New Revelations About THE Most Dishonest White House EVER: Treasury Sec Geithner Reveals He Was Instructed To Lie To The American People

This is pretty much exactly what happened in the IRS scandal.  Or in the Benghazi scandal.  Etcetera.

Obama has lied to the American people about their health care.  That is a documented fact.  He has lied to the American people about their economy – as has now been revealed by his former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as a documented fact.  And he has lied to the American people about their national security when he covered up what happened at Benghazi and then attempted to cover up his cover-up.

If you DON’T believe the same first paragraph wouldn’t read, “The White House wanted Ambassador Susan Rice to lie on Sunday talk shows to downplay the part Benghazi played in demonstrating Obama’s broad failure of policy against terrorism,” you are a rabid ideologue.  The evidence is so overwhelming it is beyond unreal.  Obama’s White House is THE most viscerally dishonest, zombie ideological and rabidly partisan administration in the entire history of the republic.

White House wanted Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to LIE to the public about social security being behind the deficit
In his memoir, out today, former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says the White House wanted him to mislead Americans about the long term costs of Social Security
 ‘I objected when  Dan Pfeiffer wanted me to say Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit. It wasn’t a main driver of our future deficits, but it did contribute,’ Geithner writes
By Francesca Chambers
Published: 09:20 EST, 12 May 2014  | Updated: 17:45 EST, 12 May 2014

The White House wanted Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to lie on Sunday talk shows to downplay the part Social Security played in driving the deficit, it was revealed today.

Geithner writes in his memoir Stress Test, out today, that the White House communications director asked him to downplay the long term cost of Social Security spending to mollify the Democratic Party’s base.

‘I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I appeared on the Sunday shows, I objected when Dan Pfeiffer wanted me to say Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit. It wasn’t a main driver of our future deficits, but it did contribute,’ he says.

‘Pfeiffer said the line was a ‘dog whistle’ to the left, a phrase I had never heard before. He had to explain that the phrase was code to the Democratic base, signaling that we intended to protect Social Security.’

Geithner’s book release comes amidst allegations that the White House changed the Sunday show talking points of U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice’s after the September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya for political reasons.

Days after the White House claims it knew what happened in Benghazi was ‘an act of terror,’ Rice wrongly blamed an anti-Muslim internet video for the deadly assault in a string of high-profile interviews on network news stations.

The White House has forcefully denied that it made anything other than minor changes to Rice’s talking points. Recently released e-mails between deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes and White House communications staff calls the veracity of the Obama administration’s claims into question.

The emails show that Rice was instructed to claim the attack was ‘spontaneously inspired ‘ and ‘to ​underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy.’

Geithner’s anecdote about White House communications staff trying pressure him into misleading Americans about the country’s ability to meet its future financial obligations once again casts a shadow on the Obama administration’s willingness to tell the truth when the truth is politically unappealing.

He writes that Pfeiffer, who is now Obama’s senior communications adviser, often let party politics come into play when discussing how the administration should respond to fiscal issues.

During a discussion on spending cuts, Geithner says that Pfieffer argued that ‘we couldn’t afford to alienate our base and split a weakened Democratic Party in pursuit of an imaginary compromise with Republicans who didn’t want to compromise.’

Early reviews of Geithner’s book indicate that the former Treasury Secretary, who now works at a private equity firm, does not appear to have an axe to grind with Obama, giving greater weight to his recollections.

Geithner mostly uses the memoir to provide context for actions he took as Treasury Secretary from 2009 to 2013 to get the nation back on track after the financial crisis of 2008.

The only other seemingly negative remark Geithner makes about the White House is about President Obama, whom he says, ‘Sometimes I thought he wore his frustration too openly.’

‘He harbored the overly optimistic belief that since his motives and values were good, since his team was thoughtful and well-intentioned, we deserved to be perceived that way,’ Geithner says in the book, according to a review in the New York Times.

Hmmm, something about that.  What does Geithner say?

‘I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I appeared on the Sunday shows…

It reminds me of ANOTHER White House prep session before – heck, FIVE Sunday talk shows in which Obama blabbermouth Susan Rice claimed five times that it was a “spontaneous attack” rather than a planned, coordinated terrorist attack and that a Youtube video was to blame even though we now have it documented that the “video” theory did NOT come from the intelligence community but was fabricated by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during a phone call shortly before Hillary invented the video (created by an American citizen) as being responsible for the terrorist attack rather than a “broader failure of policy.”

Barack Obama is a documented liar without shame, without honor, without virtue, without integrity and without decency.  He has proven more than ANY HUMAN BEING who EVER LIVED that he is wiling to look his people in the eye and lie to them right to their face – as he did at LEAST 37 times when he kept emphatically promising something he KNEW full damn well was an outright lie – NBC documenting that Obama knew for at least THREE YEARS he was lying – and which even the Clintons dating back 20 YEARS AGO knew was a lie:

Three days before the 1994 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton’s advisers fretted about including a line promising that participants in the still-viable Hillarycare insurance overhaul would be allowed to keep their favored doctors and health care plans, a concern that would come back years later when President Barack Obama promised the same thing.

The line, which made it into the final speech in a slightly different form – Clinton told Americans they would have ‘the freedom to choose a plan and the right to choose your own doctor’ – was the subject of controversy because his aides knew it was untrue.

‘We have a line on p. 10 that says “You’ll pick the health plan and the doctor of your choice,”‘ an internal memo read.

‘I know that it’s just what people want to hear. But can we get away with it?’ he asked. ‘I am very worried about getting skewered for over-promising here on something we know full well we won’t deliver.’

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The Clintons’ first term in the White House was marred by the failure of ‘Hillarycare,’ an earlier proposed version of what would later become law as the Affordable Care Act

‘Over-promising’: A 1994 memo released Friday shows a Clinton aide encouraging the president to drop from his State of the Union address a line promising Americans they could keep their health care plans and their doctors

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In his 1994 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton promised Americans ‘the freedom to choose a plan and the right to choose your own doctor’ — 13 years before Barack Obama made nearly identical pledges

The memo was part of more than 4,000 pages of documents released by the Bill Clinton Presdiential Library, and offers new insights into the development – and ‘sale’ to Congress – of the ill-fated Hillarycare program that represented a major public embarrassment for then-first lady Hillary Clinton.

‘Isn’t the whole thrust of our health plan to steer people toward cheaper, HMO-style providers?’ wrote the memo’s author, identified only as Todd.

‘It’s one thing to say we’ll preserve your option to pick the doctor of your choice (recognizing that this will cost more), it’s quite another to appear to promise the nation that everyone will get to pick the doctor of his or her choice,’ he added. ‘And that’s exactly what this line does.’

We are seeing breathtaking dishonesty all across the board.  Barack Obama is a rabid cancer upon America.

And his Democrat Party has circled their wagons and are doing everything they possibly can to prevent so much as QUESTIONS being asked about it.

And the ONLY reason they think they can get away with it is because the mainstream media are more propagandist today – and frankly more sophisticated about the art and science of propaganda – than Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda or Stalin’s TASS were sixty years ago.

We live in an age of deception just before the coming of the Antichrist who was prophesied in Scripture to come to a worshiping world in the very last days.  And we are watching with our eyes a Democrat Party that has officially announced that they are ready to take the Mark of the Beast.

If you believe Obama didn’t instruct Susan Rice to lie through his political thugs on those five Sunday Talk shows where she told outright lies that everyone KNOWS were outright lies, and if you don’t think the GOP should investigate something that frankly should lead to Obama being IMPEACHED for official corruption as he covered up the truth to maintain a lie that he had succeeded in “decimating” al Qaeda when that narrative was proven false by Benghazi – and then covered up his cover up by withholding the proof that the White House substituted its “Youtube video” talking points for “planned terrorist attack by an al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization”, you have already demonstrated that you will surely believe the Antichrist’s lies and take his mark.  And burn in hell for it.

I’m speaking with the full authority of God’s Word behind me: you’re going to get yours, you baby-murdering (55 MILLION!!!), homosexual sodomy-loving, government-worshiping Democrat.  Obama – you know, the Obama who demonized Bush for a $9 trillion debt – has jacked up that debt to over $17.5 trillion.  Consider this to see yet again how viscerally and rabidly dishonest and hypocritical your false messiah truly has been.  Well, let me assure you, in 17.5 trillion years you will STILL be screaming in the agony of being burned alive forever and ever and EVER for what you did on this earth, Democrat.

You still have time to repent.  But your day is coming.

If Nation Defaults, It Is ENTIRELY Obama’s Fault

Today Obama went to FEMA to thank them for working without pay.  That was his pretense, anyway.  Actually, he went to get in front of a microphone and demonize Republicans some more.

Here’s a short article that sums up the situation quite nicely:

Obama thanks FEMA for work during shutdown
Posted: Oct 07, 2013 9:51 AM PDT Updated: Oct 07, 2013 9:52 AM PDT
By JOSH LEDERMAN
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama is thanking workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency for doing their jobs under “less than optimal circumstances” during the government shutdown.

Obama made an unannounced visit to FEMA Monday as the shutdown neared the one-week mark. Some furloughed employees at the agency were recalled last week and worked without pay to help prepare for Tropical Storm Karen.

The president said FEMA employees remain ready to respond when needed, but their jobs have been “made more difficult.” He says the shutdown may actually end up costing taxpayers more money.

Funding for FEMA was among the series of piecemeal spending bills passed by the House last week. The White House has threatened to veto the measures, saying the government should not be reopened one agency at a time.

Do you get that, stupid universe?  FEMA isn’t shut down because Republicans shut them down; because REPUBLICANS FUNDED FEMA and a lot of the rest of the government.  No, FEMA is shut down because Democrats who control the Senate won’t allow the House-passed bill to go forward, and because if anybody tries to fund FEMA and pay those workers, BARACK OBAMA WILL VETO IT.

THAT’S why FEMA is on furlough.

But we live in an age just before Obama implodes America, sends the world into depression and the beast of the Book of Revelation comes.  And so the truth has largely been replaced by demon-possessed lies.

Here’s another reason that Obama rabidly refuses to negotiate or compromise in any way, any shape or any form as we approach a debt default:

Said a senior administration official: “We are winning…It doesn’t really matter to us” how long the shutdown lasts “because what matters is the end result.”

Obama and Charlie Sheen have something in common: they’re not bi-polar; they are BI-WINNING.

That and the fact that they are both demonic people who have a truly psychotic worldview.

Obama has been shutting down things left and right for the sole purpose of making the shutdown as painful for as many people as he can.  He’s shut down WWII memorials and things like the Lincoln Memorial that have NEVER been closed during ANY of our previous government shutdowns:

The Park Service appears to be closing  streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist  destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies’  Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national  memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the  lots are jointly owned with the Mount Vernon ladies. The rangers are from the government, and they’re only here to help.

“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park  Service ranger in Washington says  of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we  can. It’s disgusting.”

“We’ve been told – by OBAMA through his federal government demon-possessed bureaucrats – to make life as difficult for people as they possibly can.”  Quote.  And you’re damn right it’s absolutely disgusting.

Do you know that at all of these memorials that Obama has shut down for no other reason that to be petty and vindictive is that he’s using more security guards to keep the American people OUT of their monuments than were being used to just keep them open???

That was what Sen Rand Paul was mocking when he tweeted:

@BarackObama sent 7 security guards to #WWIIMemorial this AM to keep out our vets. Sadly, that is 2 more than were present in Benghazi.

Obama tried to shut down the Army-Navy football game – again, for the first time EVER during one of our many government shutdowns – just because he’s a petty tyrant and that’s the kind of cheap trick that a petty tyrant does:

ANNAPOLIS, Md. —  On a beautiful fall day, the parking lot at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium was filled with fans and tailgate parties. A record crowd of 38,225 showed up Saturday for the football game between Navy and Air Force.

Navy athletic director Chet Gladchuk looked at the activity around him and smiled. After tumultuous week, he was right where he was supposed to be Saturday.

The Air Force-Navy game was in serious jeopardy on Tuesday, when the Department of Defense suspended athletic competition at the nation’s service academies because of the U.S. government shutdown. At that point, Gladchuk took action to convince the DOD that the game should be played because it was funded by non-appropriated money.

His effort paid off. Late Wednesday night, the DOD relented. […]

“There was some concern, but I was hopeful it would happen because they’ve never canceled a Navy football game during a government shutdown,” Lang said.

“Navy athletics is privately funded,” Miles said. “The idea of them trying to cancel a game between two service academies is appalling.”

There’s another word to use to describe Obama’s thug tactics in addition to “disgusting”: “appalling.”

Obama the thug has his White House thugs and federal government thugs frantically trying to close down absolutely everything they can possibly close down just to hurt as many people as they can.  EVEN WHEN FEDERAL FUNDS AREN’T EVEN BEING USED.  Just so Obama can falsely blame Republicans even though the only part of government they basically HAVEN’T funded is demonic ObamaCare fiasco.

I recently pointed out a few other examples of just how positively VILE Obama and his Democrat stooge-thugs have been during this period.

But here’s another one that is just so utterly beyond “appalling” or “disgusting” that “vile” hardly is enough to describe it: Obama closed down the Amber alert system created to find kidnapped children before a pedophile can rape them.

And if it comes to it, believe me, Obama is thug enough and petty enough to order this, too, joke or no joke.  He’s just that demonic.

But you still haven’t grasped the true, genuine evil that is Barack Obama.  He’s actively trying to sabotage our economy just so he can blame the other party for what HE did.  Democrats are accusing Republicans of being “economic terrorists.”  But let’s take a look at our “Economic Terrorist-in-CHIEF”:

Washington (AFP) – President Barack Obama sent Wall Street a blunt warning Wednesday that it should be very worried about a political crisis that has shut down the government and could trigger a US debt default.

Obama said he was “exasperated” by the budget impasse in Congress, in an interview with CNBC apparently designed to pressure Republicans by targeting the financial community moments after markets closed.

The president then met Republican and Democratic leaders for their first talks since the US government money’s ran out and it slumped into a shutdown now well into its second day.

But few informed observers held out much hope for a sudden breakthrough.

Obama was asked in the interview whether Washington was simply gripped by just the latest in a series of political and fiscal crises which reliably get solved at the last minute.

In unusually frank comments on issues that could sway markets, Obama warned that investors should be worried.

“This time’s different. I think they should be concerned,” Obama said, in comments which may roil global markets.

“When you have a situation in which a faction is willing potentially to default on US government obligations, then we are in trouble,” Obama said.

Obama said he would not negotiate with Republicans on budget matters until House lawmakers pass a temporary financing bill to reopen federal operations and raised the $16.7 trillion dollar debt ceiling.

This is the bottom line: in a couple of weeks, America faces a debt ceiling issue.

Keep in mind that if Republicans act like Obama, they will vote against EVER raising the damn debt ceiling.  Remember what Obama said when he was a Senator to demonize George W. Bush???

“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”

And:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

That was when it was $9 trillion.  IT’S VERY NEARLY DOUBLE THAT NOW, THANKS TO OBAMA’S UTTER DEPRAVITY.

HOW WAS IT “IRRESPONSIBLE” AND “UNPATRIOTIC” TO INCREASE THE DEBT CEILING WHEN IT WAS $9 TRILLION BUT NOT SO NOW WHEN THE DEBT IS 17 TRILLION???  Other than that it isn’t fascist when Obama does it???

You need to realize something: the real crisis of this debt ceiling impasse is that America could find itself unable to make the interest payments on the debt – which would be a default on America’s perfect credit.

Do you know why that could happen?  Do you know who would be entirely to blame if that does happen?

Barack Hussein Obama, thug, liar and traitor, that’s who.

Our interest payments on the debt amount to about $25 billion a month.  That sounds like a lot, but during any shutdown or debt ceiling impasse, the United States still raises far more in taxes every single month.  And it would just be a matter of arranging to prioritize the payments on the debt and to assure the credit markets that we will be doing so in order to maintain confidence.

But Obama doesn’t want that.  He wants to create as much pain and misery and destruction as he can.  Because he wants to trot out to every single dishonest propagandist mainstream media microphone and slander the Republican Party for doing what OBAMA DID.

There is absolutely no chance of a true default if Obama does what any leader who isn’t completely morally insane would do.  It is entirely under Obama’s authority to make those interest payments.  And to complete the picture, the Republicans have already approved this and other payments.  Absolutely nobody but Obama would be to blame.

If the United States defaults on its interest payments and creates a market meltdown, it is because Obama – who could easily avoid that merely by making the interest payments that are his authority to make – wants to create a market meltdown.

And the fact of the matter is that Barack Obama is an evil enough man to make that happen.

Barack Obama has rabidly refused to negotiate.  Literally, he is the first president in the history of the republic to refuse to negotiate – in spite of his many lies to the contrary.  In fact, the debt ceiling has been raised 63 times since 1979 – and fully 27 of those times, the debt ceiling was directly linked to other issues.  For instance, in 1973, Ted Kennedy and Walter Mondale – both top national Democrats – attempted to link the debt ceiling to campaign finance reform.

And in every single case up to now, the president was enough of a grown-up to NEGOTIATE AND BE WILLING TO COMPROMISE.

I am so sick of Obama’s and his administration’s constant spewing of outright lies.

If the Republicans follow the example set by the president, they will likewise refuse to negotiate and allow the country to slide off a cliff.

Being A Democrat Means Never Holding Barack Obama Responsible for Anything After Coming Unglued Over Bush For Everything

This is just too funny.  Buzzfeed should give Benny Johnson a raise or a company car or something:

7 Things Democrats Would Have Freaked Out About If Bush Had Done Them
Obama’s national security policy has continued some of the most controversial moves of the Bush administration. Silence from much of the left.
posted on February 11, 2013 at 1:44pm EST
Benny Johnson, BuzzFeed Staff

Democrats were overjoyed when George W. Bush left office in January of 2009.

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Via: amfussybroad

Obama had promised to end Bush’s hawkish foreign policy and the “war on terror’s” detention and interrogation regime.View this image ›

But in the beginning of his fifth year as president, Obama’s record has been surprisingly similar to his predecessor’s in those areas.

1. Democrats fought George W. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq in 2006.

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Obama copied it in Afghanistan in 2009.

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You would think Democrats would react the same way they did to Bush’s surge policy:

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But they were really more like:

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2. American deaths in Afghanistan have skyrocketed since Obama took office.

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Actually, the death tolls in Afghanistan under each administration look like this:

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So you would think Democrats would react like this:

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But they are much more like this.

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3. President Obama’s drones and special operators are working down “kill lists” of suspected terrorists.

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Obama even put Anwar al-Awlaki — an American citizen — on such a list.

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Al-Awlaki [an American citizen] was killed under secret authorization from the justice department in 2011.

Source: tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com

If Bush did this, the Democrats would be all like:

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But now they are more like:

4. Drone attacks have risen sharply under Obama.

Last year, a teenage American citizen, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was taken out in a drone strike without a trial.

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If Bush did this, Democrats would literally hyperventilate.

Via: deartrolls

Via: deartrolls

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Via: thenewstribe.com

So the Democrats should be like:

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Via: brittanygracex

But they are a lot more like:

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Via: brittanygracex

6. Obama promised to end the Bush-era torture interrogation practices.

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Image by Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

But last year the U.N. released three damning reports detailing torture in Afghan facilities under Obama’s security watch.

Image by Andrew Burton / Reuters

When Bush did this, Democrats were like:

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Via: deartrolls

Now:

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Via: deartrolls

7. Obama was unable to deliver on his pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which Bush had also said he would close.

Image by John Moore / Getty Images

When Bush did this, Democrats were all like:

And…

<

Via: mr-growley

8. And…

Via: mr-growley

But now they are much more like:

Via: iced-gif

“We may not be so different, you and I.”

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Image by Courtesy of the Bush Center, Houston Texas.

We could add in stuff like the debt, the deficit and the debt ceiling.  But who’s counting?  Not the mainstream media, that’s for sure.

It is amazing how hypocritical the Democrat Party and the liberals who form their core truly are.  They are bad people and bad people always prefer lies just as they are always hypocrites.  You cannot have an honest argument with people who say one thing,do another – and then say something completely different without ever having acknoweledged how dishonest they were from the beginning.

In order to have a fair and honest debate, you simply have to have both sides have integrity.  We don’t have that as long as we have liberals with any power.

Get Your Spiritual House In Order. Because The Beast Is Coming And You Don’t Want To Be With The Huge Majority That Takes His Mark.

I write this as I hear the report from Fox News that Ohio has just been called for Obama.

Amazingly, and I would suggest incredibly insanely, the American people have decided that the status quo – Barack Obama as president, a Senate that hasn’t bothered to pass a budget in over three years, and a House of Representatives that is even more firmly under Republican control – is the path to a great and glorious future.  Part of me wants to cry, but I dare say the larger part wants to start laughing my dang head off at the sheer idiocy of the American electorate.

As I contemplate a second Obama term, a couple of quotes come to mind:

A journalist named Stephen Laurant had been jailed circa 1935 for questioning Nazism:

“I am writing this from cell 24. Outside a new Germany is being created. Many millions are rejoicing. Hitler is promising everyone precisely what they want. I think when they wake to their sobering senses, they will find they have been led by the nose and duped by lies.”

And then one from Jewish doctor Herta Knotwolf:

“So many worship him as their savior, their redeemer from unbearable poverty.  Many are filled with some have worry, but all are united in the words, ‘Now things will change.”

Ah, yes, hope and change.

I wonder how that worked out for old Herta.  Because things very certainly DID change.  I mean, she was certainly spot on about that part, right?

This isn’t about intelligence; it’s about moral intelligence.  In the 1930s when the German people were busy electing the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler to power, they were the most educated, scientific and literate people on the face of the earth.  Versus the people of the United States, who frankly have never been more stupid in their nation’s entire history.

There simply comes a point in the life of every nation and even every civilization where there is an overwhelming desire to commit suicide and the people give in to that desire.  And those peoples may not have thought that was what they were doing when they made the fatal decisions that resulted in their destruction, but suicide is precisely what they ultimately chose.

And it’s what the United States of America just decided to do.

Our real national debt is now already trillions of dollars beyond the $222 trillion that it was reported as being about three months ago.

Is that $222 trillion number new to you?  Here’s an article for you:

Blink! U.S. Debt Just Grew by $11 Trillion
By Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns Aug 8, 2012 3:30 PM PT

Republicans and Democrats spent last summer battling how best to save $2.1 trillion over the next decade. They are spending this summer battling how best to not save $2.1 trillion over the next decade.

In the course of that year, the U.S. government’s fiscal gap — the true measure of the nation’s indebtedness — rose by $11 trillion.

The fiscal gap is the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue. It captures all government liabilities, whether they are official obligations to service Treasury bonds or unofficial commitments, such as paying for food stamps or buying drones.

Some question whether “official” and “unofficial” spending commitments can be added together. But calling particular obligations “official” doesn’t make them economically more important. Indeed, the government would sooner renege on Chinese holding U.S. Treasuries than on Americans collecting Social Security, especially because the U.S. can print money and service its bonds with watered-down dollars.

For its part, economic theory sees through labels and views a country’s official debt for what it is — a linguistic construct devoid of real economic content. In contrast, the fiscal gap is theoretically well-defined and invariant to the choice of labels. Each labeling choice changes the mix of obligations between official and unofficial, but leaves the total unchanged.

Dangerous Growth

The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using theCongressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference — this year’s true federal deficit — is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.

This fantastic and dangerous growth in the fiscal gap is not new. In 2003 and 2004, the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale extended the CBO’s short-term forecast and measured fiscal gaps of $60 trillion and $86 trillion, respectively. In 2007, the first year the CBO produced the Alternative Fiscal Scenario, the gap, by our reckoning, stood at $175 trillion. By 2009, when the CBO began reporting the AFS annually, the gap was $184 trillion. In 2010, it was $202 trillion, followed by $211 trillion in 2011 and $222 trillion in 2012.

So, based on that actual debt increasing by $11 trillion in one year and three full months passing since the announcement of said debt, that figure is now $222 trillion plus an additional $2.75 trillion.  So please don’t stare at the zeros as they whiz by or your eyeballs will pop out and it is no easy job trying to stick them back into your skull.

And with an Obama who has increased the “official” national debt by sixty percent in only four years, along with a Democrat Senate that hasn’t bothered to pass a budget in well over three years (it’s been 1,259 days since Harry Reid’s Senate passed a budget back on April 23 of 2009), and a Republican-controlled House that has already shown they will not abandon their agenda or their constituents, well, that’s your team who will take on looming disaster.

We just elected our own destruction.  Taxmaggedom is an example of this dilemma we just voted to perpetuate: they’ll probably be able to kick the can of economic calamity down the road for another few months, but that calamity will continue to hang over our heads like a shrapnel-loaded bomb waiting to blow up in our national face.

I know many of you love suspense, but what’s going to happen is “disaster” will be wearing Harlem Globetrotter uniforms and coming from every direction while Team Obama will be dressed in Washington Generals uniforms.  And by the end of the game, Disaster will have made America look incredibly stupid.

We’re a hopelessly fractured nation under Obama.  And just to try to describe that in election night terms, Obama will be the first president in history to be reelected by a smaller electoral college majority than he was elected with when he first became president, and as I write this Obama is actually over two-hundred thousand votes behind in the popular vote.  Not that it will matter to Obama, who will view his victory as a mandate.

Click here if you would like to see what a “mandate” actually looks like.

And that division and bitterness and inability to solve any of our crises – which was worse than it has EVER been these last four years under Obama – will get worse.  I promise you.  And that is because we, like the locusts, have no leader; rather, we have a demagogue who masquerades as a leader.  He is capable only of blaming others while refusing to accept any responsibility for pretty much anything.  We’re going to be paying dearly for that.

I don’t know how to tell you this, America.  You deserve to suffer for your stupidity.  And you’re going to get what you deserve.  Because this is still God damn America, full speed ahead to hell.

By the time Barack Hussein Obama leaves office in 2016, America will be the proverbial headless chicken.  We might still be technically on our feet, but we’re going to be dead.  Unless you’re reaching into your pocket as we speak to pay that $224.75 trillion our country owes, that is.  Anyone?  Is that crickets I hear?

We are a nation that cannot even POSSIBLY begin to come together to solve our problems.  And the reelection of the most partisan and most divisive president to ever lead America is all you need to know to realize that the United States of America will NEVER be able to come together.  Until Antichrist comes along to sweep the same fools off their feet who were swept off their feet by Obama.

How does Antichrist come to power?  Revelation chapter six describes the scenario: a complete global economic collapse, wars on top of wars as nation and ethnic group fight nation and ethnic group to the death over resources and grudges, famine and mass death will characterize the world that Antichrist will ride to save on his white horse.

I look at that $224.75 trillion debt, I look at a European failed experiment in socialism that is teetering on the brink of collapse, and I feel in my gut that Revelation 6 isn’t very far away from the real world.

Antichrist will literally be worshiped by the entire world.  Why?  Because he will appear to have all the answers, and people will look at what the world had been like before the beast came along to save them, and behold the vision that the Antichrist shows them, and literally the entire world will belong to this coming tyrant.

The interesting thing is that absolutely everything we know about this coming Antichrist screams “big government.”  The Antichrist will be the ultimate big government socialist.  Period.   If you are a typical liberal who admires the United Nations, well, your future object of worship will literally BE the United Nations.  The entire planet will rally behind this man.  If you think that the government ought to have a stronger hand in the economy, worry no more: because the government of the Antichrist will have complete control over anything that has anything whatsoever to do with the economy.

Oh, Obama is going to fail something fierce, but you Democrats can already breathe a future sigh of relief right now: because the Antichrist you will soon be worshiping will fulfill your wildest dreams.

The Antichrist will also be the quintessential politician.

The Book of Daniel applies the term “wisdom” to both Daniel and the coming Antichrist.  Daniel was given wisdom to understand riddles and unravel them; Antichrist will have the wisdom to understand riddles and therefore tie the truth up in knots such that no human being will be able to penetrate his facade of lies and deceit.

He’s coming.  And he’s going to be here very soon.  And if you haven’t already made your decision for Jesus Christ, you will fall prey to the beast’s wisdom and you will worship him and you will take his mark.

Are you dismayed over the election last night?

Don’t be.  Read this:

An old missionary couple had been working in Africa for years and were  returning to New York to retire. They had no pension; their health was  broken; they were defeated, discouraged, and afraid. They discovered  they were booked on the same ship as President Teddy Roosevelt, who was  returning from one of his big-game hunting expeditions.

No one paid any attention to them. They watched the fanfare that  accompanied the President’s entourage, with passengers trying to catch a  glimpse of the great man. As the ship moved across the ocean, the old  missionary said to his wife, “Something is wrong.” “Why should we have  given our lives in faithful service for God in Africa all these many  years and have no one care a thing about us? Here this man comes back  from a hunting trip and everybody makes much over him, but nobody gives  two hoots about us.”

“Dear, you shouldn’t feel that way”, his wife said. He replied “I can’t  help it; it doesn’t seem right.”

When the ship docked in New York, a band was waiting to greet the  President. The mayor and other dignitaries were there. The papers were  full of the President’s arrival. No one noticed this missionary couple.  They slipped off the ship and found a cheap flat on the East Side,  hoping the next day to see what they could do to make a living in the  city.

That night the man’s spirit broke. He said to his wife, “I can’t take  this; God is not treating us fairly”. His wife replied, “Why don’t you  go in the bedroom and tell that to the Lord?”

A short time later he came out from the bedroom, but now his face was  completely different. His wife asked, “Dear, what happened?” “The Lord  settled it with me”, he said. “I told Him how bitter I was that the  President should receive this tremendous homecoming, when no one met us  as we returned home. And when I finished, it seemed as though the Lord  put His hand on my shoulder and simply said;

“But you’re not home yet.”

Author Unknown

America isn’t your home.

America has been hijacked by people who are determined to worship the beast and to force the country to worship the beast with them.

It’s sad, of course.  There’s no question it’s sad.  And you might feel sick, broken, defeated, discouraged and afraid.

But this isn’t your home.

And the same God who forewarned us about the world that would worship Antichrist also told us about a wonderful eternity that awaits all those who have placed their trust not in human government but in the Lamb of God.

If you still feel discouraged, go to your Bible and cheat: turn to the last page of Revelation to see who wins.

Why I’m Getting Out Of Politics After This Election And What I Plan To Do With This Blog Beginning On November 7

One way or another, I am going to get out of day-to-day political blogging after this election.

I’ve said it before.  All the way back on April 29, 2009, I said to someone in replying to a comment:

I never intended to remain in political blogging this long.  I thought I’d blog through the election, do my best to prevent this country from choosing this terrible man, and stop.

But it’s just been one outrage piled on top of another – so many you literally can’t cover them all.  And I demand that there be a record of these outrages.

In April of this year, I wrote:

Whether Obama wins or whether Romney wins, I’m getting out of politics after this election. I’ll continue to blog, but I’ll be done with politics.

If Obama wins, frankly Obama’s God damn America will deserve whatever hell it descends into. I will have done the best I could do trying to warn people that Obama is leading us to hell, and if he gets re-elected I will be done with warnings. I’ll warn you while you’re pouring gasoline on yourself; I’ll warn you when you strike a match; but when you set yourself on fire you’re on your own. If Romney wins, I’m frankly just not going to carry water for him. I’ll vote for him as the lesser of two evils, but he’s not exactly the guy I’m going to spend the next four years carrying water for.

So I hope no one thinks that this announcement implies that I think Obama’s going to win and can’t face liberals anymore and blah, blah, blah.

Basically, my reasoning is this: if Obama is reelected, I did everything I could to try to warn you fools.  And if a nation is foolish enough to reelect a president with the record of failure that Barack Obama has now accumulated, well, that is a nation that is immune to wisdom or warning and my conscience is clean as I shake the dust of the coming economic implosion off my feet and ride off into the sunset.  On the other hand, if Mitt Romney is elected, well, his entire history (contrary to liberals’ demonization of him) is that of a moderate RINO and while he’s got the singular virtue of being “far better than Obama,” he’s not someone I want to devote thousands of hours carrying water for.  If Sarah Palin were president, if Herman Cain were president, well, maybe I’d buckle the armor back on and keep fighting for them.

There is a personal cost for an evangelical Christian conservative to dive into political blogging.  Politics is by its very nature an angry place.  It very quickly becomes mud wrestling.  And it was simply never a place that I wanted to spend my life fighting in.  I certainly don’t want to keep dealing with fools and I certainly don’t want to keep screaming at people every day.

What got me into blogging to begin with?  I saw those Jeremiah Wright sermon tapes – “No, no, no!  NOT God bless America!  God DAMN America!” – and I knew that Barack Obama was truly an evil man to have spent 23 years of his life in that Marxist, racist, anti-American hellhole and then climbing out of that toxic nest of demons and dusting himself off only when it became convenient to his political charade.  I had a vision of America under the leadership of this evil man; and sadly enough it looked very much like what I now see all around me today.  In some ways it’s not as terrible as I feared it would be, and in other ways it’s five times worse than I feared it would be.

I got into political blogging with the intent of 1) preserving a record of what Obama did to America, because the mainstream media refuses to do it and quickly purges the few things they DO print; 2) to try to explain both liberalism and conservatism so that people can see why the former is depraved and the latter is the best worldview for a moral and free people; and 3) to provide arguments and document the facts as I present them to try to help those who have their own arguments with their own circles of influence.

Let me just say that the future does not look bright for America, even if Romney wins.  Yes, we have a $16 trillion debt, and yes, Obama has piled on $6 trillion of that debt in only four years after the hypocrite demonized Bush for adding $4 trillion over eight years.  But that isn’t anything close to our real debt.  Our real debt is over $222 trillion and skyrocketing.

But even THAT isn’t our real debt, because our real debt is that more-than-$222 trillion-and-skyrocketing figure PLUS the debt of our states.  California alone has an unfunded liberal union pension gap of $500 billion.  And Illinois alone has an unfunded liberal union pension gap of $210 billion.  And we are seeing deadbeat states that cannot pay their debts and we are seeing cities going bankrupt.

Our real debt would be impossible to estimate even if all the liberal politicians who have bankrupted their jurisdictions at every level would honestly account for what they did.  And rest assured they never will until after it’s too late.

The Bible tells us in Revelation chapter six that the beast, the Antichrist, is coming.  We find that a global economic collapse is coming; we find that in the midst of this ghastly global landscape there will be famine and plagues and war and mass death.  And what we literally see is this big government false messiah called “the beast” riding in on a white horse to save the day.  And the world will literally worship him for his “deliverance” as he steps in with one plan of action after another.  They will so worship him that they will allow him to take over the world political system and the economic activity of every single human being on earth.

It is amazing how badly things are going in America and how little reporting is being done on how badly things are going.  The labor participation rate has plummeted every single year under Obama and is now at a more than 31-year low (i.e., worse than it EVER was under Bush).  In fact, if we measured unemployment by the labor participation rate that Bush handed off to Obama, our unemployment rate would be 11.6% now rather than dropping to 8.1% because we refuse to measure the millions of discouraged workers who have abandoned hope of finding a job.  For every job Obama “adds,” there are FOUR workers who drop out of the workforce.  There are 4 million fewer jobs than there were when Obama took office, in spite of the fact that 4 million Americans turn 18 and thus “age in” to the work force every single year.  Last year new start-up businesses were at the lowest level EVER measured in the 25-year history of recording that statistic; this year new start-up businesses plunged by another 24%.  And the median household income has plunged 8.2% under Obama’s failed leadership.  And, amazingly, household incomes have dropped TWICE as much under Obama as they did during the 2008 recession, just to document what a horrible job Obama has done since.  And with statistics such as the 13.2% plunge in durable goods in one month – which is the biggest drop since January 2009 – there is no reason to think things are going to get better under Obama’s policies.

If Obama is reelected, we are going to go on a ride to hell as a nation:

Only there will be no going back up this time.

And yes, if you want to give the above picture a racial element, it is also true that blacks and Hispanics and college graduates and young people and women and those groups that have most supported Obama have fared the WORST under his failed policies.  It’s almost as if Obama is saying, “I hurt you bad these last four years; vote for me again and I will finish you off and kill you dead in my next four years.”  And his supporters are saying, “Thank you, messiah!  It’s what we deserve!”

If the media fairly and accurately reported the truth, Obama wouldn’t have a chance.  But our media has descended into shocking levels of dishonest propaganda.  And bad people always choose to believe lies.  And if there are more bad people than good people now in America, we will vote for hell and we will get the hell that we voted for once and for all this time.

Things are also going terribly for Europe.  If America goes, Europe goes, and vice versa.

And if you look at China, things aren’t going nearly as well (see also here) as the false facade that they – like the Obama media – have plastered over their “news” coverage.  And if China goes down hill, well, whose going to keep buying our increasingly worthless debt???

This world has chosen socialism; and socialism is a cancer.  It is a cancer on morality and it is a cancer on economic health.  When people say as a nation that they deserve other people’s money and that they are willing to attack job creators to rob them, you get fewer and fewer jobs and all that really gets “redistributed” is pain and misery.

So the beast is coming.  As I’ve said over and over and over again on this blog.

If Obama is president on January 20, 2013, we’re going to get the beast in short order; if Romney is president, we may have a few more years as he slows (but does not stop) the collapse.

Mitt Romney may well win.  But what has he shown in his past that indicates that he will stand up and fight for the radical changes this nation will need to survive?  Obviously, I hope I’m wrong in my estimation of Romney; I hope that he wins and that his is the “second Reagan presidency” we so desperately need.  And as I’ve said before I would crawl out of my death-bed across broken glass to vote for Mitt Romney and vote OUT Obama.

America could very well collapse in the next few years.  When it happens it will happen fast; “economic experts” will assure the people on the mainstream media that everything will be fine the evening before, and then the people will wake up to find out that their country has literally collapsed under their feet while they slept.  But when I consider the structural, fiscal, economic realities facing America, I simply cannot understand how it could possibly survive for 20 years given our pathological refusal to rise up and solve our problems in the powerful manner that we need in order to have any chance at long-term national survival.

I believe that a true conservative president and a true conservative Congress could stop the collapse by having the courage to ignore the media lies and doing what is necessary to save America.  But I also believe that American people are now past the point where they are willing to do the right thing even to save their own lives.  Instead, we’ll keep voting ourselves more benefits until we reach the collapse-stage that Europe is in, and then we’ll riot over the necessary austerity measures that would take away some of our benefits.  Until the depression when nation after nation collapses into total anarchy as Revelation chapter 6 describes and the beast comes riding in.

When the beast takes over the government, he will be a man who seems to have all the answers.  His policies will seem to take the world back from the brink that failed leaders like Obama brought us to.  But in just a few years, the Antichrist will go from promising a Utopia to delivering a literal hell on earth.  And when the REAL Messiah, Jesus Christ, returns as King of kings and as Lord of lords as the Bible describes, it will be to prevent the planet from literally destroying itself.

That’s the direction I will be taking this blog in.  While I will continue to interact with current political events, it will largely be as part of an effort to inform readers about the message of Bible prophecy and how the events we keep seeing are bringing the world closer and closer to the last days scenario so accurately foretold in Scripture.  In addition to that, I will also simply be returning more to my Christian theology roots and writing about the faith.

As a student and teacher of Bible prophecy, I DO believe in what is frequently derided as “newspaper prophecy.”  That is, I believe that when the events described in Bible prophecy are fulfilled, they will be fulfilled in a way that a person at the time would read in a good newspaper.  The thing is, if you don’t understand the Bible, and economics, and politics, and military issues, you will most likely use the wrong newspaper and thus get your understanding of prophecy wrong.  As a simple illustration of what I’m trying to convey here, consider that many people believed during World War I and World War II that they were living in the last days when (as we obviously know now) they weren’t.  On the one hand, it was true that somebody during those periods could have read their Bible and read their newspapers, and seen things in their newspapers that very much seemed to be described in their Bibles.  But on the other hand, there was one singularly critical event that had not yet happened – the rebirth of the state of Israel as prophesied in Ezekiel 37 – that should have told believers that, no, they were not yet in the last days.  The Tribulation described in Revelation begins with the nation of Israel signing a 7-Year peace covenant with the Antichrist.  And since Israel did not yet exist during World War I or World War II, a biblically-understanding Christian could know that as bad as things were, we were not yet in the last days.  You need to be able to understand your Bible and match it to the what is going on in the world to accurately understand where we are in Bible prophecy.

At the same time, you need to be able to understand what is going on in the world and then match it to the Bible to understand where we are in Bible prophecy, as well.  For example, Christian scholar Dr. Grant Jeffrey wrote a book titled, Final Warning: Economic Collapse and the Coming World Government.  Chapter 14 of that book was titled, “The Coming Economic Collapse.”  And writing back in 1995, the man just nailed the 2008 collapse – which is by no means finished with us.  He understood that the dangerous derivatives market and what we were doing with mortgages could trigger a massive collapse just as occurred 13 years later and which is still undermining the economy today (unless you think we’re free and clear and there’s nothing but blue economic skies now).

The world is now a house of cards that could collapse at any time more than it has ever been.  Weapons of mass destruction, modern technology and incredibly complex financial trading did not make the world less like the world described in Revelation; it made it MORE like the world described in Revelation.  Think about the mark of the beast as just one example of what I’m talking about.  The beast is coming and he is coming soon.  And I plan to write a lot more about what the Bible has to say about the last days and why I believe we are in them after this election.

I’m sure I’ll lose some readers as I take this blog in a different direction.  Maybe I’ll lose a lot of readers.  Obviously, I hope I’ll gain other readers, but my primary goal is simply to stand up for my faith and for what I believe and to be true to the vision that I believe God gave me.

Why Wasn’t Bill Clinton Responsible For The DotCom Collapse And 9/11 When Bush Is Still Responsible For Obama’s Economy FOUR YEARS LATER???

As we near the end of Obama’s FOURTH YEAR IN OFFICE, we had an amazing claim from our blamer-in-chief:

KROFT: The national debt has gone up sixty percent in — in the four years that you’ve been in office.

OBAMA: Well, first — first of all, Steve, I think it’s important to understand the context here. When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history. And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but ninety percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10 percent of this increase in the deficit, and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.

In his devastating Washington Post fact check that gave Obama 100% of the pinnochios for the worst possible example of lying, “Kessler says it’s the other way around — that Bush policies account for about 10% of the current annual structural budget deficit, and the rest is evenly split between bad projections from the CBO and Obama’s spending and economic policies.”

Four years.  It took the media four freaking years to say, “ENOUGH WITH YOUR DAMNED LYING EXCUSES!!!”  FOUR YEARS.

George Bush gave us $4 trillion in debt over eight years and Obama said that was “irresponsible” and even “unpatriotic.”  Obama has given America $6 trillion in debt in just four years.  And a hell of a lot more than that, if you look at our actual debt which is now well over $222 trillion.

I point out in a comment to a liberal demagogue how Obama tries to blame Bush for the massive spending.  Bush left office having produced a budget containing a $400 billion deficit that Democrats decried for the cuts.  What Obama then does is spend the first nine months of his presidency spending like a lunatic: he spends $79 billion of taxpayer money on his GM bailout – and of course has taken complete credit as the president who saved GM – while blaming Bush for its entire cost.  Obama spends $862 billion – which according to the CBO will ultimately cost American taxpayers $3.27 trillion – on his stimulus.  Then in March 2009 Obama spends another $410 billion in his Omnibus bill.  Meanwhile, Obama is spending the second half of the $350 billion in TARP funds that he voted for and which funds he demanded.  So what Obama dishonestly does is add all that spending up – HIS OWN spending – and attributes it to Bush so that he can claim this horrendous deficit that he “inherited.”  And so Obama artificially and deceitfully manufactures this enormous Bush deficit that he’s somehow a victim of – even though ninety percent of the spending in that deficit is HIS.

But that’s just the beginning of Obama’s dishonesty.  Look what he does to “the two wars.”

First the Iraq War.  Bush WON the Iraq War before Obama took office and signed the status of forces agreement before Obama took office.  We had won the war such that Bush was beginning to withdraw surge forces as early as 2007.  And yet somehow when US troops finalize their withdrawal according to Bush’s victory and according to Bush’s status of forces agreement, it is Obama who takes full credit.  Joe Biden actually had the chutzpah to claim that the Iraq War victory that he and his boss Obama had done everything they could to prevent was going to be “one of Obama’s great achievements.”  What Obama then does is equally despicable: he assumes in his numbers that the Iraq War that was already won when he came into office would have gone on forever if Messiah Obama had not won it, looks at the high-point of Bush’s spending during the war and creates another “baseline,” and then announces that in winning the war he has saved America more than $700 billion.  That Obama can spend on his policies while simultaneously blaming that spending on Bush.

Now the Afghanistan War.  Rather than look up the spending in dollars, I’ll produce the cost of the war under Bush and under Obama in American lives (as of September 28, 2012):

Whether you look at it in dollars or in lives, you’ll find that Obama is responsible for over 70 percent of the cost of the Afghanistan War.  Because you see, what Obama did was perform an incredibly cynical political calculation.  Obama demonized Iraq as “the bad war” and made Afghanistan – in which Bush was merely performing a holding action – into “the good war” as a way to attack Bush in Iraq.  Obama in effect said we shouldn’t be fighting in Iraq where the flat terrain allowed full movement and maneuver of our air, artillery and armored power and an educated population made victory possible; we should be fighting in a mountainous hellhole where we couldn’t utilize our military advantages and where the people were so ignorant they would believe every lie they were told and go on fighting forever instead.  That is literally what Obama effectively said.  And Obama is saying, “It’s not MY fault that I massively increased the war in Afghanistan; it’s Bush’s fault I did that.”  And Obama is claiming credit for the Iraq War that Bush won and blaming Bush for the Afghanistan War that he has virtually lost.

Let me move on to the economy.

You have to ask the question, why was George Bush responsible for ninety percent of Obama’s entire presidency as far as the mainstream media was concerned, but Bill Clinton wasn’t responsible for the DotCom bubble collapse that happened on his watch and that Bush inherited???  Why did we never hear 900,000 stories from the media on how Clinton was to blame and in conclusion nobody could reasonably blame Bush for it???

Clinton’s DotCom crash resulted in $7.1 trillion in American wealth being vaporized:

The Market Capitalization of the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Full Cap was $16.7 Trillion as of April 30, 2008. Comparatively, the market cap at the end of Q1 in 2000 was approximately $16 trillion (only slightly smaller). However, between 2000 Q1 and Q1 2003 the index lost a stunning 43% of its valuation. In other words, $7.1 Trillion of wealth was lost. This stunning number includes the completeness of the crash.

Who was still president in the first quarter of the fiscal year 2000 when this disaster began to blow up?  It was the guy who was still president on January 20, 2001 when George Bush assumed – and dare I say “inherited” – the office of the president.

Here’s another number to think about: 78%.  Because “The Nasdaq Composite lost  78% of its value as it fell from 5046.86 to 1114.11” as it collapsed between March 11, 2000 to October 9, 2002.

Obviously, there was a problem. The first shots through this bubble came from  the companies themselves: many reported huge losses and some folded outright  within months of their offering. Siliconaires were moving out of $4 million  estates and back to the room above their parents’ garage. In the year 1999,  there were 457 IPOs, most of which were internet and technology related. Of  those 457 IPOs, 117 doubled in price on the first day of trading. In  2001 the number of IPOs dwindled to 76, and none of them doubled on the first  day of trading.

I want to know why Bush is still responsible for Obama’s entire economic mess four years later when Bill Clinton was never held responsible for so much as one second of Bush’s mess.  I want to understand why Democrats are lying, dishonest, hypocrite slime whose only talent is bankrupting America and then demagoguing Republicans for what they did.

You find out that the Dotcom bubble began to grow huge in 1995 and virtually all of Clinton’s economic “success” that didn’t have to do with the policies of the Republican House and the Republican Senate that swept into power in 1995 as a result of the historic 1994 asskicking as a result of Clinton’s and the Democrat Party’s abject failure had to do with the inflation of that damn bubble.  Clinton fanned the flames of that Dotcom bubble because he knew that it would explode on the next president’s watch and that Democrats were far too personally and pathologically dishonest to ever blame HIM for it.

And yet Bill Clinton saunters before the 2012 Democrat National Convention and gives a speech saying “You can’t blame Obama for this disaster of an economy.  Why, even I couldn’t have fixed it.”  And the liberal media listen to their former messiah absolve their current messiah and ignore the fact that Bill Clinton is a serial liar who was DISBARRED by the Supreme Court for LYING as well as a serial womanizing sexual predator who sexually abused five women and they said, “Well, that settles it.  NO one can blame ‘the One’ now; the former ‘One’ has spoken.”  And the “War on Women” party cheers.

Let’s see: Juanita Broaddrick credibly accused Bill Clinton of raping her. There’s no question Bill Clinton had a sexual affair with Gennifer Flowers – and lied about it. Bill Clinton paid Paula Jones $850,000 to settle her sexual harassment case against him. Kathleen Willey was a loyal Democrat and supporter of Bill Clinton until he grabbed her hand and placed it on his genitalia. And then we all know about how he lied about his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky, even calling her a “stalker,” until it was revealed that she had a dress with his semen on it.

Yeah, I’d trust Bill Clinton.  Every bit as much as Monica Lewinsky’s father would trust Bill Clinton with Monica’s younger sister.

As a result of his “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” bullcrap, Bill Clinton was DISBARRED FROM PRACTICING LAW.

Lawyers constitute the fourth most distrusted profession in America.  And Bill Clinton was too dishonest to remain part of it.  That should only add to the weight that the slickest politician of all time – he was nicknamed “Slick Willie” as governor of Arkansas for damn good reason – is the king of the second most distrusted profession in America as a politician.

And so, yeah, if I were in the market for a used car, and Bill Clinton came out as the salesman, I would go find myself another used car salesman.

And I actually failed to mention Paula Jones, who successfully SUED Bill Clinton for his sexual harassment.

Yeah, let’s trust Slick Willy.  Because we are as evil as we are stupid on the days that we aren’t as stupid as we are evil.

But I’m just getting started.

Why is it that George Bush is still held responsible for the Obama’s presidency four years later when the same people who hold George Bush responsible wouldn’t hold Bill Clinton responsible for a disaster that happened seven months and 22 days into Bush’s presidency (still during Clinton’s fiscal year, for what it’s worth).  Because we had a terrible terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, just seven months into Bush’s presidency, and it was a) Bush’s fault and b) we shouldn’t be wasting time passing blame, anyway, if you began asking too many questions about just why the hell it was Bush’s fault.

It wasn’t George Bush who decimated the CIA; it was Bill Clinton:

Thursday, April 20, 2006 1:13 a.m. EDT
Pulitzer Winner: Bill Clinton Decimated the CIA

Author James Risen won the Pulitzer Prize on Tuesday for his much ballyhooed New York Times report last December that revealed President Bush’s previously secret terrorist surveillance program – a revelation he uncovered while researching his book “State of War.”

In the same book, however, Risen makes an equally explosive claim about President Clinton’s relationship with the CIA – which his editors at the Times have so far declined to cover.

Upon taking power in 1993, Risen reports, the Clinton administration “began slashing the intelligence budget in search of a peace dividend, and Bill Clinton showed almost no interest in intelligence matters.”

The agency cutbacks combined with presidential disinterest took their toll almost immediately.

 “Over a three-or-four-year period in the early-to-mid 1990s,” reports Risen, “virtually an entire generation of CIA officers – the people who had won the Cold War – quit or retired. One CIA veteran compared the agency to an airline that had lost all of is senior pilots . . . “

After Clinton CIA Director John Deutch cashiered several senior officers over a scandal in Guatamala, the situation got even worse.

“Morale [at the CIA] plunged to new lows, and the agency became paralyzed by an aversion to high-risk espionage operations for fear they would lead to political flaps. Less willing to take big risks, the CIA was less able to recruit spies in dangerous places such as Iraq.”

The Clinton era of risk aversion also hobbled CIA efforts to get Osama bin Laden. In early 1998, Risen says, the agency was prepared to launch a special operation to kidnap the al Qaeda chief in Afghanistan.

“To be sure the operation was high risk, and there was a strong possibility that it would be so messy that bin Laden would be killed rather than captured. [CIA Director George] Tenet and the CIA’s lawyers worried deeply about that issue; they believed the covert action finding on al Qaeda that President Clinton had signed authorized only bin Laden’s capture, not his death.”

Frustrated by restrictions that made dealing with the big challenges too difficult, the agency turned its energy to lesser problems.

Reports Risen: “Thanks to Vice President Al Gore, for example, the CIA briefly made the global environment one of is priorities.”

What Clinton did to the CIA he did to the Pentagon and the military.  He gave them less and less and less money while simultaneously tasking them with more and more and more costly missions.

Add to that the infamous Blackhawk Down fiasco in which Clinton expanded the humanitarian mission to Somalia began under George H.W. Bush into a military action without bothering to provide the US forces the heavy armor they needed.

It was after that disaster that an emboldened Osama bin Laden said:

Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. … 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 after the Gulf War in which it destroyed the infrastructure and the milk and dairy industry that was vital for the infants and the children and the civilians and blew up dams which were necessary for the crops people grew to feed their families. Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim. …

And bin Laden said that America was a weak paper tiger and we’d crawl out dragging our dead because that’s exactly what Bill Clinton had done in Somalia in 1993.

On 9/11/2001, the United States was both weak and blind.  And to quote Obama’s “reverend,” “our chickens came home to roost” for our weakness and blindness as we were hit with the worst attack on American soil in our history.

Just why the hell is it that the same damn hypocrite left that says, “One year of failure, two years of failure, three years of failure, four years of failure, hell, EIGHT years of failure, it doesn’t matter – IT’S BUSH’S FAULT!” never ONCE blame Bill Clinton for either the Dotcom implosion that vaporized $7.1 trillion and sank America into recession?  Why didn’t these liberals say, “What happened during the Bush presidency was ENTIRELY Bill Clinton’s fault and Bush was forced to clean up Clinton’s mess and America is paying the price for Clinton’s sins.”???  Nobody in the media said that, in spite of the facts.  And now, very nearly everybody in the media is saying exactly that regarding George Bush being entirely to blame for Obama’s mess even after Obama has presided over his mess for four miserable years.

Why?!?!?  Other than the fact that if you are a liberal, you are therefore ipso facto and ergo sum a pathologically dishonest human being whose soul swims in lies?

You have to go back to the 1930s and the propaganda of Goebbels in Germany and TASS in Russia to find this level of media manipulation and deceit.  And we’re heading in the same direction: because we are being railroaded into making increasingly stupid and immoral decisions based on the constant stream of fabrications and dishonest narratives we’re being told.

United States Drops To SEVENTH PLACE In Global Competitiveness Under Obama

The Denver Post provides the facts:

U.S. falls two spots, to seventh, on global competitiveness
Posted:   09/06/2012 12:01:00 AM MDT
September 6, 2012 8:38 AM GMTUpdated:   09/06/2012 02:38:56 AM MDTBy Pan Pylas
The Associated Press

LONDON — The United States’ ability to compete on the global stage has fallen for the fourth year running as confidence in the country’s politicians continues to decline, an annual survey from the World Economic Forum found Wednesday.

Even though the world’s largest economy saw its overall competitiveness rise on the back of its status as a global innovation powerhouse, the forum says the U.S.’s ranking this year has dropped two places, to seventh. The Netherlands and Germany have moved ahead of the U.S. on the top 10 leaderboard.

The report found that some aspects of the U.S.’s political environment continue to raise concern among business leaders, “particularly the low public trust in politicians and a perceived lack of government efficiency.”

Dropped two places to seventh.  Last year Obama dropped us to fifth.  Hey, wonder when we were last number one?  Let’s see what an article talking about our slipping to fifth place back in 2011 says about that:

Global competitiveness ranking: US falls to fifth spot
The U.S. fell to fifth place in a global economic competitiveness ranking.
News Desk September 7, 2011 14:01

The United States fell to fifth place in a global ranking of the world’s most competitive economies.

The World Economic Forum announced Wednesday that the United States fell in the survey due to its massive deficits and declining public faith in the government and political leaders, the Associated Press reports. The rankings are based on economic data and a survey of 15,000 business executives, it states.

The top spot went to Switzerland, which has held the number one ranking for three straight years.

The ranking by the Geneva-based forum put Singapore at second, Sweden at third and Finland at fourth. The United States had been in the number one spot in 2008 but has fallen for three consecutive years.

The rankings incorporated factors such as factors a nation’s infrastructure, technological readiness and business sophistication, the Los Angeles Times reports

Ah, yes, it was under the completely failed policies of the evil Bush.  Damn him and his 5.26% average unemployment rate and his #1 ranking in global economic competitiveness!  I’d rather have a completely failed Marxist like Obama any day of the week.  Wouldn’t YOU?  I mean, if you want America to collapse under the weight of its own debt and failure, Obama is THE MAN.

The Gateway Pundit has the title that every newspaper in America ought to have:

Thanks Barack… US Drops to 7th Place on Global Competitiveness Index Due to Historic Debt and Deficits
Posted by Jim Hoft on Monday, September 10, 2012, 1:24 PM

We’re Number 7!

The United States dropped in the Global Competitiveness Index ranking for the fourth year in a row because of exploding debt and deficits.

The United States just dropped to seventh place on the World Economic Forum’s newly released Global Competitiveness Index.
iStock Analyst reported:

The U.S. dropped to No. 7 on the World Economic Forum’s newly released 2012 Global Competitiveness Index report. Switzerland retained its top position as the most competitive nation, followed by Singapore, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany.

Asian countries continue to be among the most competitive—and many are gaining strength. Among the top 20, five are from Asia. Compared to last year’s ranking, Singapore retains its No. 2 spot, Hong Kong gained two positions, Taiwan remains No. 13, Korea advanced five spots and Japan dropped one position.

One year ago this week the US was downgraded for the first time by Standard and Poors.

The Obama deficit just topped a trillion dollars for the fourth year in a row with a month left in the fiscal year.

You can keep listening to demon-possessed Democrats and buy their Bush hatred, or you can finally hold this utterly failed president responsible for his completely failed policies.

Government Accounting Office Says Obama Circumvented The LAW With His Gutting Of The Welfare Work Requirement

Not that Obama or Democrats give a damn, but Barack Obama broke the law that he clearly considers his divine emperorship to be completely above:

GAO: Obama Admin Circumvented Law with Welfare Waivers
By Matt Cover
September 5, 2012

(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration circumvented federal law in announcing it would waive the work requirements in welfare, a GAO review found, saying that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should have submitted the new policy to Congress for review.

At issue is whether the policy falls under the purview of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) that requires all administrative changes of policy or regulation be submitted to Congress for review and possible disapproval.

The GAO, in a letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Senate Finance Committee ranking member Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), said that the July 12 change in policy falls under the CRA and should have been submitted to Congress for approval.

“We find that the July 12 Information Memorandum issued by HHS is a statement of general applicability and future effect, designed to implement, interpret, or prescribe law or policy with regard to TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the formal name for welfare],” GAO said in its Sept. 4 letter.

“[T]he Information Memorandum is subject to the requirement that it be submitted to both Houses of Congress and the Comptroller General before it can take effect.”

In other words, HHS must formally submit the letter to Congress and the Comptroller General before it can legally issue the waivers to the requirement that a certain portion of welfare recipients work.

GAO noted that it had not determined whether or not HHS had the legal authority to waive the work requirements in the first place, just that it must follow its legal obligations under the CRA.

HHS had contended that it had complied with the law when it notified both House and Senate committees of its new policy July 12, an argument GAO rejected saying that informal notice did not satisfy the law.

“Finally, while HHS may have informally notified the Congressional committees of the issuance of the Information Memorandum, informal notification does not meet the reporting requirements of the CRA.”

According to GAO, federal law requires that the government submit any proposed changes in federal regulations or rules to Congress, so that it may act to formally disapprove and stop the rule from taking effect. GAO found that any rule that is meant to “implement, interpret, or prescribe law or policy” must be submitted to Congress before it can take effect.

In July, HHS issued a memorandum to states announcing it would begin waiving the welfare-to-work requirements for those states who wanted to change their current welfare-to-work programs, including the definitions of what qualifies as work and how states calculate who is and who is not working.

Camp, whose office released the GAO finding, said that HHS’ waiver policy amounted to an “end-run” around Congress.

“Despite his latest attempt at an end-run around Congress, this GAO report clearly states that the Administration must submit this rule to Congress for review before it can take effect. Work requirements were the centerpiece of welfare reform, and we cannot allow that progress to be undone,” Camp said in a statement Tuesday.

On the other hand, you can kind of understand why Obama would gut the welfare work requirement, given that his presidency and his policies are clearly completely incapable of actually creating any damn jobs for welfare recipients to actually have.

It’s just a lot easier for a socialist like Obama to create a nation of needy and disabled people desperately voting “Democrat” in order to get their next welfare check.  Which is why Obama is literally creating an America in which more people go on disability than get jobs.

Obama is adding $6 trillion in debt – and he’s only just getting STARTED bankrupting America.

Harvard Professor Provides Systematic And Scathing Take Down Of Obama’s Entire Presidency: Obama’s Gotta Go

The following isn’t a takedown of Obama for merely failing to turn the economy around; it is a scathing indictment of Obama’s entire premise for his 2008 entire campaign and failed presidency:

Niall Ferguson: Obama’s Gotta Go
Aug 19, 2012 1:00 AM EDT
Why does Paul Ryan scare the president so much? Because Obama has broken his promises, and it’s clear that the GOP ticket’s path to prosperity is our only hope.

I was a good loser four years ago. “In the grand scheme of history,” I wrote the day after Barack Obama’s election as president, “four decades is not an especially long time. Yet in that brief period America has gone from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the apotheosis of Barack Obama. You would not be human if you failed to acknowledge this as a cause for great rejoicing.”

 

Despite having been—full disclosure—an adviser to John McCain, I acknowledged his opponent’s remarkable qualities: his soaring oratory, his cool, hard-to-ruffle temperament, and his near faultless campaign organization.

Yet the question confronting the country nearly four years later is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.

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COVER STORY: Obama has broken his promises, and it’s clear that the GOP ticket’s path to prosperity is our only hope bit.ly/QQLouG

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In an unguarded moment earlier this year, the president commented that the private sector of the economy was “doing fine.” Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.

In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year.

Unemployment was supposed to be 6 percent by now. It has averaged 8.2 percent this year so far. Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.

Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.

Niall Ferguson discusses Obama’s broken promises on ‘Face the Nation.’  [See site for video]

And all this despite a far bigger hike in the federal debt than we were promised. According to the 2010 budget, the debt in public hands was supposed to fall in relation to GDP from 67 percent in 2010 to less than 66 percent this year. If only. By the end of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will reach 70 percent of GDP. These figures significantly understate the debt problem, however. The ratio that matters is debt to revenue. That number has leapt upward from 165 percent in 2008 to 262 percent this year, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund. Among developed economies, only Ireland and Spain have seen a bigger deterioration.

Not only did the initial fiscal stimulus fade after the sugar rush of 2009, but the president has done absolutely nothing to close the long-term gap between spending and revenue.

His much-vaunted health-care reform will not prevent spending on health programs growing from more than 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent in 2037. Add the projected increase in the costs of Social Security and you are looking at a total bill of 16 percent of GDP 25 years from now. That is only slightly less than the average cost of all federal programs and activities, apart from net interest payments, over the past 40 years. Under this president’s policies, the debt is on course to approach 200 percent of GDP in 2037—a mountain of debt that is bound to reduce growth even further.

Newsweek’s executive editor, Justine Rosenthal, tells the story behind Ferguson’s cover story.  [See site for video]

And even that figure understates the real debt burden. The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues—what economist Larry Kotlikoff calls the true “fiscal gap”—is $222 trillion.

The president’s supporters will, of course, say that the poor performance of the economy can’t be blamed on him. They would rather finger his predecessor, or the economists he picked to advise him, or Wall Street, or Europe—anyone but the man in the White House.

There’s some truth in this. It was pretty hard to foresee what was going to happen to the economy in the years after 2008. Yet surely we can legitimately blame the president for the political mistakes of the past four years. After all, it’s the president’s job to run the executive branch effectively—to lead the nation. And here is where his failure has been greatest.

 

On paper it looked like an economics dream team: Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and Austan Goolsbee, not to mention Peter Orszag, Tim Geithner, and Paul Volcker. The inside story, however, is that the president was wholly unable to manage the mighty brains—and egos—he had assembled to advise him.

According to Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men, Summers told Orszag over dinner in May 2009: “You know, Peter, we’re really home alone … I mean it. We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes [of indecisiveness on key economic issues].” On issue after issue, according to Suskind, Summers overruled the president. “You can’t just march in and make that argument and then have him make a decision,” Summers told Orszag, “because he doesn’t know what he’s deciding.” (I have heard similar things said off the record by key participants in the president’s interminable “seminar” on Afghanistan policy.)

This problem extended beyond the White House. After the imperial presidency of the Bush era, there was something more like parliamentary government in the first two years of Obama’s administration. The president proposed; Congress disposed. It was Nancy Pelosi and her cohorts who wrote the stimulus bill and made sure it was stuffed full of political pork. And it was the Democrats in Congress—led by Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank—who devised the 2,319-page Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank, for short), a near-perfect example of excessive complexity in regulation. The act requires that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies, and issue 22 periodic reports. It eliminates one regulator and creates two new ones.

It is five years since the financial crisis began, but the central problems—excessive financial concentration and excessive financial leverage—have not been addressed.

Today a mere 10 too-big-to-fail financial institutions are responsible for three quarters of total financial assets under management in the United States. Yet the country’s largest banks are at least $50 billion short of meeting new capital requirements under the new “Basel III” accords governing bank capital adequacy.

Photos: Obama Faces a Tough Crowd in Iowa

Charles Ommanney for Newsweek

And then there was health care. No one seriously doubts that the U.S. system needed to be reformed. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 did nothing to address the core defects of the system: the long-run explosion of Medicare costs as the baby boomers retire, the “fee for service” model that drives health-care inflation, the link from employment to insurance that explains why so many Americans lack coverage, and the excessive costs of the liability insurance that our doctors need to protect them from our lawyers.

Ironically, the core Obamacare concept of the “individual mandate” (requiring all Americans to buy insurance or face a fine) was something the president himself had opposed when vying with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. A much more accurate term would be “Pelosicare,” since it was she who really forced the bill through Congress.

Pelosicare was not only a political disaster. Polls consistently showed that only a minority of the public liked the ACA, and it was the main reason why Republicans regained control of the House in 2010. It was also another fiscal snafu. The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.

Related

• Paul Krugman’s Rebuttal—and Ferguson’s Response

The president just kept ducking the fiscal issue. Having set up a bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, headed by retired Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, Obama effectively sidelined its recommendations of approximately $3 trillion in cuts and $1 trillion in added revenues over the coming decade. As a result there was no “grand bargain” with the House Republicans—which means that, barring some miracle, the country will hit a fiscal cliff on Jan. 1 as the Bush tax cuts expire and the first of $1.2 trillion of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are imposed. The CBO estimates the net effect could be a 4 percent reduction in output.

The failures of leadership on economic and fiscal policy over the past four years have had geopolitical consequences. The World Bank expects the U.S. to grow by just 2 percent in 2012. China will grow four times faster than that; India three times faster. By 2017, the International Monetary Fund predicts, the GDP of China will overtake that of the United States.

 

Meanwhile, the fiscal train wreck has already initiated a process of steep cuts in the defense budget, at a time when it is very far from clear that the world has become a safer place—least of all in the Middle East.

For me the president’s greatest failure has been not to think through the implications of these challenges to American power. Far from developing a coherent strategy, he believed—perhaps encouraged by the premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize—that all he needed to do was to make touchy-feely speeches around the world explaining to foreigners that he was not George W. Bush.

In Tokyo in November 2009, the president gave his boilerplate hug-a-foreigner speech: “In an interconnected world, power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another … The United States does not seek to contain China … On the contrary, the rise of a strong, prosperous China can be a source of strength for the community of nations.” Yet by fall 2011, this approach had been jettisoned in favor of a “pivot” back to the Pacific, including risible deployments of troops to Australia and Singapore. From the vantage point of Beijing, neither approach had credibility.

His Cairo speech of June 4, 2009, was an especially clumsy bid to ingratiate himself on what proved to be the eve of a regional revolution. “I’m also proud to carry with me,” he told Egyptians, “a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: Assalamu alaikum … I’ve come here … to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based … upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.”

Fact Check: Has Obama Kept His Promises?

Charles Ommanney for Newsweek

Believing it was his role to repudiate neoconservatism, Obama completely missed the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy—precisely the wave the neocons had hoped to trigger with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When revolution broke out—first in Iran, then in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria—the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail.

In the case of Iran he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations. Ditto Syria. In Libya he was cajoled into intervening. In Egypt he tried to have it both ways, exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, then drawing back and recommending an “orderly transition.” The result was a foreign-policy debacle. Not only were Egypt’s elites appalled by what seemed to them a betrayal, but the victors—the Muslim Brotherhood—had nothing to be grateful for. America’s closest Middle Eastern allies—Israel and the Saudis—looked on in amazement.

“This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” an anonymous American official told The New York Times in February 2011. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.”

Remarkably the president polls relatively strongly on national security. Yet the public mistakes his administration’s astonishingly uninhibited use of political assassination for a coherent strategy. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, the civilian proportion of drone casualties was 16 percent last year. Ask yourself how the liberal media would have behaved if George W. Bush had used drones this way. Yet somehow it is only ever Republican secretaries of state who are accused of committing “war crimes.”

The real crime is that the assassination program destroys potentially crucial intelligence (as well as antagonizing locals) every time a drone strikes. It symbolizes the administration’s decision to abandon counterinsurgency in favor of a narrow counterterrorism. What that means in practice is the abandonment not only of Iraq but soon of Afghanistan too. Understandably, the men and women who have served there wonder what exactly their sacrifice was for, if any notion that we are nation building has been quietly dumped. Only when both countries sink back into civil war will we realize the real price of Obama’s foreign policy.

Related Stories

• Michael Tomasky: Romney’s Wimp Factor

• Howard Kurtz: Why Campaigns Don’t Need the Media

America under this president is a superpower in retreat, if not retirement. Small wonder 46 percent of Americans—and 63 percent of Chinese—believe that China already has replaced the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower or eventually will.

It is a sign of just how completely Barack Obama has “lost his narrative” since getting elected that the best case he has yet made for reelection is that Mitt Romney should not be president. In his notorious “you didn’t build that” speech, Obama listed what he considers the greatest achievements of big government: the Internet, the GI Bill, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, the Apollo moon landing, and even (bizarrely) the creation of the middle class. Sadly, he couldn’t mention anything comparable that his administration has achieved.

Now Obama is going head-to-head with his nemesis: a politician who believes more in content than in form, more in reform than in rhetoric. In the past days much has been written about Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s choice of running mate. I know, like, and admire Paul Ryan. For me, the point about him is simple. He is one of only a handful of politicians in Washington who is truly sincere about addressing this country’s fiscal crisis.

 

Over the past few years Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” has evolved, but the essential points are clear: replace Medicare with a voucher program for those now under 55 (not current or imminent recipients), turn Medicaid and food stamps into block grants for the states, and—crucially—simplify the tax code and lower tax rates to try to inject some supply-side life back into the U.S. private sector. Ryan is not preaching austerity. He is preaching growth. And though Reagan-era veterans like David Stockman may have their doubts, they underestimate Ryan’s mastery of this subject. There is literally no one in Washington who understands the challenges of fiscal reform better.

Just as importantly, Ryan has learned that politics is the art of the possible. There are parts of his plan that he is understandably soft-pedaling right now—notably the new source of federal revenue referred to in his 2010 “Roadmap for America’s Future” as a “business consumption tax.” Stockman needs to remind himself that the real “fairy-tale budget plans” have been the ones produced by the White House since 2009.

I first met Paul Ryan in April 2010. I had been invited to a dinner in Washington where the U.S. fiscal crisis was going to be the topic of discussion. So crucial did this subject seem to me that I expected the dinner to happen in one of the city’s biggest hotel ballrooms. It was actually held in the host’s home. Three congressmen showed up—a sign of how successful the president’s fiscal version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (about the debt) had been. Ryan blew me away. I have wanted to see him in the White House ever since.

It remains to be seen if the American public is ready to embrace the radical overhaul of the nation’s finances that Ryan proposes. The public mood is deeply ambivalent. The president’s approval rating is down to 49 percent. The Gallup Economic Confidence Index is at minus 28 (down from minus 13 in May). But Obama is still narrowly ahead of Romney in the polls as far as the popular vote is concerned (50.8 to 48.2) and comfortably ahead in the Electoral College. The pollsters say that Paul Ryan’s nomination is not a game changer; indeed, he is a high-risk choice for Romney because so many people feel nervous about the reforms Ryan proposes.

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But one thing is clear. Ryan psychs Obama out. This has been apparent ever since the White House went on the offensive against Ryan in the spring of last year. And the reason he psychs him out is that, unlike Obama, Ryan has a plan—as opposed to a narrative—for this country.

Mitt Romney is not the best candidate for the presidency I can imagine. But he was clearly the best of the Republican contenders for the nomination. He brings to the presidency precisely the kind of experience—both in the business world and in executive office—that Barack Obama manifestly lacked four years ago. (If only Obama had worked at Bain Capital for a few years, instead of as a community organizer in Chicago, he might understand exactly why the private sector is not “doing fine” right now.) And by picking Ryan as his running mate, Romney has given the first real sign that—unlike Obama—he is a courageous leader who will not duck the challenges America faces.

The voters now face a stark choice. They can let Barack Obama’s rambling, solipsistic narrative continue until they find themselves living in some American version of Europe, with low growth, high unemployment, even higher debt—and real geopolitical decline.

Or they can opt for real change: the kind of change that will end four years of economic underperformance, stop the terrifying accumulation of debt, and reestablish a secure fiscal foundation for American national security.

I’ve said it before: it’s a choice between les États Unis and the Republic of the Battle Hymn.

I was a good loser four years ago. But this year, fired up by the rise of Ryan, I want badly to win.

Related Stories

• Michael Tomasky: Romney’s Wimp Factor

• Howard Kurtz: Why Campaigns Don’t Need the Media

• Michelle Goldberg: Paul Ryan’s Radical Abortion Views

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Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His Latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, has just been published by Penguin Press.

This article is a complete ass-kicking of Obama.  Which is why the doctrinaire ideologue left immediately came so completely unglued by it.

Mitt Romney To Announce His VP Pick Saturday Morning At 8:45 A.M. EST. I Believe It Will Be Paul Ryan, And Here’s WHY.

“Which of the two do you want me to release to you?” asked the governor. “Barabbas,” they answered.  “What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ?” Pilate asked. They all answered, “Crucify him!”  “Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”  When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!”  All the people answered, “Let his blood be on us and on our children!”  Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified. — Matthew 27:21-26

I was quite surprised to hear that Mitt Romney had announced that tomorrow was “the big day” to announce his vice president selection.  Like most, I assumed he would be making it immediately before the GOP National Convention.

I was also somewhat surprised to hear that, apparently, Romney had called Marco Rubio and told him that he would NOT be the running mate on the ticket.

We don’t know who it will be, of course, but there’s been a fair amount of intelligent conservative speculation that it may very well be Paul Ryan.

That will be an incredibly bold choice from a man who has a been cautious for most of his life, but this is what I believe Romney’s reasoning is:

Marco Rubio would have been a good choice if Romney was thinking in terms of winning more Hispanics or winning Florida.  And Rob Portman would have been a good choice if Romney felt that he would need Portman’s pull to carry Ohio.  Nikki Haley or Kelly Ayote would have been a decision to pursue “the women’s vote.”  But none of these excellent choices would define the race the way Paul Ryan would. 

Paul Ryan is all about the budget – and by that I mean more than ANYODY – and the need to get dead serious about reducing our spending.  Versus Democrats who haven’t bothered to even TRY to pass a budget for 1,199 days and a president who has not received a SINGLE DEMOCRAT VOTE for one of his depraved and lunatic budgets in three years.  Meanwhile as Obama and Democrats have made reckless irresponsibility their “governing strategy,” we just found out our true debt and our real fiscal gap just grew by a massive $11 trillion to – and you’d better sit down – $222 TRILLION:

Republicans and Democrats spent last summer battling how best to save $2.1 trillion over the next decade. They are spending this summer battling how best to not save $2.1 trillion over the next decade.

In the course of that year, the U.S. government’s fiscal gap — the true measure of the nation’s indebtedness — rose by $11 trillion.

The fiscal gap is the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue. It captures all government liabilities, whether they are official obligations to service Treasury bonds or unofficial commitments, such as paying for food stamps or buying drones.

[…]

The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using theCongressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference — this year’s true federal deficit — is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.

This fantastic and dangerous growth in the fiscal gap is not new. In 2003 and 2004, the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale extended the CBO’s short-term forecast and measured fiscal gaps of $60 trillion and $86 trillion, respectively. In 2007, the first year the CBO produced the Alternative Fiscal Scenario, the gap, by our reckoning, stood at $175 trillion. By 2009, when the CBO began reporting the AFS annually, the gap was $184 trillion. In 2010, it was $202 trillion, followed by $211 trillion in 2011 and $222 trillion in 2012.

If in fact Mitt Romney picks Paul Ryan, THAT reckless fiscal insanity will be the central defining issue of the campaign.

More than any election in American history, this would be a true “monumental choice” election: do you want Obama and a welfare America that will utterly implode under the supermassive weight of hundreds of trillions of dollars of debt, or do you want to have at least a chance of national survival???

Many are saying that the Democrats are “licking their chops” over the prospect of running against Paul Ryan.  Democrats have demonized Paul Ryan viciously, using a look-alike to depict him pushing an elderly lady in a wheelchair off of a cliff. But the actual reality is just the opposite – as the facts prove.  For what it’s worth, the left was going to basically run against Ryan anyway.

Over one hundred million Americans are now on some form of welfare.

And Obama just gutted the work requirement that the Republican Congress had passed and Bill Clinton had signed back in 1996 in order to receive welfare.

Food stamps have increased 53 percent since Obama took office, from 30 million receiving them in 2008 to 46 million people receiving them today.  In the 1970s when the food stamp program began, one in fifty Americans were on them; one in seven Americans are on them now.  And more Americans are filing for disability today than are getting jobs, with the number of Americans expected to go on disability expected to jump 71 percent in the next ten years.  For the record, only 1 percent of people who go on disability ever return to work.  You either think these are good things or you think they’re terribly bad things.  And this November you’re going to vote which you think it is.

If you want to abdicate all personal responsibility and parasitically suck off the tit of a government that takes from the producers to hand out to those who vote Democrat until America collapses, then vote for Obama.

If you are looking around and saying, this can’t possibly continue. America is simply doomed on the path we’re on, then vote for Romney.

No one in America is more able to get our spending, deficit and debt under control than Paul Ryan.

If Paul Ryan is the guy, more than any other guy that Romney could pick, America will face a true choice in November. 

City after city is beginning to collapse into bankruptcy as the choices to run up debts and deficits made by Democrats run their toxic course.  Liberal California is leading the way into total fiscal disaster.  Liberals keep pointing to the example of Europe even as Europe proves more every day that it is a terribly foolish model to follow.  And the liberals that gave us nearly ALL of the $222 trillion debt that is utterly unpayable and utterly unsustainable keep demaning that we double down and then triple down and then quadruple down until America simply implodes.  And don’t think the left doesn’t literally HOPE that day happens.

This election will mark the greatest and most monumental choice for the direction of America and the world since the one I cite at the beginning of this article.  I pray that we have more wisdom than that last momentous decision.  Israel was wiped off the map less than forty years later as a result of their choice; our disaster will ensue far faster than that if we choose foolishly and wickedly for Obama.