Obama’s modesty about America would be more understandable if he treated himself with the same reserve.
By Charles Krauthammer, National Review Online
Remember NASA? It once represented to the world the apogee of American scientific and technological achievement. Here is President Obama’s vision of NASA’s mission, as explained by Administrator Charles Bolden:
One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.
Apart from the psychobabble — farcically turning a space-faring enterprise into a self-esteem enhancer — what’s the sentiment behind this charge? Sure, America has put a man on the moon, led the information revolution, and won far more Nobel Prizes than any other nation — but, on the other hand, a thousand years ago al-Khwarizmi gave us algebra. Bolden seems quite intent on driving home this message of achievement equivalence — lauding, for example, Russia’s contributions to the space station. Russia? In the 1990s, the Russian space program fell apart, leaving the United States to pick up the slack and the tab for the missing Russian contributions to get the space station built. For good measure, Bolden added that the U.S. cannot get to Mars without international assistance. Beside the fact that this is not true, contrast this with the elan and self-confidence of President Kennedy’s pledge that America would land on the moon within a decade.
Our Lecturer-in-Chief demands we do as he says, not as he does. During his University of Michigan commencement address, Barack Obama assumed the professorial role and began lecturing Americans on how to behave: “Now, the second way to keep our democracy healthy is to maintain a basic level of civility in our public debate. … But we can’t expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down. You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it.”
While the idea of a civil debate is certainly appealing, Barack Obama has done more to damage civility in public discourse than any presidency in 40 years. Obama is the first president since Richard Nixon to personally launch verbal assaults on his enemies. His administration is willing to attack anyone who dares to stand up against them. They employ the shockingly un-presidential strategy of going after their critics by name. Robert Gibbs, the president’s acid tongue spokesman, attacked CNBC reporter Rick Santelli after less than a month in office.
Obama then joins Gibbs by personally lashing out at critics. Obama is even willing to go after his allies that don’t fall in line. “Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother,” Obama famously told Rep. Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon.
Obama has issued scores of scathing personal attacks. He attacked Mitch McConnell as being in bed with Wall Street. He claimed John Boehner was a healthcare Chicken Little. He said Sarah Palin is “not exactly an expert on nuclear issues,” and called Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh a “troublesome” twosome spreading “vitriol.”
Obama’s comedy also has a political bite to it. Rather than employing the strategy of most recent presidents of engaging in self-deprecating humor, Obama makes fun of others. He tells jokes mocking Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, John Boehner, Charlie Crist and Mitt Romney.
Landon Parvin, an author and speechwriter for Democrats and Republicans, and a joke writer for three Republican presidents (Reagan and both Bushes) says, “With these dinners you want the audience to like you more when you sit down than when you stood up. … Something in [Obama's] humor didn’t do that.”
Even Nancy Pelosi has told Obama to cool his critiques of Washington, D.C. Pelosi and other Democrats in the House are concerned that he is throwing them under the bus to save his own reputation. Obama is more concerned about preserving his own image and re-election prospects than he is about supporting his party in 2010.
Even Obama’s most reliable allies, the formerly dominant mainstream media, are beginning to take notice. Josh Gerstein and Patrick Gavin of Politico report: “Reporters say the White House is thin-skinned, controlling, eager to go over their heads and stingy with even basic information.” When the friendly press takes notice, there must really be a big problem.
It’s easy for the president to lecture about the lack of civility in politics, but when his administration is one of the most vicious voices in modern history those lectures are hypocritical. If Obama really wants to raise the public discourse he ought to start the cleaning in his own White House.
Barack Obama, the Insult Comic President, was up to his old shtick Saturday night.
Breaking with presidential punch line tradition for the second consecutive year, Obama dropped zinger after zinger on his opponents and allies alike at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Obama went all Don Rickles on a broad range of topics and individuals: Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, presidential advisers David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, the news media, Jay Leno, and Republicans Michael Steele, Scott Brown, John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Except for a mild joke pegged to his falling approval ratings, Obama mostly spared Obama during his 14-minute stand-up routine. Palin, he said, calls Twitter and Facebook "the socialized media." He dubbed Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican Party, "the Notorious G.O.P." The newly enacted health-care law, the president joked, has "hundreds" of secret provisions, such as one covering people in Massachusetts who’ve suffered "short-term memory loss" about the state’s own efforts to reform health care. "So good news, Mitt!" Obama said of Republican critic and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. "Your condition is covered!"
The president elicited a few shocked "oooohs" from the audience of 2,600 when he told this joke about Charlie Crist, the Florida governor who is defecting from the Republican Party to run for the Senate: "Odds are that the Salahis are here," he said, referring to the gate-crashing Virginia couple. "There haven’t been people who were more unwelcome at a party since Charlie Crist."
The outer-directed tone of the material, which was credited to Axelrod, White House speechwriter Jon Favreau and ex-Hillary Clinton speechwriter Jon Lovett, was in keeping with Obama’s inaugural voyage as presidential joker last year. Making the rounds of the traditional spring dinners, the president cracked wise on just about everyone but himself.
The Press is becoming slightly more hostile after being treated with disdain by Obama
It’s well established that Barack Obama, both as a candidate and a President, has received very favourable coverage from the American press. But what’s less known is that many of the White House reporters who cover Obama greatly resent the way they are treated by the Obama administration.
There are still some strikingly positive write-ups for Obama, even in supposedly objective news stories. This from the AP struck me at the weekend:
Casting aside years of rancor, President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday signed the biggest nuclear arms pact in a generation, lacing the moment with new warnings of sanctions for an intransigent Iran.
The treaty, sealed after months of halting negotiation, is significant not just for what it does but for what it symbolizes: a fresh start for the United States and Russia, and evidence to a watching world that nuclear disarmament is more than a goal.
Blimey. Give that man another Nobel Peace Prize.
But the truth is that it is media editors rather than reporters who tend to worship Obama most. At the coalface, there’s a lot of frustration. That’s been an undercurrent for while but it seems the issue is now bubbling to the surface.
The United States should consider raising taxes to help bring deficits under control and may need to consider a European-style value-added tax, White House adviser Paul Volcker said on Tuesday.
Volcker, answering a question from the audience at a New York Historical Society event, said the value-added tax "was not as toxic an idea" as it has been in the past and also said a carbon or other energy-related tax may become necessary.
Though he acknowledged that both were still unpopular ideas, he said getting entitlement costs and the U.S. budget deficit under control may require such moves. "If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes," he said.
Wow! Obama’s arrogance is irritating members of his own party. Rep Marion Berry who announced today that he will not be seeking re-election took a shot at President Obama for his arrogance and lack of leadership.
Glenn Thrush of Politico has the scoop: Rep. Marion Berry’s parting shot, published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette [no link, subscription only] offers a warning to moderate Democrats and border state moderates — warning of a midterm bloodbath comparable to the 54-seat D-to-R swing in 1994.
But the jaw-dropper is Berry’s claim that President Obama personally dismissed any comparison between Democrats now and under Bill Clinton 16 years ago — by saying his personal popularity would bail everybody out.
Writes ADG reporter Jane Fullerton: Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.
“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.” [snip]
“I began to preach last January that we had already seen this movie and we didn’t want to see it again because we know how it comes out,” said Arkansas’ 1st District congressman, who worked in the Clinton administration before being elected to the House in 1996… "I just began to have flashbacks to 1993 and ’94. No one that was here in ’94, or at the day after the election felt like. It certainly wasn’t a good feeling.”
Obama wants to pass a healthcare bill just to show he can…
The only thing healthy about Congress’s health-insurance legislation is the healthy skepticism about it shown by most of the public, as revealed by polls. What is most unhealthy about this legislation is the raw arrogance in the way it was conceived and passed. Supporters of government health insurance call its passage “historic.” Past attempts to pass such legislation — going back for decades — failed repeatedly. But now both houses of Congress have passed government-health-care legislation and it is just a question of reconciling their respective bills and presenting President Obama with a political victory.
In short, this is not about improving the health of the American people. It is about passing something — anything — to keep the Obama administration from ending up with egg on its face by being unable to pass a bill, after so much hype and hoopla. Politically, looking impotent is a formula for disaster at election time. Far better to pass even bad legislation that will not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election, so that the public will not know whether it makes medical care better or worse until it is too late for the voters to hold the administration accountable.
The utter cynicism of this has been apparent from the outset, in the rush to pass a health-care bill in a hurry, in order to meet wholly arbitrary, self-imposed deadlines. First it was supposed to be passed before the August 2009 congressional recess. Then it was supposed to be passed before Labor Day. When that didn’t happen, it was supposed to be rushed to passage before Christmas.
Even the Cubans realize that Obama is a habitual liar
Cuba’s foreign minister called President Barack Obama an “imperial and arrogant” liar Monday for his conduct at the U.N. climate conference, a reflection of the communist island’s increasingly fiery verbal attacks on the U.S. government.
Bruno Rodriguez spent an hour and a half lambasting Obama’s behavior in Copenhagen, telling a news conference, “at this summit, there was only imperial, arrogant Obama, who does not listen, who imposes his positions and even threatens developing countries.”
He called the summit “a fallacy, a farce” and said Washington used back-room deals and strong-arm tactics to foist on the world a deal that he labeled “undemocratic” and “suicidal” because it urges — but does not require — major polluters to make deeper emissions cuts.
Rodriguez also said Cuba and other poor nations have refused to recognize the agreement because they weren’t permitted to participate in its development.
Obama claims personal credit for a victory that wasn’t his
Intelligence officials say alleged terrorist plotter Najibullah Zazi was caught not thanks to domestic surveillance but by CIA tracking of al-Qaida. The White House says the president did it.
Imagine you, or perhaps your father, were one of the five Marines who raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. Then imagine seeing Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of that iconic image.
But then you read the caption below the photo. It says that according to the White House, what those Marines were doing was the result of "President Roosevelt’s deep involvement in the war effort." The claim is that the Marines only had sketchy information about Iwo Jima, but the president sensed something and held "an intensive three-week White House focus" on the impending attack.
Wouldn’t it sound fishy? Wouldn’t you feel as if the real heroes had been dishonored for the sake of an oversized presidential ego?
Obama really loves himself, and wants everyone to love him
The President of these United States recently expressed his love for “the Urdu poets,” a piece of inspired BS that nobody in their right minds believed for a second. But then the P was narrowcasting to Pakistan, he thought, and Americans weren’t supposed to be listening. Yet character is revealed in those little snippets of Obama’s mind — his glorious fantasy life, his everlasting hope that somebody will fall for another piece of schtick, and his essential fraudulence as a human being.
Obama’s biggest audience is himself, and no doubt he preened and pranced in his mind’s eye when he told the nation of Pakistan about his deep love and understanding of Urdu. Love ya, baby! all those sixty million Pakis were shouting, marveling at our polyglot president. Waddaguy! At least in Obi’s fantasy life, that is. Because that Zeppelin-sized ego of his needs to be pumped up a little bit more every single day.
Well, yes. For his next showboating performance our P will parade his beautiful ballooning ego in front of Vladimir Putin, whose own hands are dripping with the blood of Chechen Muslims, not to mention those brave (and now dead) Moscow journalists who dared to criticize the new Czar in the media.
Obama mocks everyone but himself
The Press is becoming slightly more hostile after being treated with disdain by Obama
Obama and Volcker are plotting to raise taxes
Obama wants to pass a healthcare bill just to show he can… 
