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Chris Cillizza could have picked the president for having the Worst Week in Washington, but instead he picked Elizabeth Warren for the second time in a month. So Maureen Dowd did her own version of WWW and she picked the kid prez.
ON Friday night, the nation’s capital was under a tornado watch. And that was the best thing that happened to the White House all week.
As the president was being slapped by Mitt Romney for being too weak on national security, he was being rapped by a Times editorial for being too aggressive on national security.
A Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane revealed that the liberal law professor who campaigned against torture and the Iraq war now personally makes the final decisions on the “kill list,” targets for drone strikes. “A unilateral campaign of death is untenable,” the editorial asserted.
On Thursday, Bill Clinton once more telegraphed that he considers Obama a lightweight who should not have bested his wife. Bluntly contradicting the Obama campaign theme that Romney is a heartless corporate raider, Clinton told CNN that the Republican’s record at Bain was “sterling.”
Covering a humorous W. at the unveiling of his portrait, the White House press actually seemed nostalgic for the president who bollixed up Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina and the economy — a sure sign that the Obama magic is flagging.
On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year. As the recovery flat-lined, the president conceded to a crowd at a Honeywell factory in Golden Valley, Minn., that “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds” and getting sucked further into Europe’s sinkhole. In depressing imagery for the start of the summer campaign, cable channels carried the red Dow arrow pointing down while Obama spoke; the Dow wiped out all of its 2012 gains.
The president who started off with such dazzle now seems incapable of stimulating either the economy or the voters. His campaign is offering Obama 2012 car magnets for a donation of $10; cat collars reading “I Meow for Michelle” for $12; an Obama grill spatula for $40, and discounted hoodies and T-shirts. How the mighty have fallen. …
Charles Krauthammer on Obama the “drone warrior.”
… So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills, has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.
A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.
This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.
Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk.
Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.
One capture could potentially make us safer than 10 killings. …
According to Matthew Continetti, picking drone targets has prevented the president from answering Assad’s atrocities in Syria.
Elie Wiesel had a question for Barack Obama. The author, a survivor of Auschwitz, was accompanying the president on a tour of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on April 23. As they passed through an exhibit detailing the U.S. government’s denial of refuge to Jews fleeing the Nazi empire, Wiesel asked Obama, “What would you do?” Afterward, in public remarks, Obama did not mention his answer. But he did say, when confronted by atrocities, “You don’t just count on officials, you don’t just count on governments. You count on people—and mobilizing their consciences.”
After the barbaric events of last week in the Syrian village of Houla, where government troops massacred more than a hundred women and children, Obama’s words sound hollow. And the initiative he announced that day seems like a slap in the face.
Obama used his visit to the Holocaust Museum to remind the world that on August 4, 2011, he issued a “Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities” that ordered the creation of “an interagency Atrocities Prevention Board” to “coordinate a whole of government approach to preventing mass atrocities and genocide.” The first task of this board would be a thorough “interagency review” to “develop and recommend the membership, mandate, structure, operational protocols, authorities, and support necessary for the Atrocities Prevention Board to coordinate and develop atrocity prevention and response policy.” The National Security Council’s staff director for War Crimes and Atrocities, a human rights attorney who once served as George Clooney’s “full time human-rights adviser,” would supervise the review.
Forget health care rationing. This toothless parody of bureaucracy is the real “death panel”—a collection of titleholders that stands by in the face of mass murder. Its job is to “help the U.S government identify and address atrocity threats,” in the midst of one of the worst “atrocity threats” in recent memory. When asked Wednesday if the Atrocities Prevention Board has even met to discuss Syria, White House press secretary Jay Carney could only say, “I don’t know the answer to that.” Maybe the board is still busy conducting its interagency review.
This isn’t a joke. It is an insult to Assad’s victims. …
WSJ Editors write on Eric Holder’s latest outrage.
The United States of America has a black President whose chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, is also black. They have a lot of political power. So how are they using it? Well, one way is to assert to black audiences that voter ID laws are really attempts to disenfranchise black Americans. And liberals think Donald Trump’s birther fantasies are offensive?
“In my travels across this country, I’ve heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens, who—often for the first time in their lives—now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble ideals,” Mr. Holder said Wednesday in a speech to the Council of Black Churches. Voter ID laws and white discrimination, he added, mean that “some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance.”
That’s right. The two most powerful men in America are black, two of the last three Secretaries of State were black, numerous corporate CEOs and other executives are black, and minorities of many races now win state-wide elections in states that belonged to the Confederacy, but the AG implies that Jim Crow is on the cusp of a comeback.
It’s demeaning to have to dignify this argument with facts, but here goes. …
Similar thoughts from Thomas Sowell.
Attorney General Eric Holder recently told a group of black clergymen that the right to vote was being threatened by people who are seeking to block access to the ballot box by blacks and other minorities.
This is truly world-class chutzpah, by an Attorney General who stopped attorneys in his own Department of Justice from completing the prosecution of black thugs who stationed themselves outside a Philadelphia voting site to harass and intimidate white voters.
This may have seemed like a small episode to some at the time, but it was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The U.S. Attorney who was prosecuting that case — J. Christian Adams — resigned from the Department of Justice in protest, and wrote a book about a whole array of similar race-based decisions on voting rights by Eric Holder and his subordinates at the Department of Justice.
The book is titled “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” It names names, dates and places around the country where the Department of Justice stopped its own attorneys from pursuing cases of voter fraud and intimidation, when it was blacks who were accused of these crimes.
If Mr. Adams is lying, he has taken a huge risk in citing individuals by name and quoting them directly. Yet, despite the fact that most of those he accuses are lawyers, apparently no one has sued him. Moreover, Adams has also testified under oath before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, on the racial double standard at the Department of Justice, when it comes to voting rights. …
More kudos for the Romney campaign. This time from a Michael Walsh Corner post.
More impressive action from the rebels of the Mitt Romney camp as they opened up a three-front skirmish against forces loyal to the Emperor Hussein yesterday in Boston, Fremont, Calif., and Washington, D.C.
There was the candidate himself, giving a sharp speech about the crony-capitalistic disaster of Solyndra outside the shuttered headquarters of the green pipe dream itself. At the same time, President Obama was pinned down in the capital, grinding his teeth through some typically solipsistic remarks while his detested predecessor grabbed the spotlight at the unveiling of his official presidential portrait — and wowed the crowd with some folksy self-deprecation and love for his family.
But the most important engagement of the day was the public heckling of presidential consigliere David Axelrod, including orchestrated chants of “Solyndra, Solyndra.” Never elected to anything, the former Chicago Tribune reporter and city-hall bureau-chief-turned-campaign-consultant made an unforced error in emerging from the shadows, where the general public could get a good look at him. …
Ed Morrissey reports on the diminished fortunes of Wisconsin’s unions.
Popquiz, hotshots*: You have public-employee unions that force public-sector employees to pay dues and make the state act as their bagman. The state refuses to collect dues and changes the law to make dues and union membership entirely voluntary. What do people do?
That’s easy … they quit paying the dues:
David Harsanyi on Bloomberg’s Big Soda Ban.
This week, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced that he will outlaw the sale of sodas, sports drinks and other sugary beverages that exceed 16 ounces. Don’t worry. There are numerous exemptions to this petty interference. Feel free to indulge in high-caloric milkshakes, fruit juices or just head to the convenience store and grab a Big Gulp, a Slurpee, or buy large bottles of Diet Coke.
When you act like a petty tyrant, making arbitrary decisions with absolutely no basis in science or common sense is your prerogative. In the Bloomberg’s vernacular this is referred to as “leadership.” “I think that’s what the public wants the mayor to do,” he explained. The public’s loathing for large-sized soda is so high, evidently, that they need a billionaire technocrat to force them to stop buying more of it.
This is nothing new in New York. Bloomberg, who embodies C.S. Lewis’ observation that “those who torment us for our own good torment us without end,” has banned smoking in bars and restaurants, public parks and on private terraces. He has gone after salt and he has banned trans fats in restaurants. …
The cartoonists have fun with NY’s soda ban.