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Marty Peretz shows how the president’s efforts have little positive effect outside the US either.
Reuters reports on the brotherly friendship of Tehran and Damascus. It is not a new relationship. In fact, it goes back many years. But since Barack Obama imagines he can change the world by telling his supporters that this is what he’s going to do he sent messengers and missives to the two tyrannies. Nothing came of these courtships, and certainly nothing came of the American effort to get Iran to cease its pursuit of nukes.
…Almost nobody notices the disasters of U.S. policy outside our borders because the disasters within our borders are so climactic. One of the president’s most ambitious ventures was to bring Syria to heel. He sent many emissaries to Dr. Assad. Their visits all flopped.
But Obama is still pressing Israel to leave the Golan Heights, and Secretary Clinton is trying get Syria to soften the views of the Palestinians. The president and the secretary of state don’t recognize failure. So they court more humiliation.
We have more musings from David Warren. He could be channeling his inner Christopher Hitchens as he writes about religious violence.
…Western security forces are at present trying to prevent anticipated Mumbai-style “soft target” attacks on perhaps five European airports. Should such attacks proceed, we will blame lapses in the same security operations. We will, so far as we are politically correct, avoid talk about the motives for such attacks — which are drawn by the terrorists themselves from religious teachings, principally in the Koran.
Now, if these terrorists were only Buddhists, or Christians, or followers of any of the other religions of mankind, we could openly discuss the connections between ideas and consequences.
David Harsanyi thinks that any power grabs by this administration should be looked at closely.
…My unease over the case of Anwar Awlaki — an American citizen penciled in for targeted assassination by the Obama administration — isn’t based on any conspiratorial daydreams about Barack Obama wanting to randomly knock off citizens.
There is no doubt, in fact, that Awlaki is a despicable character, a member of radical Islamic networks, dangerous and deserving of a most gruesome fate.
In other words, the administration has a straightforward case to make. Yet, when Awlaki’s father asked a court to enjoin the president from killing his despicable son, the administration asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the case by invoking “state secrets.”
With that, the Obama administration argued that the president should be empowered to order the execution of a U.S. citizen — outside a war zone and without exhibiting an imminent threat to other citizens — without any oversight from the judicial or legislative branches of government. And by using the protection of state secrets argument, the administration is also asserting that the public has no right to know why. …
…Clearly, there are legitimate uses for state secrets during a time of war. But let’s face it, we are in perpetual war. If conservatives oppose the intrusive domestic policy of this administration, it defies logic for them not to question a unilateral decision that abuses state power — even if the decision is helpful in a cause they deeply believe in. Does the cause of national security overpower any concern? …
From CNN, Gloria Borger gives a liberal’s view of why the Dems are doing so badly. She understands that the push for Obamacare was a bad move, but she thinks too much of the opinions of political strategists.
…”If we had been cutting deals [with the Democrats], our base voters would have deserted us,” admits one top GOP campaign operative. “We had to prove who we were to get back on the map, and back in their good graces.”
So they did. If conservatives were disappointed that Bush was a big spender, these Republicans would unanimously oppose spending, including the stimulus package. If voters were wary of big government, they would rail against any new government, especially health care.
“This was a matter of proving to our base that we could be trusted again,” says this strategist.
So even when Congress debated financial reform, the GOP felt no danger in opposing it. And in the end, Obama got little credit. Why? The populism that fueled the 2008 campaign has been replaced with the anti-government sentiment of 2010. They don’t trust the government to fix anything, even evil Wall Street.
The GOP frontal attacks were relentless. The Obama White House was wary of allowing its “post-partisan” president to get too partisan. “[Obama] let the Republicans beat him up for far too long without counterpunching,” says Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin. “That’s not happening anymore, but we let them [the GOP] get away with framing the debate for too long.”
The problem for Obama was twofold: His ambitious agenda fed into the GOP narrative. And the GOP narrative was designed to reflect the public’s overwhelming view of government — ineffective and untrustworthy. …
While it is interesting to see how a mainstream lib like Borger looks at the Dems failures, her take leaves a lot to be desired. For example she writes as if the GOP leadership developed a set of cojones only after watching a town hall meeting revolt against Arlen Specter in August 2009. In truth, in one of their finest hours, the leadership of the party opposed the $787 billion stimulus plan right from the very start of the new administration as you will see in this ABC News story dated February 13th 2009 on the bill’s passage in the Senate. In fact, other than three squishy RINOs in the Senate, all Republicans voted against the “stimulus” that has proven to be useless. We only have the opening ‘graphs of the article, but you can click on the link if you want to read it all.
… Three Republicans who supported the measure on earlier votes once again cast their votes for the stimulus package. And, as expected, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, provided the necessary 60th vote for passage. He cast his vote at 10:46 p.m. after the Senate held the vote open for several hours while he flew back from his home state.
Voting in the Senate started at 5:30 p.m., but Brown was attending his mother’s wake at the time and could not secure a commercial flight back to Washington. Eager to ensure the bill’s passage, the White House stepped in and arranged for Brown’s flight back.
Brown now will return to Ohio on an Air Force plane for his mother’s funeral Saturday.
Only 98 senators voted because there is no second senator from Minnesota yet seated, and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who has brain cancer but came to the Capitol earlier in the week to vote on procedural motions, did not vote.
An earlier Senate version of the bill passed the 61-37. In that vote, as with today’s, the only Republicans to support the bill were Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.
House Republicans Balk
Earlier today, the House passed the stimulus bill by a vote of 246-183, although a week of negotiations and lobbying by President Obama failed to convince a single Republican to support the bill. …
In the WSJ, William McGurn advises the president to prove he cares about education.
That deafening roar you hear—that’s the sound of Barack Obama’s silence on the future of school reform in the District of Columbia. And if he doesn’t break it soon, he may become the first president in two decades to have left Washington’s children with fewer chances for a good school than when he started. …
…This debate over education is now coming to a head in Washington. In the first months after he took office, Mr. Obama kept quiet when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) killed off a popular voucher program that allowed low-income D.C. moms and dads to send their kids to the same kind of schools where the president sends his own daughters (Sidwell Friends). This was followed by the president’s silence last month during the D.C. Democratic primary, in which the mayor who appointed the district’s reform-minded schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, went down to defeat. …
…In the past, Mr. Obama has himself spoken honestly about the obstacles to reform, including the close relationship between the teachers unions and his party. This past weekend, Mr. Chavous, now head of the Black Alliance for Educational Opportunity, published an open letter in the New York Times saying it’s time for the president to walk the walk. Along with the recent release of “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” Davis Guggenheim’s superb new film on the children robbed of their dreams by the failing public school system, it all adds to the sense that the moment for Mr. Obama to make himself heard is now.
Tony Blankley thinks we may be at the beginning of a monumental change in government.
The New York Times has written in explaining why the political parties have lost the confidence of the public: “Their machinery of intrigue, their shuffling evasions, the dodges, the chicanery and the deception of their leaders have excited universal disgust, and have created a general readiness in the public mind for any new organization that shall promise to shun their vices.”
The New York Evening Post, in explaining the same condition has written that the people “saw parties without any difference contending for power, for the sake of power. They saw politics made a profession, and public plunder an employment. … They beheld our public works the plaything of a rotten dynasty, enriching gamblers, and purchasing power at our expense.”
The dates of those articles were November and December 1855 (See “The Origins of the Republican Party” by William E. Gienapp, Oxford University Press, 1987).
When those words were written, the Whigs and the Democrats were the two great parties. The Whigs soon went extinct, the dominant Democrats went on to lose every White House election between 1860 and 1912 except for the elections of Grover Cleveland. The Republicans came into being and won all the those elections the Democrats lost.
I have a sense that we may be in the early stages of a similar transformation of our party system as 155 years ago, when the Jacksonian party system failed. …
Toby Harnden comments on an unusual campaign ad from Christine O’Donnell.
…O’Donnell had many weaknesses as a candidate. But is that she is, as the ad states, like “you” – an ordinary American who’s struggled to pay the bills, done some silly things (dated a witch in college!), exaggerated her CV a tad and been looked down on by elites. Despite being in her 40s, she has a little girl lost kind of demeanour that, as The Other McCain points out, makes her “awfully hard to hate”.
Again and again on the campaign trail, I hear statements about Sarah Palin – the harder-edged prototype for O’Donnell – along the lines of “when I first heard her, I thought, ‘She’s like me’”. That ability to get people to identify with you on such an elemental level in politics is a powerful thing (though not necessarily enough in itself to win national or even statewide elections). …
…Her new ad says: I’m just like you ordinary Americans and when they’re mocking me they’re mocking you. Which is why Christine O’Donnell might just be crazy like a fox.
From the Economist’s Democracy In America Blog, W. W. blogs about the ad.
BY NOW, you’ve probably seen, or heard tell of, Christine O’Donnell’s new campaign ad in which the Republican Senate candidate from Delaware begins saying, “I’m not a witch”. Ms O’Donnell issues this denial softly, with an air of wearied but good-humoured bemusement. “I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you”, she clarifies—just an ordinary Jane, a regular ol’ non-witch.
This ad is delightful. There’s something inherently great about watching a Senate candidate earnestly deny that she is a witch. But is this ad another ridiculous nail in Ms O’Donnell’s coffin? I don’t think so. In fact, like the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, I think it does just what it is supposed to do.
I take Ms O’Donnell’s message to be that she has been made the target of all manner of scurrilous slander, so desperate are her opponents to keep her from office. But why? As she says, “I’ll go to Washington and do what you’d do”, and this is terrifying to corrupt establishment politicians who subsist on dirty tricks and back-room deals. They’re scared of common people like me and you, Ms O’Donnell seems to say, hence all the bizarre stuff they’re saying about me, which is what they’d say about you were you in my position, which you are, because I’m you. …
John Stossel has an eye-opener on some of the fallout from Obamacare.
…Health insurers Wellpoint, Cigna, Aetna, Humana and CoventryOne will stop writing policies for all children. Why? Because Obamacare requires that they insure already sick children for the same price as well children.
That sounds compassionate, but — in case Obamacare fanatics haven’t noticed — sick children need more medical care. Insurance is about risk, and already sick children are 100 percent certain to be sick when their coverage begins. So if the government mandates that insurance companies cover sick children at the lower well-children price, insurers will quit the market rather than sandbag their shareholders. This is not callousness — it’s fiduciary responsibility. Insurance companies are not charities. So, thanks to the compassionate Congress and president, parents of sick children will be saved from expensive insurance — by being unable to obtain any insurance! That’s how government compassion works.
In 2014, the same rule will kick in for adults. You now know what to expect. …
The Nobel Prize for Literature went to Mario Vargas Llosa who was the subject of a WSJ Interview in June 2007 which found its way into Pickings June 24, 2007.