These NRO People Are Nuts

I didn't think it possible that the right could lose to Obama in 2012, even with all the dark forces of the MSM arrayed against us and awaiting their marching orders. But the last two months of flame throwing against Gingrich, and indeed, to a lesser extent, any candidate not named Romney has left me wondering whether we can yet pull defeat from the jaws of victory. Precious little of what is coming from the right leaning pundits has been reasoned criticism. To the contrary, its largely been overheated hyperbole of the ilk used by the left to demonize and delegitimize Sarah Palin.

I mean, NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru is telling me today how I, as a Catholic, should see Gingrich's extra-marital affairs. It's bullshit dressed up as a papal bull. It really has to be read to be believed.

According to Father Ramesh, as Christians, we should vote against Gringrich to spare him from the temptation of bimbo eruptions in high office. Further, if we vote for Gingrich, it will mean we condone adultery. And lastly, we should pick somebody other than Gingrich because his affairs could well doom him in a general election against the morally superior Obama. Morally superior Obama? Really????

Hey Ramesh, how about doing a quick calculation on Obama's sins. By my count, he violates the 1st Commandment every time he looks in the mirror. He lives to violate the 8th Commandment with his class warfare rhetoric and his focus on stealing the wealth of anyone who is moderately successful. With his disingenuous army of straw men and his habit of projecting on Republicans the absolute worst of motives, he violates the 9th Commandment. And he has spent the entire last year not as Commander-in-Chief, but as Campaigner in Chief. This joker has taken actions that solely benefit his reelection bid at the cost to our the country (Iraq, Afghanistan, Keystone Pipeline, etc.) He covets power and the Presidency the way a fat kid covets twinkies. Worse, his entire campaign hinges on him being able to get enough Americans to so covet the money of the "wealthy" that, on that basis alone, they will vote for him in November. Now that is insidious. Weighing all of that on Ramesh's exquisitely tuned scales of morality, give me a former adulterer any day. Oh, and somebody better go dig up former PRESIDENT Grover Cleveland and warn him that people just won't vote for a Republican with adultery known to be in his background.

Can any of these pundits-turned-hit-men just stop for a moment, take a deep breath - and then HOLD IT UNTIL AFTER THE F****** CONVENTION. Has a single one of these crap-for-brains people ever read up on the 1964 election?

The NRO, but for Jonah Goldberg and Andrew McCarthy, has been dead in the middle of this pack of right wing cannibals. Now the NRO has two of its authors - Brian Bolduc and Conrad Black - waxing lyrical about a brokered convention where the delegates get to nominate a Republican not among the burned and broken bodies of the current aspirants. Really, are these people bat-shit insane? Do they realize how splintered and mortally wounded the Republican Party would be if their favored scenario plays out? Are their heads so deeply implanted in their own asses that they have lost all touch with reality? The last time Republicans were so split that they had a brokered convention, they ended up with Thomas Dewey as the nominee to go up against the then incredibly unpopular Harry Truman in 1948. Hey guys, how did that one work out?

If we manage to lose this election - and every day, thanks to the NRO and their ilk, I come to believe more and more that we can - then America is toast. I agree with Krauthammer on this one - "[i]f Obama wins, he will take the country to a place from which it will not be able to return . . ."

That said, and regardless of whether we win or lose, I really think that we of a conservative bent need to consider trading the NRO, George Will, Ann Coulter, Kathleen Parker and Jennifer Rubin to the Democrats for a couple of first and second round draft choices to be named. Hell, let's see if we can get a good deal for them from MSNBC. Gingrich may have broken the 7th Commandment, but these vipers in our midst have made a cottage industry of violating the 11th Commandment - and they have done so with all the vitriol and intellectual dishonesty that we can expect from the left wing MSM. That really is an unforgivable sin.

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Obama's Claim: "I Didn't Raise Taxes, I Lowered Them"

Adolf Hitler once said "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one." Who knew Obama studied the wit and wisdom of der Furher. But that apparently is the case. Exhibit one, his claim in an interview on Sunday with O'Reilly - "I didn't raise taxes; I lowered them over the past two years." Lolllll. This joker must think we live in an alternative universe where the Lincoln hypothesis - that you can't fool all of the people all of the time - doesn't apply.

Obama's problem is that what may have been true in 1935 is not true in 2011, when there are a huge pool of people sitting at their keyboards with access to the internt. This from the WSJ:

. . . Perhaps Mr. Obama has forgotten some of his tax achievements. Allow us to refresh his memory. In his historic health-care bill, for example, there is the new $27 billion "fee" on drug companies that is already in effect. Next year, device manufacturers will get hit to the tune of $20 billion, and heath insurers will pay $60 billion starting in 2014—all of which are de facto tax increases because these collections will be passed on to consumers as higher costs. Of course, these are merely tax increases on business.

As for tax increases on individuals, perhaps he forgot the health-care bill's new 0.9 percentage point increase in the Medicare payroll tax for families making over $250,000 and singles over $200,000. That tax increase takes effect in 2013, as will the application of what will be a 3.8% Medicare surtax (up from 2.9% today) to "unearned income" for the first time. This is a tax hike on investment and interest income, which will reduce the incentive to save and invest.

Mr. Obama also told Mr. O'Reilly that he hasn't moved to the "center" since November's Democratic election defeat, saying "I'm the same guy." Save for a couple of tactical retreats that he couldn't avoid, we agree with him. As the President said recently in the State of the Union, he's going to insist on raising taxes again on people making over $200,000 when his deal with Republicans in Congress expires in 2012. Definitely the same guy.

And then there is this from the Americans For Tax Relief:

ATR says the $1 trillion health care overhaul alone added numerous taxes, including the individual mandate that requires most Americans to purchase health insurance or else pay a fine.

During the legislative debate, Obama and Democrats in Congress argued that a penalty for not carrying insurance is not a tax. But in recent attempts to defend Obamacare as constitutional, the Obama Justice Department has called the penalty a tax.

The health care law’s employer mandate provision also should be considered a tax, ATR said. That provision requires companies to report all business-to-business sales of goods and services exceeding $600 to the Internal Revenue Service. In a bipartisan vote, the Senate recently voted to repeal the so-called 1099 provision, and Obama says he supports the repeal.

The health care law also includes a tax on medical device manufacturers, as well as a higher tax on withdrawals from health savings accounts and a cap on flexible spending accounts.

Other taxes in the health care law cited by ATR include a surtax on investment income, an excise tax on comprehensive health insurance plans, a hike the in the Medicare payroll tax and a tax on indoor tanning services. (See complete list)

On Feb. 4, 2009, Obama signed a federal tobacco tax hike, raising the excise tax 62 cents per pack. Critics, including ATR, said that tax alone violated Obama’s campaign pledge not to raise taxes on couples earning less than $250,000 and on individuals earning less than $200,000.

During Sunday’s interview, Bill O’Reilly asked Obama if he is “a man who wants to redistribute wealth,” as The Wall Street Journal has described him.

The president denied it, again saying, “I didn't raise taxes once; I lowered taxes over the last two years.”

Responding on Monday, ATR said Obama’s claim of being a net-tax-cutter “rests on the temporary tax relief he has signed into law. “That tax increases Obama has signed into law have invariably been permanent. In fact, Obama signed into law $7 in permanent tax hikes for every $1 in permanent tax cuts,” ATR said.

“Over 90 percent of the dollar value of the tax cuts Obama signed into law are only temporary,” said ATR. “100 percent of the tax increases Obama signed into law are, however, permanent … Permanent changes to tax law signed by Obama amount to a net tax hike of $618.7 billion.

Obama is shameless. As Harry Truman once said of Richard Nixon

[He] is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in.

I think that could equally be said about Obama today.

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Howard Fineman & More Racial Rewriting Of History

There is little more grotesque in its complete ignorance of history than listening to a left wing ideologue wax disingenuously on race in America. Today, its Howard Fineman telling us why Harry Reid - whom I defended below - should be forgiven for his "light skinned, negro dialect" comments on Obama:

Republicans don’t want to engage in a long, drawn-out discussion of who’s more committed to equality in this society, and who has done more politically for the African-American community in the last, oh, say, 40 years or so, because that’s an argument and a discussion Republicans are going to really look bad in, and they don’t want to continue it. Yes, Harry Reid made a very unfortunate remark, and, yes, it’s troublesome, but if you attempt to put the Republican party next to the Democratic party, it’s not only African-Americans who are going to look with the Democratic party with favor on questions of race relations but everybody else in the society pretty much, too.

What an utterly scurrilous man. Republicans would love a dialogue on race and equality. I personally have been screaming about it for years. The far left that controlls all aspects of the Democrat Party today is committed to anything but equality. To the contrary, what they practice is a form of paternalistic racism and what they seek is to use permanent victim class status to achieve political power. It is time once again to trot out a piece I wrote a year ago on the history of race and equality in America, updated with some information pointed out by a reader, O' Bloody Hell.

. . . Here are some facts, some of which you might not be aware:

- The Republican Party - the party of Abraham Lincoln - was borne in 1854 out of opposition to slavery.

- The party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan was, as Jeffrey Lord points out in an article at the WSJ, the Democratic Party. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) is the only living member of the Senate who was once a member of the KKK.

- The 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (due process for all citizens) and 15th (voting rights cannot be restriced on the basis of race) Amendments to the Constitution were enacted by Republicans over Democratic opposition.

- The NAACP was founded in 1909 by three white Republicans who opposed the racist practices of the Democratic Party and the lynching of blacks by Democrats.

- The 1940 Republican Party Platform included the following:

We pledge that our American citizens of Negro descent shall be given a square deal in the economic and political life of this nation. Discrimination in the civil service, the army, navy, and all other branches of the Government must cease. To enjoy the full benefits of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness universal suffrage must be made effective for the Negro citizen. Mob violence shocks the conscience of the nation and legislation to curb this evil should be enacted.

- In fairness, it was the Democrat Harry Truman who, by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948, desegregated the military. That was a truly major development. My own belief is that the military has been the single greatest driving force of integration in this land for over half a century.

- It was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, also a Republican, who managed to convince the other eight justices to agree to a unanimous decision in the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education. That case was brought by the NAACP. The Court held segregation in schools unconstitutional. The fact that it was a unanimous decision that overturned precedent made it clear that no aspect of segregation would henceforth be considered constitutional.

- Republican President Ike Eisenhower played additional important roles in furthering equality in America. He "proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. They constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s." Moreover, when the Democratic Governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in what became known as the "Little Rock Nine" incident, "Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school."

- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was championed by JFK - but it was passed with massive Republican support (over 80%) in Congress and over fierce opposition from Democrats who made repeated attempts at filibuster. Indeed, 80% of the vote opposing the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats. Women were added to the Act as a protected class by a Democrat who thought it would be a poison pill, killing the legislation. To the contrary, the Congress passed the Act without any attempt to remove the provision.

- Martin Luther King Jr. was the most well known and pivotal Civil Rights activist ever produced in America. His most famous speech, "I Had A Dream," was an eloquent and stirring call for equality. Rev. King was a Republican.

- "Bull" Connor was a Democrat.

. . . Nothing that I say here is to suggest that racism and sexism could not be found in the Republican party or among conservatives at any point in American history. But if you take any period in history and draw a line at the midpoint of racist and sexist attitudes, you would find far more Republicans than Democrats on the lesser side of that line. And you would find a much greater willingness on the part of Republicans, relative to the time, to effectuate equality. That was as true in 1865 as in 1965 - and in 2008.

Sometime about 1968, the far left movement emerged as a major wing of the Democratic Party. This far left wing hijacked the civil rights movement and made it, ostensibly, the raison d'etre of their wing. Gradually, the far left has grown until it is now the dominant force in Democratic politics. . . .

The far left fundamentally altered the nature of the Civil Rights movement when they claimed it as their own. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. The far left has been the driver of reverse racism and sexism for the past half century. That is why it is no surprise that, with the emergence of a far left candidate for the highest office in the nation, Rev. Jeremiah Wright should also arise at his side and into the public eye preaching a vile racism and separatism most Americans thought long dead in this country. Nor is it any surprise that the MSM, many of whom are of the far left, should collectively yawn at Obama's twenty year association with Wright. Wright is anything but an anamoly. To the contrary, he is a progeny of the politics of the far left.

The far left did not merely hijack the civil rights movement, they also wrote over a century of American history, turning it on its head. That is why Bob Herbert [Howard Fineman], quoted above, is able to wax so eloquently while spouting the most horrendous of deceits. The far left managed to paint the conservative movement and the Republican Party as the prime repositories of racism and sexism. The far left has long held themselves out as the true party of equality. They have done so falsely as, by its very nature, identity politics cements inequality. Beyond that truism, the far left has for decades played the race and gender cards to counter any criticism of their policies, to forestall any reasoned debate and to demonize those who stand opposed to them. They continue to do so through this very day.

For example, Obama has attempted repeatedly to play the race card so as to delegitimize criticism of his policies. And today we have the Governor of New York calling the McCain camp racist for belittling the executive experience one could expect to be gleaned from the position of "community organizer." Apparently, according to Gov. David Patterson, "repeated use of the words 'community organizer' is Republican code for 'black'." What Gov. Patterson is doing is the well worn trick of taking any criticism of something pertaining to one of the victim class and recasting it as an illegitimate attack on the victim class itself. These tactics, which the left has used with incredible effectiveness in the past, have done incalculable harm to our nation over the decades. . . .

Mr. Fineman, it is not that the right does not want to debate this issue. The truth is you and your ilk will never willingly engage in such a debate. I can assure you, any number of us on the right would jump at the opportunity to have such a debate. The right has the facts, you have labels and a rewrite of history that will not stand up to the least of scrutiny. You are not the heirs to MLK, and little to anything for which the left has stood for over the past several decades can be called equality.

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Lieberman's Lament

This from Senator Joe Lieberman writing in the WSJ:

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

And this was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, who promised in his inaugural address that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom."

This worldview began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and "inordinate fear of communism" represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America's fault.

Of course that leftward lurch by the Democrats did not go unchallenged. Democratic Cold Warriors like Scoop Jackson fought against the tide. But despite their principled efforts, the Democratic Party through the 1970s and 1980s became prisoner to a foreign policy philosophy that was, in most respects, the antithesis of what Democrats had stood for under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy.

. . . The [9-11] attack on America by Islamist terrorists shook President Bush from the foreign policy course he was on. He saw September 11 for what it was: a direct ideological and military attack on us and our way of life. If the Democratic Party had stayed where it was in 2000, America could have confronted the terrorists with unity and strength in the years after 9/11.

Instead a debate soon began within the Democratic Party about how to respond to Mr. Bush. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. But that was not the choice most Democratic leaders made. When total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price saw an opportunity to reassert themselves. By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy – not bin Laden, but Mr. Bush – activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party further to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years.

Far too many Democratic leaders have kowtowed to these opinions rather than challenging them. That unfortunately includes Barack Obama, who, contrary to his rhetorical invocations of bipartisan change, has not been willing to stand up to his party's left wing on a single significant national security or international economic issue in this campaign.

In this, Sen. Obama stands in stark contrast to John McCain, who has shown the political courage throughout his career to do what he thinks is right – regardless of its popularity in his party or outside it.

John also understands something else that too many Democrats seem to have become confused about lately – the difference between America's friends and America's enemies.

There are of course times when it makes sense to engage in tough diplomacy with hostile governments. Yet what Mr. Obama has proposed is not selective engagement, but a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet.

Mr. Obama has said that in proposing this, he is following in the footsteps of Reagan and JFK. But Kennedy never met with Castro, and Reagan never met with Khomeini. And can anyone imagine Presidents Kennedy or Reagan sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad or Chavez? I certainly cannot.

. . . A great Democratic secretary of state, Dean Acheson, once warned "no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies." This is a lesson that today's Democratic Party leaders need to relearn.

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Obama and Peace In Our Time

For some months, as regards Iran in particular, I've been making the argument that Obama's foreign policy resembles and portends to be every bit as disastrous as Neville Chamberlain's (see here, here, here, here). Indeed, Neville Chamberlain's choice to talk with Germany and seek peace in the late 30's missed the last real opportunity to stop, at then minimal cost in blood and gold, a war that ultimately claimed near 60 million lives and destroyed Europe's economy for decades. As I wrote two weeks ago, Obama needs to be asked "What makes you think your plans to hold talks with Iran under the current circumstances . . . would be any less ill advised, counterproductive and disastrous than the attempts to find a middle ground with Hitler in the 30's?" At any rate, Ed Morrisey and others are now making similar analogies to Chamberlain in the wake of Obama's recent speech in which he claimed his foreign policy was in line with that of FDR, Truman and Kennedy.
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This from Ed Morrisey at Hot Air:

. . . On foreign policy, Obama said, it was a recognition that the US should talk to its enemies, in the same manner as FDR, Truman, and Kennedy did. At the time, I noted the strange claim and its complete ignorance of history, and today, Jack Kelly continues the history lesson for a constitutional scholar who clearly skipped 20th-century history:

. . . Our enemies in World War II were Nazi Germany, headed by Adolf Hitler; fascist Italy, headed by Benito Mussolini, and militarist Japan, headed by Hideki Tojo. FDR talked directly with none of them before the outbreak of hostilities, and his policy once war began was unconditional surrender.

FDR died before victory was achieved, and was succeeded by Harry Truman. Truman did not modify the policy of unconditional surrender. He ended that war not with negotiation, but with the atomic bomb.

Harry Truman also was president when North Korea invaded South Korea in June, 1950. President Truman’s response was not to call up North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung for a chat. It was to send troops.

Perhaps Sen. Obama is thinking of the meeting FDR and Churchill had with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in Tehran in December, 1943, and the meetings Truman and Roosevelt had with Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam in February and July, 1945. But Stalin was then a U.S. ally, though one of whom we should have been more wary than FDR and Truman were. Few historians think the agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam, which in effect consigned Eastern Europe to slavery, are diplomatic models we ought to follow. Even fewer Eastern Europeans think so.

When Stalin’s designs became unmistakably clear, President Truman’s response wasn’t to seek a summit meeting. He sent military aid to Greece, ordered the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, and sent troops to South Korea.

Given the importance that Obama places on this approach to foreign policy — he seldom fails to mention it as an example of the “change” he’ll bring to Washington — one wonders why the media hasn’t pressed him on this rationalization. Obama isn’t merely saying that he’ll reinstitute diplomatic relations with Iran, which would emulate our relations with the Nazis and the Japanese prior to Pearl Harbor. Obama wants to have meetings without preconditions with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has publicly spoken of his desire to annihilate a key ally of the US, as well as Hugo Chavez, Raul Castro, and any number of thugs and tyrants. When did FDR, Truman, and Kennedy do that? Answer: never.

As I pointed out on Wednesday, even diplomatic contact didn’t help FDR with Japan and Germany. The Japanese used diplomatic negotiations as a stalling maneuver to get its Imperial Navy in place to destroy our Pacific Fleet in 1941. Our diplomatic relations with the Nazis only encouraged America Firsters and Nazi sympathizers like Charles Lindbergh to claim that Hitler had no animus towards the West and that he could be a bulwark against Bolshevism.

Maybe Obama could ask the Czechs how well unconditional talks worked for them during Munich. Neville Chamberlain insisted on holding peace talks to avoid war in Czechoslovakia, which could have defended itself as long as it held the fortifications in the Sudetenland long enough for Britain and France to beat Germany from the rear. Instead, Chamberlain carved up Czechoslovakia without its permission, and six months afterward, Hitler swallowed the rest of it whole. FDR, meanwhile, remained steadfastly neutral diplomatically until 1939, when he began clandestine support for the UK.

Negotiations with tyrants almost always leads to appeasement, which only postpones war until the tyrant is strong enough to wage it most effectively. It results in many more deaths and far more destruction because it gives the initiative and the timing to the tyrants, while building their credibility at home. . . .

That’s what Obama’s “new approach” to foreign policy promises. It’s Neville Chamberlain without the umbrella. It certainly isn’t FDR or Truman.

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