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If someone claims opposition to Obama is racist, pass along today’s Pickings because all of the selections are from authors who are black. But that’s not the only thing they have in common. They are also smart. First off Deroy Murdock writes on the essential decency of Mitt Romney.
Why is Mitt Romney rising? Americans who watched the GOP nominee debate President Obama never met the cold, greedy, sexist, racist, carcinogenic tax cheat that Team Obama promised would appear. The calm, steady, and reasonable gentleman who opposed Obama was no Gordon Gekko.
Americans might like Romney even more if they understood his random acts of kindness and significant feats of bravery. As Mara Gay, Dan Hirschhorn, and M. L. Nestel wrote for TheDaily.com: “A man weighed down by the image of a heartless corporate raider who can’t relate to people actually has a history of doing remarkably kind things for those in need.”
• After Joey O’Donnell, 12, died of cystic fibrosis in 1986, Romney built a playground in his honor. “There he was, with a hammer in his belt, the Mitt nobody sees,” the boy’s father and Romney’s neighbor, Joseph O’Donnell, told Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, authors of The Real Romney. A year later, Joey’s Park needed maintenance. “The next thing I know, my wife calls me up and says, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Mitt Romney is down with a bunch of Boy Scouts and they’re working on the park.’ . . . He did it for like the next five years, without ever calling to say, ‘We’re doing this,’ without a reporter in tow, not looking for any credit.” …
Thomas Sowell contributes a four-part piece on Obama v. Obama.
Many voters will be comparing Mitt Romney with Barack Obama between now and election day. But what might be even more revealing would be comparing Obama with Obama. There is a big contrast between Obama based on his rhetoric (“Obama 1″) and Obama based on his record (“Obama 2″).
For example, during the 2008 election campaign, Obama 1 spoke of “opening up and creating more transparency in government,” so that government spending plans would be posted on the Internet for days before they passed into legislation. After he was elected president, Obama said, “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”
This Obama 1 sounds like a very good fellow. No wonder so many people voted for him.
But then there is Obama 2. He passed a mammoth ObamaCare bill so fast that even members of Congress didn’t have time to read it, much less the general public. It was by no means posted on the Internet for days before the vote, as promised.
The Constitution of the United States requires transparency as well. When people are nominated by a President to become Cabinet members, the Constitution requires that they be confirmed by the Senate before they can take office, so that facts about them can become known before they are given the powers of their offices.
Although President Obama complied with this requirement when he appointed Cabinet members, he also made other appointments to powerful positions created by Executive Orders — people aptly called “czars” for the vast, unchecked powers they wielded, in some cases greater than the powers exercised by Cabinet members.
These “czars” never had to be confirmed by the Senate, and so had no public vetting before acquiring their powers. We had unknown and unaccountable rulers placed over us. …
Sowell’s Part Two covers Israel and his anti-western bias.
Nowhere is the contrast between Barack Obama, as defined by his rhetoric (“Obama 1″) and Barack Obama as defined by his actions (“Obama 2″) greater than in his foreign policy — and especially his policy toward Israel.
What if we put aside Barack Obama’s rhetoric, and instead look exclusively at his documented record over a period of decades, up to and including the present?
The first thing that is most striking about that record is the long string of his mentors and allies who were marked by hatred of the United States, and a vision of the world in which the white, Western nations have become prosperous by oppressing and exploiting the non-white, non-Western nations.
The person most people have heard of who matched that description has been Jeremiah Wright, whose church Barack Obama attended for 20 years, and was still attending when he began his campaign for the presidency. But Jeremiah Wright was just one in a series of mentors and allies with a similar vision and a similar visceral hostility to the West.
Barack Obama was virtually marinated in that vision from childhood. His mother clashed with her Indonesian husband when he began to move away from his earlier anti-Western radicalism and to work with Western businesses investing in Indonesia.
As a counterweight to whatever ideological influence her Indonesian husband might have on her son, she extolled the virtues of his absent Kenyan father, who remained a doctrinaire, anti-Western socialist to the end. …
In Part Three, Sowell wonders if he thinks he is a citizen of the U. S. or owes allegiance to another flag.
… Those who have questioned whether Barack Obama is really a citizen of the United States have missed the larger question: Whether he considers himself a citizen of the world. Think about this remarkable statement by Obama during the 2008 campaign: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that every other country is going to say, ‘OK.’”
Are Americans supposed to let foreigners tell them how to live their lives? The implied answer is clearly “Yes!” When President Obama went to the United Nations for authority to take military action and ignored the Congress of the United States, that was all consistent with his vision of the way the world should be.
How has Obama gotten away with so many things that are foreign to American beliefs and traditions? Partly it is because of a quiescent media, sharing many of his ideological views and/or focused on the symbolism of his being “the first black President.” But part of his success must be credited — if that is the word — to his own rhetorical talents and his ability to project an image that many people accept and welcome.
The role of a confidence man is not to convince skeptics, but to help the gullible believe what they want to believe. Most of what Barack Obama says sounds very persuasive if you don’t know the facts — and often sounds like sheer nonsense if you do. But he is not trying to convince skeptics, nor worried about looking ridiculous to informed people who won’t vote for him anyway.
This is a source of much polarization between those who see and accept Obama 1 and those who see through that facade to Obama 2.
Sowell’s summary takes us back to the risks to Israel.
… Barack Obama is not the first leader of a nation whose actions reflected some half-baked vision, enveloped in lofty rhetoric and spiced with a huge dose of ego. Nor would he be the first such leader to steer his nation into a historic catastrophe.
In Barack Obama’s case, the potential for catastrophe is international in scope, and perhaps irretrievable in its consequences, as he stalls with feckless gestures as terrorist-sponsoring Iran moves toward the production of nuclear bombs.
The rhetoric of Obama 1 says that he will protect Israel but the actions of Obama 2 have in fact protected Iran from an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities — until now it is questionable whether Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities can be destroyed by the Israelis.
Those deeply buried facilities took time to build, and Obama’s policies gave them that time, with his lackadaisical approach of seeking United Nations resolutions and international sanctions that never had any serious chance of stopping Iran’s movement toward becoming a nuclear power. And Barack Obama had to know that.
In March, “Foreign Policy” magazine reported that “several high-level sources” in the Obama administration had revealed Israel’s secret relationship with Azerbaijan, where Israeli planes could refuel to or from an air strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The administration feared “the risks of an Israeli strike on Iran,” according to these “high-level sources.” Apparently the risks of an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel are not so much feared.
This leak was one of the historic and unconscionable betrayals of an ally whose very existence is threatened. But the media still saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil.
The only question now is whether the American voters will wake up before it is too late — not just for Israel, but for America.
Jason Riley comments on Obama’s “plan.”
… In reality the president, who can’t run on his dismal economic record, has also failed to explain in any detail what he hopes to accomplish in a second term. Throughout the campaign, and especially during the debates, Mitt Romney has been keen to point this out. The Obama campaign’s “blueprint” stunt is a concession that Mr. Romney is on to something.
Riley also comments on what Hurricane Sandy might mean to the vote next week.
… The good news for Mr. Romney is that his supporters don’t appear to be the fair-weather kind. “The GOP nominee maintains a potentially pivotal advantage in intensity among his supporters,” says Politico. “Sixty percent of those who support Obama say they are ‘extremely likely’ to vote, compared to 73 percent who back Romney. Among this group, Romney leads Obama by 9 points, 53 to 44 percent.”
Star Parker writes on education challenges to our country when we have a president owned by teacher’s unions.
… “I now want to hire more teachers, especially in math and science, because we know that we’ve fallen behind when it comes to math and science,” said the president. “And those teachers can make a difference.”
But, Mr. President, what information do you have that leads you to conclude that more teachers can make a difference?
According to information recently published by “Face the Facts,” a project of the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, over the last decade, the federal government spent $293 billion and states spent a combined $5.5 trillion – money targeted to improving academic performance – with no discernable change in reading and math scores. “A quarter of high school seniors don’t meet basic reading standards and a third fall below basic math proficiency.”
Throwing money at education may make those who get the money better off, but there is little if any evidence that it makes any difference at all in improving academic performance.
Recently I sat down and interviewed one of my heroes – Dr. Ben Carson, Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at JohnsHopkinsHospital.
Outside of his work, Dr. Carson’s passion is education. As someone who grew up in a Detroit ghetto, who’s mother was a domestic who could not read, he has some idea what it means to start with nothing and achieve the American dream.
But listening to Carson, whose latest book is entitled “America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great,” you get a much different take on what is wrong with education and our nation today than what we hear from politicians.
Carson says, “We were a “can do” nation and now we’re a “what can you do for me nation.” …
Walter Williams continues the look at Obama’s education policy.
If I were a Klansman, wanting to sabotage black education, I couldn’t find better allies than education establishment liberals and officials in the Obama administration, especially Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who in March 2010 announced that his department was “going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement.”
For Duncan, the civil rights issue was that black elementary and high school students are disciplined at a higher rate than whites. His evidence for discrimination is that blacks are three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers. Duncan and his Obama administration supporters conveniently ignored school “racial discrimination” against whites, who are more than two times as likely to be suspended as Asians and Pacific Islanders.
Heather Mac Donald reports on all of this in “Undisciplined,” appearing in City Journal (Summer 2012). She writes that between September 2011 and February 2012, 25 times more black Chicago students than white students were arrested at school, mostly for battery. In Chicago schools, black students outnumber whites by four to one.
Mac Donald adds, “Nationally, the picture is no better. The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined. Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialization that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well.” …
Williams concludes wondering why blacks support politicians who fail them.
… Last year, in reference to President Obama’s failed employment policies and high unemployment among blacks, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who is chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said, “If Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House.” That’s a vision that seems to explain black tolerance for failed politicians — namely, if it’s a black politician whose policies are ineffectual and possibly harmful to the masses of the black community, it’s tolerable, but it’s entirely unacceptable if the politician is white.
Black people would not accept excuses upon excuses and vote to re-elect decade after decade any white politician, especially a Republican politician, to office who had the failed records of our big-city mayors. What that suggests about black people is not very flattering.