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Thomas Sowell on the “Rookie President.”
Someone once said that, for every rookie you have on your starting team in the National Football League, you will lose a game. Somewhere, at some time during the season, a rookie will make a mistake that will cost you a game.
We now have a rookie President of the United States and, in the dangerous world we live in, with terrorist nations going nuclear, just one rookie mistake can bring disaster down on this generation and generations yet to come.
Barack Obama is a rookie in a sense that few other Presidents in American history have ever been. It is not just that he has never been President before. He has never had any position of major executive responsibility in any kind of organization where he was personally responsible for the outcome.
Other first-term Presidents have been governors, generals, cabinet members or others in positions of personal responsibility. A few have been senators, like Barack Obama, but usually for longer than Obama, and had not spent half their few years in the senate running for President.
What is even worse than making mistakes is having sycophants telling you that you are doing fine when you are not. In addition to all the usual hangers-on and supplicants for government favors that every President has, Barack Obama has a media that will see no evil, hear no evil and certainly speak no evil. …
Writing for the Weekly Standard, Reuel Marc Gerecht decries the weakness demonstrated by Obama.
In diplomacy and espionage, there is no worse mistake than “mirror-imaging,” that is, ascribing to foreigners your own actions and views. For Westerners this is especially debilitating, given our modern proclivity to assume that others pursue their interests in secular, material, and guilt-ridden ways. Confession is an important part of the Western tradition; self-criticism is less acute elsewhere. Americans, the British, the Spanish, and the French have written libraries about their own imperialistic sins; Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and Russians have not. In an unsuccessful effort to reach out to Iran’s clerical regime in 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized for the actions of the entire Western world. Last week, in response to President Barack Obama’s let’s-talk greetings broadcast to Iran, theocratic overlord Ali Khamenei, “supreme leader” of the Islamic Republic of Iran, enumerated 30 years’ worth of America’s dastardly deeds against the Islamic revolution–but not a peccadillo that the clerical regime had committed against any Western country.
Looking overseas, many Americans are feeling guilty. George W. Bush and his wars have embarrassed Democrats and Republicans. So the Obama administration has tried to push the “reset” button, and not just with Russia. Nowhere has this American sense of guilt been more on display than in the Middle East: Obama has picked up where Bill Clinton left off, trying to engage diplomatically Iran and Syria, and perhaps down the road the Palestinian fundamentalist movement Hamas. Yet nowhere is guilt-fueled mirror-imaging more dangerous.
Washington is again putting U.S.-Iranian relations on the psychiatrist’s couch, treating the mullahs as if they were something other than masters of Islamic machtpolitik. Obama’s message to Khamenei emphasizes “mutual respect,” “shared hopes,” “common dreams,” and Iran’s great historic “ability to build and create.” I would bet the national debt that the president and the supreme leader share not a single hope or dream that could possibly have any bearing on the relations between their two countries. Khamenei is a serious revolutionary cleric and a man of considerable personal integrity who has suffered severely for his beliefs (in 1981 a bomb blast mangled his right arm). He is a faithful son of the Islamic revolution. …
David Limbaugh spots another terrible Obama appointment.
As usual, President Barack Obama is multi-tasking the dismantling of the American system on so many fronts that not all of the outrages can be properly monitored. So while you should be mortified by his dictatorial power grab with General Motors, please don’t miss his recent nomination of former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as legal adviser for the State Department.
In his new position, Koh not only would represent the United States before international bodies, such as the U.N. and the International Court of Justice, but also would influence the degree to which laws of other countries should influence American jurisprudence.
After reading an alarming piece by Meghan Clyne in the New York Post concerning the Koh nomination and the degree to which Koh believes it’s appropriate for courts to consider other nations’ laws in interpreting our Constitution, I read a number of Koh’s legal writings and speeches.
Clyne reported that New York lawyer Steven Stein said that Koh, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, claimed that “in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.” …
Victor Davis Hanson on how to spot a narcissist.
Left libertarian Nat Hentoff, formerly of The Village Voice writes on the teacher’s unions’ war against the kids.
The “education president” remained silent when his congressional Democrats essentially killed the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in the city where he now lives and works.
Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.
First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410-billion omnibus spending bill language to eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year. …
John Fund with more details on the loss of DC’s vouchers.
Christopher Booker in London’s Sunday Telegraph says ocean’s rising is so much bunk.
If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.
Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story. …
American.com piece on how the administration will weaken the drug industry.
The pharmaceutical industry is programmed to lurch from crisis to crisis. Even the most promising drugs can fail in development, as happened to Pfizer when it spent a billion dollars on a cholesterol drug that failed in a late-stage trial and precipitated Pfizer’s exit from heart drug research altogether. The rare blockbuster success brings huge profits but those profits typically plummet when patents expire, sometimes wreaking havoc on entire firms. And there is government shock—cuts in reimbursement levels, controls over pricing, shifting regulatory standards, and massive litigation.
Now, in addition, the Obama budget and the pronouncements of the Democratic-majority Congress make clear that the industry that has given us so many lifesaving drugs will soon face politically inspired assaults, ranging from tougher FDA standards to expanded controls over drug prices in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. There will be debate, of course, but the pharmaceutical industry will be peeking out from behind the eight ball. The news media and academic pundits will declare that the industry’s best days are behind it, that most R&D money is wasted in chasing after so-called me-too or copycat drugs of negligible clinical value, and that political and financial interference in today’s fumbling and inefficient R&D enterprise would do little harm despite the familiar warnings from economists about undermining research incentives.
Correcting these dangerous misimpressions could fill a book. But for now, let’s take a look at the February 21 issue of The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest continuously published medical journals. Rather left of center in its political orientation, The Lancet has solid drug-industry bashing credentials. …
Dilbert’s here to tell us how he became a cartoonist.
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