Either Hillary Clinton Needs To Be Utterly Destroyed Over Her Emails Or The Experiment In Constitutional Republican Democracy Needs To End.

Hillary Clinton had every right to use all the private email she wanted; all she had to do was STAY THE HELL OUT OF PUBLIC SERVICE.

There is one and only one question that needs to be put to Hillary Clinton.  And put to her again and again at every event in which she talks to ANYONE until she drops out of public life and becomes a recluse with about a thousand cats for the rest of her life.

That question is this: “Secretary Clinton, do you believe that every government official ought to be allowed to do what you did by setting up your own private system such that there is no possibility of impartial third-party accountability, or do you believe that you are an elitist entitlement whore and that you alone ought to be above the laws that protect representative government from corruption?”

I mean, look, either from now on every single person who holds a government job should put his or her emails on a private server beyond access or control by the government such that each government worker must be trusted implicitly, or Hillary Clinton needs to be permanently publicly destroyed and utterly despised as a symbol of tyranny and corruption.

If Hillary Clinton is allowed to do this, then from now on your right-wing Karl Roves or Dick Cheneys working in their uber-right-wing bunkers writing orders and commands to destroy liberalism ought to have the exact same freedom to be above the law and immune from the law.

And any representative democracy needs to be abolished today and from this moment forward.

There is absolutely no question whatsoever that Hillary Clinton set up a system to make her immune from the federal records act and freedom of information requests.  In her system, she and her staff of priestesses get to decide what is relevant and what is not and everyone is required to believe her.

I don’t even think Joseph Stalin’s fascist tyrant balls were that big.

Fact checks reveal that Hillary Clinton is either lying or massively equivocating on every single thing she is saying about her emails.  But then again, the Clintons are people who could find some way to insinuate “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” when they are explaining to a traffic cop whey they refused to stop at a damn stop sign.  Liberals are people who believe that laws are things for them to pass and impose and for little people to follow.

We have a pathologically partisan and dishonest media, but it is nice to know that even the mainstream press is going after Hillary Clinton’s fascist tyrant balls:

The Associated Press said Wednesday it has sued the State Department to force the release of government documents and e-mails from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State, an action taken a day after she defended her use of a private e-mail account to conduct business and after six formal attempts by the news agency to obtain records.

“After careful deliberation and exhausting our other options, The Associated Press is taking the necessary legal steps to gain access to these important documents, which will shed light on actions by the State Department and former Secretary Clinton, a presumptive 2016 presidential candidate, during some of the most significant issues of our time,” AP General Counsel Karen Kaiser said in a statement.

“The press is a proxy for the people, and AP will continue its pursuit of vital information that’s in the public interest through this action and future open records requests,” Kaiser said.

At a news conference following a speech at a United Nations conference on women’s economic status Tuesday, Clinton defended her use of a private e-mail account, saying it was done for convenience. Using a personal account was permissible during her tenure as long as she kept the records, and she did not discuss classified information on her personal e-mail, Clinton said.

“Looking back, it would have been better for me to use two separate phones and two separate e-mail accounts,” Clinton said. “I thought using one (mobile) device would be simpler. Obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way.”

Clinton sent or received 62,320 total e-mails while heading the State Department, and deleted 31,830 that she deemed personal.

She turned over 30,490 e-mails to the State Department last fall at its request. More than 27,500 involved official government e-mail addresses.

Clinton said she “chose not to keep” personal e-mails, such as those related to daughter Chelsea’s wedding in 2010 or the funeral for her mother, Dorothy Rodham, who died in 2011. “No one wants their personal e-mails made public and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy,” she said.

Filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the lawsuit says “AP seeks the records in question from the State Department to inform citizens both regarding the operation of their government and regarding Secretary Clinton’s official actions as Secretary of State.”

Beginning in 2010, AP filed six requests under FOIA to obtain records from the State Department regarding Clinton’s tenure as secretary, including her calendars and schedules and records concerning the designation of Special Government Employee status given to her former deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin.

The news agency also sought records related to the raid in Pakistan in which Osama bin Laden was killed and surveillance and other anti-terrorism programs conducted by the U.S. government.

AP also requested documents detailing the State Department’s dealings with defense contractor BAE Systems. The State Department reached a settlement with BAE in 2011 over violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

Since the first FOIA request was submitted, the State Department “has failed to respond substantively to five of the requests, and has only partially responded to one request” related to BAE Systems, according to the lawsuit.

Consider this factoid: even if you believe Clinton’s story – which makes you a FOOL, just for the official record – you have this issue to deal with: Hillary Clinton says that she spent half of her time (31,830 personal emails out of a TOTAL of 63,320 emails as Secretary of State) engaged in personal business.  Do you know what I call somebody who spends half their damn work time on personal emails?  A FORMER employee.  Because she’s fired.

If you want to believe Hillary Clinton’s story – and again you just identified yourself as a true FOOL – she is an astonishingly incompetent and self-centered pathological narcissist.

But no, Hillary Clinton set up her “private server” to avoid transparency and to avoid accountability.  And she is refusing to turn over her server because she is a liar with something very, very serious to hide.

Meanwhile, the pissy, pathologically fascist Obama Administration that praised and adored itself as “the most transparent” (communist dictatorship) in history has refused for FOR AT LEAST FIVE DAMN YEARS to turn over so much as an email saying “good morning” from the Secretary of State of the United States of America.  Oh, yeah, Obama will have his lawthug Eric Holder investigate the police department in Ferguson forever, but here’s a giant scandal involving his very top official and he can’t be bothered.

Obama is in this over his eyeballs.  He did what he always did and lied about it and said that he is a detached incompetent fool who didn’t even know what the hell was happening all around him, but yeah, he received emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server that was in graphic violation of the rules and policies and regulations that had been set up to protect the integrity of government service:

President Barack Obama communicated via email with Hillary Clinton while she used her personal email, according to the White House.

In a press briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that Obama did correspond with his secretary of state via her private email address.

“The president, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with his secretary of state,” Earnest said. “I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email each other.”

Earnest’s admission comes after Obama said on CBS on Saturday that he learned about Clinton’s use of a private email and server “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.” According to Earnest, this comment should not be assumed to mean that Obama and Clinton never emailed back and forth. […]

When pressed on whether Obama was aware that Clinton was conducting business over her private email, Earnest responded, “the point is the president did email with Secretary Clinton. I assume that he recognized the email address that he was emailing back to,” before saying that the important issue is whether she complied with the Federal Records Act.

I mean, “Oh, THOSE private emails!”

Just another day in the fascist life of fascists doing their fascist thing.

Even the leftist Democracy Now is publicly calling Obama “the least transparent president in history”:

“My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” So wrote President Barack Obama, back on Jan. 29, 2009, just days into his presidency. “Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” Now, six years into the Obama administration, his promise of “a new era of open Government” seems just another grand promise, cynically broken.

As the news industry observed its annual “Sunshine Week” in mid-March, The Associated Press reported that “[m]ore often than ever, the administration censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act [FOIA].” The AP report continued, “The government’s efforts to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since President Barack Obama took office.”

That article is within days of being a year old now, and Obama had only just BEGUN to be a fascist thug at that point compared to what he’s done since.

In the same way, even the leftist New York Times acknowledges that Barack Obama’s regime “is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”

Consider what this rat-bastard lying fascist thug promised us when he seized power in his own now-proven-to-have-been-demonic-lying words:

“A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike.

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.” {…}

Yeah, that sure happened.

In reality, if you ask ANY SENTIENT LIFE FORM – obviously that description excludes liberals – you get the type of statements I recorded above that Barack Obama is THE most closed, THE most secretive, THE most paranoid, THE most intolerant of the press, THE most intolerant to foia requests, of any president.

Hillary Clinton is nothing more than a fascist thug trying to take over the job of a fascist thug.  Period.  She claims her emails would have gone to .gov accounts that would have fallen under the law (you know, as the lesser people who had to follow the damn laws picked up for Hillary who refused to obey the requirements of government service).  But that’s a lie.  For example, her two most senior aides ALSO had their own private email accounts and did not use .gov accounts.  So those three wicked witches could literally have conspired to commit treason and none of us would ever know about it.  And to the best of my knowledge, the foreign governments – such as the sponsors of terrorism that Hillary Clinton illegitimately raked in MILLIONS from even while she was serving as Secretary of State on behalf of the Clinton Foundation – didn’t use .got accounts and sending all their emails to the US government.

We have to trust that what Hillary Clinton and her two senior priestesses decided to save and what they decided to purge was above-board.  Because we must trust Hillary Clinton’s, Huma Abedin’s and Cheryl Mills’ integrity the same way we should have had boundless confidence and trust in everything that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove did.  We should allow all government officials to conceal their communications and only cherry pick what they deem “relevant” from now on.

It is wrong to brand Hillary Clinton “Nixonian.”  But that is because it is a blatant dishonor of Richard Nixon when Nixon makes Clinton look like Billy Graham or whatever pope you think was the holiest holiness.  Nixon, remember, set up his taping system to PRESERVE THE RECORD.  He installed it to write his memoirs and probably to remind people of exactly what they’d told him.  And he only deleted what, eighteen minutes? from that taping system when those records may have incriminated him.  Hillary Clinton, by contrast, set up her servers to CONCEAL THE RECORD.  And she didn’t delete eighteen minutes, but rather four entire YEARS, from disclosure.

Clinton has now conclusively proven – by setting up a private server in her home to dodge reporting requirements such that there is no possibility whatsoever for transparent, accountable government beyond being required to implicitly trust the word of your dictator; she has already proven in her refusal to turn over records without spending more than two years having her staff of priestesses pouring over them for anything potentially incriminating against her and purging records; she has already proven in her imperious statements that she does not have to turn over anything to anybody because she like Obama is ontologically superior to the rest of us pathetic herd animals – that she is either not fit to be in ANY government position.  Or that our government should be “fundamentally transformed” to a tyranny.

We are now learning that Hillary Clinton’s “personal, private serve” was not so very private, after all, but that it was established by taxpayer funds and should belong to the people and not the tyrant.  Hillary claims she can’t turn over any actual records because after all, her decision to ONLY use a private server for official business somehow inadvertently resulted in mixing her personal emails in with official emails.  And after all, think of all of those intimate email exchanges she had with her husband, Bill.  Mind you, Bill says that he’s only sent two emails in his entire life and neither was to his shrew wife.  So that’s a stinking load of crap.

Hillary Clinton is like Al Sharpton, who somehow mysteriously suffered from not one but TWO suspicious fires that destroyed all of his financial records when he was running for public office.  And of course, neither Hillary’s corruption nor Al Sharpton’s corruption is enough to disqualify them from being liberal Democrats in good standing.  Because, of course, it’s actually dishonesty and corruption and a fascist disregard for the rule of law that qualifies them to be Democrats.

Make your choice, liberals.  But realize that if you choose Hillary Clinton, you also just chose your own personal nightmare of the most rabidly right-wing tyrant the world has ever seen having his records immune from disclosure.  And it will have been YOU who set that nightmare up and brought it to life.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama need to go down and go down hard and go down in history as treasonous disgraces to everything that representative democracy and any kind of government by the people should be.  Either that, or else the next rabid right-wing tyrant needs to follow their example and run down the damn field with it.

 

 

Barack Obama Is A Liar. And The American People Know He’s A Liar. The Question Is, Does Anybody Give A Damn About Truth Anymore?

Do the American people believe Obama’s dishonest bullcrap any longer?

Not so much:

Poll: Most Americans believe Obama lies on important issues
By Charles Hoskinson  | APRIL 17, 2014 AT 10:53 AM

How much do Americans trust President Obama? Not much, according to a Fox News poll.

Sixty-one percent of respondents in the poll released Thursday said Obama lies at least some of the time on important issues. An additional 20 percent said he lies every now and then.

Only 15 percent believe the president is completely truthful.

“Lies” as in DELIBERATELY says things that he KNOWS are false.  Obama knows he’s looking you right in the eye and lying to your face, but he does it anyway.

The article points out that there is some political bias going on in the perception:

Predictably, Republicans were more likely to believe Obama is a liar, with 85 percent saying he lies some or most of the time. Thirty-one percent of Democrats said the president is always truthful.

Two things.  Thing one: “Thirty-one percent of Democrats”?  Less than a third of the man’s own damn party???  That aint so good.  I’m sure other roaches have a far higher opinion about their lead roach.  And thing two, well, I’ll let the article say it and just comment afterward:

What’s interesting is that independents were slightly more likely to believe Obama lies at least some of the time — 63 percent, compared with 61 percent for the total sample.

Yeah, Independents are actually MORE likely to believe Obama is a dishonest lying sack of bovine filth than Republicans are.

So, it really turns out that the only truly “biased” people are the Democrats who rabidly insist on believing their lying Führer no matter what.  We’ve seen that rabid mindset before.  But the fact is that not only are Independent voters with the Republicans, but they are actually even MORE with Republicans than Republicans are in that they are even more likely to point a finger in Obama’s face and snarl, “YOU LIAR!”

By the way:

The April 13-15 poll of 1,012 registered voters had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Democrats were 39 percent of the sample, Republicans 38 percent and independents 20 percent.

Which is to say (again) that the only people who would find “bias” in this poll are the biased Democrats who are totally out of step with reality and with the rest of the universe.

Here’s the thing.  It wasn’t all that long ago that Obama would have been done with this kind of perception.  His own party would have turned against him, the way Nixon was done when his own Republican Party said, “That’s it.  We’re better than this and we’re definitely better than YOU, Tricky Dick.”  Not long ago, Obama would have been giving his final pathetic wave as president as he flew away before the people showed up with pitchforks and torches to burn the monster.

This isn’t – or at least it shouldn’t be – just about the lies by which Obama sold ObamaCare to the American people and then got re-elected based on the same lies told over and over and over again.  This is a man who began his campaign with lie after lie.  He slandered his predecessor based on lies, such as his attack on George Bush as “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” for allowing the debt to increase by $4 trillion during his eight years only to increase it himself by nearly $8 trillion in only five years.  This is a man who demonized his opponents in the GOP for voting against his debt ceiling increase when HE HIMSELF voted against the debt increase when he was a Senator.  This is a man who routinely demonizes and slanders his opponents for their “war on women” when HE HIMSELF is far more vicious against women in HIS OWN “boy’s club” and in HIS OWN “gender gap” “wage disparity” than his opponents have EVER been.

Barack Obama is a lying, dishonest, cynical political opportunist without shame, without honor, without virtue and without decency.  And he always HAS been from his first day on the campaign trail.  Obama literally BEGAN his campaign for the presidency with a lie having broken his promise:

MR. RUSSERT: When we talked back in November of ‘04, after your election, I said, “There’s been enormous speculation about your political future. Will you serve your full six-year term as a United States senator from Illinois?”

Obama: “Absolutely.”

SEN. OBAMA: I will serve out my full six-year term. You know, Tim, if you get asked enough, sooner or later you get weary and you start looking for new ways of saying things, but my thinking has not changed.

MR. RUSSERT: But, but—so you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?

SEN. OBAMA: I will not.

And in being the first major party nominee to refuse to accept matching funds, Obama didn’t just fundamentally transform the nature of American campaigns by blowing open the doors to money as has never been seen in politics, but he LIED:

In November 2007, Obama answered “Yes” to Common Cause [and to a questionnaire by the Midwest Democracy Network] when asked “If you are nominated for President in 2008 and your major opponents agree to forgo private funding in the general election campaign, will you participate in the presidential public financing system?”

versus:

Barack Obama made it official today: He has decided to forego federal matching funds for the general election, thereby allowing his campaign to raise and spend as much as possible.

By so doing, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee becomes the first candidate to reject public funds for the general election. The current system was created in 1976 in reaction to the Watergate scandal.

Barack Obama has ALWAYS been a liar.  And those who hate the truth have always been his most ardent supporters.

Obama has spent his career slandering and demonizing his opponents with his “war on women” slander and has “my opponents want dirtier air, dirtier water and children born with Down Syndrome and Autism” vileness.

That, too, is just another lie from hell from a liar from hell.  Lest you have conveniently forgotten, Barack Obama’s “signature promise” to the American people was that he would “transcend the political divide.”  He lied.  And the only people who believe that the political climate that has become more bitter than ever is the Republicans’ faults are the pure, rabid, toxic liars who have supported Obama and his ocean of lies.

Obama’s pathological dishonesty has taken it’s toll on America’s national security.  Obama is the man who issued a “red line” warning if Syria used chemical weapons.  And then did NOTHING as they used them repeatedly.  And now Obama is threatening Vladimir Putin on an almost daily basis if Putin keeps doing what Putin keeps doing.  Because nobody believes a thing our Empty-Suit-in-Chief says anymore.

Obama has already been kissing the dirt of Nixon with his own poll numbers.  And that is with the most dishonest propaganda mill since the Soviet Union’s TASS and the Nazi Party’s Ministry of Propaganda spinning the news for their messiah.

But times have changed.  America is a much fouler place.

We are a nation of Pontius Pilates, a nation who skeptically asks, “What IS truth?”

And just like Pilate, we have turned out backs on the Man who is truth’s very embodiment.  And that is because we turned out backs on the values of that Man that made discerning truth even possible.

From the Great City on a hill that many of our founding fathers envisioned, we are a nation that is in darkness just as Israel was in a darkness of wickedness and moral relativism in their darkest days.  We are a people who do that which is right in our own eyes, rather than in God’s.

We find out that our president is a wicked, dishonest man and our response is to yawn in boredom and stuff another handful of potato chips in our faces.

God is patient, yes He is.  I already would have handed out “Flood, Part Deux” were I in God’s place.  And that’s just one of many reasons why I praise and honor God for being God.  But that said, we also know that God is not mocked as those who are deceived think He can be.  What a man sows, that he will also reap.  And what a nation plants, it will surely harvest.  Which is why Longfellow pointed out the truth that “Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small.”

And that is why we are a nation on the way out.  It is why when we collapse, there will be no part of what used to be America big enough to survive.  And it is why it will be no shame when we go the way of the failed empires before us.

God is going to judge this nation as a nation that tolerates lies and that tolerates wicked policies based on those lies.  And as I look around, I see a people and a nation that is ALREADY being ground down.

America has lived by lies, and it will surely perish because of those lies.

 

Decent People MUST Demand A Special Prosecutor Over IRS Scandal: ‘Not Even A Smidgeon of Corruption’ Obama Says Of Supposedly Active Investigation

What do we as a people do when the president refuses to put an independent prosecutor in charge of an investigation into the worst kind of democracy-poisoning corruption in his own administration???

It is a fact that 292 conservative groups were targeted by the IRS (whose union gives 97% of political contributions to Democrats versus 2% to Republicans, for what it’s worth) versus only SIX liberal groups.  And only ONE of those six liberal groups was denied the approval that ALL the conservative groups were denied.

It is a fact that the criterion for the targeting was “anti-Obama rhetoric.”  That is simply chilling to anyone who ISN’T hoping Big Brother and then the beast of Revelation will show up to take over the world.

What do we do when we find out that this investigation has without any question been slow-walked, with the director of the FBI forced to acknowledge that he had no idea who was running the incredibly important IRS investigation, or how many agents were working on it as far back as June of last year.  We found at that time that few if any of the conservatives who had been politically targeted by the IRS had been interviewed to obtain their stories and their testimony.  We learned that as of late last year, the FBI had STILL had bothered to contact any of the conservative victims of the IRS.  How on earth can you claim that you are investigating a crime if you don’t even bother to get the stories of the victims of the crime???

What do we do as a nation when the president’s handpicked law dog appoints a maxed-out Obama donor to head this investigation???

Two Republican lawmakers and a conservative legal group are questioning the Justice Department’s selection of a Democratic donor to lead the agency’s probe into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of certain advocacy groups during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) issued a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.  on Wednesday demanding the department remove DOJ trial attorney Barbara Bosserman from the case, saying her involvement is “highly inappropriate and has compromised the administration’s investigation of the IRS.”

Bosserman donated a combined $6,750 to President Obama’s election campaigns and the Democratic National Committee between 2004 and 2012, according to federal campaign finance records.

The American Center for Law and Justice, which represents 41 groups suing the IRS over its controversial screening methods, also criticized the appointment of Bosserman to lead the probe.

“Appointing an avowed political supporter of President Obama to head up the Justice Department probe is not only disturbing but puts politics right in the middle of what is supposed to be an independent investigation to determine who is responsible for the Obama administration’s unlawful targeting of conservative and tea party groups,” ACLJ chief counsel Jay Sekulow said in a statement Thursday.

The Obama DoJ excuse is that they “cannot take political leanings into account when assigning cases and that making legal political contributions does not prevent its attorneys from fulfilling their duties without bias.”  Okay, fine: so appoint an investigator who maxed-out giving political donations to Mitt Romney.  Allow a doctrinaire conservative to conduct the investigation, since it [supposedly] doesn’t matter to the Obama DoJ.  It’s kind of like the wrong price in the store: every single time it happens it seems to favor the store and work against the customer and yet it’s always an accident.

What do we do when the president says that there is “Not even a smidgeon of corruption” in an investigation that is supposed to be open and ongoing???  How can anyone now claim that this investigation has been anything other than politically tainted???  And at the very highest possible level???  And why don’t the American people deserve a special prosecutor to ensure that the tax collection service of this nation is not being used as a political attack dog to benefit a pathologically dishonest and corrupt administration???

It comes down to this: how in the hell does Obama know that the investigation won’t turn up so much as “a smidgeon of corruption”???  Because his maxed-out donor stooge is fixing the investigation for him, that’s why.

This is the most corrupt administration and the most corrupt president in history.  Obama compared himself to Nixon during O’Reilly’s interview.  Good.  Because he makes Nixon look like a choir boy when it comes to political corruption.

Consider how Obama had his gubmint thugs go after one woman who had never had a problem with the government until she made the mistake of refusing to believe that her new president was a total fascist who would reward his friends and punish his enemies:

IRS officials have recently admitted improperly giving special scrutiny to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status because the agency was “swamped with applications” and looking for “shortcuts”. But in a federal lawsuit filed last week, Engelbrecht claims the IRS’ actions toward her interests actually created a great deal more effort and paperwork for all concerned.

The trouble began shortly after Engelbrecht founded True the Vote, which trains election volunteers and aims to root out voter fraud; and King Street Patriots, a group with ideals similar to the Tea Party. Both sought tax-exempt status from the IRS in July 2010. And both organizations drew the ire of Democrats. Democrats accused True the Vote of intimidating voters in its poll watching efforts, which the group denies. And the Texas Democratic Party successfully sued King Street Patriots, arguing that it’s an unregistered political action committee.

But Engelbrecht’s attorney, Cleta Mitchell, says it’s not just the Democratic Party that went after the conservative causes, but also the federal government. Within months of the groups filing for tax-exempt status, Engelbrecht claims she started getting hit by an onslaught of harassment: six FBI domestic terrorism inquiries, an IRS visit, two IRS business audits, two IRS personal audits, and inspections of her equipment manufacturing company by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Texas environmental quality officials.

“Not a smidgeon of corruption.”  That’s like Obama when he said, “Your taxes won’t go up one dime.”  Because they went up by THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS instead.

It is a fact that 76% of the American people want a special prosecutor to investigate Obama’s IRS scandal.

Obama’s “faux” Fox scandal is an outright lie from a truly evil man.

We now find that the Benghazi scandal that Obama also refuses to acknowledge is anything other than the invention of Fox News is a red hot example of political corruption.  We learn that the CIA station chief – whose assessment is all important – very clearly and very immediately stated that the attack was NOT an “escalation of protest” as Obama had all of his officials claim it was.  Contrary to the Obama cover-up, THERE WAS NO PROTEST.  We now know that within MINUTES of the Benghazi attack, Defense Department officials briefed Obama that the event was a terrorist attack and NOT a demonstration over a video as Obama claimed for weeks afterward.  How on earth is that not a scandal???  We suffered a terrorist attack at the very time that Obama was falsely stating that he had won the war on terror.  We now know that the Deputy Director of the CIA lied – and even lied to the FBI – about having changed the official White House talking points.  And we now know that this very same former Deputy Director just joined a group founded by “Clinton’s principal gatekeeper.”

Obama says there was no scandal in the cover-up of Benghazi.  Just answer the question: who altered the talking points that claimed a Youtube video protest instead of a terrorist attack was responsible for the Benghazi event that resulted in the murder of the first US ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since 1979???  And why is it that what we now know to be a lie so transparently benefitted Obama’s political interest during a campaign when he was trumpeting his victory over terrorism???

We have a very clear pattern of systematic corruption at the highest levels of the Obama administration.  That is simply a categorical fact.

During Watergate, there came a point when Republicans had a choice to make: do the right thing for the nation or circle the wagons politically.  In doing what was right for the nation, they did something that we can now definitely say that the Democrat Party is pathologically incapable of doing.  To be a Democrat at this point means to be a person devoid of any scintilla of virtue, or integrity, or honesty, or honor, or decency of any kind.  And all we need to do is look at the ObamaCare disgrace along with the IRS scandal to learn that there is no possible way that Democrats will do the right thing for the country.

It is long past time to demand that Barack Obama appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS scandal.  If there was in fact “not even a smidgen of corruption,” then why the hell did multiple senior level IRS managers plead the fifth amendment???   What do you say when you plead the Fifth Amendment?  You say, ” “Your honor, I respectfully invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution on the grounds that answering questions may incriminate me.”  These people committed CRIMES and they KNOW they committed crimes.

What is perhaps even more frightening is that Obama is trying to rewrite the law so that the criminal targeting of conservative groups becomes the way it is done moving forward.

If Obama allows an honest investigation into the scandals plaguing his administration, it will lead to his being impeached for committing high crimes and misdemeanors.  And dirty Democrats know it.

The Fascist Hypocrite-In-Chief Says He’ll Finally Stop (A Little Of) The Spying After Demoning Bush WHO SPIED LESS THAN OBAMA

I looked at a headline in the Los Angeles Times featuring something on Validmir Putin and almost vomited.

I almost vomited because I had had a thought that I never thought I would have in my lifetime: I envied Russia for its political leadership.  I mean, yes, the guy is a former communist KGB thug, but Barack Obama is a CURRENT communist thug who has turned his FBI and his IRS into the KGB.  And of course whenever Obama and Putin have crossed swords, Putin has made Obama look like such a chump it is beyond unreal.

The United States before Obama USED to be the most powerful nation on the face of the earth.  And the president of the United States was OF COURSE the most powerful man on the planet.  Not so anymore: the most powerful man in the world is Gog of Magog (the way the Bible describes the leader of Russia in the last days), Vladimer Putin.

Obama is Putin’s poodle:

According to the magazine [Forbes], Putin has replaced US President Barack Obama in the top spot because the Russian leader has gained the upper hand over his counterpart in Washington in the context of several conflicts and scandals.

Indeed, at the moment, Putin seems to be succeeding at everything he does. In September, he convinced Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control. In doing so, he averted an American military strike against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and made Obama look like an impotent global policeman.

In late July, Putin ignored American threats and granted temporary asylum to US whistleblower Edward Snowden, a move that stirred up tensions within the Western camp. The Germans and the French were also outraged over Washington’s surveillance practices.

Since then, Putin has scored one coup after the next. In the fall, when meaningful progress was made in talks with Tehran over a curtailment of Iran’s nuclear program, Putin once again played a key role.

Obama doesn’t even look THIRD rate as a leader advancing the cause and power of his people compared to Vladimir Putin over Syria.  He made Obama look like an organ grinder’s monkey when he got Obama to fold over his stupid “red line.”  And what has Syria done since to fulfill it’s promises to Obama?  Try “zero.”  Now Syria has all of its WMD and Assad – thanks to Obama – has an iron grip on power over the rebels whom Obama flat-out betrayed.  The joke is on Obama and of course the hapless American people who are screwed by this idiot’s “leadership.”  In the same way, Obama fails to rank as a FOURTH rate leader compared to Vladimir Putin over Iran.  Right after Iran – and Putin – got everything they wanted out of the Chump-in-Chief, Iran announced the truth to the world: that Obama had “surrendered.”  Oh, the media likes to say “the West surrendered,” but of course as the so-called “leader of the free world,” it was Obama who LED the West to surrender to Iran.  And now Iran is already on the rapid economic mend and will be able to pour more funds into its ballistic missile program – immediately after the success of which they will announce that they have become a nuclear power.

I never in my wildest dreams ever believed that I would prefer a Russian president to an American one.  I mean, even Jimmy CARTER didn’t make me think that.

Friday Obama gave his NSA speech.  And of course it was just like all of his other speeches: Obama the great and grand impartial listener has heard all sides, has not yet made his infinitely wise decision, and will punt all unpopular decisions to Congress in the meantime until he imposes his totalitarian godhood without any accountability via executive orders later.

The New York Times in one of its mostly drivel articles began this way:

WASHINGTON — As a young lawmaker defining himself as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama visited a center for scholars in August 2007 to give a speech on terrorism. He described a surveillance state run amok and vowed to rein it in. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens,” he declared. “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.”

It pointed out that:

Mr. Obama’s 2007 speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars came after the revelation that President George W. Bush had authorized warrantless surveillance in terrorism cases without permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A presidential candidate, Mr. Obama criticized Mr. Bush’s “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

Oh, and my favorite line:

He was surprised at the uproar that ensued, advisers said, particularly that so many Americans did not trust him, much less trust the oversight provided by the intelligence court and Congress. As more secrets spilled out, though, aides said even Mr. Obama was chagrined. They said he was exercised to learn that the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was being tapped.

It took a traitor named Snowden to expose the treason and abject hypocrisy of our traitor-in-chief.  And so it was Snowden, now basically a Russian citizen (that’s just one of the many ways Putin has OWNED Obama) who pointed out the fact that no president in American history had ever built up such a large spying system on its own citizens.

Of course we also know that this same president used his IRS to target 292 conservative organizations plus a couple of liberal ones (who used “anti-Obama rhetoric”) so that liberals would say Obama went after both sides.

And we know that the FBI under Eric Holder refused to investigate this political crime and didn’t even bother to INTERVIEW any of the victims and get their stories to find out what actually happened.  Nope, they just listened to that lizard lady who pled the Fifth because the truth would have incriminated her.

Tyler Durden asked a good question this way:

Who said it?

This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.

That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.

That is not who we are. It’s not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works.

Our constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers and that justice is not arbitrary.

This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not.

There are no shortcuts to protecting America.

– August, 2007

Confused? It is the same guy who said this back in 2006:

“Mr. President, I rise today to talk about America’s debt problem. 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. 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.

I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

Still confused? Here he is:

Barack Obama isn’t just a hypocrite without shame, honor, decency, or virtue; he’s a liar without any shame, any honor, any decency or any virtue.

Do you remember Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Obama Press Secretary Jay Carney, Obama’s UN ambassador and a host of other Obama cronies repeatedly told us that Benghazi was NOT a terrorist attack and that it was the result of a video that even the Democrat-controlled SENATE says had nothing whatsoever to do with this Al-Qaeda-sponsored and linked terrorist attack???  And how they LIED???

Do you remember Obama’s top national security appointee Clapper who answered, “Not wittingly” to the question as to whether the NSA was keeping information on Americans that it was VERY MUCH “WITTINGLY” KEEPING???  And do you remember how he ADMITTED he lied and said he gave “the least untruthful” answer possible???  Which is of course exactly what I did every time I told a woman in a bar I was a Navy SEAL or whatever it took to get in her panties, right???

Yeah, he’s STILL on the job.  Because Obama has SURROUNDED himself with liars to cover and shelter his administration.  That’s why he also hasn’t done a damn thing about the fiasco at Benghazi where he and many of his cronies also lied, about the political attack via the IRS where his cronies pled the Fifth Amendment rather than telling the American people what they’d done, etc. etc.

Why wouldn’t we trust this abject liar???

Why wouldn’t we trust “the liar of the year” who promised if we liked our health plan we could keep it and if we liked our doctor we could keep our doctor and that health care would be less expensive after his ObamaCare and basically be wonderful for us when it turned out that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS PROMISES TURNED OUT TO BE ABJECT AND OUTRIGHT LIES???  Why wouldn’t we trust a man who demonized his predecessor for violating civil liberties only to himself be the worst violator of civil liberties in American history???  Why wouldn’t we trust the man who demonized Bush for increasing the national debt by $4 trillion but then increase it $8 trillion AND COUNTING himself???

I don’t know: why don’t we trust THE MOST DOCUMENTED LIAR IN THE HISTORY OF THE ENTIRE PLANET???  That is, unless you can show me which leader has had his lies literally heard and seen by more people than have heard and seen Obama’s lies.

The Washington reporters – and most of these guys are LIBERALS – say Barack Obama was the least transparent president since NIXON.  They point out that Obama is WORSE than Nixon when it comes to viciously targeting anyone who leaks anything that damages him.

And Obama’s pathological dishonesty, his political viciousness and frankly the demons screaming in his ugly little soul are why his approval ratings are the WORST SINCE NIXON.  As in Nixon mired in the Watergate scandal as his lies were exposed.

Barack Obama is a pathological liar.  To put it in Obamaesque terms, Obama is a pathological liar.  Period.  End of story.

Why Does Obama Blame Bush For HIS Economy (After FOUR YEARS Of Failure) When Obama Takes Credit For Every Good Bush Achievement?

OSAMA BIN LADEN RAID

Obama takes the credit for getting bin Laden.  Was it Obama who rebuilt  the national security apparatus following 9/11 to reshape it from the Cold War emphasis that had characterized it for the previous sixty years?  Was it Obama who first announced the mission to get bin Laden dead or alive?  Was it Obama who used water boarding to secure the key intelligence breakthroughs that bin Laden was relying on couriers for his communication (rather than phones, computers, etc.) and that he was living in the city of Abbottabad which allowed intelligence to zero in on him?

The key intelligence breakthrough occurred when US intelligence discovered two key facts: 1) that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in the city of Abbottabad in Pakistan; and 2) that bin Laden was relying on a courier who could then be identified and tracked to bin Laden’s specific location in that city.  Both of these key facts were discovered under the Bush presidency by means of waterboarding:

Liberals outrageously lie when they talk about how waterboarding was used.  CIA professionals did NOT ask a terrorist a question and then waterboard him until he gave them whatever answer they wanted.  Rather, they used this incredibly painful – but completely medically safe under supervision – procedure of simulated drowning to “alter the perception” of the terrorist.  The terrorist was confronted with his new reality in a cold, painful way: “We own your ass; we can do whatever the hell we want to you; and we will ultimately break you down.  Get used to the idea that you WILL tell us what we want to know.”  The point of waterboarding was to break their will to resist, not to torture immediate answers out of them but rather to inexorably bring them to the point where they would ultimately crack.  The fact of the matter was that the CIA experts didn’t even bother to ASK terrorists any questions while they waterboarded the three terrorists who ended up singing like canaries.  But it is a simple FACT that waterboarding was the essential background component that led to the breaking of these hard, hateful men: because the terrorists we waterboarded were the very same terrorists who told us about Abbottabad and the courier.

Democrats talk about “torture.”  I say if we catch a monster like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed we waterboard him until he grows gills and then we take the water away so he’ll flop around like a dying fish.  And repeat it over and over again until the same man who tried to destroy us becomes the very man who tells us how to destroy his hateful organization.

I recently watched a 2 hour documentary about the 2006 terrorist attempt to use passenger jets as bombs titled “Stopping the Second 9/11” on the National Geographic Channel.  The thing that most struck me was the fact that British intelligence recorded the terrorists talking to each other on phones.  The terrorists planned to bring their own wives and their own BABIES on the flights that they planned to destroy in order to reduce the likelihood that they would tip off law enforcement by boarding the planes as “family men.”  That ought to scream about the determination of these men to kill and destroy.  You simply are not going to get men like this to open up with courtesy and niceness.  Islamic terrorists by their culture, their religion, and their brutal nature as mass murdering killers respect only superior force, not peaceful overtures, which they see as a sign of weakness. Anyone who thinks you can “nice” a terrorist into betraying his worldview, his ideology, literally his religion, and his movement is simply a naive fool.

The question then becomes this: Why would anybody but a radical leftist ideologue give Obama credit for the intelligence breakthroughs that led to killing bin Laden when Obama was the very guy who most viciously demonized the very procedures that led to those breakthroughs?

There is a fascinating analogy that comes out of the talk about the moon landing that happened as a result of the discussion about the passing of Neil Armstrong (who by the way went on the record criticizing Obama before his death).  The anology begins with this: We give John F. Kennedy complete credit for putting a man on the moon:

Nixon gets ZERO credit even though he was the president sitting in the White House when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon.  You will not read an article written by a liberal giving Nixon any credit for landing a man on the moon and bringing that man safely back to earth.  Why?  Kennedy had been DEAD for six years prior to that moon landing.  Why isn’t Nixon “the president who put a man on the moon”?  Because it was JFKs vision and the fulfillment of that vision just as getting bin Laden was the fulfillment of George W. Bush’s vision:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush pledged anew Friday that Osama bin Laden will be taken “dead or alive,” no matter how long it takes, amid indications that the suspected terrorist may be bottled up in a rugged Afghan canyon. The president, in an Oval Office meeting with Thailand’s prime minister, would not predict the timing of bin Laden’s capture but said he doesn’t care how the suspect is brought to justice. “I don’t care, dead or alive — either way,” Bush said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

But again, that meme about the first man on the moon merely reinforces the pathology of the left to take full credit for every good thing and avoid any blame whatsoever for any bad thing.  The media gives John F. Kennedy complete credit for putting a man on the moon because JFK was a Democrat; the media gives George W. Bush ZERO credit for getting Osama bin Laden because GWB was a Republican.  It’s really that simple.

Was Obama’s decision to send the SEALs into Pakistan to kill bin Laden really that amazing?  Let me ask you this: what would have happened to Obama’s political fortunes if he had refused to kill bin Laden and a bunch of pissed off CIA and military professionals leaked Obama’s abject refusal to kill the world’s worst terrorist monster?  How many people think Obama could have been reelected as “the man who refused to kill bin Laden”???

Bottom damn line: if Obama had tried to kill bin Laden and failed, he would have been criticized for that failure.  And to insulate himself from that possibility, he set up Admiral McRaven as the fall guy by giving McRaven responsibility.  It was ultimately McRaven who made the “courageous call,” not Obama.  That said, if Obama had refused to even try to kill bin Laden, HE WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE POLITICALLY.  Does anybody seriously think for one second that the men who had devoted YEARS to getting bin Laden would have just rolled over if Obama had refused to issue the order to get him?  In fact, I will bet you that Republicans would have brought up and article of impeachment due to Obama’s refusal to protect the citizens of the United States, and Democrats would have voted for it.  Because otherwise, this election would have been the worst disaster in the history of politics for the Democrat Party as the weakling coward treasonous bin Laden Party.

So spare me about Obama’s “incredibly courageous decision” to kill bin Laden as George W. Bush had promised the world that the United States would do.  Spare me the idiotic rhetoric that if George W. Bush had still been president he never would have had the guts to kill bin Laden.  Just spare me all your blathering idiocy, liberal.

IRAQ WAR

Let’s talk about the Iraq War.  Let’s talk about the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.  Do you know which president won that war?  Do you know which president negotiated that withdrawal of American troops?  I do.  In answer to both questions, the name is George W. Bush.

But who claims credit for the success of Iraq?  Listen to Vice President Joe Biden, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration:

“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”

Two words come to mind: they are “evil” and “hypocrite.”  Obama demonized the Iraq War again and again while Bush was trying to fight and win there.  Obama demonized the incredibly successful surge strategy that allowed us to break the back of the insurgency.  But now that same Obama claims credit for what he opposed.

AFGHANISTAN WAR

That same Obama dragged America FAR deeper into the quagmire of Afghanistan than anybody could ever dream blame on Bush.  Because Obama and the Democrat Party didn’t want to appear weak on national security.  So they created a contrast between Iraq (which Bush won) as the “bad war” and Afghanistan (which Obama massively expanded) as the “good war.”

You wait and see: when Obama cuts and runs from Afghanistan, he’s going to frame it as his courageously getting us out of the last of “Bush’s wars.” When Obama massively expanded America’s involvement in Afghanistan and very obviously used Afghanistan as a political device to give Obama a cover from charges that he was a cut and run coward:

As I pointed out before, Charles Krauthammer pointed out the sheer cynical depravity of Barack Obama and the Democrat Party as regards Iraq and Afghanistan by pointing to what the Democrats themselves said:

Bob Shrum, who was a high political operative who worked on the Kerry campaign in ’04, wrote a very interesting article in December of last year in which he talked about that campaign, and he said, at the time, the Democrats raised the issue of Afghanistan — and they made it into “the right war” and “the good war” as a way to attack Bush on Iraq. In retrospect, he writes, that it was, perhaps, he said, misleading. Certainly it was not very wise.

What he really meant to say — or at least I would interpret it — it was utterly cynical. In other words, he’s confessing, in a way, that the Democrats never really supported the Afghan war. It was simply a club with which to bash the [Bush] administration on the Iraq war and pretend that Democrats aren’t anti-war in general, just against the wrong war.

Well, now they are in power, and they are trapped in a box as a result of that, pretending [when] in opposition that Afghanistan is the good war, the war you have to win, the central war in the war on terror. And obviously [they are] now not terribly interested in it, but stuck.

And that’s why Obama has this dilemma. He said explicitly on ABC a few weeks ago that he wouldn’t even use the word “victory” in conjunction with Afghanistan.

And Democrats in Congress have said: If you don’t win this in one year, we’re out of here. He can’t win the war in a year. Everybody knows that, which means he [Obama] has no way out.

Afghanistan was just a way to demagogue Bush in Iraq by describing Afghanistan – where Obama is failing so badly – as “the good war” and Iraq – where Bush won so triumphantly – as “the bad war.” It was beyond cynical; it was flat-out treasonous.

There’s more about how the Democrats – including Democrat voters – did a “cut and run” on their “good war” here.

The thing is that Obama’s “good war” aint going so good.  The thing is that if you examine the casualties of Obama’s “good war” since Obama took it over, Obama is responsible for more than 70 percent of the casualties for the entire war (i.e., compare Obama’s 1,477 casualties in less than four years to Bush’s 630 casualties over eight years of fighting.

Bush limited the Afghanistan War.  Obama radically expanded it.  And now the man who radically expanded the Afghanistan War is trying to A) walk away from the mess that HE created and 2) blame the mess that HE created on Bush just as he’s blamed ALL his failures on Bush.

We are NOT winning in Afghanistan.  We are not GOING to win in Afghanistan – particularly after Obama declared a “timetable for withdrawal” that told the enemy all they have to do is hang on until we crawl out with our tails between our legs and the country will be theirs.  There IS no winning in that hellhole.  As I have pointed out in the past echoing other conservatives, Afghanistan was a terrible place for the U.S. military to fight and be able to exploit our overwhelming air and ground power whereas the flat plains of Iraq was a GREAT place for America to fight and win.

I’ve said that before (just to show you I’m not boasting with 20/20 hindsight):

Bush was rightly resistant to putting too many troops into Afghanistan because he knew enough about history to understand that Afghanistan is a hell-hole. Bush understood that while Iraq – with its flat, mostly open terrain – was perfect for American equipment and tactics, and that mountainous and cave-ridden Afghanistan was most certainly NOT well-suited for American equipment and tactics. Bush knew that the fairly well-educated Iraqi people were capable of some semblance of democracy; and Bush knew that the ignorant, basically stone-age Afghani people were NOT capable of anything resembling self-governance.

Because Bush – however stupid the left wants to say he is – wasn’t 1/20th as massively moronic as Barack Obama is.

Afghanistan is also the place where Obama ignored and overruled his generals.  He was the one who declared that we needed to have a huge surge there (after demonizing Bush’s successful surge in Iraq, fwiw); and then he was the one who refused to listen to his own generals’ recommendations when they said we’d need at least 40,000 troops to do it right – and then after endless indecision finally decided to basically give them too many not to lose but not nearly enough to ever win.

Afghanistan is as much Obama’s war as Iraq was “Bush’s war.”  The difference was that Bush owned his war and accepted responsibility for how it went and how it was fought and Obama will NEVER own ANY of his massive failures.  So as I said above, when Obama cuts and runs from Afghanistan, he’ll deceitfully depict it as getting America out of the last of “Bush’s wars.”  Because that’s the kind of slandering liar that weasel is.

I was wrong about one thing in my past predictions: I thought that Obama would crawl out of Afghanistan before the election in November and make the immediately above claim.  But I submit at this point that Obama can’t do that: because Afghanistan is frankly going so badly with new cases of Afghan soldiers fragging their American partners practically every day that to cut and run NOW would only serve to draw attention to just how catastrophically Obama has truly failed over there.

IRAN

Obama is the president who was mocked by Hillary Clinton for his naive stupidity in assuming he could talk Iran out of its rogue regime intent on acquiring nuclear weapons status.  He is the same naive fool today that he was when Hillarly Clinton mocked him.

And Iran has doubled its centrifuges and made it all but impossible for observers to monitor Iran’s nuclear program while Obama has dithered.

Just as Iran has successfully propped up the Syrian dictatorship while Obama has done nothing.

And I have documented that when craziest nation in world history Iran gets its nukes – which it will – you can COMPLETELY lay the blame for the Armageddon that will surely ensue on Barack Obama and the Democrat Party.

Not that Obama will accept responsibility for his failure of leadership.

OIL

Barack Obama has also been constantly taking complete credit for being the president who has produced more oil than any other president.  Is that true?  No.  The reason that we are producing virtually ANY domestic oil at all right now is because of the Bush administration’s granting the leases that have produced so much American oil. 

“According to EIA’s short-term 2011 outlook, released last week, oil production was significantly higher in 2009 than in the years prior. Obama may have been in office for most of that year, but the oil production numbers are due to action taken before he became president. In 2010, most if not all of the production increase recorded is likely due to action that predates Obama, since Obama didn’t take any major action expanding offshore drilling his first year in office.”

But the Obama administration has taken action since then, as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out on Wednesday. “Over the past two years, the Obama administration has delayed, revoked, suspended, or canceled an enormous range of development opportunities. One month after the President took office, his administration cancelled 77 oil and gas leases in Utah — once the review was complete the administration refused to reinstate a single one. . . . Last January, it announced new restrictions for onshore oil and gas exploration in the Mountain West. Last February, it denied a permit to build a bridge needed to access an oil producing field in Alaska, after the Environmental Protection Agency designated a nearby river an aquatic resource of national importance. Last April, the Administration suspended 61 oil and gas leases in Montana that were issued in 2008 — then announced that all oil and gas leases in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota would be delayed indefinitely. Last May, the President announced a 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling — a moratorium that’s been repeatedly struck down in the courts.”

Bush was the president who signed the leases that Obama is taking credit for.  Obama is the president who has shut down oil production.  And yet Obama is the president who is taking credit for Bush’s success even as he refuses to stand behind his failure.  Something to consider as we face the highest gasoline prices in the history of the republic on this Memorial Day.

HEALTH CARE

ObamaCare was an unpopular fiasco the entire time Obama and Democrats were forcing it down the throats of the American people.  Obama demagogued health care costs – which were actually going DOWN before his ObamaCare boondoggle placed another one-sixth of the economy under government bureaucratic control – to pass his socialist takeover of the health care system.

Health care will be more expensive thanks to Obama and his socialism.  We’re talking $1.76 trillion more than Obama promised.  In fact, it’s already three times as expensive as Obama said it would be and we aint seen nothin’ yet.  That is a fact.

College students are seeing their health care costs skyrocket or be completely removed altogether as insurance companies decide they don’t want to pay for all the “free stuff” that ObamaCare forces them to pay for.

ObamaCare disingenuously imposes all the burden on the doctors and insurers while claiming to give all kinds of benefits.  Which is why 74% of doctors say they will quit, retire early, or see fewer patients if ObamaCare stands.  ObamaCare shennanigans, higher costs and fewer doctors mean that you will have LESS chance of actually seeing a doctor under this incredibly failed program.

Obama also swore up one side and down the other that he would NEVER raise taxes on the middle class.  And yet ObamaCare is a massive tax hike on ordinary people.  Because 75% of the 21 new tax hikes will fall on the middle class.

And where’s Obama to accept responsibility for his failed program???

ECONOMY

Question: Which president left his successor with a bubble collapse that vaporized $7.1 trillion in American wealth and wiped out 78% of the Nasdaq portolio?  Answer: William Jefferson Clinton.  But we don’t tend to remember the terrible Dotcom bubble recession that Bill Clinton left for George Bush to inherit because of three reasons: 1) the sheer unmitigated bias of the mainstream media; 2) the disasterous 9/11 attack (that can likewise be laid almost entirely at Clinton’s feet as he gutted the military and intelligence community and left America both weak and blind such that Osama bin Laden declared America to be a “paper tiger” and began to plot his devastating attack); and 3) because unlike Barack Obama, George Bush wasn’t a pitiful whiner and accepted responsibility for the economy.

The fact of the matter is that George Bush began his presidency with a huge double whammy.  Not that the media will ever assign responsibility for it to Clinton the way they were determined to assign responsibility to Bush.  Because there is a longstanding propaganda meme according to which the mainstream media will NEVER blame a Democrat for a failure and will ALWAYS find a way to blame a Republican.

Barack Obama has demonized Bush for the “Great Recession,” literally refuses to cite statistics that consider the first year of his presidency to create the rhetorical statistical illusion that his presidency has been better than it actally was, demonized Republicans for “obstructionism“, and taken credit for his “recovery”.  The truth is that none of these things is true.

Let’s take the “Great Recession” first.  Obama has demonized Republicans over and over again for “lack of regulation” and “failed policies” causing that recession.  Bullcrap.  The single entity that resulted in this collapse was Government Sponsored Enterprise Fannie Mae and its twin Freddie Mac.  I’ve documented that fact over and over again on this blog:

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/aei-article-how-fannie-and-freddie-blew-up-the-economy/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/barney-frank-and-democrat-party-most-responsible-for-2008-economic-collapse/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/2009/08/03/who-really-exploded-your-economy-liberals-or-conservatives/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/democrats-set-up-america-for-2008-collapse-and-barack-obama-became-their-king/

http://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/2009/12/31/with-eyes-finally-wide-open-reconsider-why-the-economy-collapsed-in-the-first-place/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/democrat-lies-about-their-key-role-in-2008-economic-collapse-reaches-laughable-proportions/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/2009/07/08/biden-we-misread-the-economy-and-its-all-the-republicans-fault/

http://digitalartpress.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/video-proof-democrat-party-warned-responsible-for-fannie-mae-freddie-mac-economic-crisis-repost/

https://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/barney-frank-video-proves-democrats-at-core-of-2008-economic-collapse/

And since Democrats took over and issued regulations up the yin yang and then up the whazoo of aforementioned yin yang, we’ve continued to have clear examples of the very things Democrats demonized Republicans over.  And Obama is setting up America and the world for an ultimate $600 trillion collapse that will make the one in 2008 look like a warm, sunny day compared to Armageddon.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed FIRST before ANY private sector entity to initiate the collapse – just as conservative economists had predicted a full decade before the collapse occurred:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

And in fact the private sector entities such as Lehman Brothers that collapsed did so because they suddenly found themselves holding BILLIONS of dollars in sub-prime mortgage backed securities that had been issued by the GSEs that the Democrats created and ran into the ground and protected – and refused to allow Republicans to regulate (Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prior to its collapse and was stopped by Democrats every single time).  In fact Bush was trying to regulate Fannie and Freddie all the way back to 2003 when we still had time to prevent the coming collapse.  Democrats used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to force the market to sell homes to people who couldn’t afford those homes; and when the bubble burst and Lehman Bros. and others found themselves holding “toxic assets” that they had purchased from Fannie and Freddie, they couldn’t cover their Democrat-caused losses and collapsed.

Nixon was president during the moon landing, but Democrats and liberals have never and will never give him credit because they wanted to give one of their own credit for the success.  Bush was president during the 2008 collapse, and that was all liberals needed to say to blame him for the entire fiasco regardless of how many Democrat shennanigans had gone into that collapse.

And here we are, nearly four years later, and all of Obama’s promises based on his anti-Bush demagoguery to: 1) not increase the debt ceiling; to 2) cut the deficit in half during his first term; to 3) cut the debt after demonizing Bush for his debt.  Obama imposed the most massive one-time spending binge in the history of planet earth and promised that unemployment would be 5.5% by now.  Instead not only has unemployment been over 8% longer than ANY time in history since the Great Depression, but in fact unemployment has actually been worse than had Obama’s own experts said it would be had we NOT wasted and pissed away $862 billion that we can never get back.

Obamanomics has been one catastrophic failure after another.  Here we are, with median household income under Obama nearly TWICE as bad than they were during the Great Recession – whether you want to blame Bush for that recession or not.  Here we are, with more poor people devastated by Obama’s economy than at any time in history.  And that didn’t happen under Bush’s watch, you liberal liars.  Somehow, it wasn’t Bush who put more people into poverty than ever before; it wasn’t Bush who devastated median household incomes as people move in with parents and relatives because the economy has failed them; it has been Obama.  It was OBAMA who made one out of every six Americans poor.

And Obama’s stimulus cost Americans an incredible and frankly insane $278,000 per job.  We can’t afford any more damn Obama jobs!!!

Obama is a liar and his “success” is based on lies – as you will see for yourself if you just try to match his rhetoric to painful American reality under his presidency:

But it’s Bush’s fault that Obama did it.  Because no president in history has ever abrogated his responsibilities or refused to claim responsibility for his failure to live up to his responsibilities than has Obama.

Obama has been the president for the last four years, people, not Bush.

I began talking about the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.  The only “man on the moon” now – thanks to Obama’s policies – is none other than Barack Obama: because this disgraced leader will surely assume no responsibility for anything that happens on the earth that lies so far below his lofty but meaningless rhetoric.

It’s past time to hold him responsible and fire his ass.

Obama’s ‘Major Policy’ Speech Last Thursday Documents He Is A Failure. His Abrogation Of The Rule Of Law On Friday Documents He Is A Fascist.

I thought this blog article which cites USA Today hit part of Obama’s trouble right in the testicles:

“Major economic speech” by Obama planned for Thursday
Posted by: ST on June 13, 2012 at 9:20 am

Via The USA Today:

President Obama will seek to draw economic contrasts with Republican opponent Mitt Romney in what campaign aides are billing as a major speech on Thursday.

In announcing the address at a community college in Cleveland, the Obama campaign said the president will describe his vision as “ensuring that our economy is built to last and restoring economic security for the middle class.”

Obama also plans to condemn Romney’s vision, which the campaign said is “based on the same failed economic policies that brought on the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

“Romney Economics is familiar and troubling,” said the Obama campaign. “More budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy; fewer rules for Wall Street — the same formula that benefited a few, but that crashed our economy and devastated the middle class.”

Obama is not expected to unveil any new policy proposals of his own; the president is still trying to persuade Congress to adopt elements of a jobs bill he proposed last year.

(Bolded emphasis added by me)

Translation: there’s nothing new here. It’ll just more of the same old song and dance we’ve been hearing for the last three and a half years, jacked up on spinsanity with a generous helping of predictable Democrat class warfare and demagoguery – given in front of (presumably) a captive audience of college students (shocking).

In other news, dog bites man.

BTW, here’s Obama’s fundraising schedule for this week, in the event you actually thought his “presidential responsibilities” excuse for not campaigning for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in the Wisconsin recall election was legitimate. Just sayin’ …

Obama’s major speech is a giant bag of wind from the most prolific windbag who ever lived.  Check.

Obama is completely out of ideas.  Check check.

Ninety percent of Obama’s speech was just a slightly different way for Obama to demonize Mitt Romney.  And in what had been built up as a major policy speech at that.  Only ten percent of this speech Obama gave in Ohio on Thursday, April 14 AT BEST discussed what Obama would do if re-elected – which frankly amounted to a steadfast refusal to own up to ANY kind of responsibility for his last four years and a doubling down on what has already been demonstrated to have failed.  The bottom line is that we are currently cursed with a president who doesn’t want to talk about the past but doesn’t have any ideas about the future.

It’s not just me claiming Obama’s “major speech” was a major failure.

Consider leftist Jonathon Alter from MSNBC who said it was “one of the worst speeches I’ve ever heard Barack Obama make.”  And that was actually KIND, given the fact that “Before the speech was over, MSNBC’s Mike O’Brien begged the president to stop.”  While conservatives, of course, are saying, “Don’t you let them interrupt you, Barry Hussein.  By all means, please continue.  You were saying the private sector’s doing fine, right?”

That’s from MSNBC, which without any question is THE most überbiased überObama propaganda out there (see here and here for a couple quick examples).

The reliably leftist Washington Post’s leftist writer Dana Milbank – and this woman is a raving leftie – said that “instead of going to Ohio on Thursday with a compelling plan. for the future, the president gave Americans a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy.”  This in an article titled, “Skip the falsehoods, Mr. President, and give us a plan.”

I mean, thanks for confirming what I’ve been saying all along that Obama is a complete liar without a clue or a plan, but I can’t help but admit my surprise, Dana.  I mean, coming from a woman who once argued that if Obama comes across as stupid, it’s only because he’s just so incredibly brilliant that we frankly don’t deserve his greatness.  Which of course followed the liberal script.

It’s not adequate to say that Barack Obama is a failure; because Barack Obama is an epic failure.

Essentially, Obama’s campaign is about trying to recreate his now thoroughly disillusioned 2008 base.  And the only way that he can do that – because he is a completely failed leader who cannot legislate or compromise – is to issue a “jump the shark” series of executive orders that frankly abrogate the Constitution and the rule of law in America and set a terrifying precedent.  So he demonized his rhetoric of a bogus “war on women” (see here and here and here and here for how that’s working out for him) and then jumped that shark to “come out” in favor of gay marriage in blatant contradiction of his previous posture (see here and here for how that’s working out for him) – and then he just jumped that shark on Friday to abrogate the Constitution in order to recklessly pander to Hispanics.

And what Obama did on Friday was directly related to the colossal turd he laid on Thursday.  Obama HAS to keep jumping the shark because this complete failure SOMEHOW has to keep the support of a base that would otherwise abandon him like a liberal mommy having her baby aborted.

Consider what Obama himself said in the exact context of what he proceeded to do on Friday:

“The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you, not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.”

And:

“I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the books. That doesn’t mean I don’t know very well the real pain and heartbreak that deportations cause. I share your concerns and I understand them,” he said Monday. “We work every day to make sure we are enforcing flawed laws in the most humane possible way.”

And:

“America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that. That’s part of my job,” Obama said in March 2011 at a town hall event hosted by the Spanish-language television network Univision. […]

“Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the judiciary has to interpret the laws,” he said. […]

“There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”

Apparently, Obama has limited powers unless he a) gives a crappy speech and b) is losing an election.  Then there is no law, no Constitution, and no democracy.

Which all goes to say that what Obama did was a) un-American (“not the way our system works“); b) anti-democratic (“That’s not the way our democracy functions“); and c) unconstitutional (“That’s not how our Constitution is written“).

When I say Obama is a fascist – and I’ve said it before at length – I mean it as a highly accurate descriptive term rather than merely as a rhetorical ad hominem.  And Barack Obama is a fascist BY OBAMA’S OWN PREVIOUS ADMISSIONS ABOUT WHAT HIS ACT ON FRIDAY CONSTITUTED when he set aside the separation of powers and imposed by “Führer-fiat” what the Congress had explicitly refused.

Liberal progressive legal expert Jonathan Turley (along with a number of other constitutional experts) had this to say about Obama’s action in setting aside the rule of law for his political expedience:

“The president is using executive power to do things Congress has refused to do, and that does fit a disturbing pattern of expansion of executive power under President Obama. In many ways, President Obama has fulfilled the dream of an imperial presidency that Richard Nixon strived for. On everything from (the Defense of Marriage Act) to the gaming laws, this is a president who is now functioning as a super legislator. He is effectively negating parts of the criminal code because he disagrees with them. That does go beyond the pale.”

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

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

We are watching the unravelling of America as Obama that if his presidency doesn’t succeed, America won’t succeed.

America is losing steam on all economic fronts as we speak.  Europe is falling apart at the seams.  The Middle East is going to hell.  Scandal after scandal is erupting that directly involved the White House.  And Barack Obama is doing more fundraisers than the last five presidents COMBINED.

America doesn’t matter to this Turd-in-Chief.  He’s willing to sell out American foreign policy to the Russians as long as they’ll help him win in November.  And given that we already can see right in front of our faces that Obama is a fascist dictator in his first term, there’s no telling what will happen if he gets a second term and is answerable to nobody and to nothing.

There is absolutely no question that the constant stream of top secret leaks are coming directly out of the White House and that vital secrets are being revealed as a means to create propaganda depicting Obama as a “tough” leader.  General Jack Keane said that the only times that America had ever suffered this much damage to its security was when traitors were selling secrets to our adversaries.  We are literally talking about treason.  

It is VERY possible and even probable that Obama as president declassified vital secrets such as the existence of SEAL Team 6, such as the details of the bin Laden raid and precisely what America found in the compound, such as the top secret operation known as Olympic Games and the computer virus known as Stuxnet, such as the drone missions, such as his use of a “kill list.”  Why would he do something that depraved?  Why, in order to sell long-term American security in exchange for short-term votes, that’s why.  Even Diane Feinstein has publicly stated that no nation will trust America for years to come as a result of these leaks, and it is a fact that intelligence operatives who have cooperated with America have been captured and killed or imprisoned, with far more of that to come.  If Obama declassified these and other secrets that have been leaked in an avalanche unlike anything the American intelligence community has ever seen, Obama will have legalized treason.  As commander-in-chief, a president has the right to declassify secrets.  But no president in American history until Obama will have so despised America that he would see this nation burn if he doesn’t win his election.

Even the very left-leaning Daily Beast is outraged at our Traitor-in-Chief:

Last week, the Times ran two sensational front-page articles, one detailing the president’s personally administered list of terror suspects targeted for assassination—the so-called “kill list,”—the other a book excerpt about the origins of the cyberwarfare program, codenamed Olympic Games, out of which came the Stuxnet virus. Both pieces were widely seen as boosting the president’s credibility on national security just as the 2012 presidential race kicked into high gear. Both pieces cite anonymous current and former high-level officials in the administration. The White House has denied that the leaks were authorized, calling the suggestion “grossly irresponsible.” […]

This is the nugget of the problem. If information is too dangerous to be public, it’s supposed to be classified. If it isn’t, then it isn’t—full stop. Information isn’t classified—at least it isn’t supposed to be—for political gain or to cover up wrongdoing, or so high-level government officials can unilaterally dole out secrets to their favorite reporters at elite media organizations, or so well-connected politicians can manage the news cycle, undermine enemies, or win allies.

Officially, there is no middle ground. Sadly, leaks out of the Obama administration are beginning to look like official policy. Days before the Stuxnet and kill-list stories in the Times, columnist Glen Greenwald highlighted administration leaks to Hollywood filmmakers for an upcoming production about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. This, amid the harshest crackdown on unauthorized leaks by any president ever—the Obama administration’s docket of six leak prosecutions under the Espionage Act dwarfs any previous administration’s persecution of loose-lipped officials.

One thing is obvious: Obama only goes after leakers who don’t politically benefit him.

Obama has a long history of personally demonizing people while doing the exact same thing that he demonized them for.  Think of Gitmo, when Obama demonized George Bush – only to keep Gitmo open himself in direct repudiation of his entire presidency by his very own rhetoric.  The same goes for the Patriot Act, for rendition, for military commissions, for domestic eavesdropping and for a long list of other issues.  The liberal New York Times literally accused Bush of “shredding the Constitution.”  Who is shredding it now by the very rhetoric of the left???  In the same way, it is none other than Barack Obama who has violated civil liberties in a manner that goes so far beyond anything that Bush ever did it is almost funny.  The very few liberals who are not abject moral hypocrites (eg., here and here) have pointed this fact out, but the vast majority of liberals who rabidly demonized Bush with froth drooling out of their mouths are nowhere to be seen now that the fascist in the Oval Office is the man they put in there.

Think of Obama’s demonization of Republicans being in the pockets of lobbyists and his lying promises that he would put an end to it.  In fact it’s worse under Obama than it has EVER been, and that according to the liberal Washington Post.  Obama demonized George Bush over the national debt and lied to the American people that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.  Instead the disgrace has given us more debt than all the previous presidents in history COMBINED.  Obama demonized Bush as irresponsible and even unpatriotic for his debt; now Obama’s debt dwarfs Bush’s.  Obama demonized George Bush as a failed leader for needing to raise the debt ceiling and voting against that debt ceiling himself; now Obama has THREE TIMES raised the debt ceiling to levels never seen in the history of the human race and demonizing Republicans who didn’t want to vote for it.

All again pointing out the fact that Obama leaking secrets that politically benefit him while at the same time attacking anybody who leaks secrets that doesn’t politically benefit him is par for the course.  Which reminds me of the fact that this man who is supposed to be working so hard to get America back on track recently completely his 100th round of golf – equivalent to taking four months off his job.

Barack Obama is a cynical liar and hypocrite without shame, without honor and without decency.  And that is simply a fact of history.  And so are his followers who will vote for him no matter what he does no matter how offended they were when the other side did a small fraction of what Obama has done.

That’s actually a big part of the reason Obama is pushing all of these leaks as a means of “boosting the president’s credibility on national security.”  He KNOWS that liberals are abject moral hypocrites who will vote for him even if he is murdering American citizens without any kind of trial with predator drones and even if he is personally selecting which terrorists live and which ones die with his political adviser David Axelrod sitting with him.  Obama knows that the left will vote for him no matter what he does because he knows that they are as much fascist hypocrites as he is.  It’s the independents he wants – and these people WANT the president to be like Bush and be tough on terrorist murderers.

And if Obama has to betray America to sell himself to these independents, what is that to him???  Obama is a man who never saw himself as an American to begin with.

Barack Obama is THE most evil man who has ever contaminated the White House.  I saw that in what might even be called a vision the moment I first saw those Jeremiah Wright tapes and realized that Obama had sat for twenty-plus years under the “spiritual leader” and “mentor” Jeremiah Wright and remained for sermon after sermon of this anti-American and racist Marxist.  In my very first political article ever, I betrayed both my naivety and understanding all at once.  I predicted that Democrats would rightly reject Barack Obama in favor of Hillary Clinton due to the Jeremiah Wright revelations; I was wrong because I simply failed to understand how truly depraved Democrats and the Democrat Party had become.  But I also rightly perceived the evil of Obama.  My last words in that very first article of mine were:

If Senator Barack Obama’s presidential aspirations aren’t done for now, they should be. If he wins the nomination, I have every confidence that he will be destroyed in the general election when the Wright issue comes back with a vengeance. Until this week, I believed Senator Hillary Clinton was a far more beatable candidate than Senator Barack Obama. I was wrong.

Barack Obama is far more wrong for sitting under the teaching of such a hateful man for so many years. In doing so, the most liberal Senator in the nation underscores just how extreme his views actually are, and just how dangerous a Barack Obama presidency would be for this country.

Republicans would have had to nominate David Duke for president to even BEGIN to come close to what Democrats did in nominating Barack Obama.  And this nation was asking for it and has dearly paid for it ever since that evil day on June 3, 2008 when he received enough delegates to win the Democrat nomination prior to the economic crash. 

This is God damned America until Obama is thrown out of office.  Now that we’ve seen this failure in action for four years, America has no excuse.  The soul of this nation is at stake in November, and America needs God far, far more than God needs America.

Choosing Policies Based On Character, Or Color: Please Choose Wisely

It was the late 1980s, and I experienced something that will probably puzzle me for the rest of my life on this earth.

I had ordered “Blazer Cable” so that I could see the Portland Trailblazer home games.  And in order to help pay for it – and to make it more fun to watch – I got a few friends to go in on it with me.

One night, one of my friends brought one of his friends over on a night when the Blazers were playing the Chicago Bulls.  I thought the guy had some faulty wiring from about the moment I met him, but, what they hey.

In any event, to get to the point, at some point during the game my friend’s friend was sitting on the couch alone with me (everybody else was either in the kitchen or in the bathroom, as it was halftime).  They were interviewing Michael Jordan.  And he looked over at me and said, “Would you trade places with Michael Jordan?”

This was like the stupidest questions I had ever heard, and I’ve heard quite a few stupid questions.

“Of course I would,” I said.  I mean, duh.  Michael Jordan was strikingly handsome, he was filthy rich, he was incredibly successful, and he was one of the best athletes in the history of the human race.  And I wouldn’t want to trade places with him why, exactly?

Then came the only possible answer.

My friend’s friend starting giggling.  I can’t really call it laughing.

“What the hell is so funny?” I asked.

“You’d trade places with a black guy,” he said, still giggling.

Well, yeah.  I waited to hear the cross-eyed albino boy start playing a banjo.

At the time, I was too astonished to be angry at the guy.  It was like encountering someone who – in spite of massive evidence to the contrary – believed he was invisible to the human eye.

I’ve thought about that few second encounter a number of times since.  It still amazes me to this very day.  How can somebody possibly get that stupid?

In the years before that moment, and since then, I had known some black men who were total turds.  And I have known some black men whom I regarded as having superior character to my own.

Lumping people into racial groups and then judging people on the basis of the color of their skin is every bit as stupid as not wanting to change places with Michael Jordan simply “because he’s black.”  But I see it being done all the time these days.  By the left.

I was raised to regard character, intelligence, virtue, attitude and attractiveness of personality as the qualities that determined the value of a person.  It had never even occurred to me to think that the color of one’s skin made on more or less valuable.

I was also raised to want to continue to improve myself.  I was raised to want to become a better human being, to improve my station in, and my quality of, life.

I think that’s why I react so viscerally to the racial attitude inherent in modern liberalism.  To pit people against each other on the basis of color and bigotry, and to label white people as being evil and somehow complicit in some kind of white power structure is bad enough.  But it goes beyond that.

It’s self-taught, self-limiting perpetual victimhood.  It’s providing a class of people with a ready-made excuse for failure; it’s discouraging them from even really bothering to try, and rewarding them for not trying; it’s an evil exchange in which one accepts all kinds of control over their lives in exchange for destructive and cancerous welfare; it’s wallowing in an attitude of bitterness and even self-loathing that dooms one to a life of misery.  It is a guaranteed perpetuation of failure.

It is a completely alien worldview to me.  Every bit as much as that idiot who wouldn’t trade places with Michael Jordan “because he’s black.”

I made the earlier comment that I’ve met black men whom I regarded as being superior to me in the thing that I value most – character.  They were examples to me, and as a result of their friendship, I became a better person.  I’ve also known a number of white men whose superior character helped me advance in my own life.  The point is that you desire excellence, and you take it wherever you can find it.

I have a feeling that Pastor C.L. Bryant would be one of those men, were I fortunate enough to know him.

From ScottFactor.com:

Slavery, Courtesy Of Liberals Everywhere
July 27th, 2010

Comedian Eddie Murphy once joked that Lincoln forgot to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and that people should go out and claim their slaves. I’m here to tell you that the Democratic Party took that request seriously and have claimed their slaves.
When 98 percent of African-Americans vote Democrat, that tells me that they are psychological and economic slaves to a Party that structures its fiscal policy to keep the black man down.

Welfare policy, government-forced affirmative action, reduced testing requirements for minorities…these are all things that don’t serve to elevate people to greatness, rather, they keep people down.

This video is a movie trailer about a man who proposes that these slaves to the liberals run away from the slave plantation that liberals have created. Its creator, Pastor C.L. Bryant, holds an honest discussion about black conservatives in America. Quote the man, “Run away from the slavery of tyranny toward the blessings of liberty!” Check it out:

David Horowitz rightly calls African-Americans “the human shields of the Democrat Party.”  It simply a fact of history that modern African-Americans have come hat-in-hand to the Party of Slavery, and the Party of the Ku Klux Klan.

That analogy illustrates a simple fact that was well-known only a couple years after the Civil War ended:

And the above isn’t a cartoon from some “right wing” loon, but from the venerable and quite left-leaning Harper’s Magazine.

Even the left-leaning historian Eric Foner observed that:

“In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life” (Foner 1989, p. 425–426).

I wrote the following as part of a comment a few weeks ago to point how how shockingly far black Americans have gone from what should have been their core:

Let us never forget that Democrats were the party of slavery. And that Democrats were the creators of the Ku Klux Klan. It literally took a war in which Democrats had to be militarily crushed to keep them from enslaving people based on the color of their skin. And thank God for the Republican Party and a Republican president for freeing the slaves from Democrats. Let’s not forget that Woodrow Wilson – Democrat president and the father of the progressive movement – RE-segregated the military after Republicans had DE-segregated it. Let us not forget that Wilson cheered the racist propaganda film “Birth of a Nation.” Let us never forget that the national party convention that was so directly tied to the Ku Klux Klan that it was called the “Klanbake” was the 1924 DEMOCRAT convention. Let’s not forget that FDR’s New Deal directly attacked blacks and kept them from getting jobs.

Few know about the incredibly racist history of pro-Democrat labor unions (see also here), but it is both very real and very ugly.  And progressive Democrats were at the very core of it.

Few have bothered to learn the Democrat Party’s profound legacy of racism.  Or the Republican Party’s history of standing up to protect the rights, freedoms and dignities of black Americans.

As we move into the 1950s we find that a Democrat Governor, Orval Faubus, called out the National Guard in 1957 to prevent black children being integrated into white schools. And again, a Republican president had to rise to the occasion, with Dwight D. Eisenhower sending in US Army airborne troops to enforce racial equality that had once again been opposed by Democrats. And of course Alabama Democrat Governor George Wallace would fight for racist segregation all over again in 1963. It was Democrat John F. Kennedy who sent in the troops this time. But few are aware that that same John Kennedy had previously voted AGAINST the Civil Rights Act.

And let us not forget that both the famous Martin Luther King, Sr. and his even more famous son were both registered Republicans. It’s a shame that the pseudo civil rights leaders of today aren’t fit to carry Martin Luther King’s shoes, much less criticize his party affiliation.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglas BOTH fundamentally opposed the quotas and preferential treatment that liberals have employed to create the equivalent of the Democrat “house negro.” Jack Greenberg of the NAACP said in the 1950s that “The chief problem with quotas is that they introduce a potentially retrogressive concept into the cherished notion of individual equality.”  But it is readily obvious today that the NAACP has fallen far from it’s roots.

Let’s listen to Frederick Douglas, escaped slave and greatest of all champions of civil rights, has to say:

Frederick Douglass ridiculed the idea of racial quotas, as suggested by Martin Delany, as “absurd as a matter of practice,” noting that it implied blacks “should constitute one-eighth of the poets, statesmen, scholars, authors and philosophers.” Douglass emphasized that “natural equality is a very different thing from practical equality; and…though men may be potentially equal, circumstances may for a time cause the most striking inequalities.”77 On another occasion, in opposing “special efforts” for the black freedmen, Douglass argued that they “might ‘serve to keep up very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish’ by promoting an image of blacks as privileged wards of the state.”

So now conservatives are suddenly racists for agreeing with Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr. and against liberals and the vile pseudo values that the greatest civil rights leaders in history condemned?

Richard Nixon, whom Democrats love to make the poster boy for “Republican racism,” was in fact the first president to introduce the racial quotas that Democrats have been trying to implement and expand ever since.  Which is to say that, if you want to argue that Nixon was a racist, Democrats have been baptizing themselves in Nixon’s racism ever since.  And if Nixon employed a racially immoral strategy to win whites, the Democrat Party has employed the flip-side of that same immoral strategy to win blacks.

Liberals are biblical – and never in a good way:

PSA 52:3 You love evil more than good, Falsehood more than speaking what is right.
MIC 3:2 “You who hate good and love evil, Who tear off their skin from them And their flesh from their bones

History proves again and again that DEMOCRATS are the racists, and conservatives have stood for genuine equality again and again.

There are men and women of basic virtue in every race, and even every creed.  The problem is that there are fewer and fewer of these, while the men and women of apathy, degeneration and self-centeredness abound.

Slavery is a terrible thing.  But it is even worse when one willingly applies the shackles to his or her own wrists and ankles and demands the right to a government-imposed easy way out, in pathetic contrast to the principle from an Aesop fable, “Better to starve free than be a fat slave.”

Watch the video.  One of the amazing and tragic facts that emerge is that, with liberal ideology and Democrat policies paving the way, blacks have instituted their own self-genocide, murdering more than one-third of their very own children.

How Exactly Did Bill Clinton And Rahm Emanuel NOT Violate US Code 600 In Quid Pro Quo Offer To Sestak?

First of all, the idea that a former president like Bill Clinton would be the go-between between the White House and Joe Sestak, bearing an offer that amounted to the equivalent of an unpaid Pez dispenser of a position, doesn’t pass the smell test.

I mean, who on earth seriously thinks a former admiral and current Congressman would take an unpaid intern-level position in exchange for running for the US Senate?

How many of the other members of Obama’s intelligence advisory board can you name off the top of your head without Googling it?  ZERO, just like Obama’s nickname, that’s how many.

Sestak waited until the White House announced their “narrative” in this corruption before telling his own version so they could get their stories straight.  Joe Sestak’s brother, who is also Joe Sestak’s campaign manager, gets a phone call to better hone the background details of the White House’s “narrative.”  Bill Clinton visits the White House yesterday to receive the details of HIS role in the narrative.

And then the “narrative” gets released to the public on the Friday before the Memorial Day recess and weekend.

Nothing slimy there, folks.

Bottom line: Joe Sestak knows if he’s the guy who brings down the Obama administration, that’s it for his liberal Democrat career; he also knows that he needs Obama and the DNC to help back, fund, and support his campaign if he’s going to have any chance of winning going forward.  So he’s basically been saying, “I’m not going to say another word about the White House’s role until they tell me what they want me to say they said.”

Every single player in this disgrace of our national political system has an incentive to lie.

Charles Krauthammer pointed this out today: The documents released by the White House indicate a two month effort to persuade Sestak to drop out of the Senate primary against Arlen Specter.  Unless the phone call between Clinton and Sestak lasted something like 86,400 minutes, there were other contacts and other offers.  Let’s hear about all those, too.

Like I’ve already stated, I have a very hard time believing that the “job” Joe Sestak says the White House offered him in exchange for withdrawing from the Senate race was nothing but a trivial unpaid advisory position.  Nevertheless, even if that’s what it was, it nevertheless WAS a “position.”

So here’s the language of US Code 600:

Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment,
position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit,
provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of
Congress, or any special consideration in obtaining any such
benefit, to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any
political activity or for the support of or opposition to any
candidate or any political party in connection with any general or
special election to any political office, or in connection with any
primary election or political convention or caucus held to select
candidates for any political office, shall be fined under this
title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

How was that code not violated???  “Any position.”  That would encompass even the unpaid position on the president’s intelligence advisory board.  Joe Sestak had repeatedly said that he was offered a “job” (which generally involves compensation) in exchange for dropping out of the Senate race so Obama’s guy could win.  That’s a quid pro quo exchange, and it is a clear violation of the law.

Is this going away?

When told about Clinton’s involvement, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who has been leading the charge for more details on the allegation, said, “This is punishable by prison. This is a felony.”

I guess not.

Another question, given the fact that Obama supporters are citing cases involving Bill Clinton and alleging (without any evidence) that Bush did this crap too: Barack Obama promised he’d be a “new politician” who would change the nature of Washington.  How has he not just flat-out lied about that in the most cynical way?

One way or another, the law was broken, any claim to the integrity of the Democrat political machine has been demolished, and the Obama White House has been verified to be more Nixonian than “ethical.”

As a final matter, it needs to be pointed out that this corrupt White House now has a PATTERN OF CORRUPTION:

Sestak-gate: White House Offered Romanoff Job, Too
Wednesday, 26 May 2010 08:18 PM
By Jim Meyers

Allegations that the White House offered Joe Sestak a job in exchange for dropping out of the Pennsylvania Senate race echo an earlier report of a job offer to candidate Andrew Romanoff in Colorado.

On Sept. 27, 2009, the Denver Post reported that the Obama administration offered Senate candidate Romanoff a position if he canceled plans to run for the Democratic nomination against incumbent Sen. Michael Bennet.

The paper said the job offer, which specified particular jobs, reportedly was delivered by Jim Messina, Obama’s deputy chief of staff. One position the Post cited was a job at USAID, the foreign aid agency.

And, oh, yeah, that one DEFINITELY violates US Code 600 and a bunch of other laws.  Not that the offer to Joe Sestak didn’t, too.

Who would have ever thought we’d see Chicago-style politics from Barack Obama?

Question: what sounds better, “Barack Hussein Nixon” or “Richard Milhous Hussein”?

Obama White House Accused By Democrat Of Federal Crime In Specter, Bennet Races

Richard Nixon was honest to a fault compared to Barack Obama – and Obama is displaying corruption in only a year (Nixon was into his second term before he got caught).

We have Obama on video telling what we now recognize were seven major lies in less than two minutes when he was lying his way to the presidency:

[Youtube link]

We’ve got Obama displaying a shocking pattern of corruption and lack of transparency in a case involving a friend and a sacred-cow program.  It is also a case of a president firing an Inspector General for the crime of investigating a crime in a manner that was not merely Nixonian, but Stalinist (link1; link2; link3; link4).  Rest assured that Obama has his own enemies list.

The case of the illegal firing of Inspector General Gerald Walpin is far from over as it works its way through the legal system.

Getting closer to what we now have before us, we have the cases of the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, and a list of political bribery shenanigans that gets too long to follow.

All from an administration that deceitfully promised unprecedented transparency and openness and continues to shamelessly represent itself as being the best thing since sliced bread.

But this story – supported by the testimony of Democrats – may be in a whole new class of corruption:

White House Accused of Federal Crime in Specter, Bennet Races
By Jeffrey Lord on 2.22.10 @ 6:09AM

“Whoever solicits or receives … any….thing of value, in consideration of the promise of support or use of influence in obtaining for any person any appointive office or place under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” — 18 USC Sec. 211 — Bribery, Graft and Conflicts of Interest: Acceptance or solicitation to obtain appointive public office

“In the face of a White House denial, U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak stuck to his story yesterday that the Obama administration offered him a “high-ranking” government post if he would not run against U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
February 19, 2010

“D.C. job alleged as attempt to deter Romanoff”
—Denver Post
September 27, 2009

A bombshell has just exploded in the 2010 elections.

For the second time in five months, the Obama White House is being accused — by Democrats — of offering high ranking government jobs in return for political favors. What no one is reporting is that this is a violation of federal law that can lead to prison time, a fine or both, according to Title 18, Chapter 11, Section 211 of the United States Code.

The jobs in question? Secretary of the Navy and a position within the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The favor requested in return? Withdrawal from Senate challenges to two sitting United States Senators, both Democrats supported by President Obama. The Senators are Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Michael Bennet in Colorado.

On Friday, Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak, the Democrat challenging Specter for re-nomination, launched the controversy by accusing the Obama White House of offering him a federal job in exchange for his agreeing to abandon his race against Specter.

In August of 2009, the Denver Post reported last September, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Jim Messina “offered specific suggestions” for a job in the Obama Administration to Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff, a former state House Speaker, if Romanoff would agree to abandon a nomination challenge to U.S. Senator Michael Bennet. Bennet was appointed to the seat upon the resignation of then-Senator Ken Salazar after Salazar was appointed by Obama to serve as Secretary of the Interior. According to the Post, the specific job mentioned was in the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Post cited “several sources who described the communication to The Denver Post.”

The paper also describes Messina as “President Barack Obama’s deputy chief of staff and a storied fixer in the White House political shop.” Messina’s immediate boss is White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Sestak is standing by his story. Romanoff refused to discuss it with the Denver paper. In both instances the White House has denied the offers took place. The Sestak story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, reported by Thomas Fitzgerald, can be found here, While the Denver Post story, reported by Michael Riley, from September 27, 2009, can be read here.

In an interview with Philadelphia television anchor Larry Kane, who broke the story on Larry Kane: Voice of Reason, a Comcast Network show, Sestak says someone — unnamed — in the Obama White House offered him a federal job if he would quit the Senate race against Specter, the latter having the support of President Obama, Vice President Biden and, in the state itself, outgoing Democratic Governor Ed Rendell. Both Biden and Rendell are longtime friends of Specter, with Biden taking personal credit for convincing Specter to leave the Republican Party and switch to the Democrats. Rendell served as a deputy to Specter when the future senator’s career began as Philadelphia’s District Attorney, a job Rendell himself would eventually hold.

Asked Kane of Sestak in the Comcast interview:

“Is it true that you were offered a high ranking job in the administration in a bid to get you to drop out of the primary against Arlen Specter?”

“Yes” replied Sestak.

Kane: “Was it Secretary of the Navy?”

To which the Congressman replied:

“No comment.”

Sestak is a retired Navy admiral.

In the Colorado case, the Post reported that while Romanoff refused comment on a withdrawal-for-a-job offer, “several top Colorado Democrats described Messina’s outreach to Romanoff to The Post, including the discussion of specific jobs in the administration. They asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.”

The Post also noted that the day after Romanoff announced his Senate candidacy, President Obama quickly announced his endorsement of Senator Bennet.

The discovery that the White House has now been reported on two separate occasions in two different states to be deliberately committing a potential violation of federal law — in order to preserve the Democrats’ Senate majority — could prove explosive in this highly political year. The 60-seat majority slipped to 59 seats with the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, a Democrat, and the election of Republican Senator Scott Brown. Many political analysts are suggesting Democrats could lose enough seats to lose their majority altogether.

This is the stuff of congressional investigations and cable news alerts, as an array of questions will inevitably start being asked of the Obama White House.

Here are but a few lines of inquiry, some inevitably straight out of Watergate.

* Who in the White House had this conversation with Congressman Sestak?

* Did Deputy Chief of Staff Messina have the same conversation with Sestak he is alleged to have had with Romanoff — and has he or anyone else on the White House staff had similar conversations with other candidates that promise federal jobs for political favors?

* They keep logs of these calls. How quickly will they be produced?

* How quickly would e-mails between the White House, Sestak, Specter, Romanoff and Bennet be produced?

* Secretary of the Navy is an important job. Did this job offer or the reported offer of the US AID position to Romanoff have the approval of President Obama or Vice President Biden?

* What did the President know and when did he know it?

* What did the Vice President know and when did he know it? (Note: Vice President Biden, in this tale, is Specter’s longtime friend who takes credit for luring Specter to switch parties. Can it really be that an offer of Secretary of the Navy to get Sestak out of Specter’s race would not be known and or approved by the Vice President? Does Messina or some other White House staffer — like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel — have that authority?)

* What did White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel know, and when did he know it?

* What did Congressman Sestak know and when did he know it? Was he aware that the offer of a federal job in return for a political favor — his withdrawal from the Senate race — could open the White House to a criminal investigation?

* What did Senator Specter know about any of this and when did he know it? .

* What did Governor Rendell, who, as the titular leader of Pennsylvania Democrats, is throwing his political weight and machine to his old friend Specter, know about this? And when did he know it?

* Will the Department of Justice be looking into these two separate news stories, one supplied by a sitting United States Congressman, that paint a clear picture of jobs for political favors?

* Will Attorney General Holder recuse himself from such an investigation?

While in recent years there have been bribery scandals that centered on the exchange of favors for a business deal (Democrat William Jefferson, a Louisiana Congressman) or cash for earmarks (Republican Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham), the idea of violating federal law by offering a federal job in return for a political favor (leaving two hotly contested Senate races in this instance) is not new.

Let’s go back in history for a moment.

It’s the spring of 1960, in the middle of a bitter fight for the Democratic presidential nomination between then Senators John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Stuart Symington and the 1952 and 1956 nominee, ex-Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson.

Covering the campaign for what would become the grandfather of all political campaign books was journalist and JFK friend Theodore H. White. In his book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the President 1960, published in 1961, White tells the story of a plane flight with JFK on the candidate’s private plane The Caroline. The nomination fight is going on at a furious pace, and White and Kennedy are having another of their innumerable private chats for White’s book while the plane brings JFK back from a campaign swing where he spoke to delegates in Montana.

The subject? Let’s let White tell the story.

The conversation began in a burst of anger. A story had appeared in a New York newspaper that evening that an Eastern Governor had claimed that Kennedy had offered him a cabinet post in return for his Convention support. His anger was cold, furious. When Kennedy is angry, he is at his most precise, almost schoolmasterish. It is a federal offense, he said, to offer any man a federal job in return for a favor. This was an accusation of a federal offense. It was not so.

Let’s focus on that JFK line again:

“It is a federal offense, he said, to offer any man a federal job in return for a favor.”

With a fine and jail time attached if convicted.

What Larry Kane discovered with the response of Congressman Sestak — and Sestak is sticking to his story — combined with what the Denver Post has previously reported in the Romanoff case — appears to be a series of connecting dots.

A connecting of dots — by Democrats — that leads from Colorado to Pennsylvania straight into the West Wing of the White House.

And possibly the jail house.

“It is a federal offense,” said John F. Kennedy, “to offer any man a federal job in return for a favor.”

And so it is.

Obama – who is loudly and frequently patting himself on the back for how “bipartisan” he is, is the most radically ideological partisan who ever sat in the Oval Office.

And as Obama continues to push his ObamaCare boondoggle apparently to the very last Democrat, it is more than fair to ask: why on earth are we trusting these dishonest rat bastards with our health care system and literally with our very lives in the event that their government takeover succeeds?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Los Angeles Times blog:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Andrew Malcolm

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

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

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

A Fearsome Foursome
By Edward Luce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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