Obama Now Says Democracy Will Break Down Without Compromise. So The Question Is, Obama, Why Did YOU Want To ‘Break Down’ Democracy?

It’s getting almost fun to watch Obama speak these days.  We get to see how a passive aggressive tries to disguise his BUTTHURT behind a cool façade.

So Obama is with Chancellor Merkel and he’s taking questions and in one of his answers he happens to say (offered as a swipe at Trump masquerading as “advice”):

“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not and particularly in the age of social media where so many people are getting their information in soundbites and snippets off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems. … [If we are] unable to compromise and engage in the democratic process and taking absolutism views … then democracy will break down.”

And I’ve got a face like this as he says it:

I mean, it’s not that Obama’s statement isn’t true, it’s just that the Obama who just said it just spent the last EIGHT YEARS daily living in denial of the wisdom he now espouses for his successor.

The particularly warped thing about Obama’s statement is that it came as a response to a question about “fake news” that emerged from Facebook.  There are a couple of really remarkable things about this story: the first is that Facebook is not only about as leftist as it gets, but actively suppressed conservative news sites and slanted “trending news stories” to favor liberals and liberal sights.  So it is frankly rather amazing on its ugly, pimply, Elephant-Man-FACE to make the ridiculous claim that Facebook’s “fake news” helped Trump win given the naked bias toward Democrats that the sight is now infamous for.  But it actually gets WORSE: because in his answer, Obama agreed with communist China which takes the identical same position and has its suppression of free speech on the basis of the identical same position that it shares with Obama: that we can’t allow anything other than “facts and what’s true,” and the State must therefore take an active role in suppressing anything other than “the true facts.”

So let me ask you: all those damn polls the mainstream media generated that showed Hillary winning the election that Donald Trump kept insisting were bogus push polls intended to suppress his voter turnout because why bother voting for a guy that is going to lose? – were those “facts and what’s true”???  Or how about the frantic coverage of Trump’s transition being in absolute shambles that is so rabid and so insane that even David Axelrod finally had to come out and point out the fact that the Obama transition team wasn’t ANY farther ahead of Trump’s and had made zero appointments at this point and that the media hadn’t criticized Obama.  Is that lie a “fact and what’s true,” is it???

It is ASTOUNDING how fascist and how dishonest the left and their media propagandist allies are.

But let me get back to Obama being a living, breathing embodiment of what it means to be an abject hypocrite.

You take global warming.  It’s a monolithic FACT that EVERY scientist accepts and anybody who doesn’t believe it is a Nazi idiot, says Obama and his left wing.  Except NO IT’S NOT A MONOLITHIC FACT and FORTY FREAKING PERCENT OF SCIENTISTS DOUBT IT.  But Obama and his wing gave their “information” in this manner: “Phony, contrived talking points, unscientific propositions, and a scorn for truth wrapped in false threats.”  And literally as we speak Obama’s Secretary of State is trying to shove through “international agreements” and claim they will be BINDING on the next president whether he likes it or not.

Meanwhile Obama went from supporting marriage – and doing so “as a Christian” – between one man and one woman – even though his own campaign manager later said Obama was intentionally and dishonestly misrepresenting his own views – and then proceeded to do a moral back flip to suddenly support gay marriage.  And then his gang of fascist thugs viciously targeted people who hold a faith whose Scriptures are 4,000 years old and financially ruined people like Christian bakers and Christian wedding photographers for trying to live their lives in accordance with their faith and with the 1st Amendment of our Constitution.

And I can go on and on and ON, with appalling examples such as ObamaCare where Obama decreed that, “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”  Obama shoved his shockingly flawed socialist health care takeover without ONE Republican vote in either the House or in the Senate and even had to play fascist fast and loose with the Senate rules to do that.  The article I cite shows that liberal Robert Reich actually warned what would happen if Republicans came to power and played the same game, but wicked Democrats refused to listen even if the wisdom came from their very own side.   Real Clear Politics had an article describing Obama as a blatant hypocrite on this issue in August of 2012; whereas I was screaming about this ugly fact of Democrat Party FASCISM back in 2009 when it had already more than become obvious.

I was so right about Obama it’s unreal.  Because by the time Real Clear Politics finally got around to realizing Obama was a blatant hypocrite I was saying this about what was going to happen as a RESULT of Obama’s eight-year fascist pattern of tyrannous rulings by fiat:

Obama’s strategy is to set aside and flatly ignore the law for his own political benefit.  Every American who is not deeply troubled by that – troubled enough to not vote for this fascist – is Un-American.

What Obama has done is provide an example of out-and-out lawlessness on the part of the president of the United States.  And when we get a hard-core right wing president the way Obama has been a hard-core left wing president, Obama and the Democrat Party and all of those who voted for Obama and the Democrat Party will be entirely to blame for that president and his extremist actions.  You mark my words.  Because what goes around comes around, and if a Democrat can set aside the law the way Obama has now repeatedly done, well, guess who’s going to be stomping on your necks under your own president’s prior justification???  Conservatives are rising up in a spirit of righteous outrage.  You have repeatedly slapped us in the face through your messiah Obama, and the time is coming when we’re going to punch you hard in the nose and then keep on punching.  And when that day comes, liberals, look to yourselves for blame.

Obama made it an ART FORM to refuse to uphold laws he doesn’t like.  The Defense of Marriage Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, our federal border and immigration laws, our 2nd Amendment, you name it, if Obama didn’t like it, it wasn’t the law even though it WAS the damn law.

Just as Obama proved that he was nothing short of a KING by his OWN words, Obama by his own words just told us that he spent the last eight miserable years trying to break our democracy.

Then you look at a horrifyingly misnamed “Democratic Party” that has NOTHING to do with “democracy” proving that fact by trying to rig the primary election so they could drag the worst, most paranoid, most fascist candidate in Hillary Clinton over the victory line.

If you are a Democrat and you don’t like President Donald Trump, get up right now from wherever you are, go to your kitchen, grab the heaviest cast iron frying pan you’ve got, and begin bashing yourself in the head with it until your skull is cracked open and whatever you numb wits call your brains are on the floor. BECAUSE YOU ARE MORE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RISE OF DONALD TRUMP THAN ANYBODY.

And if Donald Trump governs the way Obama did and if the House and Senate govern the way the Nancy Pelosi House and the Harry Reid Senate did, whatever the hell happens is entirely your fault, and I spent the last eight years trying to warn you.

If Barack Obama had any humility and any honesty and any love for this nation whatsoever, he would hold a press conference and acknowledge that he was a horrifyingly terrible president, that he governed like nothing short of a tyrant king by executive fiat, that his entire political party had succumbed to a fascist disease, and that as a result his party suffered disaster; and that he can only plead, mea culpa, as the head of a broken party, that Donald Trump and the Republican Party would not engage in the same sort of Nazi tactics that his Democratic Party had engaged in.  And then maybe we could have some chance of meaningful dialogue and debate and compromise.

Instead Obama is like the snooty, arrogant anthropology professor in a class that every student has either dropped or desperately wishes they COULD drop.  And all he does is drone on and on analyzing everything that is wrong with the world from his incredibly narrow and ideologically-warped perspective.  WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY DENYING HE HAS ONE.

Obama continues to prove he is nothing short of a naked fool who lives in a false reality presiding over a party of naked fools who live in a false reality.

Meanwhile the Democrat Party is proving by their own WORDS before the damn election that yes, THEY ARE THE PARTY OF FASCISM, as they VIOLENTLY AND DESTRUCTIVELY RIOT rather than accept the results of an election that went 306 to 232 electoral college votes and 31-19 states in favor of Trump.  And Democrat states and cities are declaring that just like their god Obama, they TOO will defy laws they don’t like as they continue to impose their “sanctuary cities” policies no matter how blatantly contradictory they are to longstanding federal laws.

Look at the election map by county and you see what the overwhelming majority of the COUNTRY thinks about Democrats:

Democrats rely on these giant get-out-the-vote operations where homeless people and welfare recipients can get bused in enormous masses from government housing to polling places in dense urban jungles in exchange for cigarettes as well as win by theft as illegal immigrants, dead people, criminals, etc. get to “vote.”  These hard-core Democrat cities have been under Democrat Party machine control for a century and Democrats have FAILED these miserable people for a century but they are kept ignorant and they are kept hostage by the promise of welfare-for-life for votes.  The overwhelming majority of Democrat voters aren’t “invested” in anything beyond sucking off of the American tax payers who are forced to subsidize their failed lifestyles.  That is the ONLY way they have any chance of winning.  And WE’RE the ones who are “uninformed”???

Fwiw, I had a similar reaction to something he said later that gave me the same face as depicted above:

“If you’re not serious about this job, then you probably won’t be here very long.”

And I was like, “Oh, I don’t know about that; you managed to play a round of golf about every other day of your damn presidency and YOU stuck around for eight years.”

But that’s another story and the long nightmare of Obama is nearly over, so why bother…

 

For The Record, Yes, Obama’s Dithering Delay In Syria Could Cost USA Dearly. In Fact, IT ALREADY HAS.

Two years ago, Obama told the world that Bashar al-Assad had to go.  For two years, Obama did NOTHING to bring that statement about.

One year ago, Obama said that any use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” for him.  Syria used chemical weapons FOURTEEN TIMES before cynical politics more than American credibility and prestige prompted Obama to finally do anything while 120,000 Syrians perished miserably.

There was a time to act in Syria.  The problem is that it was a long damn time ago.  Tragically for the world, Obama dithered and demagogued rather than led and acted.

Now we face nothing a series of impossible choices.  If we do nothing, we embolden Syria and worse – Iran – to continue to not only use weapons of mass destruction, but to build nukes so we can REALLY face a global crisis.  When Obama was elected, it amounted to a 100% money-back guarantee that Iran would get its nuclear weapons program because Obama and Democrats would not stand up strongly when we needed a red damn line that actually had some giant fangs in it.

And yes, Iran’s nuclear weapons program is all about Democrat dithering (see here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here).  You literally can’t shake a stick at all this evidence against Democrats and against the Obama regime.  We saw all this coming a long time ago but Obama dithered.  Now we’re seeing Islamic jihadism resurgent around the Islamic world; we’re seeing strong stable allies like Egypt fall and Jordan jeopardized.  Obama has emboldened our enemies at the very same time he has caused all of our former friends and allies that George W. Bush certainly had to distrust us and refuse to back us.

One of the things that is going on is the dismissal of U.S. intelligence proof that Syria was behind the use of chemical weapons.  Do you want to know WHY?  Go back to Democrats doing everything they could to undermine American intelligence JUST BECAUSE GEORGE W. BUSH WAS PRESIDENT and you’ll see why we distrust our intelligence now.  If that isn’t enough, just take a look at all the evidence that Obama massively and illegally expanded these intelligence programs after deceitfully and sanctimoniously saying he wouldn’t be like Bush and he would end these things that he instead made far larger and far more dangerous.

Obama claimed that Bush had no right to authorize an attack on another country without congressional approval.  But apparently that was because he felt that Bush was merely a man while Obama views himself as some kind of a pharaoh god king who transcends the limitations he asserts for mere mortals.  Because he claims that by virtue of his deity he has the authority that he said that Bush did not have.  Obama argued that Bush had to have a United Nations mandate then and thinks that he doesn’t have to get one now because it turns out that with countries like Russia and China it’s just as impossible for Pharaoh god king Obama to get UN backing as it was for George W. Bush.  Obama claimed that Bush was some kind of rogue cowboy who acted alone when Bush had 48 allies who were willing to put BOOTS ON THE GROUND while Obama can’t even get England to back us in lobbing a few cruise missiles into Syria.

Let’s go back and remember what Obama said when George W. Bush was president and Obama was just another dishonest and dishonorable demagogue rather than THE dishonest and dishonorable demagogue-in-chief:

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power…. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors…and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

Replace the name “Saddam Hussein” with Bashar al-Assad and explain the difference to me.  Saddam Hussein used weapons of mass destruction on his own people to an even greater extent than Bashar al-Assad has done.  There were at least 300,000 in mass in mass graves in Iraq.  If it wasn’t right to go then it isn’t right to go now.  Which is why the rest of the world – by its isolation of Obama – is pretty much telling us with their silence that this is “A dumb war.  A rash war.”  And they’re doing so by the same despicable arguments that one Barack Hussein Obama once employed when he was doing everything he could to undermine one George W. Bush.

You kind of want to know why “an outrageous chemical attack” is only “outrageous” when a Democrat president who used to say it doesn’t matter suddenly decides for his own naked political interests comes to the opposite conclusion from what he thought when a Republican was running things.  You want to know why John Kerry as Secretary of State asserts that doubts about the intelligence amount to cowardice and treason when he was one of the many Democrats who publicly doubted the intelligence when a Republican president’s picture hung in the CIA and NSA buildings.

That’s why the question as to whether chemical weapons were used isn’t “settled.”  And of course, it’s why even IF the Syrian regime used chemical weapons, it’s no reason to believe Bashar al-Assad authorized it.  And if you think otherwise, liberal, then explain to me how the IRS used the equivalent of chemical weapons against Tea Party conservatives but Obama can’t be blamed for it.

You start to see how Obama’s constant double-standards has undermined his own perch at the top of the wobbling pole.

Obama needs to finally OWN his disgrace.  HE disgraced the presidency both BEFORE and WHILE he was president.

The sheer weakness and complete lack of honor of this man who sits in our White House makes me sick.  But Democrats have been despicable for decades now.

Obama assured us “that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now.”  I would argue that is hogwash.

A news article has a sentence that pretty much puts the kibosh to the Obama lie (quickly butt-kissed by the career butt-kissers at the Pentagon) that delaying the strike against Syria won’t compromise anything:

Pentagon officials say strike won’t be hurt by delay
Jim Michaels and Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY 11:12 a.m. EDT September 1, 2013

WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials said Saturday that U.S. intelligence capabilities allow the military to track any movement of Syrian targets, which means a missile attack against Syria would be effective despite President Obama’s decision to delay a strike until Congress gives its approval.

Obama said Saturday that waiting would not weaken the U.S. ability to strike Syria if he gives the order. He said Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its own people deserves a military response.

If Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces try to hide its military assets, U.S. intelligence capabilities can find them, defense officials told USA TODAY. The U.S. military will also likely target buildings.

The United States has powerful signal intelligence capabilities, with the use of drones and satellites, and has the ability to monitor communications.

“Our intelligence and targeting capabilities offer the president and the nation tremendous advantages,” said a defense official who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak about a potential strike.

Moreover, the official pointed out, buildings that could be hit by missiles do not move.

However, the extra time will let Assad move weapons, such as artillery or rocket launchers, into populated areas and use civilians as human shields, said Charles Wald, a retired Air Force general who led the planning of the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban.

“It’s almost immoral to give the enemy more time to prepare,” Wald said.

Moving weapons from “a remote air base to a building near a school … does change the military calculations,” said Colin Kahl, an associate professor at Georgetown University and former Pentagon official. “But that was happening already,” he said.

A delay may add some complexity to the mission, said a second defense official speaking on condition of anonymity for the same reason. But the delay does not translate into protection for Syria’s military assets. U.S. intelligence and targeting technologies provide “tremendous advantages,” the official said, adding that if the Syrian regime thinks it will gain by a delay, it would be sorely mistaken.

Obama said Saturday that Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “has indicated to me that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive. It will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now.”

The Navy has positioned five destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean, within cruise missile striking distance of Syria. The ships can each carry up to 90 cruise missiles, though typically they carry less in order to make room for other weapons and personnel. A Marine troop-carrying ship has joined them.

U.S. military officials and analysts have said any attack will be aimed at military and intelligence targets, particularly units linked to the Aug. 21 chemical attack. It will not be designed to remove the Assad regime.

“We continue to refine our targeting based on the most recent intelligence, and the chairman assured the president that we would have appropriate targeting options ready when he called for them,” said Air Force Col. Ed Thomas, a spokesman for Dempsey.

Here’s the sentence:

Moving weapons from “a remote air base to a building near a school … does change the military calculations

Yes, smarmy, arrogant Obama-worshipers: you’re right that Syria would probably not be able either move many of the targets that military planners are targeting in a manner that would keep us from re-locating them.  But Syria doesn’t HAVE to move the targets.

Syria has two other things they could move while keeping all of their precious targets in plain view.

One would be his chemical weapons.  If the U.S. were to hit any of those chemical weapons, we would send giant lethal clouds of WMD in whatever direction the wind was blowing.  Thanks to Obama’s dithering, Syria has plenty of time to do that.

If you think the Arab world isn’t ALREADY pissed off enough at Obama’s incompetence, well, we’d find out pretty quick that nope, they’re capable of being even MORE pissed off if Obama ignites any poison gas.

The other would be civilians – a.k.a. “human shields.”  Syria could chain a bunch of crying women and children to every one of their chemical weapons located at every single one of the locations the U.S. has targeted.  Thanks to Obama’s dithering, Syria has plenty of time to do that.

And it would be Obama murdering them, wouldn’t it?  I mean, it wouldn’t have been Syria that detonated those chemical warheads; it would have been Obama and his God Damned America that did it.  American cruise missiles would hit, and then all of a sudden there goes tons of poison gas from the very sites that those missiles had just hit.

What would our “plan B” look like if Syria were to use all the time and heads-up that Obama has given them to pull off that trick???  What would Obama’s “narrow” option be then???

Now, we can hope that Syria’s leaders are as incompetent and stupid as OUR leaders are.  And we can hope they won’t think of that.  But according to the article above, it pretty much sounds like they already have.

But it’s just hard to imagine anybody else would be as incompetent and stupid as our leaders have proven themselves to be.

Obama’s delaying could also give Russia more than enough time to position weapons capable of sinking a U.S. warship, if that’s what Russia wanted to do through its proxy Syria.  This isn’t the same Russia that was weak when Bush I and Bush II were presidents; it is a Russia resurgent under the weakness of Obama and it is a Russia that seems quite willing to let Obama know what it thinks of him.

That’s one reason why we shouldn’t compare Syria to Iraq, as Obama says we shouldn’t: Syria is armed with more recent Russian weaponry given to them by a far more dangerous and aggressive Russia.

What would happen if Obama tried to act tough to cover himself for his “red line” idiocy and Syria attacked us right back?  Would Obama skulk home with his tail between his legs or would it be Gulf of Tonkin, part deux???

I’m going to guess one of the reasons the U.S. strike will be utterly feckless and ineffective will be that there just won’t be any target we can strike that something really bad wouldn’t happen were we to hit it.

Any strike against Syria frankly already should have HAPPENED.  Any strike on any target should be a) massive and b) by as much surprise as we can attain.  Thanks to Obama’s weakness, we shall have neither.

What should Republicans do?  How should they respond?

Well, if they want to win this POLITICALLY they should be like Democrats were with Bush.  Do you notice Obama is going to Republicans trying to find somebody to help him?  I mean, where are the damn Democrats?  That’s because no Democrats have anywhere near the courage and integrity needed to do the right thing in this nation of God Damned America.  Here’s a statement in a Reuters article about which party has that integrity to do the right thing and which one has its finger to the political winds:

No one knowledgeable about Congress was willing to predict with any confidence how it would deal with a resolution to permit strikes in Syria.

The uncertainty is compounded by Obama’s often strained and distant relationship with Congress.

A House Democratic aide, on condition of anonymity, said “the vote will depend on the Republicans” because Democrats “will be split down the middle.”

That’s it, dishonorable Democrats.  Vote “present,” just like your messiah did when he was a senator.  Vote just like the despicable, dishonorable cowards you are.  Vote just like the despicable, dishonorable cowards you’ve been for well over forty years.

Do you want to know where Democrat presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is on Syria?  Good luck finding out where that cynical coward stands:

One voice in Washington that has been remarkably absent from this week’s Syria debate has been that of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton hasn’t said anything at all about President Obama’s plans for military strikes against the dictatorship in Damascus. As someone who dominated the US foreign policy landscape over the past four years, Clinton’s silence on Syria is striking. What explains this?

I mean, hey, other than the Benghazi debacle where somehow HRC was strangely completely absent and to this day nobody knows where the hell Obama was, wasn’t Hillary Clinton supposed to be the greatest Secretary of State in the history of the world???  Surely such a great statesperson has something to say.  But what we’ve got from her instead is this.

And what are key Obama figures doing on Syria?  Playing naked politics even as their false-messiah boss keeps disingenuously asserting that stuff like this transcends politics.  As soon as Obama got through meeting with his political advisers and decided to “punt” to Congress, David Axelrod – who basically CREATED “Black Jesus” Obama – immediately came out and wrote:

“Big move by POTUS.  Consistent with his principles.  Congress is now the dog that caught the car.  Should be a fascinating week!”

Of course, just the day before getting congressional approval had NOT been “consistent with Obama’s principles” because Obama had repeatedly said he didn’t need to do it and had no intention of doing it.  Maybe Axelrod was describing “Obama’s principles” when BUSH was president???  And note how politically and how cynically politically Axelrod puts this act of cynical presidential hand washing.

And keep in mind that Obama punted to Congress when Congress won’t be back to do anything about it until at least September 9.  When they DO come back, they’ll have their hands more than full dealing with the budget and the sequester and the debt limit.  And I’ll bet you anything you want that Obama will be politicizing the hell out of the whole godawful mess.  Because that’s the only thing he can do well.

You see, if Republicans want to win, they need to be the same sort of naked gutless and soulless political opportunists that Democrats have been.  They need to hold back on the vote until AFTER the Democrats have voted.  If the Democrats split down the middle, defeat the damn authorization bill and blame Democrats and say that the president couldn’t even convince his own damn party.  You know, the same way Democrats would have done if Bush were president.  And then start pounding the airwaves with the “Obama has isolated himself and isolated America” rhetoric.  You know, the same way Democrats would have done if the shoe were on the other foot.

Republicans – if they were like Democrats – would be flooding the airwaves crying that Obama is taking us to war only because his foolish “red line” bluff was called and he looks like a weakling and a fool now.  The only difference is they would actually be RIGHT to say that whereas the Democrats really don’t give a rodent’s posterior about the actual facts when they demagogue.

The biggest political problem Republicans have is that, unlike Democrats, they actually care about their country rather than using every issue as an opportunity to hurt the other side.  And in this God Damn America that Obama and Democrats have forged, doing the right thing morally is the wrong thing politically.

The day Republicans start acting like the Democrat Party, America will fall.  Because the Democrat Party is the party of Pandering via-socialist giveaways and it is the party of weakness and suicide.

In the meantime, Obama’s dithering and delays and weakness have already irreparably harmed America.  This is the Arab consensus of Bush v. Obama:

Mohammed Yassin, a 45-year-old Palestinian in Gaza said Obama did not look like  the “tough guy Bush was”. Employing an Arab nickname for Obama, derived from his  Kenyan father’s name, Yassin said, smiling: “Abu Hussein has no balls.”

“No balls Obama.”  This is a particularly dangerous attitude in a part of the world where ONLY dictators can govern because only strength and power are respected and any hint of weakness is something to exploit and attack.

Even the überüberliberal Los Angeles Times acknowledges “No Balls Obama’s” lack of resolve with their headline:

To Mideast, U.S. policy on region seems adrift
Middle East friends and foes alike seem to find President Obama’s lack of decisiveness confounding.
By Patrick J. McDonnell, Jeffrey Fleishman and Paul Richter
September 2, 2013, 7:00 a.m.

Is there any wonder the Arab world believes Obama has no balls when even his most ardent, most partisan, most ideologue supporters (i.e. leftwing journalists) don’t think he’s got any balls???

In the Middle East in particular, what Obama just did is tantamount to a man backing down from a fight in front of everybody after doing a lot of tough talking, but saying he’d come back later (with his friends from Congress – and THEY’D show you!).  Oh, and when Obama and his friends finally show up sometime later, they won’t be kicking ass because that would involve them putting their boots on the ground, wouldn’t it?  Nope; they’ll come in with a little token show of force and a lot more tough posturing.  The obvious conclusion to everybody who watches Obama cringe away to Congress is that he’s a coward and a weakling.

That’s why Obama is less respected and more hated by Arabs in the Middle East than George W. Bush ever was.  That is why Obama’s approval in the Middle East is lower than Bush’s EVER was.  That is why the United States is less popular under the failed regime of Barack Obama in the Middle East than it EVER was during the Bush administration.

For the record, Bush demanded that Libya dismantle its chemical weapons, and Gaddafi took one look at what he’d just seen Bush do to Saddam Hussein and he dismantled his chemical weapons.  THAT’S the only way to deter a threat in the Middle East.

Obama projected abject weakness and indecision and wavering in the Middle East at a time that we needed to project strength and stability and resolve.  And the Middle East has dissolved into chaos as a result of Obama.

America’s image as a nation of strength and resolve has been pissed away.  And we are back in the days that Bill Clinton created when one Osama bin Laden watched years of Clinton’s cowardice and concluded that:

As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press

That was before the last massive attack against America.

Next up, a nuclear armed Iran with no fear of America and a rabid desire to strike at the Great Satan.  Because, let’s suppose Republicans come through when coward Democrats won’t and Congress authorizes the “very limited strike” against Syria that Obama wants.  Is anybody truly so stupid that they think that a “very limited strike” will frighten Iran away from crossing the finish line with its nuclear program and becoming IMPERVIOUS to such strikes?  Does anybody actually believe that a few cruise missiles will do anything other than EMBOLDEN Iran?

The day that America elected the weakling Obama was the day that America voted for ultimate nuclear Armageddon.  And every day that passes makes that fact more and more clear.

P.S. For the record, I am dead set AGAINST the kind of strike that Obama has called for because it would do nothing save allow Obama to declare that he’d lived up to his “red line” bovine feces.  That said, I’d be FOR a strike in Syria: provided it was a DECISIVE strike that truly made Syria rue their use of chemical weapons and Iran think twice and then think twice again about their nuke program.  I would like to see John Boehner present TWO bills authorizing the use of force, with one representing Obama’s gutless limited approach and the other representing the kind of sustained ass-kicking that the situation calls for.  And within that latter bill a clear statement declaring that anything SHORT of a sustained ass-kicking has been specifically banned by that bill.  And we would put boots on the ground ONLY to establish a perimeter around and then remove the chemical weapons stockpiles from Syria.  And let’s vote and see what happens.

Btw, if you want to know why we didn’t find Saddam’s wmd stockpile when we invaded Iraq, it was because Saddam sent them to his fellow Ba’athist thugs in Syria.

As part of any resolution to attack Syria, we would have to have a contingency plan for dealing with the al Qaeda element taking over if our strikes collapsed Assad’s regime.  We would be voting to hang in there and help – by whatever means were necessary – to secure a democratic successor to the thugs who now run the country.  Or at LEAST a “pro-democracy thug” such as what we’ve now got and frankly had before with Mubarak in Egypt.

Nothing less is adequate.  Nothing less will do anything but create more harm and more havoc than good.

Furthermore, given that the United Nations Secretary General has already stated that anything Obama does SHORT OF ABSOLUTELY DAMN NOTHING would be illegal, either do nothing or stomp enough to leave a nice big splash.  If we lob so much as ONE missile into Syria, it will be an act of war.  Don’t be half-assed when you play at war, Obama.  If you want to send “a shot across the bow,” please do it here rather than with your toys stationed in the Mediterranean.

Also for the record, I think the reason the world has so completely isolated Barack Obama is that the world wants to back a winner.  Forty-eight nations got behind Bush and put boots on the ground because Bush was a winner and they could count on him to hang tough.  Nobody is backing Obama because they know that he is a loser who will abandon both his positions and his friends who got behind his positions the moment it serves his political posturing to do so.

Obama Vs. Gallup (When A Communist Dictator Doesn’t Like The Polls, He Has The Pollster Shot)

I wish I could label the Obama regime “Nixonian.”  But Obama makes Nixon at his worst look like a choirboy at his best:

Emails suggest Axelrod leaned on Gallup after unfavorable poll
Published September 06, 2012
FoxNews.com

Employees at the venerable Gallup polling firm suggested they felt threatened by Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod when he questioned the methodology of a mid-April poll showing Mitt Romney leading the president – according to internal emails published Thursday.
 
That poll showed Romney leading Obama 48-43 percent.
 
The exchange, according to emails published by The Daily Caller, started when Axelrod sent a tweet saying the tracking poll was “saddled with some methodological problems” and directing followers to a National Journal story in which a professor suggested outdated sampling.  
 
According to the email chain titled “Axelrod vs. Gallup,” the White House in addition asked that a Gallup staffer “come over and explain our methodology,” which was apparently perceived as a subtle threat.
 
A Gallup official said in an email he thought Axelrod’s pressure “sounds a little like a Godfather situation.”
 
“Imagine Axel[rod] with Brando’s voice: ‘I’d like you to come over and explain your methodology…You got a nice poll there … would be a shame if anything happened to it… .’”
 
The exchanges also show that Gallup invited White House officials to its Washington offices, but it remains unclear whether any of the meetings occurred. 
 
However, when Gallup declined to change its polling methodology, the Obama administration’s Justice Department revived a 2009 whistle-blower lawsuit against the firm by joining the suit, a senior Gallup official alleges.
 
The suit was filed by former Gallup employee Michael Lindley, who claims the firm violated the False Claims Act by overcharging the federal government for its services.
 
Gallup declined to talk about the issue. Calls to the Justice Department, the White House and the Obama campaign have not been returned.
 
Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs told The Washington Times this week that he was unaware of any communications between the campaign and Gallup.

You want an investigation about “methodology”?  This is EXACTLY how the Obama “methodology” works.  The Eric Holder “Justice” Department has repeatedly been sicked on anybody Obama has regarded as a political enemy:

Internal emails between senior officials at The Gallup Organization, obtained by The Daily Caller, show senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod attempting to subtly intimidate the respected polling firm when its numbers were unfavorable to the president.

After Gallup declined to change its polling methodology, Obama’s Department of Justice hit it with an unrelated lawsuit that appears damning on its face.

Obama has sicked Eric Holder on numerous states that had the audacity to try to get Obama to uphold federal law (whereas Obama is ABOVE the law).  Arizona and a lot of other states know what its like to try to suffer attack after attack from their own openly hostile federal government.

Obama sicked the NLRB on Boeing because it had the audacity to think it had the right to open a plant in right-to-work state South Carolina.

Obama flagrantly trampled over the rights of SECURED GM and Chrysler bondholders when he stole their equity and handed to his union allies along with $79 billion in taxpayer money.

Obama played the same game he’s playing with Gallup with Gibson Guitar that he attacked to intimidate them after they stuck their heads out by stupidly believing they had free speech rights in Obama’s America.

Just as Obama played the same game by attacking Sherrif Joe Arpaio after Arpaio clashed with him on immigration – whether he had any legitimate grounds to do so or not.  After a three-year-long witch hunt, mind you.

Obama is described in terms of his “Nixonian quality” regarding his godawful treatment of the press.

And Obama is out to make Nixon’s enemies’ list look like a list of people to write ‘thank you’ notes to.

That’s not an exhaustive list, boys and girls; that’s just the stuff I thought of off the top of my head.  Obama is a Chicago Gestapo-style thug, pure and simple.

And so, lo and behold, what does Gallup give Obama next time around?  The Outside The Beltway title says it all: “Obama Gets ‘Big Bounce’ in Gallup Poll.”  What were the odds of that happening?

Of course, Obama’s stooge David Axelrod brought it to our attention: Gallup has crappy methodology and so the organization’s work ought to be ignored – especially when their work is coming with Obama’s gun to their head like it is.

Abject Vile Obama Hypocrite Alert In Celebration Of Obama’s Milestone Of 100 Rounds Of Golf (4 Full Months Of Work Time Spent Golfing!!!)

The housing market – you know, the thing that actually blew up the economy in 2008 and hasn’t ever been fixed since – is getting worse in a fearsome sign of any chance of a recovery in the housing sector. The unemployment rate is shooting back up as the economy stagnates. Europe is very probably going to implode and create a global recession because they’ve done pretty much exactly what Obama wants to do more of here. I know that you’re very concerned, but please don’t be. Your president is doing fine. He’s relaxing, he’s getting plenty of golf in and really isn’t worrying himself at all. Thank you for caring so deeply about your messiah.

Please remember that Emperor Obama is particularly attuned to your prayers of devotion when he’s on the golf course, surrounded by the nature that he loves. And he is especially attuned to you if you give generously to his campaign.

Let’s go back to David Axelrod talking about George Bush.  Yes, it was George H.W. Bush, but one Bush is as good as another and Bush was a Republican and therefore a target for future Obama cockroach David Axelrod to demonize:

Flashback: Axelrod called Bush ‘out of touch’ for playing golf in bad economy
Published: 11:15 AM 06/13/2012

Video from 1994 has surfaced of David Axelrod, President Obama’s chief campaign strategist, calling former President George H.W. Bush “out of touch” for “tastelessly” playing golf while trying to convince voters that the economy is improving.

“Bush tastelessly did it, often from the ninth hole, and from the cigar boat and other places,” Axelrod said.

Added the adviser: “The impression you got was that he was out of touch.”

Throughout his presidency, Obama has been known to hit the links nearly every week.

Axelrod explained in the 1994 interview that if “you cite these statistics that say the economy is improving, you almost do political damage to yourself.”

“If you stand up and claim great progress, you are only frustrating this alienated middle class more,” he said.

For the record, I’m guessing instead of “1994” it was 1992, because that was the year of the election and there was no point beating an already dead-by-sheer-demonization Bush.

Let’s consider an April 2010 (i.e., more than TWO YEARS AGO) article about Obama and the golf course:

President Obama plays more than Bush
April 20, 2010 4:29 p.m. EDT

(CNN) — Barack Obama has come in at eighth in a list of golf-playing American presidents, higher than both George Bush and Ronald Reagan.
 
Bush was known for his love of golf, but figures released by Mark Knoller of CBS Radio, the unofficial White House statistician, have revealed that Obama has played golf 32 times during his presidency — eight times more than his predecessor did during his entire tenure at the White House.
 
In fact, president Obama played a round as recently as last Sunday, when his flight to Poland for the funeral of president Lech Kaczynski was cancelled due to the volcanic ash cloud over Europe.
 
Golf Digest magazine has ranked president Obama ahead of both Bush and Reagan, but behind Bill Clinton — who was known to practise his putting in the aisle of Air Force One.

As of April 2010 – again, that’s over two years ago – BARACK OBAMA HAD PLAYED GOLF EIGHT TIMES MORE THAN GEORGE BUSH DID DURING HIS ENTIRE EIGHT YEARS IN OFFICE.

But, of course, it gets worse.  Much, much worse.

Remember, Axelrod demonized Bush Sr. as “out of touch” for playing a tiny infinitesimal fraction of the sheer massive volume that his current boss has played.

In honor of that, Obama has recently reached a rare milestone for an American president who presumably has far better things to do – especially while his economy is in shambles:

MILLER: Obama’s 100th golf round
President putters while economy sputters
By Emily Miller – The Washington Times
Thursday, June 14, 2012

The next time President Obama hits the links, it will be his 100th round of golf since coming to the White House. That’s quite a milestone in just 3 1/2 years. As it takes him about six hours to drive to the greens and complete 18 holes, Mr. Obama has spent the equivalent of four months’ worth of work time golfing. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has been stuck in a sand trap.

Before Mr. Obama teed off for the first time as president, he delivered a State of the Union address that promised his new stimulus bill would “save or create 3.5 million jobs.” At that time, February 2009, unemployment was 8.3 percent and the debt was $10.8 trillion. He kicked off the golf streak on April 26, 2009, and he played a total of 27 rounds in his first year.

When he returned to the Capitol the following year, he stood in front of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with unemployment at 9.7 percent. He asked the Democratic Congress for a second stimulus and an overhaul of the health care system, and Congress obliged. Mr. Obama also said he would freeze government spending for three years, starting in 2011, but that idea got lost in the woods during the 31 golf games he played in 2010, using his personalized “44” Titleist balls, which remind haughty caddies he’s the 44th president.

By the time Mr. Obama gave his annual address to Congress in 2011, he was standing in front of new House Speaker John A. Boehner, brought in during the Republicans’ midterm wave. Unemployment was still at a high 9.1 percent. Mr. Obama announced, “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment” and demanded more money be spent. The debt hit $14 trillion.

Last year, the number of Mr. Obama’s golf outings rose to 33, and many turned out to be memorable. He was on the green on May 1, 2011, when the Navy SEALs were en route to Pakistan, cutting his game to nine holes to hear of their successful mission against Osama bin Laden. Mr. Obama’s golf partners included Mr. Boehner, former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Joseph R. Biden, who got asked to tag along with the boss four times in 2011.

By the time Mr. Obama gave this year’s State of the Union address, he had 93 golf games on his scorecard. Unemployment was 8.3 percent, having never gone below 8 percent in his presidency. He took no responsibility for the $15.2 trillion debt or the nation’s credit-rating downgrade. Instead, he called for higher taxes and the “Buffett rule” while hosting the billionaire’s secretary in his guest box for the speech.

Mr. Obama had no sense of the inappropriateness of playing 99 rounds of golf while 99 percent of the country couldn’t even afford the cost or time to go once. Now he wants a second term to finish what he started. After the 100th round, voters may want to think twice about giving him a mulligan.

Emily Miller is a senior editor for the Opinion pages at The Washington Times.

Barack Obama has spent four entire months of his presidency golfing.  Just so far.  Makes me pine for the days when we had Roman emperors fiddling while their city burned to the ground.  At least they didn’t spend four freaking months playing their damned fiddles.

I’ve said it so many times in my articles that it’s unreal: the quintessential ingredient of a liberal is abject moral hypocrisy.  If you are a liberal, you are a complete hypocrite without shame, or honor, or decency.  You are the kind of poisonous snake that demonizes somebody else for a tiny fraction of what you do.  You are in fact a bad person.

The same kind of person David Axelrod, senior political adviser to Barack Obama, is.

David Axelrod has always reminded me of that used car salesman who gives an already morally troubled industry an even worse name.  He’s the kind of slime who sells broken down pieces of junk to naive young kids and then relies on the cops to keep those kids’ dads from beating the crap out of him.  He’s the kind of slime who sells lies for the worst and most evil president in American history.

Let’s not forget to remember the mainstream media cockroaches otherwise known as “journalists.”  George W. Bush loved golf as much as Obama obviously does.  But the media ran stories about Bush playing golf while soldiers died screaming under his command and so George W. Bush did something that Barack Obama has never done so much as a single time in his entire life and took personal responsibility for himself and gave up golfing.

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels and Joseph Stalin and TASS would be so proud of their legacy in Barack Obama, David Axelrod and the American mainstream media.

Coward-in-Chief Obama Agrees With You Whether You’re For, Against Gay Marriage

The pretzel president.  That’s Barry Hussein.  He’ll say one thing, then say another thing that completely contradicts the first thing.  Then he’ll enact a policy which contradicts both positions.  And then he’ll brazenly tell you, “As I’ve said all along” as though you are some kind of drooling imbecile who can’t remember anything from two minutes ago.

Of course, that last description apparently suits the mainstream media quite well.  At least it does most of the time.

Fortunately, it doesn’t ALWAYS.  Once in a very great while, someone in the mainstream media actually holds the Obamaland rhetoric to account.

From the MSNBC transcript with senior Obama adviser David Axelrod:

GUTHRIE:  So let’s start with the news, the federal judge striking down the ban on same-sex marriage that California voters passed in 2008.  I think the American public could be forgiven if they’re a little confused about where the president stands on all of this. He has said he opposes same-sex marriage.  He has said during the campaign he didn’t mind what California voters were trying to do, trying to ban Prop 8.  Yesterday, though, the White House comes out and says, well, the president has spoken out against Prop 8 in the past.  He said he would work to repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act, but that the Justice Department, since he’s been president, has actually litigated on behalf of that law.  So let’s just forget all of that in the past and ask you, where does the president stand today?  Does he still opposed same-sex marriage?

AXELROD:  Well, Savannah, let me just correct something in your rather lengthy litany of events there.

The president opposed Proposition 8 at the time.  He felt that it was divisive.  He felt that it was mean-spirited, and he opposed it at the time.  So we reiterated that position yesterday.  The president does oppose same-sex marriage, but he supports equality for gay and lesbian couples, and benefits and other issues, and that has been effectuated in federal agencies under his control.  He’s supports civil unions, and that’s been his position throughout.  So nothing has changed.

GUTHRIE:  But David, can I just say, I’m looking at an interview right here that Jake Tapper of ABC did back in June of 2008, where Tapper asks him, “Does it bother you what California’s doing?”  And the president responds, “No.”

AXELROD:  Well, Savannah, I’m at a loss here, because I’m just sitting on a set, but I’d be happy to ship you the statements that the president made on — specifically on Proposition 8 and his opposition to it at the time.  So you’re working off of incomplete information there.

How DARE you correct your messiah, Savannah.  It doesn’t matter if he’s a dirtbag liar.  If Barry Hussein says two and two make five, then two and two make five.  If Obama lies, then his lie becomes your truth.  Understand?

Okay, here’s the Hussein-unapproved version of reality.  Obama interview with Jake Tapper, June 16, 2008:

TAPPER: OK, last one, and that is same-sex marriage is now going on in California.

OBAMA: Right.

TAPPER: You oppose same-sex marriage.

OBAMA: Yes.

TAPPER: Do you think that the fact that this is now going on in California, does that cause you to re-think your pledge to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act?

OBAMA: No. I still think that these are decisions that need to be made at a state and local level. I’m a strong supporter of civil unions. And I think that, you know, we’re involved in a national conversation about this issue.

You know, I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, but I also think that same-sex partners should be able to visit each other in hospitals, they should be able to transfer property, they should be able to get the same federal rights and benefits that are conferred onto married couples.

And so, you know, as president, my job is to make sure that the federal government is not discriminating and that we maintain the federal government’s historic role in not meddling with what states are doing when it comes to marriage law. That’s what I’ll do as president.

TAPPER: Does it bother you, what California’s doing?

OBAMA: No.

Well, at least Obama wasn’t for it before he was against it, like previous Democrat slimebag for president John Kerry.  Not at all: Obama was against it before he was for it.  Big difference.

And if you don’t think so, it’s only because you’re a racist.

For the official record, this is NOT David Axelrod “misspeaking.”  This is David Axelrod, senior Obama official, continuing to enact the “official” White House position.  Let’s go back to the spot that Axelrod said:

“… and he opposed it at the time.  So we reiterated that position yesterday.”

Now who is this “we”?  Do you think that it was just David Axelrod and the snake he always keeps in his pocket?  No.  The White House came out and lied.  They came out and tried to correct the factual record, and whitewash what Obama had said so it would jive with his current line of crap.  Just like they always do.

It was a coordinated, preplanned Obama administration lie.

Why did Obama say he opposed gay marriage?  Because he’s a lying weasel who understands that if he were honest with the American people, they never would have elected him.  And why is Obama trying to whitewash that previous dishonest denial?  Because more and more Americans – especially independents – are abandoning him, and he has to build the support of his core base.

If Obama truly opposed same-sex marriage, as he has said, then why has he now appointed not one but two Supreme Court Justices who will – mark my words – vote for same-sex marriage when the case comes before the Supreme Court?  Obama told the nation a lie to get votes because he knew his actual views would never allow him into the Oval Office.

Obama was a liar from the very moment he announced his candidacy for president.  Let’s go back to his Meet the Press interview with Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT:  Before you go, you know there’s been enormous speculation about your political future.  Will you serve your full six-year term as U.S. senator from Illinois?

SEN.-ELECT OBAMA:  Absolutely.

In the most massive and far-reaching policy enacted in more than sixty years, Obama’s lies were all over the place.  Obama – who had promised that he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $200,000 a year – assured Americans that his health care mandate was not a tax increase.  But now he is admitting that the $6 TRILLION in mandates over just ten years is in fact a tax increase as he faces lawsuits from 20 states arguing that the mandate to force citizens to purchase insurance or pay a fine is unconstitutional.  Thus Obama told not one but two lies: that he would not raise taxes on middle class Americans, and that his mandate was not a tax.

These aren’t just lies; they are massive lies straight from the pit of hell.  They are the lies of a fundamentally and profoundly dishonest man.  Not only are the mandates a tax increase on the backs of middle class Americans, but it is in fact the largest tax increase in the history of not only America but of the entire human race.

It’s not a question as to whether Obama has lied.  It’s a question as to whether the man has ever told the truth.

At some point, if you have any capacity of honesty whatsoever in your being, you’ve got to get sick of Obama’s lies, and his incredibly cowardly weakness.

White House Implosion Approaching

We’re seeing growing sings that all is most certainly not well in the Camelot Part Deux that liberals wanted to recreate in the Obama White House.  Obama himself is cracking under the stress, smoking too much and drinking too much.  I think we’d all like it if the man who had the responsibility of imposing his will on an Iran determined to develop nuclear ICBMs had at least enough willpower to impose his will on the next pack of cigarettes.  Meanwhile, Obama’s Chicago-thug “fearsome foursome” who form his paranoid inner circle are taking all kinds of heat – and showing signs of meltdown from all the gear-clashing.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel – Mr. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” himself – has been under fire from liberals who want to blame him for the near-total failure Obama’s first year has been.  But Emanuel has some allies in the press as well, who have come out to make a strong defense (mayhap with Rahm’s help?) at the direct expense of Obama.  I mean, the mainstream media is blaming the failure of the Obama administration on Emanuel’s lack of discipline and management skills, while other parts of the mainstream media argue that Rahm Emanuel is the only thing preventing Obama from ending up worse than Jimmy Carter.  I mean, you know there are a lot of hurt feelings and dead bodies in closets at the White House with this stuff going on.

And now we see the glue is coming off the veneer of David Axelrod, too.

March 6, 2010
Obama Message Maven Finds Fingers Pointing at Him
By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON — David Axelrod was sitting at his desk on a recent afternoon — tie crooked, eyes droopy and looking more burdened than usual. He had just been watching some genius on MSNBC insist that he and President Obama’s other top aides were failing miserably and should be replaced.

“Typical Washington junk we have to deal with,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview. The president is deft at blocking out such noise, he added, suddenly brightening. “I love the guy,” he said, and in the space of five minutes, repeated the sentiment twice.

Critics, pointing to the administration’s stalled legislative agenda, falling poll numbers and muddled messaging, suggest that kind of devotion is part of the problem at the White House. Recent news reports have cast the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, as the administration’s chief pragmatist, and Mr. Axelrod, by implication, as something of a swooning loyalist. A “Moonie,” dismissed Mr. Axelrod’s close friend, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. Or as the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, joked, “the guy who walks in front of the president with rose petals.”

Still, it is a charge that infuriates Mr. Axelrod, the president’s closest aide, longest-serving adviser and political alter ego. “I guess I have been castigated for believing too deeply in the president,” he said, lapsing into the sarcasm he tends to deploy when playing defense.

No one has taken the perceived failings of the administration more personally or shown the strain as plainly as Mr. Axelrod, who as White House senior adviser oversees every aspect of how Mr. Obama is presented. As such, Mr. Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed message maven, has felt the brunt of criticism over what many view as the administration’s failure to clearly define and disseminate Mr. Obama’s agenda and accomplishments for the country.

“The Obama White House has lost the narrative in the way that the Obama campaign never did,” said James Morone, a political scientist at Brown University. “They essentially took the president’s great strength as a messenger and failed to use it smartly.”

Mr. Axelrod said he accepts some blame for what he called “communication failures,” though he acknowledges bafflement that the administration’s efforts to stimulate the economy in a crisis, overhaul health care and prosecute two wars have been so routinely framed by opponents as the handiwork of a big-government, soft-on-terrorism, politics-of-the-past ideologue.

“For me, the question is, why haven’t we broken through more than we have?” Mr. Axelrod said. “Why haven’t we broken through?”

That question has dogged Mr. Axelrod in recent months and has preoccupied Mr. Obama’s inner circle, fueling speculation that the vaunted “No Drama Obama” team might be fracturing. Not surprisingly, the White House has no patience with the notion.

“You guys want to fit people into boxes and categories that are just not accurate,” Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Axelrod would not discuss what counsel he offered to Mr. Obama, though he denies any “fissure with my buddy Rahm” and any charge that he is too infatuated with the president to recognize the political risks of his ambitious agenda.

“Believe me, if we were charting this administration as a political exercise, the first thing we would have done would not have been a massive recovery act, stabilizing the banks and helping to keep the auto companies from collapsing,” he said. “Those would not even be the first hundred things he would want to do.”

But Mr. Axelrod argued that the president, confronted with “breathtaking challenges,” did not have the luxury of moving more slowly or methodically.

In a lengthy interview in his office on Wednesday, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”

When asked how he would assess his performance, Mr. Axelrod shrugged. “I’m not going to judge myself on that score,” he said. But then he shot back: “Have I succeeded in reversing a 30-year trend of skepticism and cynicism about government? I confess that I have not. Maybe next year.”

The criticism of the administration’s communication strategy — leveled by impatient Democrats, gleeful Republicans, bloggers and cable chatterers — clearly stings Mr. Axelrod, as well as the circle of family, friends and fans he has acquired over three decades in politics as a consultant and, before that, a reporter for The Chicago Tribune.

“Every time I hear that the White House is getting the message wrong, it breaks my heart,” said Mr. Axelrod’s sister, Joan, an educational therapist in Boston. “I know he agonizes.”

Ms. Axelrod says that while her brother is devoted to Mr. Obama, he is not a sycophant. She paused when asked whether he admired the president too much. “He is very, very loyal, sometimes to a fault,” she said.

Added Mr. Gibbs: “The list of people who have to deliver bad news to the president is very small, and David is first on that list. I’m probably second.”

Mr. Axelrod’s friends worry about the toll of his job — citing his diet (cold-cut-enriched), his weight (20 pounds heavier than at the start of the presidential campaign), sleep deprivation (five fitful hours a night), separation from family (most back home in Chicago) and the fact that at 55, he is considerably older than many of the wunderkind workaholics of the West Wing. He wakes at 6 in his rented condominium just blocks from the White House and typically returns around 11.

Unlike other presidential alter egos, Mr. Axelrod is not viewed as a surrogate “brain” (like Karl Rove), a suspicious outsider (like Dick Morris in the Clinton White House) or a co-president (James Baker in the first Bush White House). Sometimes portrayed as a bare-knuckled Chicago operative, he is also a bantering walrus of a man in mustard-stained sleeves who describes himself as a “kibbitzer,” not a “policy guy.”

Sitting at his desk next door to the Oval Office last week, he was tearing into a five-inch corned beef sandwich on rye with a Flintstone-size turkey drumstick waiting on deck. “I am the poster child for the president’s obesity program,” he said.

A few minutes later, Mr. Obama walked in unannounced, scattering two aides like startled pigeons. “Hey,” Mr. Axelrod said by way of greeting (no “sir” or “Mr. President.”) Mr. Obama surveyed the spread on Mr. Axelrod’s desk with a slight smirk.

“What is this, King Arthur’s court?” he asked, then pulled Mr. Axelrod aside to talk about a health care speech he was about to deliver.

Mr. Axelrod is often at the president’s side; he sits in on policy and national security meetings and is routinely the last person he talks to before making a decision. He directs every aspect of the administration’s external presentation, overseeing polls, focus groups and speeches and appearing on the Sunday shows. Mr. Emanuel describes Mr. Axelrod as “an integrator of the three P’s” — press, policy and politics — “and how they make a whole.”

White House officials describe Mr. Axelrod’s focus as big themes rather than day-to-day sound bites. There has been no shortage of Democrats willing to second-guess his messaging approach.

“They made a big mistake right out of the box with the Inaugural Address,” said former Senator Bob Kerrey, adding that a president pledging bipartisanship should not have disparaged the previous administration in his speech, as many listeners believed Mr. Obama did.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

Of course, they are continuing to make the same mistake of blaming Bush over and over and over again on a daily basis over a year later.

And that does go to the core of the Obama failure: the inability to match his rhetoric with reality, or even his rhetoric with his own rhetoric.

The man who pledged bipartisanship and a transcendent ability to reach across the divide and bring the country together has blamed and demonized the Bush administration and the Republican Party every single time he “reached.”

The man who promised transparency, who promised repeatedly to open up the entire “bipartisan” health care negotiations on C-SPAN, has not never even bothered to try to do so (and dang I wish I could have seen the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, Gator-Aid, and various other acts of illegal political patronage being negotiated), but has routinely had closed door meetings which were not open to the press, the public, or certainly the Republicans.  Meanwhile, the Democrats have been so byzantine, so secretive, so wheeling-dealing, that even senior Democrats have had to acknowledge they were completely in the dark as to what in the sam hill was going on.

And of course now we have the same Obama who basically said that reconciliation was a totalitarian act of “simply majoritarian absolute power” that was both unconstitutional and as partisan and evil as Karl Rove is, now saying that it’s okay as long as he’s doing it “to maintain his strong presidency.”

That’s just health care.  You can take almost any other issue and find the same thing with Obama.  Foreign policy?  Take Renditions.  Take Eavesdropping programs.  Take the Patriot Act.  Take  Gitmo.  Take the surge strategy.  Take the Iraq War.  Take the  Iranian nuclear threat.  And now, take military tribunals.  In every single one of these cases Obama personally demonized the Bush position, and then did the same thing himself without ever once having the integrity to say that George Bush had been right and he had been wrong.  Energy policy?  Obama so completely abandoned his own stated energy policy promises that a senior Democrat was forced to say that Obama “is beginning not to be believable to me.”

I have to say I feel sorry for the messengers who are being hounded for not being able to get the White House message out: it’s full of lies and deceit; how do you make all the Obama lies look good without telling a whole bunch of other lies?

Then you’ve got the fact that a whole bunch of Democrats across the spectrum are just furious with the Obama administration for massively expensive policies that didn’t work and for sheer flagrant incompetence.

How do you make a turd look good?

The one word that most accurately frames this piece is, “Wah.”  The people who most successfully demagogued mainstream media narratives when it came to George Bush and Republicans are the biggest bunch of thin-skinned whining crybabies I’ve ever seen.  Someone else is ALWAYS to blame with these people.

And when they demonize Republicans for their criticisms when the Obama team has done nothing BUT demonize Bush and Republicans, it is beyond disgusting and even beyond despicable.

What couldn’t be more obvious about Obama’s inner circle – political rather than policy experts all – is that all they can do well is campaign.  So they constantly campaign in campaign mode, and then cry the moment anybody suggests they’re doing anything because of “politics.”  I mean, think about it: the same man who lambasts the press for their “every day is Election Day sort of mentality,” is the guy who is closer than anyone to Obama – and  who spends all his time as the “integrator of the three P’s” — press, policy and politics — “and how they make a whole.”

I mean, how DARE you people accurately describe us as what we are, and consider policies from the same uber-political perspective that WE consider them.  HOW DARE YOU!

The Obama inner circle lives in a bunker and embraces a “bunker-view mentality” to the world.  In contradiction to their statements to the contrary, they are hyper-hyper sensitive to any skepticism at all.  And their growing problem is that the nastiest skepticism of all isn’t coming from “the right” or from Fox News, but from their very own left and from media that should be in their pockets.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take before it happens, but this president and this inner White House circle are heading for a meltdown of epic proportions.

Barack Obama Oh-So Close To Being Jimmy Carter, Jr.

This article from a mainstream liberal does so many things.  1) It tells us the only thing that keeps Obama from already being the complete loser and failure Jimmy Carter was is Rahm Emanuel; 2) It tells us that Barack Obama has repeatedly ignored wise advice and paid attention to far-left liberal lunacy; and 3) It points out that the failure of health care isn’t Republican obstructionism, but Barry Hussein stupidity and his refusal to try to pass bills that Republicans could have supported.

I’m glad that even liberals are starting to recognize that this health care mess we’re in wasn’t the Republicans’ fault; it was Obama’s incompetence and hard-core liberal ideology.

Why Obama needs Rahm at the top

By Dana Milbank
Sunday, February 21, 2010; A13

Let us now praise Rahm Emanuel.

No, seriously.

It is the current fashion to blame President Obama’s disappointing first year on his chief of staff. “First, remove Rahm Emanuel,” writes Leslie Gelb in the Daily Beast, because he lacks “the management skills and discipline to run the White House.”

The Financial Times’s Ed Luce reports that the “famously irascible” Emanuel has “alienated many of Mr. Obama’s closest outside supporters,” while the New America Foundation’s Steve Clemons lumps Emanuel in with the “Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama Presidency.”

They join liberal interests who despised Emanuel long before he branded them “retarded.” Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com, together with conservative activist Grover Norquist, demanded a Justice Department investigation into Emanuel, who is “far too compromised to serve as gatekeeper to the president.”

As Emanuel would say: What the [expletive deleted]?

Clearly, “Rahmbo” has no shortage of enemies in this town, and with Obama’s approval rating dipping below 50 percent, they have ammunition. But sacking Emanuel is the last thing the president should do.

Obama’s first year fell apart in large part because he didn’t follow his chief of staff’s advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter.

Obama chose the profane former Clinton adviser for a reason. Where the president is airy and idealistic, Rahm is earthy and calculating. One thinks big; the other, a former House Democratic Caucus chair, understands the congressional mind, in which small stuff counts for more than broad strokes.

Obama’s problem is that his other confidants — particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod — are part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn’t dirty his hands in politics.

The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel’s counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig’s effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn’t politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn’t met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support. He opposed the public option as a needless distraction.

The president disregarded that strategy and sided with Capitol Hill liberals who hoped to ram a larger, less popular bill through Congress with Democratic votes only. The result was, as the world now knows, disastrous.

Had it gone Emanuel’s way, a politically popular health-care bill would have passed long ago, leaving plenty of time for other attractive priorities, such as efforts to make college more affordable. We would have seen a continuation of the momentum of the first half of 2009, when Obama followed Emanuel’s strategy and got 11 substantive bills on his desk before the August recess.

Instead, Congress has ground to a halt, on climate legislation, Wall Street reforms and virtually everything else. Emanuel, schooled by Bill Clinton, knew what the true believers didn’t: that bite-sized proposals add up to big things.

Contrast Emanuel’s wisdom with that of Jarrett, in charge of “intergovernmental affairs and public engagement” — two areas of conspicuous failure. Jarrett also brought in Desiree Rogers as White House social secretary; the Salahi embarrassment ensued. Then there’s Gibbs. It’s hard to make the case that you’re a post-partisan president when your on-camera spokesman is a hyper-partisan former campaign flack.

No wonder Emanuel has set up his own small press operation and outreach function to circumvent the dysfunctional ones that Jarrett and Gibbs run. Obama needs an old Washington hand to replace Jarrett and somebody with gravitas on the podium to step in for Gibbs.

The failure of the president’s message also reflects on his message maven, Axelrod, who is an adept strategist but blinded by Obama love. A good example was Obama’s unproductive China trip in November. Jarrett, Gibbs and Axelrod went along as courtiers; Emanuel remained at his desk in Washington, struggling to keep alive the big health-care bill that he didn’t want in the first place.

In hiring Emanuel, Obama avoided the mistakes of his Democratic predecessors, who first gave the chief of staff job to besotted loyalists. Now in trouble, Obama needs fewer acolytes and more action. Rahm should stay.

If Rahm Emanuel doesn’t have a giant man-crush on Barack Obama, maybe he should stay.  Certainly, if the Milbrank article has any truth to it, Rahm Emanuel would be the only one at the White House who has either common sense or a freaking clue.

It’s actually quite funny.  Democrats are increasingly at each others’ throats while all the while telling everyone (and I’m sure trying to reassure themselves) that everything is right as rain.

Whether Rahm Emanuel stays, or whether someone else goes, Barry Hussein is an utter failure, and a future utter disgrace.  You can change the whole rest of the team and it won’t matter, because their franchise player is an incompetent loser.

Obama Job Numbers, And Why Won’t The NBA Believe Me When I Say I’m 25 Feet Tall?

Obama keeps saying he’s created 2 million jobs.  And I keep filling up barf buckets.

One of the biggest Big Lies of the Obama administration was the invention of the never-before-seen category of “saved or created” jobs.  Simply put, it is a giant load of rotting baloney.  Harvard economics Professor Gregory Mankiw has said, “There is no way to measure how many jobs are saved.” Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University has said “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?” If George Bush had EVER tried to use this same “saved or created” shenanigan, he would have been simultaneously mocked as a complete moron and attacked as a criminal who was trying to deliberately deceive the American people.  But a liberal Democrat did it, so the mainstream media has merely duly reported the totally-made-up and self-serving “statistic” as though it weren’t a complete fabrication.

Why does Obama keep lying to the American people about jobs?

A couple of weeks ago, his three senior advisers trotted out with wildly disparate job numbers that Obama had ostensibly “saved or created.” On the very same day, David Axelrod said we had saved or created more than 2 million jobs.  Robert Gibbs said we’d saved 1.5 million jobs.  And Valerie Jarrett said we’d saved thousands and thousands of jobs.

Valerie Jarret would have to say, “thousands and thousands” a thousand times to get to Axelrod’s “2 million.”

The numbers are arbitrary bullcrap.  The Obama administration has “saved or created” as many jobs as they think they can get away with before they think the American people will realize they are liars.

We can go back and look at how shockingly deceitful Obama’s job claim numbers have been.  I never thought an American president could get away with so many shockingly transparent lies.  You have to be a hard-core lie ADDICT to tell these kind of lies.

We can go back and look at all the bogus congressional districts and phony zip codes that have been “saving or creating” job after job.

Why, you can almost believe Obama’s claims when just one lawnmower was all it took to “save or create” a whopping 50 jobs (and that as reported by the New York Times).  I mean, if we produce just 6 million lawnmowers, we can have total employment of every single man, woman, and child in America.

And even given Obama’s OWN INFORMATION, he has only “saved or created” 595,263 jobs as of February 20, 2010.  Which amounts to $456,941 per job given how much of the porkulus slush fund otherwise known as stimulus dollars have been paid out.

595,263 can become more than 2 million if it’s stretched long enough.

I tried Obama’s tactic.  I called up every single team in the NBA and told them I was 25 feet tall.  Only nobody believed me.  I really hoped my six foot body could be out there on the floor with Shaquille O’Neal, and I could simply tell any skeptic who doubts my 25-foot status that “they just aren’t looking at the full picture” or something similar.

Senator Evan Bayh, in announcing that he would not run again as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate, had this to say to convey the truth:

“[I]f I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.”

[link] [Youtube]

That’s an awfully far cry from 2 million, isn’t it?

According to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, a whopping 94% of the American people agree with Bayh. Only 6% of Americans believe Obama’s massive porkulus has created jobs a full year after going into effect.

Only SIX PERCENT of Americans believe that Obama’s porkulus has created any jobs at all.  That means more Americans believe that space aliens have anally probed them than believe in the stimulus.  It also means that 94% think Obama and his entire administration and the entire Democrat congressional leadership are completely full of crap.

So why does the mainstream media keep reporting that Obama has saved or created 2 million jobs, when 94% of the American people – even according to CBS and the New York Times!!! – don’t think he’s created ANY jobs?

I have an even better question for you: why on earth do you keep watching or reading the mainstream media when they keep reporting flagrant lies as if they were facts?

Do you like being lied to?  Were you told so many lies as a child that you now need a constant stream of lies to stay in your little happy place?

Meanwhile, even as Obama falsely tells us that he gave us 2 million jobs this year, and that we are “clearly” emerging from the recession – which means even MORE job growth in future years – his own numbers are telling him that he will leave office in 2012 with unemployment higher than it was when he came in.

If you’re willing to believe that Obama saved or created 2 million jobs, please send me $99.99 for my miraculous elixir that is guaranteed to make you 25 feet tall.  And for an extra $99.99, I will send you a ruler that will prove that you have grown fourfold.

And please ignore the fact that the contents of the bottle look and taste rather like urine.

Why Does Obama Keep Lying To Us About Jobs?

A few weeks ago, three inner-sanctum Obama circlers came out and provided three different numbers as to how many jobs they thought that Obama had created:

David Axelrod: Axelrod, on CNN’s State of the Union: “But understand that, in this recession that began at the beginning of 2007, we’ve lost 7 million jobs. Now, the Recovery Act the president passed has created more than — or saved more than 2 million jobs. But against 7 million, you know, that — that is — it is cold comfort to those who still are looking.”

Valerie Jarrett: Jarrett, on NBC’s Meet the Press: “The Recovery Act saved thousands and thousands of jobs. There are schoolteachers and firemen and— and— teachers all across our country, policemen, who have jobs today because of that recovery act. We’re investing in infrastructure. We’re investing in public education so that our kids can compete going forth into the next— generation.”

Robert Gibbs: Gibbs, on “Fox News Sunday”: “Well, Chris, let’s take for instance the example you just used of the stimulus package. We had four quarters of economic regression in terms of growth, right? Just last quarter, we finally saw the first positive economic job growth in more than a year. Largely as a result of the recovery plan that’s put money back into our economy, that saved or created 1.5 million jobs.”

You get the sense that 1) these people have no idea what they are talking about; and 2) they are pulling numbers right out of their butts.

Barry Hussein has repeatedly used the 2 million number.  After all, it’s bigger and sounds better.  Why should he care about reality?

But let’s look at reality for just one second:

Jobs Saved: PR or Fact?
While the unemployment rate continues to rise–to 10.2 percent in October–the debate over the “jobs saved” concept also continues, most recently on last Sunday’s Meet the Press with host David Gregory asking Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner whether the concept is PR or Fact. Gregory first quotes Allan Meltzer saying “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?” Gregory then pops the question to Secretary Geithner. Watch this short video clip for his answer, and then search your textbook as Professor Meltzer suggests.

And you will search in vain.

Had George Bush tried this crap talking about all the jobs his administration had “saved,” the mainstream media would have been tearing into him like pit bulls tearing into red meat.  Because it is a giant fabrication created for the sake of pure political posturing.

Obama hasn’t “created or saved” anywhere NEAR 2 million jobs.  And his own numbers prove it.

Here’s a screenshot from Obama’s Recovery.gov site, accessed Thursday, February 11, 2010:

Let’s see: 595,263 jobs versus 2 million: Obama is a big fat liar.  And a transparent liar at that.

We find that the government has spent $272 billion in stimulus funds so far.  And $272 billion divided by 595,263 jobs comes out to $456,941 per job.

Obama has created his own Pyrrhic victory.  For the sake of argument, suppose Obama has created jobs with his stimulus, contrary to the bogus zip codes, nonexistent congressional districts, and the claims that a single lawnmower “saved” 50 jobs as evidence to the contrary.  Damn, we’ll go bankrupt if we create many more.

Which is to say it is every big as gigantic of a boondoggle and failure as every single House Republican who voted against the stimulus said it would be.

You’ve got to do your own research to see what a stinking pile of lies Obama’s jobs figures have truly been, with billions of stimulus dollars disappearing into bogus zip codes and nonexistent congressional districts.  You can be certain that the Obama administration and the sycophantic mainstream media will tell you the truth.

Now we’re hearing that the White House is forecasting that the economy will expand by 95,000 jobs a month.  But we should believe one word they’re saying WHY???  All they’re doing is taking a demonstrated dishonest metric and pointing it at the future.

What’s Happened To Obama’s Chicago-Way Thug-Style ‘Hope And Change’?

One of the things that was truly amazing during the 2008 campaign is that the mainstream media were hyper-eager to gather in droves over Sarah Palin’s and then Joe the Plumber’s trash cans for any dirt they could find, but utterly refused to examine Barack Obama’s record in the most politically corrupt city in America.

This is why Obama was able to say, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”  He could be whatever he wanted to depict himself, because the mainstream media wasn’t going to challenge anything he said.

Americans are finally beginning to understand who Mr. “blank screen” really is – and they are rejecting him in droves.  The pity is that they should have had an opportunity to learn who he was before they elected him.  But the dishonest ideologically-biased mainstream propagandists were not about to tell us anything they thought we might not want to hear.

The mainstream media have long held a “gatekeeper” mentality to the news, which is to say that they only told you what they wanted you to know, while holding back what they didn’t want you to know.

And they didn’t want you to know how Obama’s Chicago past would influence or even dictate his presidency: what happens in Chicago stays in Chicago.

But, inevitably, the American people were going to see the “Chicago side” of Barry Hussein.

From the Los Angeles Times blog:

President Obama Day 386: What’s happened to him?
February 9, 2010A favorite story about Chicago politics involves Roman Pucinski, who served six long terms of political apprenticeship in the Washington minor leagues of the U.S. House of Representatives before the Windy City’s vaunted Democratic political machine allowed him to step up and serve on the City Council.

The late Pucinski then served for 18 years as a loyal operative assigned to the 41st Ward (of 50).

It’s always useful for Chicago pols to have White House connections if, say, they’d like to dispatch someone famous to fly off to Copenhagen to lobby the International Olympic Committee for their city’s 2016 summer games bid.

But the Chicago Daley machine, which is actually a ruthless coalition of urban Democratic factions united by the steel reinforcing rods of self-interest, didn’t much care about this Barack Obama fellow before, as long as he was quiet, obedient and headed on a track out of town. How he acquired a reform label coming out of that one-party place is anyone’s guess.

But now that the sun has risen on the 386th day of the Obama White House, many political observers are coming to see that the ex-state senator from the South Side is running his federal administration in Washington much the way they run things back home: with a small….

…claque of clout-laden people from the same school who learned their political trade back in the nation’s No. 3 city, named for an Indian word for a smelly wild onion.

That style is tough, focused, immune to any distractions but cosmetic niceties. And did we mention tough. A portly, veteran Chicago alderman once confided only about 40% jokingly, that he had taken up jogging to lose weight but quickly gave it up as boring because “you can’t knock anyone down.” That’s politics the Chicago way.

For instance, remember how much we heard all last year about the need for healthcare legislation before early August, before October, before Thanksgiving, before Christmas, before the State of the Union? And how spanked the White House was by the Massachusetts Senate upset that Obama said his laser-vision for 2010 was on jobs and the economy?

So, what did he announce during a Super Bowl interview? More healthcare meetings, designed to politically box Republicans into the No-Nothing corner.

In the last few days at least three major outlets have published well-informed evaluations of Obama’s first year in office.  All are well worth reading.  The dominant themes: disappointment and disillusionment with the Chicago way.

In one respect it’s not surprising that a capitol city with its own style of take-no-prisoners politics should find a professed outsider’s style of smoother-spoken take-no-prisoners discomforting.

But now, no less than the Huffington Post headlined its Obama evaluation by Steve Clemons: “Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama presidency.”

The devastating Financial Times report by Edward Luce: “A fearsome foursome.”

And the Washington Post story by Ann Gerhart: “A year later, where did the hopes for Obama go?“

The Post story focuses on a handful of Obama supporters, so fiercely motivated and hopeful in 2008 and through the inauguration, now largely drifting back to normal lives lacking fulfillment of so many promises.

The other two fascinating accounts examine Obama’s close-knit team of Chicagoans: confidante Valerie Jarrett, who’s so intelligent she once hired Michelle Obama; Rahm Emanuel, the diminutive, acid-tongued chief of staff with overwhelmAxelrod and Obamaing energy and ambition; David Axelrod, the ex-Chicago Tribune politics reporter-turned-consultant who’s been coaching Obama forever; and Robert Gibbs, who isn’t from Chicago but that’s OK because he’s only the mouthpiece and the others keep a close eye on him.

Clemons focuses on how dead-on the Luce piece is and how the FT Washington bureau chief had to assiduously hide his sources as everyone was properly so fearful of retribution from the quartet around the mayor, er, president.

And Clemons attributes the lack of online link love to the Luce item Monday to the same fears among D.C. journalists dodging disfavor from the same four.

Quoting “administration insiders,” Luce says “the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. ‘I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,’ says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently.”

And both articles note, accurately, how savvy cabinet secretaries like Kathleen Sebelius at Health and Human Services and Ken Salazar at Interior have been marginalized because putting a media face on the Obama Oval Office can only be entrusted to the likes of Gibbs and Axelrod.

Another Luce source talks about the difference between campaigning, which is easier, and governing, which is the ultimate goal but takes a more refined skill-set:

‘There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,’ says one. ‘Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.’

Also noted, how most everything coming out of the executive office is filtered through a political prism above all. i.e. the Afghanistan troop surge speech that touched all the political bases in 4,582 words without once saying “victory.”

Warning that Obama needs to take action quickly, Clemons adds that needed advice from a broader range of advisers “is getting twisted either in the rough-and-tumble of a a team of rivals operation that is not working, or is being distorted by the Chicago political gang’s tactical advice that is seducing Obama towards a course that has not only violated deals he made with those who voted him into office but which is failing to hit any of the major strategic targets by which the administration will be historically measured.”

David Gergen, who helped guide Bill Clinton out of not dissimilar troubled waters, tells Luce: “There is an old joke. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don’t think President Obama wants to make any changes.”

— Andrew Malcolm

Mark Steyn reminded viewers of Obama’s horribly botched pronunciation of the Navy Corpsmen who save the lives of wounded Marines, and then referred to “the four corpse men of the Obamaclypse.”  That’s quite accurate, as it turns out.  and these four corpse men are riding America into apocalypse right along with Barack Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s political future.

It’s scary to think that we have a preening peacock campaigning and campaigning with absolutely no idea how to actually govern.

Since the FT article is hard to obtain, and since I am all about preserving a record of the facts, here is the Luce article:

A Fearsome Foursome
By Edward Luce

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”

Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.

With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama’s brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans – like the president. And barring Richard Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

“It is a very tightly knit group,” says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. “This is a kind of ‘we few’ group … that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep.”

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.

Among the broader circle that Mr Obama also consults are the self-effacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the inner circle.

“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”

This White House-centric structure has generated one overriding – and unexpected – failure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr Emanuel managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, say observers. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion – not Capitol Hill. But for the setback in Massachusetts, which deprived the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, Mr Obama would by now almost certainly have signed healthcare into law – and with it would have become a historic president.

But the normally liberal voters of Massachusetts wished otherwise. The Democrats lost the seat to a candidate, Scott Brown, who promised voters he would be the “41st [Republican] vote” in the Senate – the one that would tip the balance against healthcare. Subsequent polling bears out the view that a decisive number of Democrats switched their votes with precisely that motivation in mind.

“Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they had voted for as something they suddenly didn’t want,” says Jim Morone, America’s leading political scientist on healthcare reform. “Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able to master.”

Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr Axelrod or Mr Gibbs on television to explain the administration’s position. “Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president,” says an exasperated outside adviser.

Perhaps the biggest losers are the cabinet members. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr Obama’s health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas, almost never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.

Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. “I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,” says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. “If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them.”

In addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration, Mr Emanuel has alienated many of Mr Obama’s closest outside supporters. At a meeting of Democratic groups last August, Mr Emanuel described liberals as “f***ing retards” after one suggested they mobilise resources on healthcare reform.

“We are treated as though we are children,” says the head of a large organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr Obama’s campaign. “Our advice is never sought. We are only told: ‘This is the message, please get it out.’ I am not sure whether the president fully realises that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for the president.”

The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama’s November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.

The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama’s “G2” visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama’s inner circle had any background in China. “We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president,” says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. “It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China.”

Then there are the president’s big strategic decisions. Of these, devoting the first year to healthcare is well known and remains a source of heated contention. Less understood is the collateral damage it caused to unrelated initiatives. “The whole Rahm Emanuel approach is that victory begets victory – the success of healthcare would create the momentum for cap-and-trade [on carbon emissions] and then financial sector reform,” says one close ally of Mr Obama. “But what happens if the first in the sequence is defeat?”

Insiders attribute Mr Obama’s waning enthusiasm for the Arab-Israeli peace initiative to a desire to avoid antagonising sceptical lawmakers whose support was needed on healthcare. The steam went out of his Arab-Israeli push in mid-summer, just when the healthcare bill was running into serious difficulties.

The same applies to reforming the legal apparatus in the “war on terror” – not least his pledge to close the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year of taking office. That promise has been abandoned.

“Rahm said: ‘We’ve got these two Boeing 747s circling that we are trying to bring down to the tarmac [healthcare and the decision on the Afghanistan troop surge] and we can’t risk a flock of f***ing Canadian geese causing them to crash,’ ” says an official who attended an Oval Office strategy meeting. The geese stood for the closure of Guantánamo.

An outside adviser adds: “I don’t understand how the president could launch healthcare reform and an Arab-Israeli peace process – two goals that have eluded US presidents for generations – without having done better scenario planning. Either would be historic. But to launch them at the same time?”

Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. “There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,” says one. “Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.”

The White House declined to answer questions on whether Mr Obama needed to broaden his circle of advisers. But some supporters say he should find a new chief of staff. Mr Emanuel has hinted that he might not stay in the job very long and is thought to have an eye on running for mayor of Chicago. Others say Mr Obama should bring in fresh blood. They point to Mr Clinton’s decision to recruit David Gergen, a veteran of previous White Houses, when the last Democratic president ran into trouble in 1993. That is credited with helping to steady the Clinton ship, after he too began with an inner circle largely carried over from his campaign.

But Mr Gergen himself disagrees. Now teaching at Harvard and commenting for CNN, Mr Gergen says members of the inner circle meet two key tests. First, they are all talented. Second, Mr Obama trusts them. “These are important attributes,” Mr Gergen says. His biggest doubt is whether Mr Obama sees any problem with the existing set-up.

So you learn that Obama is all fluff and no substance (i.e., all campaign mode and no actual governing mode), and that Obama has to rely on his “Chicago fearsome foursome” the way he relies on his teleprompter: ubiquitously (as in even in sixth grade classrooms!!!).

And you should think long and hard about the profound comparison of Nixon’s tight (and tightly wound) inner circle and Obama’s same same.  A tight, insular circle that answers to no one and keeps its counsel secret is a frightening thing in any republic.

Here’s another comparison between Obama and his alter ego.  And realize that for a CHICAGO POLITICIAN to say, “I am not a crook,” is pretty much like a Chicago politician saying, “I am not a Chicago politician.”

Everything is politics for Obama.  Political posturing, political preening, political hatchet jobs.  Nothing else matters.

It is frankly amazing to me that such a hypocritical and cynical man as Barack Obama was ever elected president.  He constantly lectures Republicans (and even Democrats when it suits him) to “rise above petty politics” when the very construction of his administration is completely about politics.

I have on several occasions compared Barack Obama to Neville Chamberlain.  Both men were utterly ruthless (there’s your ‘Chicago Way’) in pounding head after head to achieve their signature domestic issues, and both men became utter failures as they attempted to have their personal domestic agenda at the expense of everything else.

People are starting to learn that the “blank slate” may well be blank because the man behind the grand facade has no soul.