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Mark Steyn wants to know why the bien pensants never did due diligence on the kid.
“The way I think about it,” Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, “is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft.”
He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53 percent of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in contempt those who allow him to seize it on the basis of such flaccid generalities as “hope” and “change”: That’s more than “a little” soft. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” declared presidential historian Michael Beschloss the day after the 2008 election. But you don’t have to be that smart to put one over on all the smart guys. “I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap,” admits David Brooks, the softest touch at The New York Times. Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek, now says of the president: “He wasn’t ready, it turns out, really.”
If you’re a tenured columnist at The New York Times, you can just about afford the consequences of your sappiness. But out there among the hundreds of thousands of your readers who didn’t know you were a sap until you told them three years later, soft choices have hard consequences. If you’re one of Obama’s core constituencies, the ones who looked so photogenic at all the hopeychangey rallies, things are really hard: “Young Becoming ‘Lost Generation’ Amid Recession” (CBS News). Tough luck, rubes. You got a bumper sticker; he got to make things worse.
But don’t worry, it’s not much better at the other end of the spectrum:
“Obama’s Wall Street Donors Look Elsewhere” (UPI). Gee, aren’t you the fellows who, when you buy a company, do something called “due diligence”? But you sunk everything into stock in Obamania Inc. on the basis of his “perfectly creased pant leg” or whatever David Brooks was drooling about that day? You handed a multitrillion-dollar economy to a community organizer, and you’re surprised that it led to more taxes, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more barnacles on an already rusting hulk? …
The administration’s jobs act still has no co-sponsors in either the House or the Senate. Ed Morrissey points out that in a parliamentary system, the government would fail because of this no confidence vote.
… Anyone in either chamber can add their name to the bill as a co-sponsor. It’s not as if there are only a couple of Democrats in Congress. The House has 193 Democrats, 192 of which apparently don’t want to be associated with Obama’s job-creation track record. Democrats control the Senate with 51 members and two independents, although on this legislation it looks more like one Democrat and 52 independents.
We have a federal system, not a parliamentary system, so our legislature doesn’t take votes of no-confidence to force an executive out of power. But given the high-profile rollout of the AJA by Obama, including his demand for a joint session to escalate pressure for action, the lack of any co-sponsors on these bills is about as close as we’ll get to a vote of no confidence in this executive short of an outright floor-vote failure in the Senate on the bill.
Matthew Continetti shows how the left media was hot on the Enron trail, but decides to overlook Solyndra.
In happier times, the firm had been celebrated as a harbinger of the future. The political connections it enjoyed were the fruit not only of well-placed contributions but of a self-imposed ideological mission: It was going to deliver cheap energy in amazing ways. Top executives had dismissed accounting irregularities. The normal rules, it was said, did not apply.
Then came the reckoning. Bankruptcy. Layoffs. An FBI investigation. Subpoenas. And the guard dogs of the press—always ready to sniff out a good scandal—leaped into action. What you read in the news was “not just the story of a company that failed,” wrote one major columnist. “It is the story of a system that failed. And the system didn’t fail through carelessness or laziness; it was corrupted.” A frenzy of speculation surrounded the company’s demise: “One wonders if it is the tip of an iceberg,” the columnist wrote. “And how many of us have, without knowing it, booked passage on the Titanic?”
The columnist’s then-colleague, who has a flair for the dramatic, wasted no time placing this image of corporate greed “against the stark backdrop of those less well-connected Americans who are fighting our war.” And the editorial board at their paper let its verdict be known throughout the land: “In order to restore confidence in American capitalism and in the integrity of its financial markets,” the editors wrote, “the public needs to understand what brought” the company “down.”
Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and the New York Times, in other words, were all bent on uncovering the extent of the executives’ crimes and the nature of the White House’s involvement. But that must have been only because the company in question was Enron and the administration under attack was George W. Bush’s. About the spectacular bankruptcy of the (admittedly smaller) solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra, our most fashionable minds are much less curious. …
This administration by the numbers. Great graphics from flickr.com Could not manage to massage the format of this blog post. So, follow the link.
Jennifer Rubin on hypocrisy alert.
I had to rub my eyes when catching up on my news reading for the past few days. Are liberals such as columnists Eugene Robinson and Michael Kinsley really suggesting that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is too fat to be president?
If so, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with reasons why throngs of GOP voters and a great many independents and Democrats otherwise prepared to vote for Christie should reconsider.
Let me first observe the gross hypocrisy at work here. President Obama smokes. While in office Bill Clinton was overweight and had high cholesterol. I never heard any of these folks raise a peep. So long as there was no evidence that they could not fulfill their duties over the course of their term, liberals (being nonjudgmental in all things except the behavior of conservatives) didn’t seem to mind. (I suppose they’d have insisted that Winston Churchill stay in the wilderness with that smelly cigar?) …
The US is oil rich like Saudi Arabia? WSJ piece by Stephen Moore says so.
Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be “completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century.”
“President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy,” he adds. We can’t come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into “green energy” sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas.
You’d expect an oilman to make the “drill, baby, drill” pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation’s fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers.
How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: “No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels.”
If he’s right, that’ll double America’s proven oil reserves. …
… Mr. Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, “I truly believe the federal government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties.” That’s more than the U.S. national debt, I say. He smiles.
This estimate sounds implausibly high, but Mr. Hamm has a lifelong habit of proving skeptics wrong. And even if he’s wrong by half, it’s a stunning number to think about. So this America-first energy story isn’t just about jobs and economic revival. It’s also about repairing America’s battered balance sheet. Someone should get this man in front of the congressional deficit-reduction supercommittee.