Clarice’s Pieces: Know When to Hold ‘Em (Sherrod)

 Clarice Feldman
Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” is as good a start to this week’s summary as I can think of:

“You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,

Know when to walk away and know when to run.

You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.

There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.”
In my view, Obama still doesn’t know when to hold or fold his race cards. Neither does the NAACP. They’ve been bluffing the dummies so long they think they can get away with it forever. And they are wrong.

And when “the dealin’s done, the Democrats and their friends in the press will find out that their decades-long race-baiting of their political and ideological opponents has lost its power to bluff. Let’s start seeing and raising them every time they try it .

Obama ran and won in large part on a theme: this was going to be a post-racial presidency. We could end the Balkanization of American and begin working together. From the outset he danced a tightrope. To appease his base — and perhaps because it fits his worldview — he filled his administration with people who had a decidedly racialist/ spoils system view of government. The agenda was to increase the number of racial preferences while pretending it was not doing so.

One of his most important picks was Eric Holder as Attorney General. And one of Holder’s first acts was to call the United States “a nation of cowards” on racial issues. “Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we average Americans simply do not talk enough with each other about race,” he said.

At the same time, his Department was dismissing a case it had won against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation and directing the staff of the Civil Rights Division to ignore similar cases in which the perpetrators of voter intimidation were black and the victims white (according to sworn and corroborated testimony). It was forcing jurisdictions still under the Voting Rights Act to adopt voting rules that would assure racial quotas were met in election outcomes. To date, the Department, instead of welcoming a debate on race and on its conduct, has refused to cooperate with any official inquiries on its conduct.

In the same vein, when the Administration stripped car dealerships from Chrysler and GM owners race was a factor in deciding who would be allowed to remain in business and who would not.

On the Hill, with Congressional assistance, new racial preferences were slipped into ObamaCare and the misnamed Financial Reform Act. All of this had the likely effect of driving further a wedge between citizens; violating our firmly held belief in equality of opportunity and creating more tensions and ill-will.

Last summer the President made an unforced error, attacking the Cambridge police Department for what he characterized as behaving stupidly in arresting Harvard Professor Gates. When it turned out that it was Gates who was at fault and Obama who had acted unfairly before the facts — the “context” if you will — were known, he tried to patch it over with a Rose garden Beer Summit.

This week, the President again acted precipitously in forcing the resignation of Shirley Sherrod, a USDA employee, for her remarks made in March to an NAACP group .When it appeared that her remarks — while they were intemperate and would surely have been deemed racist if they’d been made by a white speaker, were somewhat ameliorated (but no less racist) by her claimed epiphany that the issue was class, not race — he was forced once again to backtrack. Obama apologized and apparently another position was offered to her.

In the event you haven’t watched all the ins and outs, here’s a summary.

Shirley Sherrod was the USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack appointed her to this position on July 25 of last year, days after a group she’d formed with her husband and others won a thirteen million dollar settlement of a suit they’d file against Vilsack claiming the Department had discriminated against them, a case whose claims have mushroomed and for which taxpayers have already paid out over a billion dollars plus some millions in defense costs, in some cases to plaintiffs with dubious claims.

Speaking at an NAACP dinner in Georgia, she talked about how some years before while working at a non-government organization — she’d not done all she should have to help a struggling white farmer. Her words are clearly racist. The audience signaled agreement with them.

Andrew Breitbart received a copy of this tape.

When the NAACP falsely charged Obama’s opponents in the tea party with being racist, Breitbart who has repeatedly shown the claim against the tea party to be without foundation unloaded the tape, using it to show the hypocrisy of the NAACP:

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another group’s racial tolerance.

In fact, Breitbart’s aim was directed as much toward the media as the NAACP and Sherrod’s class warfare language. He said, when presenting the video tapes:

The emerging Tea Party nation understands that the media has focused on the manufactured racial schism while intentionally ignoring the schism between free market thinkers and government expansionists, that the latter of which is brazen in its desire to transform America into a European-model welfare state with a healthy dose of socialism.

It’s unfortunate that the NAACP’s recent resolution and false accusations have forced us to show you video 1 when video 2 is the bigger problem. That’s not to say video 1 is not a problem, but this country can ill afford, in this time of economic peril, to waste our time poking and prodding at the racial hornet’s nest that was supposed to have been removed with this post-racial presidency. But now President Obama and the modern-day Democrat party reveal they are anything but post-racial.

Yet again, the juxtaposition of the real video evidence shown here versus the mainstream media’s straight faced reportage of the NAACP’s baseless accusations demonstrates that, once again, the American main stream media has asserted itself as the number one enemy of the truth, when the facts don’t fit the left-wing narrative. Like the NAACP, it has become no better than Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in its willingness to exploit race for political ends and their unflinching support of the Obama’s left-wing agenda.

Not on the version of the tape he had, but on the longer version in the NAACP’s possession, Ms Sherrod later said she’d had an epiphany: Poor whites weren’t the enemy. It was the rich folks who were harming the poor of all races.

Perhaps Breitbart should have made even clearer that he was not attacking her, but the NAACP. He later clarified that her admission of racist behavior concerned conduct which occurred before she was on the government payroll. It was clear nonetheless that what he’d given (two different snippets from the speech, the latter advising blacks to seek employment at the USDA here they wouldn’t be fired) was not the entire tape. Fox news, signaled to its producers not to use the tape and with the exception of Bill O ‘ Reilly, they held off showing the video until she resigned though other media did run with it before the entire tape was found.

The NAACP leapt in and demanded she be fired, and the White House pressured her to resign.

When the full tape — or at least more of it (there is an unexplained break in the tape) — was made public, the NAACP backtracked, the White House apologized and there was a suggestion that she was going to be offered another job in “civil rights.”

What Breitbart had done was a bit of judo, using the NAACP’s hair trigger response to racism and its habit of using selective and not credibly evidenced reports against opponents like the tea party to embarrass the organization itself to demonstrate how careless it is in its accusations of racism. They stepped in it with both feet, embarrassing Ms. Sherrod, the White House and their own organization in the process. To my knowledge this is the first serious pushback against such NAACP techniques. There is a certain symmetry in all this.

As my friend JMH noted,” They demanded that tea party leaders publicly excommunicate putative racists in their midst — and then suddenly found themselves stumbling over their own petard.”

Those who use this to attack Breitbart are wrong. He baited the hook and all the usual suspects leapt at it.

People are already hard at work trying to rewrite the history of this. In the new version Ms. Sherrod is another Dreyfus according to the laughably hyperbolic Keith Olbermann, but in her speech while on the government payroll she said,

“Now we just endured eight years of the Bushes, but we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black President.”

After the forced resignation the NAACP had some “context” which in its mind softened the racism in the initial video, the NAACP blamed Fox and Breitbart for their own overreaction to the video.

She, too, blamed Fox. She said Fox showed no professionalism in continuing to bother her for an interview, but failing to correct their coverage.

“I think they should but they won’t. They intended exactly what they did. “They were looking for the result they got yesterday,” she said of Fox. “I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person.”

In sum, in the new telling of the events Breitbart’s own words are ignored and he was blamed for what were the White House and the NAACP’s intemperate actions. Sherrod and the NAACP both blamed Fox, the network that held back on the basis they wanted to see the whole tape and would not run the story until it could see the whole thing and get some context for her remarks.

For Sherrod and the NAACP the enemy is Fox and Republicans. Not themselves or the White House. For Obama the fault is Vilsack’s.

The story gained even more traction than it might have — at least online. (Who knows what minimal information those who rely on old media have of any of this?)

The reason for that is the Daily Caller obtained the archives of the 400 member listserv JournoList emails which reveal the connivances of this band of journalists and academics.

There’s a lot of unsavory meat being exposed. Not the least of it is the plan to tar any opposition to Obama and his policies during the presidential campaign as racist even though the claims were far fetched and baseless, and to prevent news of Obama’s racist and Marxist Reverend Wright from being published.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists.” [Emphasis supplied.]

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks-in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

“Richard Kim got this right above: ‘a horrible glimpse of general election press strategy.’ He’s dead on,” Tomasky continued. “We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”

Don Surber reviewed some of the campaign coverage and noted how often the reportage contained false accusations of racism.

One of the columnists in his hometown, Mary Mitchell of the Chicago Sun-Times, frequently cried wolf, er, racist.

Consider this from an October 9, 2008, column: “Despite Palin’s steady stream of hateful speech, Obama’s poll numbers have gone up, while McCain’s supporters are growing antsy.”

What hateful speech?

She opposed Obama’s policies, not his skin color. And when Palin said of Obama he “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist,” Palin was absolutely right. Only two groups have ever bombed the Pentagon: Al-Qaeda and Bill Ayers’ Weather Underground.

Mary Mitchell’s column also included a reference to a phantom shout of a racial epithet at a Palin rally. This set a pattern of unsubstantiated of racism at rallies against Obama any time things get tough. members of the Congressional Black Caucus trolled for racial taunts at a Tea Party. Hearing none, the rumor of an N-word against Congressman John Lewis was whispered.

Let me tell you, if it happened, Congressman Lewis would still be shouting against it. There would be videos of it.

This makes it seem as if Obama was chosen by the Democratic Party solely because his race could shield their socialistic agenda from attack. To be sure, he received the highest percentage of white votes any Democratic presidential candidate has received since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Some of that may be white guilt. Most of it was a vote against President Bush.

While liberals point to a few incidents here by fringe groups, conservatives point to Obama belonging to Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years. “Black liberation theology” turns out to be race-baiting. No patriot would return to a church after the pastor swore “God Damn America.” Barack Obama wrote a book titled by that preacher.

So now Obama has a race problem?

The chickens, as Reverend Wright would say are coming home to roost.

The denouement comes too late to remedy the outrages perpetrated by the race baiters over the years. How much “context”, for example, did civil rights activists give the decent Judge Pickering with a lifetime of working for better racial relations and square dealing? None, of course.

But this tactic has been so good to them, the examples of the bluffs’ working are numerous. Thus Senator Byrd was given a hero’s farewell in the Capitol, his role in blocking civil rights legislation for years was all but forgotten by the Democrats and most of the press when his party laid him to rest after a long career redolent of racism. But Byrd’s an easy example of how public memories have been distorted by time and media disinformation. Here’s a better test. Ask your family and friends if then Senator John F Kennedy, voted for or against President Eisenhower’s 1957 Civil Rights Act.

When you realize how few know the correct answer, maybe you’ll agree that the time to push back against this race card bluffing and media distortion of the truth is long overdue.

Read the original article AmericanThinker

Obama’s Cynical Recess Appointment of Donald Berwick

Ruth Marcus
WASHINGTON — As a matter of policy, President Obama’s nomination of Donald Berwick to oversee Medicare and Medicaid was inspired: Berwick, co-founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, is the country’s leading evangelist for the proposition that it is possible to deliver higher quality medical care at a lower cost. He’s not only preached that gospel; he’s shown that it can be translated into reality.

As a matter of politics, the president’s choice of Berwick was, well, the polite word would be bold. The less polite word: boneheaded. Administration officials argue that Republicans would have seized on any nominee as an opportunity to re-litigate the health care debate. But Berwick offered opponents a loaded gun with his talk about rationing, his discussion of health reform as a matter of redistributing wealth, and his effusive praise for the British system. If the president wanted to buy a fight like this, he ought to have been better prepared to wage it.

And as a matter of good government, the president’s move to snub the Senate and install Berwick by recess appointment was outrageous. Using — more accurately, abusing — this mechanism to make appointments during a Senate recess is a bipartisan temptation. All presidents succumb, and Obama is facing a more implacably recalcitrant Senate minority. Yet the original purpose of recess appointments was to let government function during the long stretches with Congress away, but that’s water under the constitutional bridge.

A recess appointment should be a last step in cases of egregious delay, not one of the first. That standard was nowhere near met in Berwick’s case. Berwick was nominated to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on April 19, less than three months ago. He had not yet had a hearing. His committee vetting wasn’t complete.

In short, Berwick is no Dawn Johnsen.

Johnsen was Obama’s choice to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — like CMS administrator, one of those government jobs as important as it is obscure. Like Berwick, Johnsen could not have been more qualified. She was chosen even before the inauguration. The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings in February 2009. It approved her nomination in March.

And then … nothing. Because the Senate failed to act before ending the 2009 session, the president had to nominate her a second time. Finally, 14 months into the process, Johnsen’s nomination was withdrawn. A recess appointment — if Obama wanted to take the political heat — would have been entirely justified in her case.

Not in Berwick’s.

As Montana Democrat Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said after Obama’s precipitous action, the confirmation process “serves as a check on executive power and protects … all Americans by ensuring that crucial questions are asked of the nominee — and answered.” Bypassing the process also harms the nominee, undercutting his legitimacy and truncating the time he has to act. Berwick can only serve until December 2011, a short opportunity to make a big difference.

There are legitimate explanations for Berwick’s more incendiary comments on health care. It’s too bad he didn’t get to offer them. A cynic — (BEG ITAL)who, me?(END ITAL) — might think that the administration simply preferred not to suffer the political downside of a public airing.

A cynic might wonder, with Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln facing a tough re-election fight, whether Berwick could even get through committee on a party-line vote. A cynic might think that the last thing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wanted before the election was a floor fight about rationing health care.

A cynic might look at the White House explanation — that it was urgent for CMS, without a confirmed administrator since 2006, to have a leader — and ask: Then why did you dither for 15 months before nominating someone?

In announcing the appointment, the president complained that “many in Congress have decided to delay critical nominations for political purposes.” True, but where’s the evidence of delay in Berwick’s case? You can’t fairly accuse the other side of political gamesmanship when you short-circuit the process and storm off the court before the first set.

“To some degree, he’s damaged goods,” then-Sen. Barack Obama said in 2005 about John Bolton’s recess appointment as United Nations ambassador.

Would the president say the same about Berwick?

Read the original article RealClearPolitics

Malkin: Whitewashing Black Racism

Michelle Malkin

Why haven’t national media outlets reported on the vile and violent rants of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) thugs whose 2008 voter intimidation tactics got a pass from the Obama administration? Simple: Radical black racism doesn’t fit the Hope and Change narrative. There’s no way to shoehorn Bush-bashing into the story. And, let’s face it, exposing the inflammatory rhetoric of the left does nothing to help liberal editors and reporters fulfill their true calling — embarrassing the right.

This week, Justice Department whistleblower J. Christian Adams came forward with damning public testimony about how Obama officials believe “civil rights law should not be enforced in a race-neutral manner, and should never be enforced against blacks or other national minorities.” In the wake of Adams’ expose on how the Obama DOJ abandoned default judgments against the NBPP bullies for the sake of politically correct racial politics, a shocking video clip of one of the lead defendants in the Philadelphia voter intimidation case resurfaced on the Internet. It shows bloodthirsty King Samir Shabazz during a 2009 National Geographic documentary interview spewing:

“You want freedom? You’re gonna have to kill some crackers! You’re gonna have to kill some of their babies!”

These NBPP death threats and white-bashing diatribes are nothing new to those who have tracked the black supremacy movement. In August 2009, nearly a year ago, I reported on a sign on display outside NBPP defendant (and elected member of Philadelphia’s 14th Ward Democratic Committee) Jerry Jackson’s home. It reads: “COLORED ONLY: No Whites Allowed.” In July 2009, I interviewed poll watcher/witness Christopher Hill, whom Shabazz and Jackson called “cracker” several times while Shabazz brandished his baton.

“They physically attempted to block me,” Hill recounted. He also saw a group of elderly ladies walk away from the polling site without voting while the duo preened in front of the entrance. “If you’re a poll watcher, you shouldn’t be dressed in paramilitary garb,” Hill said, as he wondered aloud at what would have happened if he had showed up in the same sort of costume.

In May 2009, I reported on the affidavit of civil rights attorney and poll watcher Bartle Bull, who witnessed the NBPP thuggery in Philadelphia and reported on billy club-wielding Shabazz’s election day boast: “You’re about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.”

In the fall of 2008, just days before he showed up to hector white poll workers, Shabazz told the Philadelphia Inquirer:

“I’m about the total destruction of white people. I’m about the total liberation of black people. I hate white people. I hate my enemy… The only thing the cracker understands is violence… The only thing the cracker understands is gunpowder. You got to take violence to violence.”

The desire to kill, subordinate and demonize white people is a staple of NBPP propaganda. An NBPP Trenton, N.J., chapter “block party” music video posted on YouTube calls on black followers to “bang for freedom,” “put the bang right into a cracker’s face,” and “if you’re going to bang, bang for black power …  hang a cracker … if you’re going to bang, bang on the white devil … burying him near the river bank with the right shovel … community revolution in progress … banging for crackers to go to hell, we don’t need em.”

Chanting “Black Power,” Minister Najee Muhammad, national field marshal for the New Black Panther Party, and Uhuru Shakur, local chairman of the Atlanta NBPP chapter, issued a pre-Election Day 2008 threat to “racists and other angry whites who are upset over an impending Barack Obama presidential victory.” Said Muhammad: “Most certainly, we cannot allow these racist forces to slaughter our babies or commit other acts of violence against the black population, nor our black president.”

That’s rich, given that the only racists talking about slaughtering babies are the ones with New Black Panther Party patches on their puffed chests.

If a Tea Party activist threatened to kill the babies of his political opponents, it wouldn’t just be front-page news. It would be the subject of Democrat-led congressional investigations, a series of terrified New York Times columns about the perilous “climate of hate,” a Justice Department probe by Attorney General Eric Holder, a domestic terror alert from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and another Important Teachable Moment Speech/Summit from Healer-in-Chief Barack Obama.

But with the racism shoe on the other foot, Team Obama and its media water-carriers are exhibiting the very racial cowardice Holder once purported to condemn. Thanks to Obama’s feckless Department of Injustice, these black supremacist brutes are free to show up on the next national Election Day at polling places in full paramilitary regalia with nightsticks, hurling racist, anti-American epithets at those exercising their right to vote and at those protecting the integrity of the electoral process.

The reaction of our national media watchdogs: Shhhhhhhh.

Read the original article Human Events

Alarkon:Obama pushes back at criticism his White House is anti-business

Are unions Dock Blocking oil cleanup ships in the Gulf of Mexico?

White House watchdogs call for investigation into tech official

Olivastro:The perfect summer storm

Richard Olivastro

Summer begins June 21; for our nation, the long hot summer has already begun.

The industrial accident in the Gulf of Mexico—being reported 24/7 by the media as an “environmental catastrophe,” as it may indeed turn out to be—has made it worse. Whether you watch the Weather Channel or the news channels, respective forecasts and commentaries alike seem designed to seed both the clouds and viewer perceptions. All of which affects political atmospherics and has contributed to the level of heat felt by Mr. Obama and others inside the White House.

The presidential game was not supposed to be like this.

Everything Barack Obama touched, said, did—or even tried to do—was supposed to be “perfect.”

That was the script; and, for some, will remain the progressive fiction purveyed as an article of faith.

Such fiction will persist despite reality, facts, and poll numbers that confirm citizens have stopped buying the Chicago packaged and published fairy tale distributed nationally. What was introduced and originally sold as biography—auto and otherwise—is now off even the N.Y. Times fiction list.

* * * * *

Secular progressives may be shocked to learn that ‘Only God is Perfect.’

Baseball fans of all political stripes might wonder: Even during summer?

Yes, no man, woman, or president is—or ever will be—perfect in all aspects of life’s innings.

Philadelphia Phillies pitching ace Roy Halladay understands this reality despite achieving perfection over nine full baseball innings on May 29. Four days later, Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers performed the same; but, unfortunately, in his reality, veteran baseball umpire Jim Joyce did not. You likely already know those sports stories.

Mr. Obama, and erstwhile supporters, should accept reality and start behaving accordingly in all aspects of presidential innings during summer and all seasons.

* * * * *

In defense of Mr. Obama, the industrial accident in the Gulf was not his fault.

In spite of that, the president’s statement that he “takes responsibility” may be admirable—on the surface. That is, if all federal government actions are properly limited and in appropriate support of necessary state initiatives and BP responsibilities. If Mr. Obama does it only that way, maybe… a Roy Halladay?

However, if any federal actions overreach constitutional authority, or can be rightly viewed as indicative of nefarious intent, then citizens will, however reluctantly, conclude those federal government actions were planned and existed below the president’s surface-level “takes responsibility” statement.

And, pray tell, if that proves to be the case, then such federal government actions are yet another example of the Chicago school of political training in which, as Rham Emmanuel originally said in his own signal ‘surface statement,’ “…crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

The opportunity afforded the incoming Obama administration 17 long months ago was to use a steady hand to weather the domestic economic storm. Instead, from the outset, the president seems to have always purposefully pursued what he always calls a “transformational” agenda that—simply and accurately stated—has been “takeover” at the core.

In the beginning, Chief of Staff-to-be Rahm Emanuel’s signal ‘surface statement’ energized Obama supporters. Perhaps, back then, only aggressive-progressives understood, knew, or could see beneath the water line what lie ahead?

In retrospect, when Mr. Emanuel made his infamous “crisis is opportunity” statement, he—and others—outlined the shape of things to come in the Obama ‘transformation’ iceberg.

Here’s a recap for you:

Emanuel declared the “U.S. largely squandered the opportunity the oil shocks of the 1970s presented to make serious, long-term changes in its energy habits.”

And, back then, analysts talked about pent up “yearning for government spending on infrastructure to stimulate economic activity” and that the incoming president should “push the kind of green projects” that are consistent with calls during the campaign for “a transition to alternative energy sources including new kinds of mass-transit systems” and “government investment” in all market arenas.

And, this gem: “of course, all of this would be easier to push through if it was called stimulus spending.”

And, finally, “with rising levels of unemployment” and stress among the masses “health care reform could be rammed through along with more regulatory…” oversight of financial markets and industries.

All of that is exactly what has happened.

What might be next on the horizon?

Answer: The Perfect Summer Storm!

That’s the way aggressive-progressives would view it. After all, the aggressive-progressive mindset self-justifies unilateral action for any and all purposes whether based on responsibilities real or assumed.

What is the Perfect Summer Storm?

The Feds begin using the oil spewing from the BP Deep Water well as part of their justification for taking over control of all private oil drilling operations.

When will the Perfect Summer Storm begin?

If you live on or near the Gulf Coast, go to the shoreline, pick up a seashell, cup it to your ear, listen very carefully. Beyond the sound of the surf… you just might here: “I take this action because it is my responsibility as….”

Read the original article Daily Caller

Wilson: Arrogance in the Executive

What the oil spill has revealed about the Obama presidency.

Andrew B. Wilson

Real leadership means never having to say you’re the boss. There is no surer sign of weakness and insecurity than the repeated assertion of your own power and authority. This truth has somehow eluded Barack Obama. Hence the unending (and off-putting) self-puffery in his recent presidential press conference.

Again and again, the president felt obliged to remind us of the centrality of his own position in responding to the Gulf oil spill, as if this would counteract the horrible pictures of thousands of gallons of oil gushing out of the ocean floor. Quoth the president:

The American people should know that from the moment this disaster began, the federal government has been in charge of the response effort. .  .  .

Make no mistake: BP is operating at our direction. Every key decision and action they take must be approved by us in advance. .  .  .

There has never been a point during this crisis in which this administration, up and down the line, in all these agencies, hasn’t understood that this was my top priority. .  .  .

It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down.

All of this is wildly over the top. No one blames Barack Obama for the Gulf oil spill. No one is asking him to swim down and plug the hole. Nevertheless, his response to the crisis is revealing. It points to several deeply troubling aspects of the Obama presidency. 

Most striking is his unbounded faith in government—and an equally unbounded faith in his own abilities as a self-proclaimed transformational leader. Then there is his contempt (not too strong a word, in my judgment) for the private sector. Government, he seems to think, is a supermagnet for supersmart idealists from academia, while the business world is populated by dullards motivated by a crass and shortsighted desire for profit.

Obama apparently believes that government should be able to stop all man-made disasters before they happen. “As we continue our response effort,” he said, “we’re also moving quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.” In fact, neither he nor anyone else can “ensure” any such outcome, unless he proposes to call an end to all of the progress that has been made since the beginning of the industrial revolution, if not before.

There is no way to guarantee that accidents will not happen as long as people are people, and as long as some of the most creative and imaginative among us continue to push the envelope in engineering and scientific disciplines—whether it is human flight, the exploration of space, hunting for oil in deep water, the development of new forms of energy, or the construction of awe-inspiring bridges or buildings.

My favorite observation on engineering comes from Frank E. Mosier, formerly a top executive at Standard Oil, because it recognizes both the possibility of greatness and the impossibility of perfection. In a commencement address at the University of Pittsburgh School of Engineering in 1989, Mosier said, “All engineering is glorified failure analysis, and great feats of engineering are nothing more than successful bets that your ideas will be more economical or efficient or beautiful without being disastrous.”

It is a pity the same kind of failure analysis—subjecting every assumption to rigorous testing and scrutinizing all the ways in which a grand design might fail to deliver the desired result—is rarely if ever applied to major social legislation. The passage of the hastily conceived and sloppily written health care bill ranks as an obvious example.

The blowout in the Gulf occurred in “ultra deep water.” Drilling for oil at a depth of a mile or so below the surface became economically feasible about a decade ago, when the price of oil shot up above $20 a barrel. Still, it was a considerable technical challenge to go from deepwater drilling (depths of about 1,000 feet) to ultra deep (5,000 feet).

Until the explosion on April 20 that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig, oil companies had experienced only one significant spill in drilling hundreds of wells in the Gulf over a period of more than 60 years, including many in ultra deep water. It has taken just one disaster to call an exceptionally good safety record into question. After the eventual postmortem, we may decide that wisdom dictates a long moratorium on ultra deep water drilling. Or not. It may be possible to learn quickly from whatever mistakes were made in this instance and move on.

In his analysis of the situation, Obama has been quick to blame this disaster on the supposed sins of free enterprise and private companies seeking private gain, the public be damned. Without citing any evidence of wrongdoing, he talked about the “oil industry’s cozy and sometimes corrupt relationship with government regulators” and how that has meant “little or no regulation at all.” Clearly, it does not occur to him that the oil companies have a powerful motive to self-regulate—in light of the physical threat to their own workers and the huge potential damage to the long-term viability of their companies that awaits anything less than an exceptional safety performance.

In thinking so poorly of business and business people, it may be only natural for Obama to look upon himself and his friends from academia as being​—well—a cut above the ordinary (and quite possibly corrupt) people doing actuarial work for insurance companies, or toiling in the engineering departments of companies like BP. This holier-than-thou, smarter-than-everyone-else ivory tower elitism has unfortunately become a defining element of the Obama presidency.

Perhaps because it was so far-fetched—so bizarre even—few of the reporters covering the May 27 press conference picked up on the fact that Obama seemed to favor the idea of the federal government going into the business of marshalling the technology needed to fix the oil industry’s mistakes. “For now,” he disconsolately noted, “BP has the best technology, along with the other oil companies, when it comes to actually capping the well down there.” But in the future, he said, it might make sense for the government to take direct charge of such operations. 

Twice he lauded the contribution that Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, could make to recovery efforts in the Gulf. Never mind that Chu is known for his research in cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. These are the president’s exact words: Chu “brought together a team, basically a brain trust, of some of the smartest folks we have at the National Labs and in academia to essentially serve as an oversight board with BP engineers and scientists in making calculations about how much mud could you pour down, how fast, without risking potentially the whole thing blowing.”

In the mind of this president, there seems to be nothing that government cannot do.

Read the original article Weekly Standard

Dunkirk Conservatism

Quin Hillyer

The greatest rescue operation in history began in full 70 years ago today. In nine days beginning May 27, 1940, the British Navy and hundreds upon hundreds of private vessels rescued an astonishing 338,266 men from the harbor and beaches of Dunkirk, France, all while under constant bombardment from German air and land forces that killed 68,111 Brits and captured as many as another 80,000. Instead of Great Britain being left at the mercy of the German death machine, the island nation had saved an army big enough to repel a Nazi invasion.

As Winston Churchill rightly noted: “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”

American conservatives right now do not seem to realize that we are in the immediate post-Dunkirk phase of a desired political recovery.

All around the country, I hear conservatives talking giddily about how many seats Republicans will pick up in this fall’s congressional elections, and about how many of those Republicans will be true conservatives.

Newt Gingrich, for instance, is out there playing his usual game of speaking extravagantly about a coming victory. On May 18, he forecast up to a 70-seat gain in Republican House seats. On May 20, on the basis of one special election, he downgraded his prediction to “the 30-to-50-seat range” — which still would be mighty impressive, by historical standards. This sort of volatility is nothing new: This is the same Gingrich who promised a 30-seat Republican House pickup in 1998, only to see an actual loss of five seats instead.

Maybe we should learn something from 1998. Or from 1980, where polls six days before Election Day had Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in a dead heat, only to see Reagan win 489 out of 538 electoral votes. Conventional wisdom says that “six months is an eternity in politics.” Actually, six days is an eternity in politics. Six months might as well be “infinity and beyond.”

WHICH LEADS US BACK to Dunkirk. On the same day the evacuation began, the British War Cabinet came close to an ignominious deal with Italy’s Mussolini that would amount to agreeing to permanent Nazi/Fascist domination of the European continent — so close that only Churchill’s dogged willpower stood between the deal and a continued battle for civilization. Yet six days after coming so close to what amounted to surrender, a quarter-million soldiers already had been evacuated, and it was clear that the Brits would indeed live to fight another day. Six days from apparent defeat to survival.

Yes, six days is an eternity.

That’s why the current conservative giddiness is misplaced. Yes, the more conservative candidates won general elections in New Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Hawaii, and conservatives have won primaries in Utah, West Virginia, and Idaho, while conservatives have surged or even forced more liberal candidates out of races in Florida, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and elsewhere. Good. But all that means is that conservatives can now again wage a real fight. It means we have avoided the rout that the Obama-Pelosi-ACORN-SEIU brigades had planned for us. We have been evacuated. But our political D-Day, and V-E Day, and V-J Day, remain a long, long way off, and the outcome is by no means assured.

Some indicators, meanwhile, are not good at all. The Republican National Committee has just about $12 million cash on hand, compared to $40 million at this point in the most recent comparable cycle. All three of the main national party committees are reeling from embarrassments, and poorly led. Thousands of dollars for strip clubs and softball equipment. Chairman’s feet continually in mouth. Blown endorsements and elections in New York-23, Florida Senate, Utah Senate, Kentucky Senate, Pennsylvania-12. Ham-handed interference in primary battles across the nation rather than letting locals choose their own candidates while the committees save their money and prestige and keep their powder dry until it’s time to beat Democrats rather than fellow Republicans.

And, lest anybody forget, conservatives continue to lose legislatively. Health care has been nationalized. Student loans have been nationalized. The financial industry has been turned on its head. Spending continues to go through the roof. The auto industry has been partly nationalized. Half of the 1996 reforms of welfare have been gutted. The Justice Department is run by corrupt, leftist ideologues. The census has been politicized. AmeriCorps has been expanded ten-fold and altered into the first makings of a political army, while its inspector general has been illegally hounded from office — and thus the internal controls against rank politicization have been torn asunder. Civil rights are now protected only for minorities, but not for whites or Asians. In a North Carolina case, civil rights were even adjudged to be nonexistent unless Democrats are virtually guaranteed electoral victory. The Supreme Court now features its most radical member ever, a truly dangerous Latina who is anything but wise — and she seems likely to be joined by another leftist, this one bright and personable enough to have a chance to sway Justice Anthony Kennedy in her direction.

And on and on the disasters have gone. While conservatives pick up popular support and occasional off-year electoral victories, the Left has gobbled up vast amounts of the political continent — and much of that land will be exceedingly difficult to re-take. Anzio, anyone? Guadalcanal? The Somme in World War I? Korea above the 38th parallel? Can anybody doubt that possession of territory, along with the levers of power within it, does anything other than confer huge advantages?

Friends, the fight to retake what already has been lost will be a long, long, hard, hard slog. Giddiness is out of place.

Yes, it is true that confidence, tempered by grim realism, is certainly not out of line, considering the poll numbers, the grassroots enthusiasm, the Tea Parties, and the incompetence and clueless of much of the leftist opposition. But confidence must be backed not just by hard work but also by smart work. Conservatives must not fall prey to mere attitudinal action based on an unfocused anti-establishmentarianism. Some people already in office are not “bums” who merit being thrown out. And some maverick outsiders aren’t really competent or wise. Conservatives must learn to discern which are which.

Sobered by the task ahead, but justifiably confident that victory can indeed be attained, conservatives can indeed learn not just from Churchill’s warning that evacuations are not victories, but also from the determination to earn real victories even against tough odds. At the risk of repeating what has become so familiar as to almost be trite, let us remember what else Churchill said immediately after the deliverance of Dunkirk. Remember his words, but read them and savor them as if they are new:

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight… in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air; we shall defend our [land], whatever the cost may be. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

It should hearten us that Barack Obama banished the bust of Churchill from the White House. Obama doesn’t understand. Pray Lord that we conservatives do understand. And never surrender.

Read the original article American Spectator

‘Tea party’-backed platform sails

Colin Woodard,

Portland, Maine

Conservative activists backed by “tea party” groups have rejected the Maine Republican Party’s proposed platform, replacing it with a document praising the tea-party movement and calling for a number of potentially radical changes, such as the sealing of borders.

An overwhelming majority of the 1,800 delegates at the party’s state convention passed the conservative platform Saturday. The move surprised many in the Maine GOP, which has a half-century reputation for moderation. The state’s two Republican US senators – Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins – are both considered moderates, as is their predecessor, Bill Cohen, who served in Bill Clinton’s cabinet.

“If you’re not a moderate, you don’t get elected in Maine,” says political consultant Chris Potholm, a professor of government at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. “Any candidate who gets nominated is going to ignore that platform, or he or she is going to lose.”

The development in Maine coincides with one in Utah, where the tea-party movement ousted Sen. Robert Bennett (R) at the state’s GOP nominating convention Saturday. Although Senator Bennett is generally considered a conservative, tea partyers had targeted him largely because of his 2008 vote in favor of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) for banks.

In Maine, the newly adopted GOP platform outlines various changes, although its ambiguous language leaves the meaning of many sections open to interpretation. There’s a call to restore “Constitutional Law as the basis for the judiciary,” to “reassert the principle that ‘Freedom of Religion’ does not mean ‘Freedom from Religion,’ ” to “return to the principles of Austrian Economics,” and to remove “obstacles created by government” to the private development of natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power.

Other parts are clearer: a rejection of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, elimination of the US Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, and a freeze and prohibition on stimulus spending. Healthcare is “not a right” but “a service” that can be addressed only by using “market based solutions.”

The wide acceptance of the platform at the convention surprised even its co-authors. “I had no inkling this would pass, and frankly we’d been told as much by people running the convention,” says co-author Steven Dyer, an evangelical youth pastor and vice chair of the Knox County Republican Committee, which sponsored the document. “They didn’t even make copies of it for the delegates. They just read it to them from the podium.”

Mr. Dyer says he and his co-authors aren’t members of the tea party, although some have attended such events. They were motivated by disappointment with the party’s “progressive” wing, which had “forgotten what it means to be a Republican,” he says.

He agrees that the document is vague in parts, but that was because they had expected it to be merely a draft to begin negotiations with less-conservative party members. To their amazement, it passed with the support of not only tea-party groups, evangelical Christians, and Ron Paul libertarians, but also a large number of presumably rank-and-file conventioneers.

State party chair Charles Webster denied that the platform represented a major change, saying it was just “more specific” than past platforms. “These are things that Republicans believe, especially working-class people,” he says. “If it had been really controversial, it wouldn’t have passed.”

It will help Republican candidates get elected, he says, even though Maine has been becoming increasingly Democratic in recent years.

Democrats currently control the governor’s mansion, both houses of the state Legislature, and both US House seats. Barack Obama won 15 of 16 counties in the 2008 election. Democratic control of the Portland City Council is threatened not by Republicans, but by Greens.

Seven Republicans, four Democrats, and two independents are running to replace Gov. John Baldacci, who is term-limited.

“If I was a Republican, I’d be a little nervous about this. And if I was a Democrat, I’d be cautiously optimistic,” says Mark Brewer, a political scientist at the University of Maine in Orono. He thinks that parts of the platform will play poorly with the general electorate in the gubernatorial race.

Professor Potholm played down the significance of the new platform, saying that candidates and voters will simply ignore it. “The party’s moderate constituency hasn’t changed,” he says. “It’s a tempest in a teapot.”

But longtime Republican state legislator Peter Mills, a moderate gubernatorial candidate, says it’s a mistake to underestimate the sentiment that fuels the tea-party activists. “They’re very small, very vocal, and very intense, but they reflect a wider feeling of frustration, discontent, and lack of confidence in government,” he says. “The challenge is to be able to harness that anger and frustration and, once elected, convert it into significant change.”

Read the original article Christian Science Monitor