Posts Tagged ‘Bush’
Written on February 4th, 2010 by joone shout
By: Chris Stirewalt
President Obama has adopted a new kind of bipartisanship — daring Republicans to offer their policy views so that he can discredit them.
You might call it punching-bag bipartisanship. The president and his party believe that by eliciting Republican policy ideas they can remind Americans how much they hate the GOP.
Obama now says he is not going to let Republicans “sit on the sidelines” while Democrats are stuck trying to solve problems.
It’s a big shift from last year, when his theme in dealing with the GOP was summed up in a favorite line from his stump speech for Democratic candidates: “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking.”
The Left believes voters have soured on Democrats because Americans have forgotten the awfulness of GOP policies.
In truth, voters tossed out the GOP because of arrogance, incompetence and corruption. It was not the policy, it was the people.
Sex scandals, corruption, profligate spending and recklessness in Iraq didn’t put people off limited government, but rather government itself.
Rather than correctly reading a mandate for a sensible and competent government, Obama’s hubristic agenda and dithering execution was exactly the thing to convince voters that Washington was not able to solve problems.
Now, having been thrice rebuked by voters for pushing a big, complex agenda, Obama is betting his presidency on his ability to create jobs in the next nine months.
The president wants to convince the American people that he’s working every day in practical ways to put people to work while Republicans are offering no constructive answers for joblessness.
This is a poor strategy.
If Tom DeLay or Donald Rumsfeld were the ones offering the alternatives, it might flash voters back to the second Bush term with a shudder. But it’s unlikely that some fresh face like Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin or Sen. John Thune of South Dakota will provoke much horror.
The administration did not learn the right lesson from picking a fight over terror policies with the greatest villain of the Left, Dick Cheney. Cheney took Obama to school and helped solidify bipartisan opposition to the president’s plans to close Guantanamo Bay and treating terrorist attacks against the United States as criminal matters.
Now, Obama will attempt to give Democrats a boost by taunting Republicans for their ideas to help the economy. It will likely meet the same end as the administration’s attempt at bearbaiting Cheney — the bear gets off its chain and the dogs get mauled.
Democrats had their big chance to trap Republicans, but their health plan was too big and too shoddily built to pass, even with a supermajority in Congress. Democrats went from first and goal to their own 1-yard line on delay-of-game penalties alone. Then Scott Brown picked off their final passing play.
Republicans have little experience doing anything but opposing health care policies, but they all love to talk about economic policy and their answers sound good to voters.
Obama is offering another complex, nuanced mix of green, socially conscious stimulus efforts. So Republicans will say, “We want to get government off your back, cut spending and cut taxes.”
Obama will chuckle at their simplistic answers and remind voters of the failures of the Bush era. But since Obama has lost so much credibility on issues, it’s unlikely that voters will prefer his opaque promises to the straightforward solutions of the GOP, especially if the economy remains anemic after so much big talk and big government.
Even if Obama were inclined to play against type and offer straightforward solutions, his own precarious political position would not allow it.
The Wall Street Journal tells us that for the first time ever, the members of public employee unions outnumber the members of industrial unions. The slow demise of American manufacturing and the explosive growth of government means that 51 percent of the 15.4 million union workers are government employees. In 1973, they constituted less than 20 percent of the union work force.
The president and his party have always depended on unions for votes and done their bidding in Washington. Now, that means expanding the government as a jobs program for the party’s most important constituency.
But alas, the more government jobs, the higher the burden on the private sector and the weaker the recovery.
That means Obama will struggle not only in the rhetorical struggle with Republicans over the economy. He will also have a devil of a time delivering results.
Read the original article Washington Examiner
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Filed under Obama
Tags:Bush, corruption, Democrats, Dick Cheney, government jobs, Inthrutheoutdoor, Obama, Republicans, Ryan, Thune, trap, unions, Wall Street Journal
Written on January 6th, 2010 by jono shouts
Christopher Chantrill
Sooner or later, the American people must rise up and do more than complain about the latest wizard wheeze of the progressive educated class. We must take one of their gigantic government takeover bills and flat-out repeal it.
Otherwise, they will return every generation and lay another unjust burden upon us.
Why don’t we do it to the Frankenstein’s monster of a health bill now in final delivery, courtesy of the Obama administration and the Reid/Pelosi Congress? The Obama-Reid-Pelosi bill takes one-sixth of the economy and puts it under the power of the administrative state.
The issue is clear. The administrative state, championed over the centuries by imperial dynasties, absolute monarchs, revolutionary cadres, and in our own time, by the progressive educated class popularly known as liberals, is unjust. It really is that simple.The administrative state was unjust when it was the means by which the mandarins ruled China. It was unjust when the European absolute monarchs used it to finance their palaces and their standing armies. It was unjust in the hands of the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Nazis. It remains unjust in the hands of the Castro brothers, the Chavistas, the Putins, and the Ahmadinejads.Why wouldn’t the administrative state be unjust in the hands of the American liberal elite?
Over the last century, our liberal friends had one great advantage: Their naked power plays were written up by liberal journalists and historians as the very essence of progress and justice. Woe betide the dissident conservative who attempted to tell a different story.
But then, in the fall of 2008, a political blessing came. The Democrats won the presidency, and eventually a filibuster-proof majority in Congress. They had the opportunity to ram through legislation that their liberal base wanted and that the American people hated, and they took it. They rammed their corrupt and unjust health bill down the throats of the American people. And the American people saw their liberal masters as they really are.
Last week, Michael Barone recalled a similar moment in American history. It was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, championed by Sen. Stephen Douglas (D-IL), that repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The act said, “Hey, fellas out there in the newly-settled territories! You can vote slavery in or out for your state, as the mood takes you.”
Sen. Douglas thought that he had resolved the slavery issue once for all. But he was wrong. Instead, he set off a political earthquake. The Democrats lost seventy seats in the House of Representatives
in the elections of 1854 and two new parties, the American Party and the Republican Party, arose to oppose their unjust and immoral Kansas-Nebraska Act. If seventy seats doesn’t seem all that much to you, don’t forget that the House had 252 seats in 1854. In today’s House with 435 seats, the equivalent would be 121 seats changing hands next November.
The Politico‘s Lisa Lerer and Chris Frates cast a jaundiced eye upon the tactics of the health bill repeal idea as a cheap political trick.
The repeal-or-bust strategy is designed to give Republican candidates a powerful talking point for the midterms – a way to tap into deep anxiety about the health care plan among the GOP base and independent voters.
Some Republicans say they don’t see what all the fuss is about.
“They can push for repeal; they’re just not going to get it,” said Tom Davis, former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “I think there are probably better targets for Republicans.”
We will see a lot more of this from experts and pundits still mired in the old politics.
That was then. This is now. In 2009, we conservatives had the blinders pulled off our eyes. We thought that the Reagan-Bush years had established a rough national consensus that one-size-fits-all government centralism is a failure. National politics would now follow the example of the successful welfare reform. The era of big government is over, President Clinton told us.
Now we know that we were wrong. The Obama Democrats are like the French Bourbon kings after the fall of Napoleon. After thirty years of Reagan and Bush, they have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing. Given a brief opening, they have stampeded back to the big-spending liberalism they love — only this time, it’s on steroids.
So the question before the American people is simple and straightforward. Shall we allow this injustice to stand, or shall we band together and work and fight in 2010, and every year thereafter, until the stain upon our national honor is expunged and the present generation of liberal leaders is banished to political oblivion?
Let every American know that Reid plus Pelosi plus Obama equals injustice.
Read the original article on American Thinker
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Filed under Uncategorized, health care
Tags:Bush, Democrats, French Bourbon kings, health care, Inthrutheoutdoor, Obama, Pelosi, Reagan, Reid, Republicans
Written on December 30th, 2009 by jono shouts
William Tate
Obama has received considerable criticism for waiting three days to address the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Flight 253. In the holiday spirit of giving, I would like to offer Obama … the Top 10 excuses Obama can use for why it took him so long to speak up.
10. My teleprompter was on vacation last week.
9. Polishing a Nobel Prize takes longer than you think.
8. It was Bush’s fault. (Hey, it worked last year.)
7. The waves here in Hawaii are bitchen, dude.
6. Janet Napolitano said the system worked great, even if I couldn’t get email on my Blackberry for a while there.
5. This sort of thing just ain’t supposed to happen on my watch.
4. It was Bush’s fault.
3. Axelrod never told me I’d have to work holidays.
2. I was busy celebrating Festivus.
And the Number One excuse Obama can give for taking so long to respond to the attempted attack on Northwest Flight 253:
I was busy looking for my birth certificate.
Read the original article on The American Thinker
Written on November 19th, 2009 by joone shout
Why does Obama’s tolerant, apologetic America seem so very self-centered?
By Victor Davis Hanson
The liberal writ was that a strutting “bring ’em on” George W. Bush for eight years did what he pleased on the international scene. His “unilateral” America supposedly did not consult with either allies or international organizations, as he rammed through democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush’s “my way or the highway” personal credo resulted in an America alone.
Obama, of course, was hailed as the multifaceted antidote to all that. The new nontraditional America would reach out to the world. We would now listen rather than lecture. This was a welcome reflection of Barack Obama’s own cool and tolerant approach to politics, learned as a seasoned community organizer in Chicago.
But things have not quite worked out as planned. Barack Obama to all appearances is certainly more relaxed than Bush. And he resonates abroad as a nontraditional American. Indeed, Obama is now the paradigm of America’s ongoing metamorphosis into something more like the rest of the planet.
Yet in his own way Obama projects a far more prissy, self-indulgent America than we had under Bush. And that self-centeredness seems a logical extension of the new commander-in-chief himself.
How can that be, given Obama’s well-known apologies — for everything from slavery and our treatment of Native Americans to being imperious toward Europeans and Muslims? In obsequious fashion, we have sought to assure the Russians that we won’t deploy anti-ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. Obama has reminded the Chinese that they enjoy sovereignty over Taiwan. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, the Castro brothers, Hugo Chávez, and assorted other old enemies of the United States are suddenly considered either neutrals or friends.
It seems counterintuitive, then, to suggest that Obama’s America is increasingly self-absorbed.
GLOBAL PENITENT
But consider first the nature of his apologies. America deigns to apologize to Muslims without much mention of a murderous Islamic radicalism that almost daily fuels a terrorist attack on some portion of the world’s civilian population.
Left unsaid by the global penitent is that Russia flattened Grozny and butchered hundreds of thousands of Chechens in serial wars. No need to talk of the absorption of Tibet by China or of the 70 million Chinese who were killed or starved to death under Mao. Will the adjudicator Obama not say who was at fault in Rwanda, who needs to apologize — and how?
Obama is conflicted over Hiroshima, but not so much over the millions of Chinese, Koreans, Australians, British, and Americans who were slaughtered by the legions of the Co-Prosperity Sphere — and were desperate to find a way to stop Japanese militarism.
The point is this: When Obama takes it upon himself to adjudicate, in quite a historical fashion, who is culpable and who not, the resulting verdicts are consistent only in terms of the president’s own Chicago-style race/class/gender politics.
Detention in Guantanamo is Bush’s transgression against the Constitution, but the incineration of terrorists and their families by judge/jury/executioner Predator drones in Waziristan is Eric Holder’s approved cosmic justice.
Read the rest of the article on NRO.com page 2.
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Filed under Obama
Tags:apologies, Bashar al-Assad, Bush, Co-Prosperity Sphere, constitution, Guantanamo, Hugo Chávez, Inthrutheoutdoor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama, self-indulgent, the Castro brothers
Written on November 14th, 2009 by jono shouts
Obama not mentioned by name
By Joseph Curl
Former President George W. Bush said Thursday that America must resist the “temptation” to allow the government to take over the private sector, taking a subtle shot at his Democratic successor by warning that too much state intervention and protectionism will squelch the economic recovery.
As the Obama administration has made far-reaching moves into the auto, real estate, health care and financial sectors to fight the economic recession, Mr. Bush, without mentioning the president by name, said, “The role of government is not to create wealth but to create the conditions that allow entrepreneurs and innovators to thrive.
“As the world recovers, we will face a temptation to replace the risk-and-reward model of the private sector with the blunt instruments of government spending and control. History shows that the greater threat to prosperity is not too little government involvement, but too much,” said Mr. Bush, who has remained out of the limelight since leaving office and rarely criticizes his successor.
Mr. Bush has addressed private groups since leaving the White House in January, but Thursday’s speech, delivered at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was his first major public policy address since leaving office.
Obama administration officials have defended many of their economic moves as emergency measures to deal with the economy they inherited from Mr. Bush. They note that some of the most intrusive policies — including the $700 billion Wall Street bailout — were instituted under Mr. Bush’s watch.
At SMU, the future home to the George W. Bush Presidential Center, the former president sought to explain his decision to have the government intervene at the peak of the financial crisis last fall, a decision he called “one of the most difficult of my presidency.”
“I went against my free-market instincts and approved a temporary government intervention to unfreeze credit and prevent a global financial catastrophe,” he said.
Although many economists credit that early action with halting the economic free fall, Mr. Bush said the only long-term path to prosperity is to free up the private sector and to push for open foreign markets to U.S. goods.
“Trade has been one of the world’s most powerful engines of economic growth and one of the most effective ways to lift people out of poverty. Yet a 60-year movement toward trade liberalization is under threat from creeping protectionism and isolationism,” Mr. Bush said.
In one of his first major decisions on trade policy, Mr. Obama in September imposed a tariff on tires from China, making good on a campaign promise to the United Steelworkers union to “crack down” on imports that hurt American workers.
read the original article on CNSNews.com
Written on October 23rd, 2009 by joone shout
By PETER BAKER
PRAGUE — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had a blunt response on Friday to the latest broadsides from former Vice President Dick Cheney: “Who cares?”
In the latest exchange between old and new administrations, Mr. Biden rebuffed his predecessor’s criticism about President Obama’s handling of Afghanistan as “absolutely wrong.” And Mr. Biden rejected the last review of the war conducted by the White House under former President George W. Bush and Mr. Cheney as “irrelevant.”
The dismissive reply came during an interview here at the end of Mr. Biden’s three-day swing through Eastern Europe and underscored the weariness in the current White House with Mr. Cheney’s periodic assaults on the new team’s record. At the same time, advisers to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden consider the former vice president a useful public foil and have not shied away from escalating the debate by taking him on directly.
At the heart of the dispute is a fundamental disagreement on national security, from how to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan to how to protect Americans at home from possible terrorist attacks. In a speech in Washington this week, Mr. Cheney complained that Mr. Obama was “dithering” in deciding whether to send more troops to Afghanistan and had committed a “strategic blunder” in scrapping the last administration’s missile defense plan in Eastern Europe.
Mr. Biden spent much of this week in Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic assuring leaders in the region that the cancellation of Mr. Bush’s antimissile shield in favor of a more mobile replacement was not a concession to Russia, as Mr. Cheney and others contended. Mr. Biden secured an agreement with the Czech Republic on Friday to participate in the new missile defense system, just as he did with Poland earlier in the week.
Asked about Mr. Cheney’s criticism during a half-hour interview at the American ambassador’s residence here, Mr. Biden responded indirectly at first, saying leaders in the region now agree that the Obama plan will be more effective. “They believe that the new architecture is better,” the vice president said.
But as he warmed to the discussion, he became sharper in his rebuttals of Mr. Cheney. “I think that is absolutely wrong,” he said of the “dithering” charge. “I think what the administration is doing is exactly what we said it would do. And what I think it warrants doing. And that is making an informed judgment based upon circumstances that have changed.” (more…)
Written on October 23rd, 2009 by jono shouts
By Victor Davis Hanson
For 30 months the nation has been in the grip of a certain Obama obsession, immune to countervailing facts, unwilling to face reality, and loath to break the spell. But like all trances, the fit is passing, and we the patient are beginning to appreciate how the stupor came upon us, why it lifted, and what its consequences have been.
HOW OBAMA WON
Barack Obama was elected rather easily because, in perfect-storm fashion, five separate trends coalesced last autumn.
1) Obama was eloquent, young, charismatic — and African-American. He thus offered voters a sense of personal and collective redemption, as well as appealing to the longing for another JFK New Frontier figure. An image, not necessarily reality, trumped all. (more…)
Written on October 8th, 2009 by Joone shout
Gene Healy: Obama is becoming the omnipresident
“No-drama Obama”? The president’s flight to Copenhagen last week to make a personal pitch for holding the 2016 Olympics in Chicago was an audacious move — and a dramatic failure. “Second City Absorbs Its Latest Defeat,” read the (rather snotty) headline in the New York Times.
But shed no tears for Chicago. As a 2006 report from Europe’s leading tourism trade association concluded, there’s “little evidence of any benefit to tourism from hosting an Olympic Games, and considerable evidence of damage.” With a projected half-billion-dollar deficit next year, the Second City is better off without the Games.
We can’t say the same for Obama’s reputation after his in-person appeal failed to get his adopted hometown past the first round of voting. What new project can the president undertake to save face?
How about … reforming college football? In a post-election “60 Minutes” interview last November, Obama called for selecting the national champion via an eight-team playoff: “I’m going to throw my weight around a little bit. I think it’s the right thing to do.”
Perhaps those of us who oppose national health care and cap and trade shouldn’t complain that the president seems so easily distracted. But you have to wonder: Does Obama think there’s anything too frivolous to merit the president’s attention?
Obama’s failed Olympic gambit was dumb politics. But it’s also bad policy for the president to involve himself in nonpresidential issues, reinforcing as it does an infantile and unhealthy view of presidential responsibility.
Obama didn’t invent that view of the presidency, he inherited it. Over the course of the 20th century, the public, conditioned by the media’s relentless focus on presidential action, came to view the chief executive as a national father-protector, with a purview far broader than the limited role the Constitution sets out for him.
Nor is Obama the first president to involve himself in minutia. In his 2004 State of the Union, for example, President George W. Bush urged major-league baseball and football to “get tough, and get rid of steroids now.”
And Bush periodically played the role of national fitness coach, meeting with food company executives to hammer out “a coherent strategy to help folks all throughout our country cope with” childhood obesity.
Faithfully executing the laws, protecting the country from foreign attack — and helping Americans “cope” with their kids’ Dorito cravings — the president’s portfolio is vast indeed.
But Obama has forged new frontiers in triviality. He’s the president of all things great and small: He calls for “a cure for cancer in our time” while also promising to stand behind the warranty on your new Ford Fusion.
With the two wars he’s running and his ceaseless efforts to micromanage the U.S. economy, you’d think he’d have plenty to do. But in his televised speech to America’s schoolchildren last month Obama took time out to urge students “to stand up for kids who are being teased” and “wash your hands a lot.”
He just can’t help himself. Six months into his presidency, the Politico reported, Obama had already “uttered more than half a million words in public.” In one whirlwind week last month, the president made his third appearance on “60 Minutes,” gave a major speech on the financial crisis the next day, and made a record five talk-show appearances the following Sunday. And on the eighth day, he did Letterman.
Obama’s incontinent approach to presidential responsibility doesn’t seem to be helping him politically, however. August was the toughest month of his young presidency, and it began with the ridiculous “beer summit,” in which the president gratuitously injected himself into a disputed arrest by a local cop in Cambridge, Mass.
Given how much bloom has come off the rose since then, Obama’s decision to stake some prestige on securing the Olympics is baffling. What was the point of getting himself into an irrelevant fight that he might well lose?
More importantly, why would Obama go out of his way to encourage the public’s irrationally broad view of presidential responsibility? Isn’t the president’s job hard enough?
Obama has become the omnipresent omnipresident. But a man who is everywhere, promising to do everything, may end up accomplishing very little, and he’s sure to disappoint.
Washington Examiner
Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of “The Cult of the Presidency.”
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