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Mark Steyn writes about how lost our president is.
My radio pal Hugh Hewitt said to me on the air the other day that Barack Obama “doesn’t know how to be president.” It was a low but effective crack, and I didn’t pay it much heed. But, after musing on it over the past week or so, it seems to me frighteningly literally true. I don’t just mean social lapses like his latest cringe-making bow, this time to Their Imperial Majesties The Emperor and Empress of Japan – though that in itself is deeply weird: After the world superbower’s previous nose-to-toe prostration before the Saudi king, one assumed there’d be someone in the White House to point out tactfully that the citizen-executives of the American republic don’t bow to foreign monarchs. Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is just a bit of colorful back story in the Barack Obama biopic – or as he put it in his video address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:
“Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”
Tear down that wall …so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no-one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that Nov. 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who lead dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who, at a critical moment in history, decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They’re no big deal, they’re never going to land a photoshoot for Vanity Fair. But it’s their day, not yours. It’s not the narcissism, so much as the crassly parochial nature of it. …
…Some years ago, when Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian and ensuing episodes of her sitcom grew somewhat overly preoccupied with the subject, Elton John remarked: “OK, we know you’re gay. Now try being funny.” I wonder if Sir Elton might be prevailed upon to try a similar pitch at the next all-star White House gala: OK, we know you’re black. Now try being president. But a few days later, Obama dropped in on U.S. troops at Osan Air Base in South Korea for the latest episode of The Barack Obama Show (With Full Supporting Chorus). “You guys make a pretty good photo op,” he told them. …
…The above are mostly offenses against good taste, but they are, cumulatively, revealing. And they help explain why, whenever the president’s not talking about himself, he sounds like he’s wandered vaguely off-message. …
In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin agrees with David Gergen’s assessment of Obama’s foreign policy blunders.
…The media did not miss the way the Chinese leadership handled Obama. Even such a purveyor of the conventional wisdom as David Gergen wrote on CNN.com to compare Obama’s poor performance with that of another young and inexperienced president, John F. Kennedy, whose disastrous 1961 meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the Russians the impression that the Americans didn’t know what they were doing and that they could be pushed around. That led to the nearly catastrophic showdown over missiles in Cuba a year later. …
…Gergen is right. Though the most embarrassing moment of the trip was Obama’s obsequious deep bow to the Japanese emperor — which was duly noted by American bloggers and dismissed by the liberal punditry as well as by the White House — the real damage done to the national interest by Obama’s travels is the way he has come across to America’s rivals and foes, not to our allies. The Chinese, like the Iranians and the Russians, all think they have the measure of Barack Obama. He strikes them as a weak man more interested in trying to please and to evoke applause than in standing up for principles such as human rights or even the danger of nuclear proliferation. The occasional tough talk that has come from Obama has been undermined by his relentless devotion to engagement, which has convinced these countries that he is a leader to be trifled with. That is the only explanation for the disrespect that the Iranians have shown to his diplomatic outreach as well as for the harsh way in which the Chinese demonstrated their disdain for the president.
Gergen believes that Obama must treat this as a moment for a “wake up call” to revive his foreign policy. “For the President, the challenge is whether he will start approaching international affairs with a greater measure of toughness, standing up more firmly and assertively for American interests.”
We will soon see whether Obama is capable of doing that or whether his blind faith in engagement as well as his unbounded desire for adulation will lead to similar or worse fiascoes in the future. The problem, as the Kennedy example highlights, is that the country’s margin for error on dangerous foreign-policy issues is limited. Obama’s ongoing failure to act to halt Iran’s nuclear program is evidence of the price the country is paying for the president’s on-the-job education. … But Obama’s weakness, a fault rooted deeply in his inexperience in foreign affairs as well as in his overweening vanity, has become a major liability for the United States, the price of which has yet to be fully assessed.
America in the World shows the November 21st 2009 cover of the Spectator, UK showing the empty suit in the oval office, with the title “The Worst Kind of Ally” and posted this quote from Con Coughlin’s article:
“The astonishing disregard with which Mr Obama treats Britain has been made clear by his deliberations over the Afghan issue. As he decides how many more troops to send to Afghanistan — a decision which will fundamentally affect the scope of the mission — Britain is reduced to guesswork. The White House does not even pretend to portray this as a joint decision. It is a diplomatic cold-shouldering that stands in contrast not just to the Blair–Bush era, but to the togetherness of the soldiers on the ground… There will, though, inevitably come a time when Obama discovers who America’s true friends really are. Sooner or later he will have to deal with the considerably more taxing issues of Islamist militancy, rogue nuclear states and other tangible threats to the West’s security. At that point, Obama will discover a simple but essential truth. The world divides between those who support American values of freedom and democracy, and those who seek to destroy them. Few nations have been more committed to supporting those values with both blood and treasure than Britain. This country, and especially those British troops fighting alongside their American counterparts, deserve far better than this president’s disregard.”
President Obama did not want KSM tried by military tribunal. For that reason alone, we now have an upcoming trial that is illogical in many respects, writes Charles Krauthammer.
…What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) “do not get convicted,” asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. “Failure is not an option,” replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn’t the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure — acquittal, hung jury — is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.
Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning. …
…What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime — an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war that the United States itself has engaged in countless times? …
…Moreover, the incentive offered any jihadist is as irresistible as it is perverse: Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform — everything but your own blog.
Alternatively, Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Barack Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It’s Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice. …
On his blog, Roger Simon posts a criticism of Obamacare from the Dean of Harvard Medical School.
Jeffrey S. Flier – the dean of Harvard Med – has thrown a haymaker at Obamacare in today’s WSJ – Health ‘Debate’ Deserves a Failing Grade:
“In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care’s dysfunctional delivery system.”
Game, set, match, tournament. But, hey, it’s only the Dean of Harvard Med. What would he know compared to such great clinicians as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? This would be magnificent black comedy were it not our lives and – more importantly – those of our children that were hanging in the balance. The rush to enact this self-serving legislation is pretty much the most disgraceful US governmental act of my lifetime …
In the WSJ, we have Dean Flier’s full article.
As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I’d give it a failing grade. …
…Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that’s not true. The various bills do deal with access by expanding Medicaid and mandating subsidized insurance at substantial cost—and thus addresses an important social goal. However, there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform. …
…So the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.
We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.
John Stossel points out that some states have created their fiscal troubles by increased spending. He then discusses the hidden taxes that will be assessed by some states to make up for their lack of fiscal responsibility.
…Last week on “The O’Reilly Factor” , we talked about California’s and New York’s enormous budget deficits and planned tax increases. Those states would have big surpluses had they just grown their governments in pace with inflation. But of course they didn’t. Now the politicians act like their current deficits are something imposed on them by the recession.
But that’s nonsense. They created the problem with their reckless spending.
Let’s look at the particulars. Had the government of New York state grown at the rate of population and inflation over the past 10 years, it would have a $14 billion surplus today. Instead, spending grew at twice the rate of inflation. So New York has a $3 billion deficit. …
…Hidden taxes are more pernicious because they disguise what we pay for government. We blame merchants, not our legislators, for the high price of gasoline, liquor, cigarettes and phone calls, but the money goes to the political thieves. …
… It reminds me of Walter Williams’ riff: “Politicians are worse than thieves. At least when thieves take your money, they don’t expect you to thank them for it.”
Taxes, even counting hidden taxes, are not the real measure of what the thieves take. The true burden of government, the late Milton Friedman said, is the spending level. …
David Harsanyi comments on the MSM attack coverage of Sarah Palin.
…There’s nothing wrong, for instance, with The Associated Press assigning a crack team of investigative journalists to sift through every word of Palin’s book, “Going Rogue” (HarperCollins, November 2009) for inaccuracies. You only wish similarly methodical muckraking was applied to President Barack Obama’s two self-aggrandizing tomes — or even the health care or cap and trade bills, for that matter.
The widely read blogger and purveyor of all truth, Andrew Sullivan, was impelled to blog 17 times on the subject of Palin on the same day Americans learned that the Obama administration awarded $6.7 billion in stimulus money to non-existent congressional districts — which did not merit a single mention. To see what is in front of one’s nose demands a constant struggle, I guess. …
…Newsweek must have a point. Palin is a populist dead end. “Just over half of Americans,” a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds, “have an unfavorable opinion” of Palin overall, “as many say they wouldn’t consider supporting her for president and more — six in 10 — see her as unqualified for the job.”
Similarly, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation recently found that 48 percent disapprove of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a woman busy writing policy that affects all of us. …
Now it’s time for some entertainment. In a post on The Corner, John Miller tells us about the little ferry that could. Less than 20 miles from the DC beltway there is a small privately owned ferry service with one craft named the Gen. Jubal A. Early. Early attacked Washington in July 1864, and Lincoln observed the fighting from Fort Stevens which is located just south of the site of Walter Reed Medical Center. Imagine if Early had succeeded; New Yorkers might need visas to enter Virginia. We need Gen. Early to come out of internment.
It has been a goal of mine for some years to cross the Potomac River at White’s Ferry — the river’s last remaining ferry crossing. I finally had a chance yesterday, when my daughter had a soccer game in Maryland. The ferry wasn’t a novelty; it was actually the quickest and most convenient way to travel between Virginia and Maryland, given where we had to go.
And it felt good to support this family-owned throwback enterprise, which has gotten into scraps with federal government. Three years ago, the Coast Guard tried to shut down White’s Ferry for having an unlicensed operater on the ferry. You know, because the Coast Guard doesn’t have more pressing things to do. The ferry’s 86-year-old owner, Edwin Brown, was plucky and defiant:
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before they collect any money from me,” Brown, 86, said yesterday, adding that he had made his fortune defending property owners in eminent-domain disputes with the authorities. “I have never had any fear of the government.”
Brown also was shocked that Coast Guard investigators in Baltimore were considering hefty penalties, saying he thought he had worked out a settlement with officers who had visited the ferry’s offices in Dickerson.
“You can’t trust the government,” he said.
To give you a little more background on the ferry, here’s an article from 2006 that Fredrick Kunkle wrote for the Post.
True to its Confederate namesake, the Gen. Jubal A. Early ferryboat yesterday defied orders by the federal government to halt operations because of a licensing dispute and instead kept chugging back and forth across the Potomac River carrying hundreds of commuters.
The penalties risked by the 70-year-old family-run service, known as White’s Ferry, were not trifling, either. U.S. Coast Guard officials said yesterday that investigators were considering seeking criminal charges and fines that could run into the thousands of dollars per trip for allowing an unlicensed mariner to operate the ferry and disobeying an order to terminate a voyage.
But that did not seem to rattle the ferry’s owner, Edwin Brown, who bought the ferry in 1946 and christened its first wooden barge in honor of the flamboyant cavalry officer whose great-niece was a regular passenger. …
…The controversy could not have alighted on a more peaceful stretch of the Potomac. The river is wide and shallow there — no more than four feet deep on the Maryland side, maybe twice that on the Virginia shore. …
The 87-foot vessel has a ship’s bell, a pilot house, a fire ax, a lifeboat and a grand old silver anchor, but it looks more like a hunk of driveway that has broken loose and floated downstream with a bunch of cars. Each trip takes about 15 minutes, and the round-trip fare is $6. …
What happened to the little ferry that could, you ask? Shannon Sollinger has the denouement in a 2006 Loudoun Times article.
…Capt. Brian Kelley, Coast Guard commander of the Port of Baltimore, met Tuesday morning with the ferry’s owner, Edwin Brown, at the ramp down to the Potomac just west of Poolesville, Md.
“He found everything to be very pleasing and very satisfactory,” Brown said. “He’s happy the ferry is operating and everything is fine.”
The key word in his fracas with the authorities, Brown said, is “substantial. We were in substantial compliance, and there was never a safety risk of any kind.”
Commander Brian Penoyer said the ferry now is “street legal and safe” and will continue operating. Although the Coast Guard has a history of issues with Brown, Penoyer said, his office has opted to assess fines for a first-time offense. Brown can pay a fine of about $8,000, or appeal the tickets to a Coast Guard hearing officer.
White’s Ferry made the news again in 2008 for a less rebellious reason. Debbi Wilgoren reported the excitement in WaPo.
…The vehicle ferry that crosses the Potomac River between Poolesville and Leesburg became mired in a floating debris field yesterday morning, forcing about two dozen passengers to be removed by smaller boats.
The ferry became stuck in the unusually large amounts of debris flushed into the river by the heavy rain of recent days, according to ferry operators. …
…”The river hadn’t been up like this for months, and there was a lot of stuff piled up along the banks,” said Malcolm Brown, whose family owns and operates the White’s Ferry barge. “Debris is a constant problem on any river, but we had a big mass of trees coming down.”
Montgomery County fire and rescue workers took passengers to shore, leaving about 20 cars aboard as ferry operators cleared branches and logs from the cable that guides the barge across the river. There were no injuries, and drivers got their cars about an hour later. …