Move Over, Baghdad Bob

By Alan Caruba

Move over Baghdad Bob and make room for White House Bob. Robert Gibbs, the official spokesman for the Obama administration, master of the daily briefings, and quite possibly the biggest dufus to hold the job since Scott McClellan, formerly of the G.W. Bush administration.

It is noteworthy that W’s new book has sold well in excess of the backstabbing McClellan’s version of what occurred while he was press secretary. Happily, Dana Perino, who replaced him now adorns the Fox News Channel.

The infamous Baghdad Bob gained fame during the 2003 invasion of Iraq in which, while U.S. soldiers were occupying one of Saddam's many palaces, he kept insisting that Saddam’s glorious Republican Guard had the enemy—the U.S.—on the run. I don’t know what happened to him and I don’t much care.

Robert Gibbs is embarrassing to watch. Lately he dismissed the massive WikiLeak data dump of purloined State Department cables as just “some guy with a laptop.” It doesn’t get more moronic than that.

To be fair, press secretary for the White House has to be one of the most challenging jobs on earth, but it helps if one is the spokesman for a reasonably popular president and not one being vociferously rejected by the far Left of his own party along with a growing majority of all Americans.

Gibbs has been close to the president from the days he served in a comparable position during the 2008 campaign. He appears to have the confidence of the president, but the usual tension in the White House press room appears to have morphed into a bored acceptance that he is a fairly useless source of information.

Gibbs is relentlessly cheery no matter the size and scope of whatever new crisis has hit the White House and that is either a coping mechanism or reflective of how clueless he truly is.

It is instructive, too, to note the increasing rarity of appearances on the Sunday news shows that involve Gibbs and other White House advisors like Valerie Jarrett or David Axelrod. When they do appear, the total vacuity of their answer to any question renders them useless as a source of insight and information.

What is clear is that Obama’s presumed base in the Democrat Party’s Left has been disappearing for some time. In August, Gibbs called them “crazy” and then had to back off that evaluation of the ultra-liberal critics. At the time, he said, “I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested. I mean, it’s crazy.”

Not really that crazy as we have seen Obama reluctantly embrace the extension of the Bush tax rates, in place now for a decade, while claiming it was the GOP holding Americans “hostage”. In fact, it has been the Democrats and the White House, desperately braying about “millionaires and billionaires”, that are still holding taxpayer’s hostage barely three weeks from the day they end.

Obama has also embraced the Bush policies regarding Afghanistan, at first promising to be out in 2011, but now setting that horizon in 2014.

At the heart of the administration’s problems, though, is the president’s “greatest achievement”, Obamacare, a piece of legislation that was opposed by the majority of voters going back to the raucous “town hall” meetings members of Congress had to endure and a massive protest of nearly a million who gathered near the steps of the Capitol building.

We have the tendency to infuse those who have gained control of the White House with a wisdom beyond our own understanding of events and issues. This almost always turns out to be wrong. Watching Gibbs trying to cope is in many ways watching an embattled and besieged president do the same.

It’s not pretty.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Fired & Hired

How Not to Run a Government

Ignoring Reality While Killing the Economy

By Alan Caruba

The powers in Washington, D.C. seem to be living in a parallel universe from the one the rest of the nation occupies. Even worse is the way the Obama White House and Democrat controlled Congress appears to be hell-bent on destroying the economy before they can be voted out of office.

No Congress since the days of the Great Depression and the Roosevelt administration has been driven to pass legislation that is more injurious to the present and future of the nation. It began with the so-called Stimulus Act that is widely seen as a failure, followed by Obamacare, the government takeover of one sixth of the economy replete with the rationing of care that will literally kill some people.

On Wednesday the President signed "financial reform" legislation that will play havoc with the financial industry while expanding government regulation still further.

Let us examine the reality. Washington tells us that the unemployment rate is 9.5%. Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence has been closely following unemployment data. His survey in May revealed that 28% of a thousand households reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job.

Mayur’s firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors’ Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. The June poll revealed 27.8% of households experiencing unemployment and, in the second week of July, it showed 28.6%. That translates to an unemployment rate of more than 22%!

The so-called financial reform act is likely to be as great a power grab as Obamacare, but it totally ignores the root cause of the 2008 financial crisis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government sponsored “entities” whose collapse revealed that many of mortgages granted by banks and lending companies, and then purchased by Fannie and Freddie for bundling and resale were inherently unsound.

Why? Because the government had long been pressuring banks and mortgage lenders to issue mortgages to people who could not afford to borrow the price of a hamburger. They were called “Ninja” loans; no job, no assets.

The concept of the government getting involved in the housing market is based on the notion of “social justice” and the belief that everyone had a “right” to own their own home.

Social justice was the basis for Social Security when it was established in the 1930s and later for Medicare/Medicad. Both programs are insolvent.

Everything the FDR administration did prolonged the Great Depression for ten years until the advent of World War Two rescued the economy. The Obama administration is repeating the same mistakes.

In June, Bloomberg Business Week took a look at four scenarios regarding the cost of the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Bear in mind that together they hold or guarantee 53% of the nation’s $10.7 trillion in residential mortgages. They operated as shareholder-owned corporations that financed home loans with the tacit support of the federal government.

In February the White House Office of Management & Budget estimated a bailout cost of $160 billion; a December report by Barclays Capital analysts put the figure at $230 billion based on a doubling of defaults and losses averaging 50% of each loan. According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate in August of last year, the figure was estimated to be $389 billion and Sean Egan, president of Egan-Jones Ratings estimated it would come in closer to $1 trillion.

Wall Street and the banks were being lambasted for having purchased the bundled securities Fannie and Freddie were selling them while the White House and Congress ignored these agencies. Well, not totally ignoring them. In October 2008 the government seized control of both. They are not, however, part of the new financial “reform” legislation.

Fannie Mae and the whole system in place since 1938 functioned on what can only be called a system of winks, nods and self-deception.

That mindset led to a 2004 scandal in which the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight revealed a pervasive misapplication of accounting standards. That, in turn, led to the resignation of Fannie Mae CEO, Franklin Raines. In a spooky sidebar, Raines owns the patent on the exchange system for the trading of carbon credits, the objective of the Cap-and-Trade Act under consideration in the Senate.

The debate about what to do with either or both will not even begin until next year. It is useful to keep in mind that the two legislators, Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd, who have defended Fannie and Freddie for years, are the authors of the new financial reform bill. The foxes have been in the henhouse for a very long time.

Conservatives think that both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be put out of business and that mortgage loans should be a fully private market enterprise. This alone would likely guarantee that a future financial meltdown regarding mortgage lending would be avoided. A trillion dollars or even several hundred billion dollars is too high a price to permit what has occurred to occur again.

When the new, expanded government reforms kick in, there is no telling what effect they will have on the economy, but they are unlikely to be good. Believing anything the government has to say these days is a very bad idea.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Taking a Whack at Arizona

And you thought the real problem was illegal aliens entering the US?

The Bigger They Are...

By Alan Caruba

The phrase, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall” comes from the world of boxing, but it applies increasingly to government.

Americans have seen that the bigger the government grows, the less able it is to respond to both the major needs of Americans, like national security, and the immediate ones such as the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The thing I liked most about our response to 9/11 was the fairly swift response of President Bush and the U.S. military. It wasn’t long before bombs were falling in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora. The thing I liked least was the astonishing incompetence that followed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The lesson, I think, is that the military is ideally structured to identify and carry out a mission while its civilian counterparts are so mired in caution as to eviscerate any likelihood of success.

The consolidation of several agencies under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security was possibly a good idea though it has its detractors. Americans are forced to believe that both they and our intelligence community are functioning well enough to protect us right up to the moment we learn they are not. It is thankless work to know you have deterred terrorist attacks only to have that wiped out with an incident like the one on Christmas.

It is made worse when, as in the normal course of things, the people at the top of the departments and agencies are too often the end result of politics, not competence. Janet Napolitano, the former Governor of Arizona, is a classic example of someone with virtually no security experience being tasked to oversee a department entirely devoted to security.

It is clear to everyone that Janet Napolitano needs to be replaced. She poses a danger to the nation’s security because she has probably demoralized her entire department and because her judgment is severely impaired.

Beyond Napolitano, there are the many “czars” that have been added to the White House payroll, the director of what has become a rogue agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, and serious concerns about an Attorney General who dismisses action against union thugs at election centers while extending the rights asserted by the U.S. Constitution to admitted enemy combatants.

The November 2010 midterm elections will afford Americans the opportunity to rid itself of as many Democrats as possible in Congress and, presumably, Republicans that will replace them will have learned their lesson since 2006. There is one overriding requirement facing Congress and that is to put our fiscal house in order, pay down debts, and get out of the way of Main Street so they can begin to create jobs again.

The only jobs government can create are government jobs and there are clearly far too many of them.

I must confess I do not see the Obama administration doing any of this. What I expect is more idiotic “Cash for Clunkers” and “Cash for Caulkers” programs, more billions wasted on “clean energy” industries that cannot attract private investment, and in the fullness of time, more revelations about corruption in the body politic.

If the Republic should fail from the prolificacy we are witnessing, it will take all of us with it.

Corruption

Captive Voters

By Alan Caruba

Americans are beginning to learn what it is like to be governed by a Congress that doesn’t care what they think or want. All over the world there are legislatures in nations that exist for no other purpose than to rubber stamp what the local despot or monarch wants to do.

Those like myself who live in New Jersey have become so accustomed to the indifference of those we elect that it took one of the most obtuse and incompetent governors in recent times in order to get a Republican elected.

Jon Corzine, multi-millionaire, tool of the civil service and teacher’s unions, and serial perpetrator of some of the highest State taxes in the nation was replaced by Chris Christie whose campaign promised nothing specific beyond the fact that he was not Jon Corzine.

Christie faces a hostile, Democrat-controlled legislature. He joins the rest of the vast majority of Americans in facing a hostile Democrat-controlled Congress led by two of the most vile, demented politicians in modern times, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

We can blame Pelosi for a two-thousand page so-called healthcare reform bill pegged at a cost exceeding a trillion dollars. Reid is likely to have a harder time getting the Senate version passed, but if the Democrats remain united it will, barring a filibuster.

Nobody likes the healthcare reform bill except people who are determined to “transform” America into a socialist workers paradise comparable to failed European and Russian governments. In Europe, ten percent unemployment has been the norm for years. Americans regard that with horror, but if they keep electing Democrats to office, it too will become the norm.

The odds are pretty good that our military will be incrementally reduced in size and that offensive war, regime change operations, and occupations will become a thing of the past. An all-volunteer military, such as we have had since the 1970s, is simply not capable of sustaining such efforts without severe human cost to our service personnel. The military suicide rate is testimony to that.

The Army is so worn out and so politically correct it could not spot something seriously amiss in a major who dressed like an Arab on base even though he was American-born and bred. His openly expressed opposition to American policy in the Middle East should have gotten him cashiered, but didn’t. So he killed thirteen servicemen and wounded another thirty or more in a now classic case of “Sudden Jihad Syndrome.”

Despite calls to “Drill here, drill now” Americans who want to tap abundant reserves of oil have been ignored for decades. It is nothing less than obscene that a patch no bigger than a few football fields in the massive Alaska National Wildlife Reserve cannot be permitted to tap millions of barrels of oil. Or that more than a hundred coal-fired plants to generate electricity have been cancelled in recent years because of an utterly bogus limit on “greenhouse gas emissions” that might “cause” a “global warming” that is not happening.

A similar grievance regarding the protection of our southern border against further illegal aliens has been ignored by Congress and, no doubt, given the opportunity, they will extend another amnesty to the estimated twelve million illegal aliens living in our midst. This will automatically double their population as extended family members of the new citizens join them. Apparently Mexicans cannot leave Mexico fast enough.

The most astonishing aspect of the House Democrat vote for healthcare takeover, not reform, is the way it totally ignored nearly a million people who came to Washington on September 12 to oppose it, the earlier “town hall meetings” that opposed it, and the even earlier coast to coast tea parties that opposed it.

When the Republicans didn’t listen, they lost ground in both the 2006 and 2008 elections. The zeal to impose more Big Government, Big Spending, and Big Borrowing, along with bailouts and takeovers, has blinded the Democrats.

We the People voted for the current members of Congress (or insufficiently for their opposition) and, unless we vote them out and replace them with legislators that will actually listen to and act upon our grievances, all the rallies, tea parties, and protests will be meaningless.

If we fail, we will be looking at an incipient, authoritarian dictatorship.