This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Chuck Hagel sucks canal water

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    That other “maverick” Republican, Chuck Hagel, announced that he’d accept a VP offer from Obama. Ain’t that precious? Last year, Hagel was the first one to cave to Democrats on the war and urged immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Now, he’s joining his personal loser politics to those of the perpetually wrong Democrats. He made a good move when he decided that he’d retire after this term, but he’s lingering way too long.

    Hagel’s even been practicing his Obama-without-the-teleprompter answers;

    “If it would occur, I would have to think about it,” Hagel said. “I think anybody, anybody would have to consider it. Doesn’t mean you’d do it, doesn’t mean you’d accept it, could be too many gaps there, but you’d have to consider it, it’s the only thing you could do. Why wouldn’t you?”

    Why couldn’t you just say “No” instead of making a goofy dolt of yourself. In 2006, Hagel helped us get recognition for National Airborne Day, and he even had his staff call me to thank me for helping get the legislation passed. But I think soon after that his brain fell right out.

  • Gopher vs. Supreme Court

    I’m sure you all remember Fred Grandy who played the character “Gopher” on the TV series “Love Boat”. You probably know he went on to become a Republican Congressman, and now he has a conservative radio program here in DC on WMAL 630 with a co-host Andy Parks, a local radio icon.

    The other day, Fred took on the Supreme Court’s decision to grant Fifth Amendment rights to terrorists in a remarkable essay on the subject;

    …it was 1950 and the Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. Eisentrager that non-Americans (in this case German nationals) held in a prison in then American-occupied Germany did not have a Fifth Amendment right of habeas corpus. In fact in a 6-3 decision the high court held  that to rule otherwise would effectively give enemy aliens engaged in “unlawful hostile action against us” immunity from military trials, putting them in a more protected position than our own American soldiers.  Here’s how they expressed it.

    But even by the most magnanimous view, our law does not abolish inherent distinctions recognized throughout the civilized world between citizens and aliens, nor between aliens of friendly and of enemy allegiance, nor between resident enemy aliens who have submitted themselves to our laws and non-resident enemy aliens who at all times have remained with, and adhered to, enemy governments.

    So here is my question to the five eminent justices who saw fit last week to effectively overturn Johnson v. Eisentrager  and extend Fifth Amendment protections to enemy combatants which will, of course, grant them access to civilian courts, allow them to lawyer up, seek favorable venues, file motions to delay, and otherwise manipulate the American legal process to their own advantage:

    The piece is worth a thorough read. Communists, hippies and terrorists have all used our system against us to some degree, depending on the magnanimity of our civil rights commitment and the fairness of our court system – which is why we’ve become like the world’s school nerd. Everyone knows they can pick on us and get away with it. hell, this morning, I read that Ahmadinejad  bragged that he foiled a US plot to kidnap him while he was in Iraq and that the Islamic Republic has faced down the US in a nuclear standoff and won. As if….

    Now we’ve decided we’re going to give these filthy animals Fifth Amendment rights so they can get another shot at killing more Americans? Hell, give them a shot at killing their own people trying to bring civilization to their own countries. I think we’ve reached the limits of our generosity. But, if a Democrat gets to appoint Supreme Court judges for the next four years, I’m sure we’ll get to see a lot more wrong-head and ill-fated decisions in our future.

  • Maybe Obama’s not so moderate

    Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson comes to a revelation the rest of us  have known for quite some time; Obama is a “false moderate“. It took ABC correspondent  Jack Tapper to enlighten Gerson;

     “Have you ever worked across the aisle in such a way that entailed a political risk for yourself?” Obama’s response is worth quoting in full: “Well, look, when I was doing ethics reform legislation, for example, that wasn’t popular with Democrats or Republicans. So any time that you actually try to get something done in Washington, it entails some political risks. But I think the basic principle which you pointed out is that I have consistently said, when it comes to solving problems, like nuclear proliferation or reducing the influence of lobbyists in Washington, that I don’t approach this from a partisan or ideological perspective.”

    For a candidate running as a centrist reformer, this is pretty weak tea. Ethics reform and nuclear proliferation are important issues, but they have hardly put Obama in the liberal doghouse. When I recently asked two U.S. senators who are personally favorable to Obama to name a legislative issue on which Obama has vocally bucked his own party, neither could cite a single instance.

    I guess the fact that we’ve been saying all along that Obama votes with his party leadership 100% of the time didn’t sink in. He has the highest leftist rating of any Senator – now I suppose he’s a “maverick” in the sense that he votes further Left than anyone else. is that what maverick means these days – just voting further Left than anyone in your own party – that’s what earned the moniker for McCain.

    As I’ve been pointing out the last few days, Obama has proposed nothing but failed policies of the past – that’s hardly consistent with his “reformer” image. He wants to continue blocking our usage of domestic energy sources, he refuses to accept our progress in the war against terror, he clings to 60s radicals of all stripes and all national persuasions. He’s just a younger version of every Democrat President of the last 40 years (luckily there’s only been two).

    I guess the Democrats, with Obama in the lead, are becoming the reactionary conservative party, since reactionary and conservative are terms that refer to policies that return us to the past.  That makes John McCain the forward-looking man in this race. Funny how that works.

  • The failed policies of the past

    Barack Obama is fond of comparing John McCain’s policies to those of President Bush labeling them the “failed policies of the past”, but actually, Obama’s policies are failed policies of a more distant past.

    With gas over $4/gallon, Obama says we should continue to depend on some as yet undiscovered miracle to save us…the same thing Democrats have been saying for nearly forty years. of course, they claim the reason that there’s no new source of energy is because the government hasn’t thrown enough taxpayer dollars at the problem yet.

    I remember too well the failed policies of the past – when we were straining under OPEC embargoes in the early 70s, Democrats stood against the building a pipeline in Alaska to transport our own oil to port. That’s why Jimmy Carter promised in 1979 that he’d build refineries and pipelines…two years later, the Democrat Congress forbade more drilling in the Guld of Mexico when a Republican was president.

    Jimmy Carter never built a refinery, by the way, none have been built in this country since 1977. There are two sites currently approved for refineries, one in New Mexico and another in South Dakota – but they’ll spend years in court battling Luddite environmentalists before a spade of dirt is turned.

    Carter founded the Energy Department in hopes it would slash through the red tape and respond to our domestic energy needs, but it’s just another whale beached in dowtown DC. Obama clings to the same delusions that Democrats have clung to for years.

    AFP/Beitbart quotes Obama yesterday;

    “Much like his gas tax gimmick that would leave consumers with pennies in savings, opening our coastlines to offshore drilling would take at least a decade to produce any oil at all, and the effect on gasoline prices would be negligible at best since America only has three percent of the world’s oil.

    “It’s another example of short-term political posturing from Washington, not the long-term leadership we need to solve our dependence on oil.”

    Obama is pushing for a “windfall tax” on oil companies’ record profits and for federal investment of 150 billion dollars over 10 years in renewable and green energies.

    First of all, those are OUR pennies, Senator – why can’t we have them? You’re not doing anything useful with them. Secondly, how long is it going to take to invent a new energy source, get it and the vehicles that’ll use it to market? The Democrats have been promising us that for forty years and there’s nothing on the horizon. Oh, and how is a windfall profit tax helping? Are you going to redistribute that money to the people, since we’re the ones from whom oil companies are profiting? Or are you just going to cram in your pockets and then tell us how you know how to spend it better than us?

    The Wall Street Journal writes today that Obama and the Democrats sound a little silly at $4/gallon gas;

    Anticarbon Democrats are on the defensive for once. Their default position – doing nothing – doesn’t have the best resonance amid $4 gas. They’ve been reduced to arguing that more exploration would merely make a difference over the long term. The GOP plan, in other words, is too pragmatic.

    Democrats also claim that land already leased is “sitting idle,” and should be used before any new exploration begins. As put by Maurice Hinchey, a senior member of the House Resources Committee, Big Oil is “trying to take control of as much land now during the oil-friendly Bush Administration years, but are holding off on drilling until the price of oil soars to $200 or $300 a barrel so they can make even greater profits.”

    Conspiracy theories aside, it is true that only 0.46% of the Outer Continental Shelf is producing oil (though only 2.3% is under lease). But because of the exploration ban, oil companies go in more or less blind, not knowing the extent of the available resources. Millions of acres lack oil or gas, which is why it’s called “exploration.” Federal law stipulates that an oil company must sink a producing well within 10 years or lose the lease; it often takes nearly a decade to navigate the geography, not to mention the long process of environmental and regulatory review. Or coping with multiple lawsuits from the green lobby.

    Yes, this campaign is about the failed policies of the past – the failed policies of the seventies and eighties as foisted on the American public by Democrats.

  • WaPo calls Obama’s Iraq plan outdated

    The lead editorial in the Washington Post this morning characterizes Barack Obama’s position on the war in Iraq as “badly outdated”;

    SEN. BARACK OBAMA told Iraq’s foreign minister this week that he plans to visit the country between now and the presidential election. We think that’s a good thing, not because Sen. John McCain has been prodding the candidate to do it but because it will give Mr. Obama an opportunity to refresh his badly outdated plan for Iraq. To do that, the Democrat needs to listen more to dedicated Iraqi leaders like Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister — who, it seems, didn’t hold back during their telephone conversation.

    Mr. Obama laid out his current strategy for Iraq in November 2006, shortly before announcing his candidacy for president. At the time, Iraq appeared to be on the verge of a sectarian civilian war, and Mr. Obama was trying to distinguish himself in the Democratic primary race by offering a timetable for withdrawal. Nineteen months later, the situation in Iraq has changed dramatically, with violence down 75 percent from its peak and the Iraqi government and army in control of most of the country. But Mr. Obama has not altered his position:

    Not only is it outdated, it’s been wrong since he formulated his intellectually shallow “plan”. If Obama had the opportunity to enact this “plan”, Iraqis would be suffering the consequences of that wrong-headed and ill-conceived shot at pandering to his anti-war base. Of course, we wouldn’t know about it, just like many Americans are surprised when they discover that Somalia and Haiti are still embroiled in violence a decade after they stopped being newsworthy here in the US.

    Just as a few new commenters here haven’t updated their arguments on the legality of our involvement in Iraq, Obama’s current policy needs to be updated considering recent successes there. But I wouldn’t hold my breath awaiting any coherent thoughts coming from either our resident commenters or Obama and his acolytes. They seem to have super powers that make them impervious to facts.

    Earlier this week, Obama said that he hasn’t “seen any evidence” that tax cuts help the economy, nor has hr seen any evidence that we’re safer because of Iraq just yesterday. As long as the left fails to “see any evidence” that’s contrary to the party line, they’ll find themselves at odds with the truth and the actual facts. And in the minority in Congress…and not in the White House.

    They repeat the false McCain quote about staying in Iraq for a hundred years and the retarded mischaracterization of opposition to the Senator Webb version of the GI Bill because they won’t look at facts – and they don’t see any reason that Obama should look at the facts either. They’re comfortable finding easy and non-intellectual reasons for supporting Obama because it makes them feel good about themselves. To Hell with what damage they do to the country.

  • Lawyers will fight Barack’s war against terror

    In an interview the other night Barack Obama, the candidate of change, suggested we return to the Clinton way of dealing with terrorists as a law enforcement issue, rather than accept that we’re really at war (Evening Standard link);

    The comments from his camp came hot on the heels of a TV interview on Monday in which Mr Obama insisted the U.S. government could successfully crack down on terrorists ‘within the constraints of our Constitution’.

    He backed a Supreme Court ruling last week that said detainees at Guantanamo Bay have a constitutional right to challenge their indefinite imprisonment in U.S. civilian courts – a ruling derided by Mr McCain as ‘one of the worst decisions in the history of this country’.

    Obama suggested we should depend on law enforcement agencies to track down perpetrators (after they’ve committed a crime) and put them in prison to negate their future attacks.

    [Obama] said that he believed that “we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution,” and noted that the United States had been able to arrest, try and jail the culprits in the first World Trade Center bombing.

    […]

    “And, you know, let’s take the example of Guantánamo,” Obama said in the interview. “What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center — we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial.”

    To his credit John McCain’s camp hit back with his big guns (International Herald Tribune link);

    The McCain campaign asserted that Obama wanted to go back to treating terrorism as nothing more than a criminal matter, called him naïve and argued that the World Trade Center case was an example of how insufficient that was. “Once again we have seen that Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a Sept. 10 mindset,” Scheunemann said on the call.

    Former CIA director James Woolsey, who is advising the McCain campaign, said Mr Obama, 46, had ‘an extremely dangerous and extremely naive approach toward terrorism … and toward dealing with prisoners captured overseas who have been engaged in terrorist attacks against the United States’.

    Obama struck back by saying that there’s no proof that the Bush Doctrine has been successful. Well, other than the fact that we haven’t been attacked here or abroad. The proof that the Clinton method was a failure is the countless attacks on us and our assets abroad.

    Everything that reflects negatively on Obama is a distraction;

    Mr Obama responded sharply to yesterday’s comments from the McCain camp.

    ‘These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,’ he told reporters on board his campaign plane.

    I guess all of those al Qeada lying in graves in Iraq are just a distraction, too. The best Obama camp could do is drag out Richard Clarke and John Kerry (Tahoe Daily Tribune);

    The Obama campaign countered with its own conference call in which Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism official in Republican and Democratic administrations, argued the McCain campaign was emulating Rove.

    “I’m a little disgusted by the attempts of some of my friends on the McCain campaign to use the same old, tired tactics … to drive a wedge between Americans for partisan advantage and to frankly frighten Americans,” Clarke said.

    Kerry accused McCain of “defending a policy that is indefensible” by siding with Bush’s policies, particularly with respect to the Iraq war.

    Obama said Republicans could be counted on to do “what they’ve done every election cycle, which is to use terrorism as club to make the American people afraid to win elections.” He said he didn’t think it would work this time.

    More of that “fear-mongering, chickenhawk” sloganeering. Since there’s been no attack, there won’t be one ever, as I wrote earlier today – it’s terribly naive and it’s raw political pandering. If Obama becomes president, you can count on criticism of Obama over the imminent terrorist attack to be called a distraction from his social policies. That should make the victims feel better.

  • Liberal white guilt on the Obama blogs

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    There’s change we can believe in on the My Obama blogs. Change like assuaging our white guilt with a vote for Obama, according a young Socialist there who writes;

    Capitalism presents an interesting dilemma for the white, upper middle class male, a demographic that, unjustly, has been and continues to enjoy the ripest fruits of capitalism. On the one hand, a person like me (or anyone else who lives in the economically secure class of citizens of a capitalist nation, especially America) can sit back and enjoy and take advantage of the limitless opportunities afforded them. Thousands of universities, both domestic and international are within their grasp. After that, countless occupations with career paths that could lead them to even greater heights on the social ladder await.

    But on the other hand, this education afforded them (hopefully) enlightens them to see the reality of the perverse economic system that got him or her to the position he now occupies.

    You can soothe those guilty feelings by throwing your vote to Obama. Sweet. You know you didn’t work to get to where you are by studying or working hard, so instead of enjoying the fruits of winning life’s lottery, give it up to Obama and his minions.

  • Obama economics = willful blindness

    Obama outlined his economic policy yesterday on his campaign bus among (fawning) reporters. Apparently, his palns consist of ignoring proven principles and clinging to politically expedient promises of more class warfare (Wall Street Journal link);

     Sen. Barack Obama shed new light on his economic plans for the country, saying he would rely on a heavy dose of government spending to spur growth, use the tax code to narrow the widening gap between winners and losers in the U.S. economy, and possibly back a reduction in corporate tax rates.

    Um, a heavy dose of spending means a heavy dose of taxation.

    He didn’t say how deeply he would cut the [capital gains tax] rate, but said it could be trimmed in return for reducing corporate tax breaks, simplifying the tax system. With existing loopholes, he said, “How much you pay in taxes as a corporation a lot of times is going to depend on how good your lobbyist is.” With “a level playing field,” he said, the rates could be reduced.

    “Level playing field” is Marxist code for redistribution of wealth. The redistribution of misery.

    He stressed the idea was not a move toward Sen. McCain’s broader tax-cutting philosophy. While Sen. McCain has argued that tax cuts — particularly on business — spur growth, Sen. Obama rejected that as flawed economics. “I’ve seen no evidence that…would actually boost the economic growth and productivity,” he said.

    No evidence? In order to see now evidence of reduced taxation spurring growth you have to slam your eyelids shut and stick your fingers in your ears for the last three decades. Just between 2003 and 2006;

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    The New York Times was even admitted that the economy and tax revenues expanded after tax cuts;

    An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.

    On Tuesday, White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year’s levels and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what they projected six months ago. The rising tide in tax payments has been building for months, but the increased scale is surprising even seasoned budget analysts and making it easier for both the administration and Congress to finesse the big run-up in spending over the past year.

    The unemployment rate dropped and has stayed low – well, until the Democrats raised the minimum wage and priced many young workers right out of the market.

    So Obama’s economic plans are a mix of willful blindness and political rhetoric. That’s change you can believe in.