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George Will writes on the adolescent president.
Recently, Barack Obama — a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance; a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment — spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue — in 2012, he received 67 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor’s county — after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a muse must have whispered in the presidential ear. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a “meanwich” and a “stinkburger.”
Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan talking like that. It is unimaginable that those grown-ups would resort to japes that fourth-graders would not consider sufficiently clever for use on a playground. …
… he talks like an arrested-development adolescent.
Anyone who has tried to engage a member of that age cohort in an argument probably recognizes the four basic teenage tropes, which also are the only arrows in Obama’s overrated rhetorical quiver. He employed them all last week when he went to the White House briefing room to exclaim, as he is wont to do, about the excellence of the Affordable Care Act.
First came the invocation of a straw man. Celebrating the ACA’s enrollment numbers, Obama, referring to Republicans, charged: “They said nobody would sign up.” Of course, no one said this. Obama often is what political philosopher Kenneth Minogue said of an adversary — “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.” …
In normal times the unfortunate unintended consequences of a president’s bad policies take years to unfold. And usually this is after the miscreant is safely out of office. But this president is so abysmally ignorant, the bad effects of his foolishness have borne fruit during his time in office. Of course, this would not be the case if the media was not in the tank for him. But they are. So to its everlasting shame, the American public returned him to office. The bright side is we get to see him try to construct ways to fix the problems he created with his special brand of left-wing stupidity.
From the WSJ Editors we learn of efforts to fix the student loan program taken over in the affordable care act. I know it has nothing to do with health care, but it has a lot to do with increasing federal power. And that is the point.
The federal student loan program is becoming so costly to taxpayers that even President Obama is pretending to fix it. Readers will recall Mr. Obama as the man who has spent much of his Presidency expanding this program, creating new ways for borrowers to avoid repayment, and then campaigning about these dubious achievements on campuses nationwide.
Now Team Obama is acknowledging that his policies are turning out to be more expensive than he claimed. Participation in federal debt-forgiveness programs is surging. In a mere six months the number of borrowers who’ve signed up for such plans has increased to more than 1.3 million from less than a million, with total balances rising to $72 billion from $52 billion. Maybe the White House didn’t understand that when you give people an economic incentive not to repay a loan, more people won’t repay.
Taxpayers can suffer in many ways from federal education lending, because most loans are issued regardless of a borrower’s ability to repay. So loose is this form of credit that in the slow-growth Obama economy it has become a vehicle to fund basic living expenses, with tens of thousands of borrowers consuming aid even when they’re not enrolled for courses. …
Even this corrupt media can’t cover for the fool forever. Time has this on his foreign policy;
In a rough month of a rough year of a rough second term for Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Thursday was a particularly rough day.
It began with dour news from the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that he won’t negotiate with a unified Palestinian government that includes both moderate Fatah and radical Gaza-based Hamas. Shorter version: the already-gasping Middle East peace process is likely dead for the remainder of Obama’s presidency.
The day ended with Secretary of State John Kerry’s angry speech accusingRussia of violating the diplomatic agreement Kerry co-signed a week ago in Geneva, …
And the NY Times has this;
TOKYO — President Obama encountered setbacks to two of his most cherished foreign-policy projects on Thursday, as he failed to achieve a trade deal that undergirds his strategic pivot to Asia and the Middle East peace process suffered a potentially irreparable breakdown.
Mr. Obama had hoped to use his visit here to announce an agreement under which Japan would open its markets in rice, beef, poultry and pork, a critical step toward the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the proposed regional trade pact. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was not able to overcome entrenched resistance from Japan’s farmers in time for the president’s visit.
In Jerusalem, Israel’s announcement that it was suspending stalemated peace negotiations with the Palestinians, after a reconciliation between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the militant group Hamas, posed yet another obstacle to restarting a troubled peace process in which Secretary of State John Kerry has been greatly invested.
The setbacks, though worlds apart in geography and history, speak to the common challenge Mr. Obama has had in translating his ideas and ambitions into enduring policies. He has watched outside forces unravel his best-laid plans, from resetting relations with Russia to managing the epochal political change in the Arab world. On Thursday, as Russiastaged military exercises on the border with Ukraine, Mr. Kerry denounced broken promises from the Kremlin but took no specific action. …
Jennifer Rubin says the first term set all these problems in motion. Once we get these fools out of Washington, it will take decades to clean up the mess.
… We can draw a number of conclusions from all of this. First, the disasters may be popping up now, but it is hard to argue that the first term did not set in motion (by inaction in Syria, a faulty arms deal with Russia, contentious relations with Israel) the failures we see now playing out. For that, the president and his first-term national security team are directly responsible. Second, the left- and right-wing dream that the United States could recede and let others deal with their problems proved once again just plain wrong. Third, the adage that small steps early can obviate the need for big, costly commitments later on has been borne out in Syria. Fourth, the United States needs a president fully engaged in national security who can assess how U.S. actions are interpreted by others. Finally, when things get worse (first Crimea and then Ukraine, a few hundred dead and eventually over 150,000 dead in Syria) they will continue to get worse until we try something new. Passivity is a recipe for chaos, instability and violence. In Europe, for the first time since the Cold War the sovereignty of U.S. allies is at risk.
We can therefore expect additional crises, more aggressive behavior and less cooperation from allies as they assess American fecklessness. The president who wanted to rid the world of nukes is convincing Sunni monarchs and Eastern European countries that it is foolish to rely on the American nuclear umbrella. How many countries will insist on their own arsenal to protect themselves against Russia, China or Iran?
When Republicans choose their candidate for commander in chief, they’d be wise to pick someone who understood this all along — not simply when it all went haywire in 2014.
Turning to another execrable miscreant, Fred Barnes writes on Harry Reid.
The Romney strategy is back. Not the flawed campaign plan of Mitt Romney for the 2012 election, but the effort by President Obama and Democrats to malign Romney, even before he’d become the GOP nominee, as morally unfit for the presidency.
Now the strategy is focused on Republican Senate candidates, some of them still running in contested primaries. From Democratic TV ads, we learn that Dan Sullivan in Alaska may not be “one of us,” a true Alaskan. Tom Cotton in Arkansas, having worked for insurance companies, is “a politician we just can’t trust.” And Bill Cassidy in Louisiana sought to “cut off hurricane relief for Louisiana families.”
There’s a name for this strategy—the politics of personal destruction. It was successful in 2012 in transforming Romney’s image into that of an uncaring, greedy corporate boss who made millions while shutting down companies and throwing workers out of jobs. In one Obama ad, Romney was falsely blamed for the cancer death of a worker’s wife.
The chief practitioner of the Romney strategy today is Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who is desperate to keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate in the November midterm elections. The ads are the handiwork of Reid’s Senate Majority PAC or its sister organization, the Patriot Majority PAC.
What’s striking is their emphasis on personal matters rather than major public issues like health care or the economy and their frequent inaccuracy. Cotton, for example, has never worked for an insurance company. Nor did Cassidy seek to curb disaster relief. …
Scott Johnson posts a Reid summary.
It seems to me that in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid we have something new under the sun. He revives old-fashioned, LBJ-style corruption in office, as Adam O’Neal’s understated RCP column suggests. He brings pure partisan prevarication and hackery to his office, as Fred Barnes suggests in “Mudslinger in chief.” And he disgraces the institution that he leads, as Victor Davis Hanson judges in “A McCarthy for our time.”
Liberal commentators observe Reid’s shenanigans in the spirit of detached amusement. In this respect Chris Cillizza is representative. It’s the best he and they can do, but it is pathetic.
If that’s the best Cillizza can do as a supposed political junkie — if the chairman of the Republican National Committee is a truer guide to the Reid phenomenon than Cillizza — it’s time for him and his ilk to pursue other opportunities.
As Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid has brought his office to an unprecedented low. There is no lie he will not recite, no libel he will resist so long as it advances some narrow partisan purpose. As Majority Leader, he holds the mirror up to President Obama. They illuminate each other. It’s not a pretty sight. …