Obama's Delusions of Grandeur

By Alan Caruba

Did Obama really think that a 2,000-page takeover of the nation’s healthcare system, passed late on the night before Christmas 2009 in the Senate was going to go unnoticed or unprotested?

Indeed, it was protested when a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. in September 2009 to demand its defeat.

The obscenely misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed because all the Democrats in the Senate voted for it, but in the House 34 Democrats in addition to all the Republican members voted against it on March 21, 2010. The President signed it into law on March 23, 2010.

By November 2010, political power in the House passed from the Democrats to the Republicans and in almost every election before and since Republicans have been the people’s choice. The House voted to repeal Obamacare and that bill sits idle in the Senate that is still controlled by Democrats.

The Supreme Court is expected to take up the case brought against Obamacare by 26 state attorneys general and various amicus curiae. It would be justice, indeed, if it were declared unconstitutional before the November 2012 elections. A new Congress controlled by Republicans would finish it off no matter how the Supreme Court decides, but Obamacare has had a dangerously disruptive affect on the economy.

I have been saying that Obama is a moron since well before it became fashionable to doubt his alleged intelligence. I saw little evidence of it and now, like many others, I am seeing evidence of a man under intense pressure and—to be generous—not handling it well.

We expect our presidents to be able to take the heat. It is the job description.

We learned belatedly that President Nixon was a raving paranoid, convinced that everyone was plotting against him when, in fact, he was plotting against them. He even kept an “enemies list”. The result was the Watergate scandal and it took impeachment proceedings in Congress to finally get him to resign. His successor, Jerry Ford, granted him a pardon and promptly lost the next election. Unfortunately for America, it was won by Jimmy Carter.

I was therefore not surprised when New York Post columnist, Michael Goodwin, made the same connection, writing “While there is no indication Obama is walking the halls of the White House late at night, talking to the portraits of former presidents, as Richard Nixon did during Watergate, the reports explain his odd public remarks.”

In a similar fashion, a recent column by David Limbaugh titled “Obama’s Behavior is Getting Worse” spells out the reasons to doubt his intelligence and judgment, while focusing on his personality and the price we all pay for his failures. Elections have real consequences.

What we know about Obama at this point is that he is a hardcore narcissist who will not take the blame for anything. This is an unpleasant trait in children, but we know, too, Obama is extremely immature.

We know that he spends taxpayer’s money on all manner of foolish things such as loan guarantees to Solyndra and countless other “Green” enterprises that yield either bankruptcy or slim returns. He threw billions at the nation’s unemployment problem without success and, incredibly, is insisting that Congress authorize more of the same.

We know that his “answer” or “fix” for any problem is to give another speech either before a joint session of Congress (usually reserved for a State of the Union speech or the declaration of war). on the campaign trail, or in a hasty press conference where any serious questions evoke the rather tiresome blaming syndrome.

Lately everything is the Republican’s fault even though Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for the first two years he held office and still control the Senate. The President’s own party is dragging its feet on his latest “jobs” bill.

For a President of all the people, he makes no secret of the fact that he has no love for people who use corporate jets, for businesses of any size, for bankers, for Wall Street, for physicians and their patients, and people who don’t want to join a union.

Most certainly, he has been actively engaged in bankrupting the nation, achieving in two and a half years (with the authorization of a Democrat-controlled Congress) a national debt that exceeds the total achieved by every prior President from George Washington to George H.W. Bush.

This reflects his penchant for self-indulgence which has been seen in his vacation choices, the lavish lifestyle he maintains in the White House, and his frequent visits to the golf course. His wife seems to think she is the National Nanny, forever hectoring everyone about what and how much they should eat. The administration tried to pass her off as someone who shops at Target!

The worst aspect of all of this is the contempt other nation's leaders feel for him and, in particular, his judgment which impacts events worldwide. He is a great embarrassment for his inept handling of foreign relations. Ironically, after decrying George W. Bush’s conduct of the war on terror, he has adopted every single aspect of it.

His energy policies have favored no energy as his administration attacks coal, oil, and natural gas extraction and use. Unleashing the energy industries would generate thousands of jobs and billions in tax revenue. Lacking adequate energy, America will begin to resemble a Third World nation.

In so many ways, his election has proven disastrous whether it is for the 14 million Americans who cannot find work or those whose homes have been foreclosed. It is a national shame that so many are on food stamps and other government handouts.

We have witnessed a mainstream news media that debased itself, first by ignoring his thin resume and then by ignoring to whatever extent is possible the damage he has done and continues to do.

All Americans must now wait out the election process until November 6, 2012. The good news is that his party will suffer greatly at the polls and America will be rid of Barack Hussein Obama on January 20, 2013.

The nation has taken wrong turns in the past and reversed course. It will do so again.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Busybodies, Nags and Control Freaks

By Alan Caruba

Not long ago I saw a television documentary on the rise of the Third Reich in Germany. I have, in addition, read any number of books on the period of the 1920s and 30s. The lesson it teaches is that the Nazis did not suddenly arise, take control, and impose a totalitarian government on Germans. It was a matter of slow progress until October 29, 1929 when the U.S. stock market crashed.

The effect was worldwide. In Europe where nations were still trying to revive from the devastating impact of World War One, it created havoc similar to the Great Depression that gripped America for a decade.

In the wake of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, a defeated Germany had been hit with huge reparations. The Weimar Republic was struggling to return the nation to some degree of stability.

The destabilization of the worldwide financial system created the chaos needed for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists to gain seats in the government and when Hitler was named Chancellor it opened the door to total control.

Thousands of communists were rounded up and put in concentration camps, thus eliminating the main political challenge. Ordinary Germans realized that anyone could be arrested and detained without any recourse to the law.

Hitler then turned his attention to the Jews of Germany, a minor part of the population, many of whom had lived there for generations. Scapegoating the Jews played into the anti-Semitism that had existed for centuries in Germany and provided an “enemy”, an alleged reason for the nation’s travails.

I was thinking about this with regard to the way Hugo Chavez managed to take over Venezuela, a major oil producer, step by step until recently when that nation’s supine congress gave him the right to rule by dictate. Ever since he took over and began to nationalize everything, Venezuela has been on a downward path economically and socially. The same thing happened after Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959.

Dictators are the ultimate control freaks, nags and busybodies.

In countries where Islam is both the state and the primary religion, people can be whipped, stoned to death, jailed, tortured, and executed for religion-based reasons. One must always demonstrate support for the state and the faith or run terrible risks, but unlike Communism, religion is the all-consuming factor.

Largely unreported, the ethnic cleansing of Christians continues apace in the Middle East, hardly differing from the fate of its Jews. There are few Jews in those nations where many had lived for generations because, with the founding of Israel in 1948, thousands were forced to flee for their lives. Many Arab Christians and Persian Bahaists, joined them. Thousands sought sanctuary there along with the survivors of the Holocaust, but Israel would have to fight several wars of defense. For more than sixty years, no effort to find peace with the Palestinians has yielded any positive response.

What does this have to do with America?

Well, it seems to me that the first two years of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid administration has given most Americans a taste of what it is to live in a nation where the central government is run by people who do not give a damn for public opinion or the Constitution.

It took barely a year for Americans to come together in a Tea Party movement to oppose Obamacare. That hideous piece of legislation interposes the government between all Americans and their physicians, inflicting a bureaucratic nightmare that, if permitted to exist, will surely kill Americans denied timely care.

The members of the Tea Party are not just Republicans, not just Democrats, and not just independents. They are quintessentially Americans that swiftly concluded that a serious mistake was made when Obama was elected. On the anniversary of the original tea party, Sen. Reid was forced to make a humiliating retreat, dropping the $1.1 trillion "budget" bill intended to shackle the newly elected members of Congress and to impose still more debt and control over Americans.

The Obama administration is shot through with control freaks, nags and busybodies, not the least of whom is the First Lady, Michelle Obama. On the signing of a bill giving the governmental control over food in the nation’s schools she said that obesity is “not just an economic threat, it’s a national security threat as well.” That is just absurd. It is a feeble excuse to interpose the federal government between parents and the schools to which they are compelled to send their children.

“We cannot leave it up to the parents,” said Michelle Obama. Not surprisingly, a Rasmussen Reports poll revealed that 75% of those asked did not agree with the First Lady.

Hardly a day goes by when some member of the Obama administration doesn’t say or do something absurd. In mid-December, the U.S. Surgeon-General, Regina Benjamin, said “there is no risk-free level of exposure to tobacco smoke.”

She claimed that even occasional smoking or exposure to second-hand smoke “causes immediate damage to your body that can lead to serious illness or death.” That is not based in any valid analysis and it ignores the rising levels of life expectancy in America. It is just another piece of the hysterical anti-tobacco agenda of busybodies who have no right to tell anyone whether they should smoke or not.

The most dangerous thing Americans do every day is to get behind the wheel or be a passenger in an automobile. Auto accidents annually kill 40,000 or more.

Recently, at the Cancun, Mexico conference of global warming charlatans, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, said that “climate change is one of the greatest threats facing our planet” as if human beings had anything to say or do about it. He might was well have said that the United Nations must begin to control the Sun, the oceans, and the clouds.

Finally, after being banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1980, the agency decided that saccharin, a sweetener substitute for sugar, was neither toxic nor a cancer-causing agent, a fact determined in the late 1990s by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The EPA routinely bans chemicals claiming they could cause cancer, ignoring the fact that too much exposure to any chemical, including salt or sugar, is unwise.

These and a thousand other examples are reasons to distrust the Obama administration in particular and the federal government in general. As it continues to grasp more and more power over lifestyle decisions that belong to individuals, it threatens the very reason America was founded.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Is Obama Just a Moron?

By Alan Caruba

How many recall the eight years of George W. Bush’s two terms in office during which he was constantly derided as being too dumb to be president? He was deemed “a frat boy” and yet Bush had graduated from Yale University and went onto to secure a master’s degree from Harvard Business School. When his grades were compared to Sen. John Kerry during his campaign for reelection, it turned out he had higher scores.

We can’t compare Barack Obama’s grades to Bush or anyone else because they, along with his birth certificate, and indicators of his scholastic achievements have been hidden from public review.

This is not, however, a defense of Bush. This is about a question that millions of Americans are beginning to ask. Is Obama just a moron?

When I use the term, it should be noted that we have had presidents in the past who had impressive scholastic records, but who still turned out to be dumber than your average pea-picker and ridge-runner.

Woodrow Wilson took office after a distinguished career in academia and had been the governor of New Jersey. It was Wilson who embraced the income tax and who turned out to be astonishingly naïve about international affairs despite having helped the allies win World War One. Jimmy Carter, on paper, was no dummy. A graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, he had been governor of Georgia, but as president he was a dismal failure.

In early 2009, I wrote a commentary, “Putting a Child in Charge”, suggesting that having a young president—he was 47 at the time—be in charge of the greatest economic and military power in the world might not be a good idea. I noted that Obama’s resume was unusually thin in terms of any real achievement. His main claim was that he had been a community organizer in Chicago. Politically he was best known as a state senator for voting “present” much of the time and he had barely spent any time in the U.S. Senate before beginning to run for president.

It’s not like he didn’t signal what he actually thought. “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times…and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.” Huh? When did we ever care what other nations thought about our driving, eating, or the setting on our thermostats?

And Michelle was scary, too. “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual—uninvolved, uninformed.”

Not that far into his first twenty months in office, the independent Tea Party movement erupted all over the nation and it wasn’t because hundreds of thousands of Americans were uninvolved or uninformed. The problem was that a million of them had earlier journeyed to Washington, D.C. to protest against passage of the disastrous Obamacare “reforms” only to be dismissed by the White House as “wrong.”

Americans took notice of all the tax cheats and various loonies nominated to be in Obama’s cabinet, many having to withdraw from consideration, one who became Secretary of Treasury, and dozens who went on to become “czars” without any vetting from Congress.

So far, the guidance offered by his initial choices as economic advisers has driven up the deficit to historic highs and done nothing to reduce unemployment. So, as Michelle says, Obama will require you to work…just as soon as he figures out where real jobs come from.

The President just admitted that he was unaware there were no “shovel ready” projects for a huge infusion of government funding and yet he used that phrase over and over again while stumping for his failed “stimulus” program. Even the mayor of a small city could have told him that, but Obama had never run so much as a lemonade stand until being elected President.

At this point, Obama has spent more time playing golf in just under two years in office than Bush spent during his entire eight years. He does so mostly on Sundays and was noticeably missing from any church attendance until people began to think he was a Muslim.

As the midterms approached, key members of his administration have headed to the exit doors including his aforementioned economic advisors, a national security advisor, and his chief of staff. The man credited with getting him elected, David Axelrod, will quit soon to help shape his campaign for reelection if, that is, Democrats are stupid enough to nominate him again.

Famously, Americans early on realized that Obama could not deliver a speech without having Teleprompters and, when called upon to speak without them, became a mass of stuttering, sputtering, sentence-splitting incoherence.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Obama demonstrated an ability to insult whole nations while, at the same time, apologizing to the world for America’s exceptionalism and achievements.

He sent back a bust of Churchill to the British consulate and his gift to then Prime Minister Gordon Brown was a box of 25 DVDs, all in a format that would not work in the UK. He gave the Queen an iPod preloaded with 40 show tunes.

Since being elected he has insulted Wall Street, insurance companies, physicians, the president of France, Las Vegas, the Postal Service, Nancy Reagan, and lately the U.S. Chamber of Commerce!

Mostly, though, he has insulted the intelligence of millions of Americans, many of whom will be going to the polls on November 2nd to let him know they think he is a moron and among the worst, if not the worst, president to have ever held that office.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Unfair, Butt True

It is clearly unfair to compare, from left to right, Princess Letizia of Spain, Carla Bruni, the wife of France's president, and Aunt Esther...I mean Michelle Obama, seen here together. That said, one picture is still worth a thousand words.

It's wrong! Wrong to compare first ladies, but this one is always going on about what we should eat and how much.

Do as I say, Not as I Do