President Blah, Blah, Blah

By Alan Caruba

President Blah, Blah, Blah got in front of the television cameras midday on Monday to say the usual meaningless things he has been saying since he was elected, none of which are true and none of which have been able to hide the fact that he has driven the nation into the ditch with a lot of help from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Over the weekend he unleashed the White House attack dogs to blame the nation’s problems on the Tea Party when, of course, it was his administration that added three trillion to our debt.

After a while we just stop listening to what a president says; especially if we have concluded he is either clueless or has a hidden agenda.

“If his lips are moving, he’s lying” is an old cliché, but it fits President Barack Hussein Obama because it is quite likely that no one believes him any more with the exception of the usual brain-dead liberals who still think he is a genius. So far he has shown a genius for increasing the debt and the unemployment numbers.

This is a man who was still talking about electric cars, high speed trains, and renewable energy while the price of gas continued to increase along with everything else.

On Monday he was still talking about the nation's infrastructure as a source of jobs even after recently admitting there were few "shovel ready" projects. Tired ideas, ideas that don't work, repeated over and over again.

President Obama has been boring people from the day he took office. “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” The oceans have been rising a few centimeters every century and the planet is just fine. His election did not transform either the laws of nature or physics.

Instead, all that transformational gibberish turned out to be about a nation already in financial trouble as the result of the September 2008 bursting of the housing bubble. His response was to waste a great deal of time forcing Obamacare on everyone. Americans want to feel that they have a say in what the government is doing and, when they don’t, they organize.

The emergence of the Tea Party was the legacy of Obamacare. A movement without leaders, but one that made itself felt in the 2010 elections that transferred the power of the nation’s purse from Democrats to Republicans in the House and reduced their majority in the Senate.

It may just be my imagination, but President Obama seems to believe he can just stand at the podium, read from the Tele-Prompters, and convince Americans that all our problems have to do with “millionaires and billionaires”, “corporate jets”, and the folks who provide the sources of all real energy; coal, oil, and natural gas.

Nobody is buying those idiotic electric cars (except government agencies) and nobody believes the Green grifters who have been living off federal largesse with their pathetic wind and solar farms, and ghastly ethanol. If it were not for government mandates they would all have been out of business long ago.

Politico recently reported that “people and households earning more than $1 million annually made up just 0.1 percent, or just over 235,000, of the 140 million tax returns filed in 2009.” Meanwhile, there are now a record 45.8 million Americans using food stamps, nearly 15% percent of the population. You do the math.

As for those awful oil companies, the top three paid $42.8 billion in income taxes in 2010. Moreover, according to the American Petroleum Institute, oil and natural gas companies employ 9.2 million Americans and account for 7.5 percent of GDP.

If the Obama administration had not set out to thwart any new oil exploration and a US-Canada oil pipeline, and to shut down active coal mines while punishing coal-burning utilities, the economy would be looking a lot better.

In a recent column, former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, said, “But the president is supposed to be great at speeches. Why isn’t it working? One answer is that it never ‘worked.’ The power of the president’s oratory was always exaggerated.”

“The debt-ceiling crisis revealed Mr. Obama’s speeches as rhetorical kryptonite. It is the substance that repels the listener.”

In an effort to look as if he was truly engaged in finding room for compromise during the debt ceiling debate, Obama seemed to be on television with either a prepared or impromptu speech every other day. He does not do “impromptu” well. The casual “eat your peas” remark was received as it should have been, as someone pretending to be the only adult in the room, lecturing the rest of us as children.

I am beginning to sense that even in Congress, a lot of Democrat Senators and Representatives are beginning to do the calculus of getting reelected if they continue to vote the straight party line or are even seen on the same stage as Obama.

None of Congress’s solutions to our economic doldrums are working because of the sharp partisan divide that ignores the problems millions of Americans are encountering. They were all tried in the 1930s and they all failed.

Now that Obama has hit the campaign trail, it would be nice if the mainstream media began to report on how many or how few people turn out to listen to President Blah, Blah, Blah. How many of them are union members? How many are minorities?

How many will have been out of work for so long that by November 2012 they will vote for Bugs Bunny if he is on the Republican ticket?

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Tea Party is Making Obama Look Good

By Alan Caruba

"There are plenty of ways out of this mess, but we are almost out of time," said President Obama on Friday morning. It only took from his Monday address to Friday’s to make Obama look good and, for that, we can thank the intransigent Tea Party element of the Republican Party.

When presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) says she will never vote to raise the debt ceiling, she is being unrealistic because the “ceiling” simply allows the nation to continue borrowing to meet its massive financial obligations. The time for cutting spending lies ahead and the Tea Party can play a role in that, but right now the United States of America is looking default in the eye and risking a downgrade of our historic AAA credit rating.

It is ironic that the author of much of the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt, achieved over three short years in office, can talk about the Republicans resisting Speaker John Boehner’s proposed legislation and correctly say they are risking “taking down the nation.”

A nation this sharply divided between Republicans and Democrats has gone to the mat at the eleventh hour far too many times whether it was TARP or Obamacare. The 2010 elections that gave power to the GOP in the House was a good step in the right direction insofar as it curbed Obama’s efforts to spend the nation out of the deep financial hole created over decades. It gave, however, majority power to only one element of Congress, the House, leaving the Senate in the hands of Democrats. There can be no change in the White House until 2012.

You don’t, however, cure the spending built into the nation’s budget, but putting its credit rating in jeopardy or giving President Obama the opportunity to scare senior citizens, veterans, contractors and everyone else with threats their checks are not going to be in the mail. That’s a recipe for anarchy.

Up to now the Republicans have made a succession of very good moves—all of which have been rejected by President Obama. The plan put forth by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) provided for $6.3 trillion in spending cuts in the first ten years. It will take ten years to winnow a debt that has been building since the introduction of “entitlement” programs in the 1930s and 1960s.

As Peter Ferrara who has conservative credentials as long as your arm wrote in The American Spectator, the Ryan plan would “drive federal spending to 15% of GDP, well below the postwar historical average of 20%. Ryan’s budget included tax reform to get the economy booming again, with a 25% top income-tax rate for incomes over $100.000 a year, and a 10% rate for incomes below that.”

Lest we forget, noted Ferrara, “the first act of the new GOP House majority was to vote to repeal Obamacare. That means $1 trillion in spending cuts, and $500 billion in tax cuts, during the first ten years alone, as scored by the CBO.”

The Tea Partiers in the House do not want to take yes for an answer when it comes to the gains that can be secured if the debt ceiling is raised and the 2012 elections promise to put a GOP candidate into the Oval Office and capture power in the Senate. They can have it all if they support Speaker Boehner.

As Wall Street Journal columnist, Kimberly A. Strassel noted Friday morning, referring to Speaker Boehner’s prolonged negotiations with President Obama, “Instead he realized that this White House had no intention of agreeing to serious debt reduction and that it cared primarily about tax hikes. His decision to call off the talks earned him some catcalls, but it reset the political dynamic.”

That was evident in President Obama’s Monday primetime address to the nation that was universally seen as offering no plan and no leadership. By Friday morning the dynamic had changed as Speaker Boehner became the man unable to achieve a resolution to the current crisis; all because Tea Party dead-enders could not see their way clear to a compromise.

This is precisely why the President is effectively beating up the Republicans in Congress.

As Strossel correctly noted of Speaker Boehner and the House Tea Partiers, “What he did do this week is position his party to take credit for a bill that averts a crisis, cuts more spending than any Democrat thought possible, and exposes the White House’s insincerity on the deficit and economic prosperity. The Republicans who yesterday undermined (the) bill now bear sole responsibility for whatever political fallout comes next.”

If that is four more years of President Obama, it will be because Tea Partiers refused to compromise, to be realistic, and to understand that you don’t turn around decades of bad social legislation in a day.

They now have a weekend left to see the light or take down the Republican Party and the nation.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama is Boring Us to Death

By Alan Caruba

About halfway into his fifteen minute televised address on Monday evening, it occurred to me that Obama is literally boring Americans to death. He was elected to a great degree based on his eloquence and he delivers a speech well, but last night’s speech is the one we have been hearing since January and earlier.

I really don’t give a hoot about “millionaires and billionaires.” Heck, I want to be a millionaire!

“Corporate jets”? What’s that all about? Even Playboy’s Hugh Hefner once had a corporate jet. I would love to have a private jet if only to avoid having to go through airport security these days.

“Corporate taxes”? US corporations pay the highest tax rates of virtually every other nation. Yes, they look for loopholes. You would, too!

“Hedge fund managers”? I don’t know any. Are they doing something criminal? No. They are making bets on the economy. Better that than blowing the money in a casino.

Peggy Noonan, a former speech writer for Ronald Reagan, bestselling author, and now a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, last Saturday wrote “The president, if he is seriously trying to avert a debt crisis, should stay in his office, meet with members, and work the phones, all with a new humility, which would be well received. It is odd how he patronizes those with more experience and depth in national affairs.”

And then she said, “He should keep his face off TV. He should encourage, cajole, work things through, be serious, get a responsible deal, and then re-emerge with joy and the look of a winner...” Noonan concluded saying, “he should choose Strategic Silence. Really, recent presidents forget to shut up. They lose sight of how grating they are.”

Obama’s first year in office was distinguished by his being on television all the time, from The View to late night comedy shows. He loves the camera, loves the attention, and loves himself to the point of an unseemly, off-putting narcissism.

Instead of taking Noonan’s advice, he has become the National Mosquito, always buzzing around somewhere in the room.

Why was the Monday night speech necessary? Both Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, a Democrat, and John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, a Republican, have concluded that Obama had to be cut out of the discussions regarding the necessity to raise the debt ceiling because he was a hindrance to achieving any deal. To put it more bluntly, both concluded that Obama could not be trusted.

Reid and Boehner have essentially cut Obama out of the process. They have asserted the independence and the role of the legislative branch. Together they will send Obama a debt ceiling bill and tell him to take it or leave it. If he finds a reason to veto it, they will over-ride his veto and the rest of us will know that Obama’s agenda has always been the destruction of the nation.

Obama’s polling numbers reflect the growing realization of his arrogance and his incompetence. The advisors he chose and the programs he initiated have all proved to be failures and very costly ones at that. Unemployment rates today equal those of the Great Depression. Millions are on food stamps. Economic growth is an anemic one percent or so. Even people who don’t listen to presidential speeches or follow the news that closely know he is a loser.

There will always be at least 20% of voters who will support Obama no matter what happens. They are the true believers, the core that Democrats have always depended upon, unions, minorities, and federal employees.

The political pundits all said that the speech was aimed at the independents, always the most critical factor in recent national elections. The problem for Obama is that the next election isn’t until November 2012 and people tend to have very short memories. A lot of voters don’t make up their minds until they are in the booth. A year and a half from now is an eternity for these “undecideds.”

The speech was a bore, a repeat of all the poll-tested words and phrases he will repeat between now and November 2012. He’s become a windup doll, the White House Chatty Cathy.

It would be nice if we could ignore him and millions of American wish they could. The bad news is that he’s not going away for at least a year and a half. The good news is that he’s about to be neutered by both the Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

© Alan Caruba, 2011