks points out, Obama threw caution to the winds when he unveiled his monstrous budget: …
Abe Greenwald on how the Russians said nyet.
… Barack Obama is turning into a bizarro Don Corleone: He makes offers you can’t not refuse. Here are the fruits of “smart power” so far: Iran responds to President Obama’s “extended hand” by demanding apologies for a litany of American crimes; China has been given an American green-light to ramp up undisguised human rights abuses; the Russian president brushed off Obama’s appeal for help like so much dandruff; and Eastern Europe, where George W. Bush had successfully built up a spate of American allies, has been cut loose.
Next stop on the Smart Power ‘09 Tour: Syria, where the Assad regime is undoubtedly astounded by its own good fortune.
Bill McGurn wants to know if Obama will stand up for his children’s classmates.
Dick Durbin has a nasty surprise for two of Sasha and Malia Obama’s new schoolmates. And it puts the president in an awkward position.
The children are Sarah and James Parker. Like the Obama girls, Sarah and James attend the Sidwell Friends School in our nation’s capital. Unlike the Obama girls, they could not afford the school without the $7,500 voucher they receive from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Unfortunately, a spending bill the Senate takes up this week includes a poison pill that would kill this program — and with it perhaps the Parker children’s hopes for a Sidwell diploma. …
Cato posts on the DC voucher program.
WaPo editors defend the vouchers in DC.
CONGRESSIONAL Democrats want to mandate that the District’s unique school voucher program be reauthorized before more federal money can be allocated for it. It is a seemingly innocuous requirement. In truth it is an ill-disguised bid to kill a program that gives some poor parents a choice regarding where their children go to school. Many of the Democrats have never liked vouchers, and it seems they won’t let fairness or the interests of low-income, minority children stand in the way of their politics. But it also seems they’re too ashamed — and with good reason — to admit to what they’re doing. …
Walter Williams has words for Eric Holder.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the United States is “a nation of cowards” when it comes to race relations. In one sense, he is absolutely right. Many whites, from university administrators and professors, schoolteachers to employers and public officials accept behavior from black people that they wouldn’t begin to accept from whites. For example, some of the nation’s most elite universities, such as Vanderbilt, Stanford University and the University of California, have yielded to black student demands for separate graduation ceremonies and separate “celebratory events.” Universities such as Stanford, Cornell, MIT, and Cal Berkeley have, or have had, segregated dorms. If white students demanded whites-only graduation ceremonies or whites-only dorms, administrators would have labeled their demands as intolerable racism. When black students demand the same thing, these administrators cowardly capitulate. Calling these university administrators cowards is the most flattering characterization of their behavior. They might actually be stupid enough to believe nonsense taught by their some of sociology and psychology professors that blacks can’t be racists because they don’t have power. …
Jonah Goldberg defends Rush Limbaugh.
Here we go again. Rush Limbaugh is public enemy No. 1.
Liberal bloggers and media chin-strokers are aghast at Limbaugh’s statement that he hopes Barack Obama fails.
Well, given what Obama wants to do, I hope he fails too. Of course I want the financial crisis to end — who doesn’t? But Obama’s agenda is much more audacious. Pretty much every major news outlet in the country has said as a matter of objective analysis that Obama wants to repeal the legacy of Ronald Reagan and remake the country as a European welfare state. And yet people are shocked that conservatives, Limbaugh included, want Obama to fail in this effort?
What movie have they been watching? Because I could swear that conservatives opposing the expansion of big government is what conservatives do. It’s Aesopian. The scorpion must sting the frog. The conservative must object to socialized medicine. …
Scott Ott of Scrappleface reports in the DC Examiner that soon AIG will not be too big to fail.
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