The President may think that his single-digit approval ratings in Israel are simply because his middle name is “Hussein,” but he’s wrong.

In mid-July, the President gave his first interview with Israel’s Channel 2 news, and he was asked to explain why he thinks he has only a single digit approval rating in Israel. He suggested that much of the animosity towards him was because his middle name is “Hussein” inferring some anti-Muslim bigotry on the part of the Israelis, and he ruled out anything having to do with his policies or his behavior. Truth is, he was initially quite popular in Israel prior to his election (as July 2008 polls indicate) so the issue of Israeli religious bias against him because of his name is a non-starter.

Could it possibly be that the Israelis have serious disagreements with his policies, or are we to believe that they suddenly woke up one morning, discovered his middle name was Hussein, and decided to distrust him? If the man is polling in the single digits in Israel, could it be because other issues are bothering them?

Perhaps it’s because as candidate Obama, he stated unequivocally that Jerusalem would remain the undivided capital of the Jewish state, yet almost from the get-go, he has demanded that east Jerusalem be the capital of a new Palestinian state.

Or perhaps it’s because the Israelis perceive that he has a fundamentally different view of the world and world affairs including the Arab narrative than previous U.S. presidents, and is determined to change U.S. foreign policy in ways detrimental to Israel’s security.

Or, perhaps it’s because his first interview as President was with Al-Arabiya TV, and his first phone call was to Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.

Or perhaps it’s because he called Mahmoud Abbas in early July and thanked him for his “strong support” and his “commitment to peace” after Abbas had told an Arab League Summit in Libya (in Arabic): “If you want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favor,” and stated directly to the President on his June visit to the White House: “I say in front of you, Mr. President, we have nothing to do with incitement against Israel, and we’re not doing that” . . . this from a man who not only refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, demands a return to the unacceptable 1967 borders, insists that international forces be placed on the West Bank (no doubt recognizing that UNIFIL has singularly failed to prevent the rearming of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon as did the European monitors who fled from the Rafiah crossing between Gaza and Egyptian in 2005 when they were threatened by Hamas), and continues to support “armed resistance” against and the destruction of Israel (which was confirmed at the 6^th Fatah General Conference in Bethlehem last August*), and allows his Palestinian Authority (despite its undertakings made in the Oslo Accords) to spew anti-Semitic blood-libels through its controlled media, glorify terrorism by honoring murderers as martyrs in Palestinian schools, mosques and public squares, create children’s television programs that praise the religious war against Israel, use Palestinian textbooks to teach Palestinian children that Tel Aviv and Haifa are part of Palestine, and design maps that do not show an entity called Israel as documented in detail byhttp://www.memri.org/ and http://www.pmw.org/. So far as Israelis are concerned, and the President must recognize this, the key test of the Palestinian commitment to peace is not what Abbas and his colleagues say to Americans in English, but what they say to the Palestinians in Arabic – about Israel, about terrorism and about desiring a real peace.

(*It should be noted that the English version of this Conference has been removed from Fatah’s website while the Arabic version remains!)

Or perhaps it’s because he pledged to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh on June 3^rd, 2009 that the United States would force Israel to withdraw from east Jerusalem and the entire West Bank by 2012 in exchange for Abdullah’s help in arranging an end to the war in Afghanistan – this undertaking having been made despite the April 2004 letter of commitment and principles between President Bush and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stating that the issue of final defensible borders, major Jewish population centers on the West Bank, a possible token return of some Palestinian refugees, and perhaps even ceding east Jerusalem would be subject to end-of-conflict negotiations and an agreement with the Palestinian Authority pursuant to the parameters set by UN Resolution 242 and the Roadmap – as opposed to being dictated by the U.S. – all of which implies that concessions made by Israel are to be considered permanent, but concessions made to Israel by the U.S. can be withdrawn at any time.

Or perhaps it’s because in his Cairo speech, delivered the day after he met with King Abdullah, he failed to mention the four-thousand-year Jewish connection to the Land, suggesting instead that Israel was a consolation prize given by the Europeans because of Holocaust guilt (confirming the myth pervading the Arab world that Israelis are merely colonial invaders with no history in the Land), focused on his plan to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank, and empathized with Palestinian suffering (which he compared to Jewish suffering under the Nazis) without making one reference to the suffering of the Israelis who have endured years of Palestinian missile attacks, and buried more than a thousand men, women and children who died as a result of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Or perhaps it’s because he supports the so-called 2002 “Arab Peace Initiative,” which demands that Israel return to the pre-1967 borders (what Abba Eban once termed “Auschwitz borders”), give up half of Jerusalem and permit Arab refugees and their millions of descendants to move to Israel effectively making Jews a minority in their own country – in return for Arab promises of “normalization” – whatever that means.

Or perhaps it’s because (despite pledges to the contrary) he has rejected virtually every Israeli request for U.S. weapons platforms, delayed decisions by the former Bush administration to deliver attack helicopters, air transports, and Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, imposed an embargo on equipment needed in Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor, and diverted promised bunker-buster bombs from Israel to a military base in Diego Garcia to insure that Israel wouldn’t attack Iran’s nuclear facilities without his blessing – something unlikely to be given.¹

Or perhaps it’s because he’s spent the past year-and-a-half dithering with Israel’s arch-enemy Iran over inspection procedures for its nuclear weapons program, while allowing critical deadlines to pass without serious consequences – this, to a regime that threatens to annihilate Israel, establish a Middle East Shiite caliphate, is absolutely committed to replacing the U.S. as the new hegemon in the Middle East, and is on the brink of achieving a nuclear bomb despite recently imposed sanctions.

Or perhaps, it’s because the Israelis view his overtures to Iran’s messianic, apocalyptic regime as not only naive but dangerous (since it has created the perception of American weakness among our enemies and our friends), a betrayal of the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom, and as signaling Washington’s diminishing resolve to confront terrorism by rewarding groups and countries that sponsor it.

Or perhaps it’s because of his constant coddling of Syria by appointing a new U.S. ambassador to a country that not only arms Hezbollah, trains and exports terrorists to Iraq, allows foreign terrorist organizations to set up shop in Damascus, snuffs out Lebanon’s embryonic democratic revolution, assassinates its pro-democracy leaders, establishes a military alliance with Iran, suppresses criticism by filling its prisons with political prisoners, journalists, and human rights activists, and has massacred hundreds of Syrian Kurds with Turkish and Hezbollah help while the U.S. administration has remained silent.

Or perhaps it’s because it took three visits to the White House by Israel’s PM before he condescended (under pressure from Democratic Congressmen and Senators who fear being decimated in the upcoming November elections) to “make nice” to Netanyahu after humiliating the man on his previous visits.

Or perhaps it’s because, in the immediate aftermath of the Gaza flotilla incident (according to the Globes News Service), Netanyahu was instructed by his officials not to come to Washington for his scheduled visit because he didn’t want Netanyahu to use the White House as a stage upon which to present Israel’s side of the flotilla story lest it interfere with his engagement efforts with the Muslim world.

Or perhaps, it’s because his administration is resisting attempts by the Senate to investigate the Turkish terrorist front, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (I.H.H.) – and possibly classify it as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) – an organization that is known to have extensive ties both to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) party and with Hamas, and was responsible for the deadly May 31^st violence against Israeli Navy commandos on the Mavi Marmara flotilla ship that, upon investigation, happens to have been carrying no humanitarian aid at all.

Or perhaps it’s because the Israelis simply don’t trust a man who is so concerned about political correctness that, rather than trying to delegitimize Islamic extremism by empowering moderate Islamic voices and contesting extremist narratives, he hedges or ignores the problem by issuing an internal gag order directing his Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, to refer to it as “man-caused disasters” and directs his Attorney General, Eric Holder, to skirt around the words “radical Islam” or “jihad” at a House Judiciary Committee hearing (when referring to the Fort Hood massacre, and the Christmas Day and Time Square bombing attempts) for fear of offending Muslim sensitivities.

Or perhaps it’s because both in the Feb. 1, 2010 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review and the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the words “terrorism” and “violent extremism” are mentioned, but no mention is made in any context of radical Islam as a motivating factor.

Or perhaps, it’s because when the Department of Homeland Security Domestic Extremist Lexicon listed Jewish extremism and various forms of Christian extremism as threats, it made not one mention of any form of Muslim extremism, leaving the Israelis to ponder how the U.S. intends to defeat an enemy it’s afraid to identify.

Or perhaps, they question the wisdom of an administration determined to make terrorism a law enforcement issue, and try enemy combatants like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorists in civilian courts as opposed to military tribunals for crimes relating to the jihadist war against the West.

Or perhaps it’s because they’re concerned when the President sends U.S. generals to train and build a Palestinian army, which may very well turn their weapons against Israeli soldiers . . . and civilians.

Or perhaps it’s because he has travelled to Riyadh, Amman, Istanbul, Ankara and Cairo, but has yet to visit Israel as President, and hesitates to do so until after November though having been invited by Prime Minister Netanyahu on July 6^th.

Or perhaps it’s because he ended the U.S. boycott of the UN Human Rights Council (that has spent 90% of its time vilifying Israel) in the naive belief that he can moderate its positions – a pipedream given that the Council is controlled by dictators, despots and tyrants whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the U.S. and Israel.

Or perhaps it’s because of the President’s apparent abandonment of a 40-year understanding between the U.S. and Israel over maintaining Israel’s ambiguity about its reported nuclear arsenal by failing to veto an Egyptian proposal last May during the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NTP) review conference in New York – a proposal calling for a General Conference in September on a “nuclear-free Middle East” that’s expected to single-out Israel so its nuclear facilities can be exposed – regardless of the fact that NPT signatories like Iran, North Korea and Syria have reneged on their own obligations and, in the case of North Korea, proliferated nuclear technology around the Middle East.

Or perhaps it’s because of Israeli fears that the President will force Israel into making nuclear concessions as part of any deal the U.S. might strike with Iran on its nuclear program, or worse, will blame Israel for rejecting such a deal when Iran goes nuclear.

Or perhaps it’s because he bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia last spring – viewed in the Arab world as an act of fealty to the king of a nation that treats women like chattels, forbids the public practice of any religion other than Islam, permits floggings, amputations, and executions by beheading and stoning, imposes imprisonment or death on homosexuals in accordance with strict Islamic law, and has spent an estimated $100B of our petro-dollars over the past 25 years spreading radical Islamic doctrine globally – not to mention having educated 15 of the 19 September 11^th terrorists at Saudi-funded Islamist universities and madrasses in Saudi Arabia and around the world.

Or perhaps it’s because he constantly blames Israel for the lack of progress in bringing peace to the Middle East despite the fact that the Palestinians have been offered statehood many times and have rejected each offer; have failed to keep one single promise they made since the Oslo Accords, and have rejected every compromise that would have required them to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Or perhaps it’s because senior administration officials have commented that American soldiers in the Middle East were being targeted because of the failure to end the Arab-Israeli conflict – comments implying that Israel may be more of a strategic liability to the U.S. than a strategic asset.

Or perhaps it’s because Israelis are frustrated by senior administration officials who continue to equate the IRA with Hamas without recognizing that the latter is a jihadist organization seeking to create an Islamic state in place of Israel, while it was never the desire of the IRA to deny Britain’s right to exist, to conquer it, and to force its population to submit to Catholicism.

Or perhaps, in line with the above thinking, it’s because his chief national security advisor for counter-terrorism, John Brennan (no doubt motivated by the belief that Hamas’s Islamist zeal can be moderated through dialogue and more concessions), is holding not-so-secret meetings with Hamas and Hezbollah to lay the foundations for a new U.S. policy the President is expected to initiate after the November elections (of course) that would remove both terrorist organizations from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list, opening the door to an Iranian base of operations on Israel’s borders.

Or perhaps it’s because of his endless series of demands for more and more concessions from Israel while there are never consequences for the Palestinians who continually break their commitments such as ending the incitement of hatred against Jews and Israel or promoting terrorism.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because of the President’s $400M pledge in aid, a significant amount of which will be used in Hamas-controlled Gaza – the effect of which will be to empower Hamas, legitimize its position, assist in its recruitment and fundraising efforts, facilitate its takeover of the West Bank, and solidify its control over Gaza without regard to the fact that it’s a genocidal Islamist terrorist organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction and serves as Iran’s proxy in the Middle East.

The President may think that his single-digit approval ratings in Israel are simply because his middle name is “Hussein,” but he’s wrong. The Israelis have plenty of reasons to distrust the man and his promise of an “unbreakable bond” between our two countries. From their perspective, he’s been doing everything possible to break that bond for the past year-and-a-half. In reality, his middle name could have been “Smith” and the Israelis would still distrust him because his actions have spoken louder than his words, and no charm offensive or eloquence can change that perception. It’s the substance and the results of his policies that count for them not his name, and by that standard, he’s come up short on the issue of trust.

ENDNOTE

1. In July, Israel successfully conducted a test of the new “Iron Dome” mobile missile-defense shield designed to protect Israeli towns and cities from incoming enemy missiles from Gaza or Lebanon – half the cost of which is being borne by the U.S. The U.S. also provides 50% of the funding for two other Israeli missile-defense systems – Arrow and David’s Sling. The apparent contradiction suggests that while the U.S. administration may be supportive of Israel’s critical need to defend itself from enemy missile attacks, it is seeking to restrict Israel’s access to offensive weapons and weapons systems that would enable it to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities preemptively.

President Obama has his priorities straight, indeed.  Within hours of Shirley Sherrod asking to speak to Obama, he spoke to her to express his regret:

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president expressed his regret, and told Sherrod he hoped she would accept the Agriculture Department’s offer of a new position, saying she could parlay “this misfortune” into an opportunity to use her life experiences to help people. Gibbs said the president thought Sherrod was “very gracious.”

[snip]

“The president expressed to Ms. Sherrod his regret about events of the last several days,” the White House said. “He emphasized that Secretary Vilsack was sincere in his apology yesterday, and in his work to rid USDA of discrimination.”

[snip]

White House staff were trying to reach Sherrod this morning, and when she called back to the White House, the president spoke with her from his private office.

Wow.  That was fast–the White House staff even trying to call her this morning.  So efficient.  Sadly, this concern and efficiency was severely lacking with the Gulf oil spill and Obama’s timeline, in which Obama finally met with BP’s (former) CEO Tony Hayward on day 58 of the oil spill.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6urJsX3KX4

I had a little fun in this space recently with Obama’s Saturday Radio Address, during which he suggested Republicans actually WANT people to suffer in order to gain a political edge. That the Democrats have made this approach to governance a cornerstone of their success should not be lost on anyone here; Democrats get elected when they have more handouts to promise to potential voters than Republicans. Then, they go about the business of keeping their constituents down so they can up the ante come the next election cycle.

This is a terribly cynical approach to life, and a wholly unproductive way to move America forward. It is also the best way to lose an election at a time when the country has finally been awakened to the class wars this Administration has been quietly waging across America. Republicans might be the party of “NO” but Democrats have been busying themselves with the business of becoming the party of “LOSE” and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.

Barely 2 days after suggesting that Republicans were intent on making “their stand on the backs of the unemployed,” Obama once again ups the ante:

President Obama Monday called on Congress to pass an extension of benefits for out-of-work Americans, accusing Senate Republicans of a “lack of faith in the American people” for repeatedly blocking passage of a bill.

After introducing three Americans whose benefits are expiring, the president complained that “after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit,” Republicans “who didn’t have any problems spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are now saying we shouldn’t offer relief to middle-class Americans like Jim or Leslie or Denise who really need help.”
[snip]
“That attitude, I think, reflects a lack of faith in the American people,” said Mr. Obama. “Because the Americans I hear from, in letters and town hall meetings, Americans like Leslie and Jim and Denise — they’re not looking for a handout. They desperately want to work. It’s just, right now, they can’t find a job.”

I’ll not bother re-arguing Obama’s outright lie about the surplus, I’ll ignore his willful ignorance about the extent to which he is directly and personally responsible for why Leslie and Jim and Denise can’t find a job…hell, I’ll even let go that little flash of stupidity about tax cuts for the rich (refusing to point out how much Fed revenues actually increased after them)…but I can’t give Obama a pass on his suggestion that Republicans somehow have a “lack of faith in the American people.”

The lack of faith in the American people is based on Obama’s belief that “we, the People” are not capable of making our own decisions about what might be best for us without the constant drumbeat of Legislative intervention(s) in the daily dealings of the private sector (Erick Erickson sums this up quite nicely, by the way). These things are Democrat perversions of Liberty and Freedom, not Republican ones. Further, Obama’s suggestion later in this piece that this is a time in our nation when elections should be put aside in the interest of taking care of the people is stunning, if not hysterically funny:

“These are honest, decent, hardworking folks who have fallen on hard times through no fault of their own and who have nowhere else to turn except unemployment benefits and who need emergency relief to help them weather this economic storm,” he said.

“It’s time to stop holding workers laid off in this recession hostage to Washington politics,” said the president. “It’s time to do what’s right, not for the next election, but for the middle class.”

“I know it’s getting close to an election, but there are times where you put elections aside,” he added. “This is one of those times.”

It’s getting close to an election, and Democrats know they are about to lose it…specifically because of what they’ve done to this country. Note, for the record, that Obama is NOT campaigning on what he HAS done but rather he wants us to focus on what the Minority has not allowed him to do. The problem here, however, is that the Democrats have been in the Majority in Congress for the past two legislative sessions. Democrats have held both gavels of Leadership and have done what…exactly…about the hostages they’ve been holding? When Obama says “people have fallen on hard times through no fault of their own” just where does he want us to lay blame? At the feet of the minority in Congress, through sessions of Congress where bill after bill has been shoved down the throats of the minority with no time to even read them, let alone be allowed to offer amendments?

Really?

How stupid Democrats must think we are, that we would allow their Leader to tell us not only how to live, where to go for our entitlement checks, what healthcare coverage to get, and whether or not we’re too fat? How naive they must also be to presume we need them to tell us who to blame for not getting MORE than they insist they have already given us?

So long as Obama and the Democrats are allowed by us to get away with praising themselves for what they’ve accomplished, are given a pass on the fact that takeovers on a massive scale of the private sector have destroyed it, and that they have made these things more of a priority than easing the struggles of the American people…they will get re-elected.

More and more, people are beginning to realize that just can not be allowed to happen.

Doug Powers skewered Obama’s odious 9/11-BP oil spill analogy the other day — setting the Soros-bots at Media Matters into a fit over “right-wing media misrepresentation” of the remarks.

But it isn’t just “right-wing media” in America taking offense.

From the London Daily Mail:

British families of 9/11 victims described Barack Obama as ‘cruel’ yesterday for comparing the terrorist outrage to the BP oil spill.

The U.S. president said there were ‘echoes’ between the Gulf of Mexico disaster and the Al Qaeda suicide attacks which killed 2,995 people, including 67 Britons.

He said that just as the events of September 11, 2001, had profoundly shaped ‘our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy’, so the oil disaster would shape thinking on the environment and energy for years to come.

Those who lost loved ones when terrorists flew hijacked planes into the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Centre said Mr Obama’s remarks were yet another attempt to slur the UK.

Joy Bennett, 66, a mother of two from Amersham in Buckinghamshire whose son Oli, a 29-year-old financial journalist, died, said: ‘It is an unfair parallel and is really a cruel thing to say.

John Podhoretz digs deeper and probes Obama’s 9/11 envy in the NYPost today:

So what on earth could the president have been thinking?

The first possibility is that there is some kind of perverse wish being expressed in these words. They have a wistful quality, as though the president wished he had a different crisis, a more popular crisis, on his hands.

… What the deployment of the 9/11 analogy suggests is that Obama would like to treat BP as though it were al Qaeda, at least rhetorically — a villain for him to confront on behalf of the wounded American people.

That may seem politically shrewd to Obama and his team, but it will have parlous consequences. The analogy muddies and obfuscates.

By comparing an unwanted disaster to a conscious act of war, Obama is adding an improper moral dimension to the effort to clean up the Gulf — a moral reckoning that will make it harder rather than easier to focus on the task of actually plugging the damn hole.

By likening the murder of 3,000 people and the efforts to take out the US government to a series of mistakes that added up to a catastrophe, Obama has defined evil down in a fashion that does immense violence to good sense, good taste and good leadership.

Flashback: Obama in crisis.

Andrew Malcolm at LATimes’ Top of the Ticket goes to town on Obama:Ouch.

President Barack Obama is often seen wearing a battered White Sox cap to let the world know he’s not just a baseball fan, but a dedicated follower of Chicago’s working-class, gritty South Siders rather than the more genteel cross-town Cubs.

Baseball, like politics, is not taken lightly by real fans, and particularly not by those who follow Chicago’s teams. Declaring one’s allegiance to one of these teams in Chicago is serious business. When the two teams squared off against each other in the 1906 World Series, Ring Lardner Jr., the greatest sportswriter of the day, warned Chicagoans of the dangers of walking into the wrong saloon.

I grew up a White Sox fan following the likes of Sherm Lollar, Minnie Minoso and Early Wynn. My father was a labor union organizer and therefore a White Sox fan; he insisted my brothers and I promise never to disgrace him by setting foot in Wrigley Field. I’ve kept that promise, although I was tempted some years back when I got tickets for an interleague game at Wrigley. After more than a little soul-searching, however, I sent my children and retired to a bar to watch my team whip the Cubbies on television.

I’d be the first to admit that I was less than overjoyed by Mr. Obama’s victory in 2008, but at least it put a fellow Sox fan in the White House for the first time since Richard Nixon was pulled in the late innings of his less-than-successful second term.

I was wrong. It turns out that our president knows about as much about baseball as he does about, say, the dangers of trillion-dollar budget deficits.

His oft-claimed devotion to “his” team runs at least as deep as his campaign commitment not to raise taxes on the sorts of middle-class and working people he would run into at Comiskey Park if he was the fan he claims to be.

The president tossed out the first ball at the Nationals’ home opener last week wearing his White Sox cap. He then adjourned to the broadcast booth for the sort of easy interview a politician expects on such occasions. After all, he was being interviewed not by a Fox News anchor or even Katie Couric, but by a retired pitcher-turned-sports announcer whom any baseball fan could handle without a teleprompter.

It all came apart when announcer Rob Dibble asked the president a simple question. Dibble politely asked, “Who was one of your favorite White Sox players growing up?”

His response says it all and is worth quoting in full: “You know … uh … I thought that … you know … the truth is that a lot of the Cubs I liked too.”

Compare President Obama’s knowledge of his favorite team with that of the late President Nixon, who grew up as a White Sox fan in Whittier, Calif., forced to follow his team on the radio. Nixon ran into Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman at an all-star game in 1960 and told him not only that he was a fan, but that Luke Appling was his favorite player growing up. Nixon went on to recall and comment on the team’s 1936 starting lineup. Holtzman wrote later that he wasn’t sure if Nixon was right, but went back to his office and checked. Nixon was dead right on all counts.

And it got worse for Obama. The president went on, after flubbing the easy one, to tell Dibble how much he’d always enjoyed “Cominskey Park.” Every sentient creature in Chicago, including diehard Cubs fans and aspiring politicians, must have rolled their eyes at that one.

Those are not the words of a White Sox fan. They are the words of a politician caught in the sort of double-talk that would bring Congressman Joe Wilson to his feet.

Presidents like to identify with baseball; some legitimately and others for effect. Warren Harding was part-owner of a minor league team and George W. Bush was president of the Texas Rangers. Herbert Hoover and George H.W. Bush played ball in college and Dwight Eisenhower played in the minors as a center fielder, while Ronald Reagan was a minor league broadcaster.

They all knew baseball and their affection for the game was real. Barack Obama wears a cap not because he loves the game or the team whose logo appears on it, but for effect. It’s time for him to lose the cap.

This one sentence tells you all you need to know about Obama.

Speaking to Katie Couric on Feb. 7, Obama said:

“I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”

Unfortunately???? Damn Democracy! Obama sees it as “unfortunate” that in a Democracy we have to do “a lot of negotiation with a lot of different people”, ie: Congress.

How much EASIER would it be if we didn’t have those pesky branches of government. If only King, oh excuse me, I mean Pres. Obama could just give (force on us) us an “elegant (whatever that means), academically approved” health care legislation.

Good grief.

via George Will

In a 1999 Gallup poll, that’s what 6 percent of Americans believed. And today, that’s the same percentage of Americans that believe that Obama’s $862 billion stimulus created jobs, in a new CBS/New York Times poll. Compare that to the 48 percent of Americans who don’t believe that the stimulus has created, or will create, any jobs.

But Obama’s problem isn’t just the poll numbers.  It’s the reality of his stimulus failure.  And a new report from Obama’s own economists are confirming that his stimulus package is not delivering on his promises. Yesterday, the White House Council of Economic Advisers released a report estimating the U.S. will add 95,000 jobs per month in 2010, well short of their own job standard. Here’s why:

• Obama promised the stimulus package would create 3.5 million jobs by end of 2010.
• Since the stimulus was signed, we have lost 2.8 million jobs.
• In order to meet his own job standard, President Obama needs to create 6.3 million jobs this year, but 95,000 jobs per month would only result in 1.1 million.
• Therefore, at the end 2010, Obama will still have a net job loss of 1.7 million.

Two days ago, Obama still had the gall to say that his policies were “fundamentally business-friendly” and that we “would be hard pressed to identify a piece of legislation that … is not good for business.” But while a majority of Americans (56 percent) say that President Obama does not have a clear plan for creating jobs, it’s actually worse.  Obama’s agenda actually kills jobs, and he is dead set on nominating people like Craig Becker, an SEIU and ACORN lawyer, to implement his job-killing regulations.

President Obama on Wednesday blasted Senate Republicans for using “holds,” a tactic that delays considering nominees — even though as a senator he used the technique to block several of President George W. Bush’s appointments.

Speaking to Senate Democrats at their annual retreat, Mr. Obama complained that Republican objections have created “a huge backlog of folks who are unanimously viewed as well qualified” but who get held up because a senator is trying to force the administration’s hand on an issue.

As an example, Mr. Obama said his nominee to head the General Services Administration, Martha Johnson, is being held up over issues unrelated to GSA’s business of running federal buildings.

“Let’s have a fight about real stuff. Don’t hold this woman hostage. If you have an objection about my health-care policies, then let’s debate the health-care policies. But don’t suddenly end up having a GSA administrator who is stuck in limbo somewhere because you don’t like something else that we’re doing,” he said.

In the Senate, a hold on a nominee is a senator’s way of saying he or she would object to bringing the nominee to the floor for a vote. If the majority leader insists on bringing the nominee to the floor anyway, a hold can develop into a filibuster, which requires 60 votes to overcome.

The process is so time-consuming that holds are often respected out of necessity. It is often not known which lawmaker placed the hold on a given nominee.

Mr. Obama made use of that power when he was in the Senate. He was one of several senators in 2007 to put a hold on Hans A. von Spakovsky, whom Mr. Bush nominated to serve on the Federal Election Commission.

And, according to news reports, Mr. Obama in late 2005 also put a hold on all Environmental Protection Agency nominees. Mr. Obama said he was trying to force the EPA to move more quickly to issue rules on lead-paint exposure.

Susan P. Bodine, a nominee to be an assistant administrator at EPA, was one of those caught in that blanket hold, though she said Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, also placed a hold on her nomination specifically.

Ms. Bodine said Mrs. Boxer was seeking “extensive amounts of documents” in exchange for letting her nomination go forward.

“It had nothing to do with me. It was leveraged to get documents out of the agency,” Ms. Bodine said.

As for the 2007 hold on the FEC nominee, Mr. Obama disagreed with Mr. von Spakovsky’s support for allowing states to impose voter-identification requirements at the polls.

Mr. von Spakovsky, who is now senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the standoff was funny because federal courts had upheld voter-identification laws in both Georgia and Indiana.

The president “is the last person that should be complaining about holds being put on nominees because of the hold he put on me, which he had no reason to put on me other than pure politics,” Mr. von Spakovsky said.

Mr. Obama, in his comments Wednesday, acknowledged Democrats also used holds, but said, “I think it’s fair to say we were a little more selective in how we did it.”

From The Heritage Foundation:

Heritage members and fans are discussing President Barack Obama’s State of the Unions address at Twitter and Facebook right now. And here are just some of our experts immediate reactions to parts of the speech:

State of the Economy
President Obama inherited a global recession and a global financial meltdown. So far, his enacted policies have had no beneficial effect as the 10 percent unemployment demonstrates in spades, and his threatened policies remain perhaps the greatest barrier to a strong economy. The economy will recover, and appears to have started to do so, thanks to the inherent strengths of the American economic system and the energy and hard work of American families and American businesses.

The President now says he is focused intently on getting the economy to create jobs, but his announced policies say otherwise. Altogether, they are little more than a series of benign sounding talking points substituting for serious action, similar in quality and nature to the proposals already advancing in the House and the Senate.
- J.D. Foster

Jobs
President Obama is right to focus intensely on the economy and jobs. When he took office, the unemployment rate was 7.7 percent. One year and $1.4 trillion later (total deficit spending from February, 2009 to December, 2009), the unemployment rate stands at 10 percent, and 3.4 million jobs have been lost.

In addition to his ineffectual fiscal stimulus, Obama has proposed a variety of policies sharing the unified characteristic of being anti-jobs. He proposed higher tax rates on investment and small businesses. He proposed an immensely expensive and unpopular health care reform. He proposed massive additional taxes through cap and trade. It is fair to say the policies of Obama and his congressional allies, through the uncertainties and threats they make toward the producers in the American economy, are the single greatest impediment to economic recovery we now face.

Obama should remember to “First, do no harm.” In that spirit he should remove government barriers to hiring. An executive order suspending the Davis-Bacon Act, for example, would create 160,000 new construction jobs in 2010.

Then Obama should press for policies that will encourage investment and entrepreneurship – the activities that create lasting jobs and will bring employment down. His capital gains tax cut for small businesses is a step in the right direction, although he should apply it to all businesses. Tort reforms that make it more difficult for trial lawyers to extract multi-million dollar jackpots from productive businesses would also spur business investment and hiring.
-J.D. Foster

“Clean Energy” Jobs
The President apparently has dropped the term “green jobs” and instead has adopted the new term “clean energy” jobs. New words, same failed ideas.

Spain provides a case in point.  With a world-leading quantity of both wind and solar electricity (both highly subsidized), Spain’s green-job creation should be second to none.  However a study by Spanish economist Dr. Gabriel Calzada found 2.2 conventional jobs were destroyed for each green job created.  This finding is consistent with Spain’s overall employment situation.  At 19.4 percent, Spain’s latest unemployment rate is nearly double that of not only the United States (10.0 percent) but it is also nearly double the rate for Spain’s European neighbors, France (10.0 percent) and Portugal (9.8 percent).

Budget-busting subsidies and ham-fisted regulations will not help end the recession.  Instead, they will shrink economic activity and prolong the recovery.
-David Kreutzer

New Hire Tax Credit
The tax credit for new hires is another recycled idea from Washington. Last tried in the 1970’s, the tax credit proved to be a windfall for big businesses that were planning to hire anyway. Small businesses, the engine of job growth, did not use the tax credit largely because they were unaware of it and did not understand how to take advantage of the credit.

The small credit does not offset the larger tax increases that the government is threatening to impose through the health care plan and the potential expiration of the Bush tax cuts. The jobs tax credit proposal will likely also delay hiring since businesses that understand the tax credit now face an incentive to postpone hiring decisions to take advantage of the tax credit. Extending the Bush tax cuts and undoing the heavy taxes in the health care legislation is a better step to job creation than this tax credit.
- Rea Hederman

The Bank Tax
President Obama tonight called for a new tax on banks and other large financial institutions, “a modest fee,” he said, “to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need.” That sounds great, but in truth, the new tax would do nothing of the kind. Mr. Obama knows that almost every major bank has paid back their bailout funds, with interest. Taxpayers made substantial profits on those repayments.

On the other hand, most of the companies that still owe billions to taxpayers, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and auto firms GM and Chrysler would not be subject to the tax. In short, Mr. Obama would tax those that have paid back taxpayers, and exempt those who have not.

Mr. Obama also calls for “serious financial reform,” to “guard against the financial recklessness that nearly brought down our entire economy.” Again, that’s a nice sentiment, but most of his proposed reforms would do little or nothing of the kind. In fact, major parts of his proposals would only guarantee additional future bailouts, by treating some companies as “too big to fail,” and creating a resolution process for troubled financials that is so open-ended that it could be used in almost any situation. The better choice, ignored by the President in his speech, would be to amend U.S. bankruptcy law to create an open, expedited bankruptcy process in which an impartial court would oversee the restructuring or closure of large and complex financial firms.
- James Gattuso and David John

Health Care
Despite overwhelming public opposition, the President in his State of the Union restated his commitment to flawed health care legislation that would transfer more power and decisions to Washington and away from patients and families.

These flawed bills would nullify the President’s numerous promises, ranging from allowing Americans to keep their existing coverage to protecting middle class Americans from tax increases. Indeed, the congressional health care legislation would break his pledges for fixing the economy, bringing down deficits, and creating jobs. In fact, the health care bills would cost in excess of $2 Trillion over the next 10 years and increase, not decrease, health care spending. Moreover, projections show the bill, when taken in its entirety, would add billions to the already staggering federal deficit and record government debt. Finally, the bills’ taxes and mandates would weaken the economy and lead to fewer jobs.

All fair-minded Americans, regardless of their political views, have been appalled by process. This includes blatant special interest politics at the expense of taxpayers, including backroom schemes to exempt some groups from provisions of the bill while forcing the rest of Americans to pick up the tab. The subsequent decline in public trust has been aggravated by the cavalier violation of the President’s numerous and highly publicized pledges to guarantee transparency, including C-Span coverage of congressional negotiations.

Instead of overhauling one sixth of the US economy, Congress should stop, and take a step by step approach to increase competition, expand personal choices, and reduce costs for businesses, individuals and families. By reaching out to congressional conservatives, the President could achieve common sense reforms and improve the efficiency of health insurance markets and deliver better value for Americans’ health care dollars.
- Bob Moffit and Nina Owcharenko

The Spending “Freeze”
Obama’s spending freeze would apply to a narrow sliver of spending (somewhere around 1/8th of total spending) and at best, savings would be less than one percent of the total budget. Moreover, it explicitly exempts the very entitlement programs driving future deficits. At a time when the deficit is $1.4 trillion and we face a sea of even worse red ink as far as the eye can see, such a freeze is tantamount to bailing out – forgive the double entendre – the Titanic with a dixiecup. And it would start next year, conveniently after the elections. Freezing spending is the right idea, but this freeze falls short of real action.

This freeze would not be applied across the board, but rather some functions like so-called investment in job creation would increase and other functions like Judiciary (a core constitutional function of government) would receive cuts. This is a normal part of budget writing, setting priorities and making trade-offs. But it’s hardly a freeze. If Obama is serious, he should start with a freeze right now in the form of a rescissions package and demand Congress act on it in an expedited fashion.

If the President is serious about righting the fiscal ship, he needs batten down the hatches and take far tougher actions, like cancelling TARP, ending the stimulus program, and turning his attention to the tsunami of entitlement programs that threaten swamp our economy.

His proposed entitlement commission would have no teeth to tackle surging entitlement spending. It is a hollow gesture, designed to buy time for Congress to kick the can down the road again in an election year so they can pass another huge budget filled with new spending while his Commission dithers away behind closed doors. If he truly refuses to pass this problem along to another generations of America, he should to tell Americans the true cost of entitlement programs ($43 trillion in excess costs) and put these programs on a hard budget with trade-offs across all priorities – not just a narrow sliver of the budget. That’s how budgeting works.
-Alison Fraser

Automatic IRAs
In all the soaring rhetoric and misguided policy proposals in President Obama’s State-of-the-Union address, one,  the Automatic IRA, is a simple, easy to understand way to increase Americans’ retirement security.

Almost half of all US workers are employed by companies that don’t offer any sort of pension or retirement saving plan.  Social Security benefits alone are not high enough for a comfortable retirement, and the programs financial problems means that even those benefits could be lower.  Unless workers can save for their own retirement from the day they first enter the workforce until they retire, either they face retirement poverty, or will need to rely upon yet another new government program.

The Automatic IRA allows workers to save some of their own money in a simple, low cost savings plan.  Employers would deduct the contributions and send it on to a private sector funds manager just as they now deduct federal taxes from the workers and send it to the Treasury.  Investment choices will include a no-cost government bond for new savers to use until they build up enough money to transfer into privately managed funds.  Because an IRA is personal savings, employers would not be required – or even allowed – to match these savings.

The Automatic IRA has wide bipartisan support from the left and right, and was endorsed in 2008 by both the McCain and Obama campaigns.  It is a simple, practical solution to a serious problem.
- David John

Education
President Obama was right to speak tonight about the urgent need to reform and improve American education. But the President is choosing the wrong responses, following failed paths that will put our country deeper in debt, expand dependence on government, and increase burdens on taxpayers — all while rejecting some of the most promising reforms.

A year ago, President Obama stated that his administration would
use only one test to decide which programs to fund — whether or not they worked. But his administration has consistently broken that promise. For starters, President Obama allowed Congress to end the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, which has proven to be one of the most effective federal education initiatives in history, improving low-income students’ academic achievement. And he pushed Congress to create a new $8 billion preschool program, while his administration buried a report showing that the federal Head Start program was a colossal failure.

If the President is serious about his commitment to education reform and fiscal discipline, he should press Congress to completely overall the federal role in K-12 and early childhood education by terminating ineffective programs and reforming remaining ones to empower parents and local leaders use our precious tax dollars to best meet children’s needs.

The President also talked about the need to address the important problem of college affordability. But decades of experience have shown that his costly solution — increasing federal subsidies and placing more of the burden for paying college on taxpayers — hasn’t addressed the root problem of out-of-control college costs. Rather than increasing the burden on taxpayers and growing the deficit, federal and state policymakers should focus on reforming higher education to improve efficiency to lower costs.

That’s the right way to improve college access while reducing the burden on taxpayers.
- Dan Lips

War on Terror
More than 40 minutes into his State of the Union speech, Obama mentioned terrorism. If you weren’t listening carefully, you might have missed it. It was all about 10 sentences.

This isn’t surprising. Obama has at times in the past year seemed reluctant to embrace the responsibility of defending the nation against acts of terrorism. Thus far, President Obama has only given one speech on the war on terrorism in his time in office. He pledged early on to close down Guantanamo Bay and prosecute terrorists in civil courts. And at the same time, he has limited the tools of the CIA and done everything he can to distance himself from Bush era counterterrorism policies, remaining almost silent on reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, provisions which he is said to support.

These actions are of course cracking under the weight of the national security threats facing the nation. And this lack of enthusiasm for his national security responsibilities has caught the attention of the American public. The Christmas Day plot was a reminder to all of what can happen if an Administration fails in this duty. Americans are asking—will President Obama take the steps necessary to defend the United States against its enemies?

Tonight’s speech was light on rhetoric— and even lighter on substance when it comes to terrorism. What the public expects is for President Obama to be a President engaged in terrorism and ready to do what is necessary to stop attacks. This isn’t an easy job; it’s a no-excuse, 24-7-365 commitment, but it is absolutely necessary.
- Jena McNeill

Child Care Tax Credit
President Obama’s State of the Union proposals tonight to expand the Child and Dependent Care Credit by increasing its size for middle-income Americans goes about tax relief for a limited number of U.S. families in a thoroughly unacceptable way.

The credit discriminates among families with comparable incomes and work effort – simply on the basis of their decision to use or not to use paid day care providers. President Obama’s proposal is similar to one advanced in 1998 by President Clinton, and similar criticisms apply.

The Obama Administration proposal raises the value of the child care tax credit to 35% of allowable day care expenses for families making less than $85,000 a year (with smaller increases for families making from $85,000 to $115,000 per year).

To qualify, parents must pay someone else to care for their children. Parents who make different arrangements in order to maximize the amount of time they can spend with their children are left behind by the Obama proposals. These include families where one parent works full-time and the other works part- or full-time at a different time of day (split shifts) or on weekends, as well as families where one parent foregoes wage income entirely in order to stay home and raise the children.

The diversity of child care arrangements among U.S. families is great. Tax relief for families with children is a need that can be addressed in many ways as well, but whatever way is chosen should be equitable to all families and treat all work-family time options similarly. The Child and Dependent Care Credit fails this key test, and expanding it only aggravates the failure.
- Chuck Donovan

Defense Spending
For a speech well over an hour in length, it was hard not to notice the breezy and brief reference to military needs. The President spoke for only a moment about the need to provide the U.S. military the resources it needs during war and support when forces return home.

Both priorities are incredibly important to sustaining the long-term health of the America’s Armed Forces. However, the President made no mention of his long-term commitment to the military and the urgent demand to give our men and women in uniform a capable array of next-generation systems to defeat any threat in the future, as well as those threats in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

Not including defense spending as part of the President’s domestic discretionary spending freeze is important given ongoing wartime requirements. Yet the President’s 10-year budget plan would dramatically cut defense spending in real terms and as a percentage of the economy.

Providing for the common defense of the American people is the first job of government, not the second, third, fourth or even last responsibility.

When the President’s budget is released to Capitol Hill next week, members of Congress should demand robust resources and spending levels for the military until victory is achieved in combat operations overseas and for several years thereafter to rebuild the force strained by war and coming off a decade of underinvestment.
- Mackenzie Eaglen

Afghanistan
The war in Afghanistan deserved more attention than the one paragraph it was allotted in the speech. Not only is it a crucial theater in the war against al-Qaeda, but the President himself spent a good deal of time in his first year in the White House on two separate policy reviews that produced two major decisions to commit more troops to that struggle. Success in Afghanistan requires the long term support of the American people. This cannot be taken for granted.

The President missed an important opportunity to shore up wavering public support for his Afghanistan policy by explaining how his strategy can bring success, appealing for steadfast public support, and underscoring the huge potential costs of failure in Afghanistan. His emphasis on U.S. troops beginning to pull out in 2011 undercuts the overall U.S. strategy by signaling to our enemies that we are anxious to withdraw. Wars are won by demonstrating resolve and commitment, not by telling our enemies that our patience for the fight is limited.
- Lisa Curtis

Taxes
President Obama in his State of the Union address reiterated again that he wants to raise taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year. He says we can’t afford to. This is nothing new. He has reiterated his desire to raise taxes on high-earners time and again since he began campaigning for the presidency.

But the president’s insistence to raise taxes on high-earners conflicts with his also oft-repeated pledge that he won’t raise taxes during a time of recession. So which is it? If taxes shouldn’t be raised in a recession why is it alright to raise them on high earners?

The answer is it isn’t. Raising taxes on anyone in a recession is a mistake. Even if we are in the nascent stages of a recovery, now is not the right time to burden the fragile economy with higher taxes. Higher taxes on those making over $250,000 will not only hurt those high-earners, it will hurt those that make much less because there will be fewer jobs and lower wages as a result.

Congress and President Obama should extend the 2001 and 2003 for all taxpayers. The economy can’t afford to do otherwise.
- Curtis Dubay

On Inherited Budgets and Earmarks
The President’s claim that the long-term trillion-dollar budget deficits are “the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program” is clearly misleading. While these factors contributed to turning earlier surpluses into deficits, the budget deficit still stood at just $162 billion when the recession began in late 2007. The larger subsequent deficits have been driven by the recession, the financial bailouts, the President’s stimulus bill, and large discretionary spending hikes enacted by a Democratic Congress. Once the recession ends and its costs wind down, budget projections show permanent trillion-dollar deficits driven by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid growth, as well as the higher discretionary spending baseline, and growing net interest costs on this large debt – not even counting the President’s expensive proposals. While President Bush certainly spent too much, it’s not okay Obama would more than double down.

President Obama’s proposal to post all earmark requests on a single website is strong. Yet the President who promised to “slash earmarks to no greater than 1994 levels” – 1,318 earmarks at a cost of $7.8 billion – just signed into law approximately 10,642 earmarks at a cost of $15.4 billion. He clearly has a long ways to go keep this pledge.
- Brian Riedl

On the Constitution
The former law school lecturer left much to be desired concerning legal issues in his State of the Union address.

First, in addressing the White House’s signature proposal to date, the President failed to give any assurances that he will expend any effort to force Congress to address the serious constitutional failures of the health care mandates in the existing versions of the legislation.

Second, the President ridiculed the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Citizen’s United as opening “the floodgates for special interest.” Contrary to the President’s characterization, the decision properly rejected the idea that the government can decide who gets to speak and ban some from speaking at all, particularly those doing their speaking through associations of members who share their beliefs. Amazingly, he urged Congress to “right this wrong” – amazing because the “wrong” is First Amendment protection of speech rights.

Third, the President claimed that his administration “has a Civil Rights Division that is once again prosecuting civil rights violations and employment discrimination.” This will come as news to anyone who has followed the Justice Department’s shenanigans in the New Black Panther Party case, one in which the Civil Rights Division chose not enforce a default judgment it had secured in a case against individuals caught on tape intimidating voters. Rather than prosecuting civil rights violations, the Obama Justice Department is seeking to evade subpoenas from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which is investigating the incident. If Obama is serious about showing that his civil right division follows and enforces the law, he should begin by complying with the Commission’s subpoenas.
- Robert Alt

Energy
President Obama used his State of the Union address to continue promoting his clean energy and green jobs agenda. His calls for new nuclear power, offshore oil and gas exploration, and other new energy technologies are certainly welcome. The problem is that his program of subsidies, special tax treatment, and government support will not work.

While government programs can create jobs in specific sectors, the President ignores the evidence that these programs end up killing more jobs than they create. Spain has already gone down this road and its experience should give the President caution. Between 2000 and 2008, the Spanish government spent $36 billion in taxpayers money on wind, solar and mini-hydro development. Each green job created cost on average $758,471.

And that is not all. Dr. Gabriel Calzada of the King Juan Carlos University in Spain found that, for every green job created, 2.2 jobs in other sectors were destroyed. While correlation does not imply causation, keep in mind the country’s unemployment rate is currently at 19.4%. This result is predictable because government programs do not yield commercially viable products. Indeed, they stifle the entrepreneurial activities that drive technological innovation in a free market place.

That is why the President should forge a new path for the United States that relies more on free enterprise and less on Washington handouts. If the President believes that the nation needs more nuclear power, then he should reform the regulatory system that continues to stifle progress in the industry. If he believes that we need to gain access to our domestic energy resource by drilling in our offshore waters, then he should lift the ban on those activities. And finally, if he truly wants to see wind and solar power to be commercially viable, then he must stop subsidizing those activities.
- Jack Spencer

Arms Control
President Obama alluded in his speech to the threat of nuclear weapons and his commitment to defending the United States. If only his policies matched the security challenges facing the nation.

First and foremost, he has yet to propose the establishment of a strategic posture that seeks to protect and defend the people, territory, institutions and infrastructure of the United States against strategic attack. He cut the missile defense budget in his first year by roughly 15 percent. He has demanded that the number of interceptors in Alaska and California to provide such a defense be reduced from 44 to 30. President Obama then terminated agreements with the Czech Republic and Poland to field defense facilities in both countries capable of protecting the United States and Europe against long-range missile attacks, particularly against those that are likely to be fielded by Iran. This is not the kind of protect and defend strategy that will effectively address the threats posed by world that is becoming proliferated with nuclear weapons

On the arms control front, President Obama’s policy of seeking a world without nuclear weapons provides virtually no guidance on how the United States will maintain its security as it goes down the disarmament path, given that Iran and North Korea are moving in the opposition direction and China and Russia are modernizing their nuclear forces. The nation’s nuclear weapons infrastructure continues to atrophy as the overall size of the force continues to shrink. He has pursued a new ambitious arms control agenda with Russia incompetently by setting an unrealistic deadline for the negotiations and failing to meet it.

It is all but impossible to avoid concluding that President Obama’s strategic policies are seeking to make American weakness a virtue. Such weakness will not be a virtue, but a danger to the security of the American people, America’s allies and ultimately world peace. If he continues down his present path regarding these issues, one wonders when and under what circumstances a dangerous world will remind him of this fact.
- Baker Spring

Public Diplomacy
In a speech that focused closely on President Obama’s domestic agenda, an hour into his first State of the Union address to Congress, the president got around to the issue of foreign affairs, terrorism and U.S. foreign military engagements. Many around the world have expressed concern that a US administration so focused on domestic priorities and troubles as the current one will be too inward-looking to be deeply engaged in the world. Judging by its placement in his list of priorities, foreign affairs did seem like an afterthought, briefly addressed.

Still, there were assertions of American leadership and a reach for ideas that seemed to be somewhat of a departure for this self-avowedly pragmatic president. “America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity,” Obama stated. “American ideas are its greatest source of strength.” And rather than naively reach out to the regimes of Iran and North Korea, the president emphasized their growing isolation, somewhat optimistically holding out the promise of tighter sanctions on Iran. In that sense, the speech reflected some of the hard earned experience of the past year.

In other areas, the speech seemed almost out of touch with reality. The United States has not, as asserted, become a leading nation on climate change — much to the dismay of the Europeans. In Afghanistan, allied nations are hardly coming together to support the president’s surge — indeed French President Nicolas Sarkozy very publicly stated this week that he would not be contributing any more troops to the endeavor, this on the eve of the Afghanistan conference in London. And the fight on terrorism has not, as stated, been advanced by the Obama administration — quite the reverse as the nation has become more vulnerable. Nor has the administration distinguished itself by its support for human rights in Iran — in fact it missed a critical moment to get involved during last summer’s uprisings against the Iranian regime. As for the president’s aspiration to control nuclear materials around the world, a goal to be reached through an international conference — that horse has left the barn a long time ago.

The Obama administrations record for its first year is so thin that improvement will not be hard to come by. Yet, the American leadership that the world needs to see is not likely to become reality before the president speaks again next January.
- Helle Dale

Economic Freedom
In his State of the Union address tonight, President Obama signaled no retreat from the big-government extravaganza of his first year in office. The three year “spending freeze” that he articulated is only a blip in the midst of a panoply of interventionist policies that would further restrain our economic freedom. Consider the followings. President Obama’s proposed “freeze” will not start until 2011, will only apply to only about one eighth of $3.5 trillion budget, and will not be relevant to any of the unspent $862 billion stimulus plan, his health care plan or the House of Representatives’ additional $156 billion stimulus plan.

The shortcomings of Obama’s first year economic policies have vividly reminded many Americans that government stimulus and big government can neither create more opportunity for people nor manufacture enduring prosperity. Unfortunately, rather than recognizing it is time for real “change” and a new approach, President Obama tonight eloquently asked us for more patience with his big government policies and renewed his own allegiance to an ineffective course of policy action. His words, rather than reassuring, have reminded us that our economic freedom is in greater peril than ever.

As the Index of Economic Freedom, an annual independent study by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, has documented, policy choices do matter in determining economic vitality. Unfortunately, America’s economic freedom has been falling–dramatically. While many countries around the world continue on the path of increasing competitiveness and flexibility, the United States is, in many respects, moving in the opposite direction, simultaneously burdening its economy with increasing government spending, uncompetitive tax rates, and barriers to trade and investment that stifle entrepreneurship and dynamic growth. As President Obama stated, “It’s time to get serious about fixing the problems that are hampering our growth.” Unfortunately, many of those problems are caused by government itself, under Obama’s leadership. Many small and large firms are currently postponing spending decisions and projects while they try to discern government’s latest intentions. Others are put off by anti-business rhetoric that demonizes those whose profit-seeking is the very foundation of investment and job creation.

It’s time to get government out of the way and let the American people get on with the business of building a better future.
- Ambassador Terry Miller

NATO and Afghanistan
During the Presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama stated that Afghanistan would be his primary focus in America’s battle against terrorism, and that he would rally the international ISAF coalition to recommit to the fight there. In the 12 months since his election, he has ordered 30,000 additional combat troops into Afghanistan, confirmed $2.7 billion in non-military aid from his 2010 budget and maintained broad bipartisan support for the war effort, despite huge tensions over domestic issues such as health care reform. However, he has been wildly unsuccessful in rallying additional international commitment to mission, save the same countries who have long shouldered a disproportionate share of the burden such as the UK. Several European members of NATO including France, Germany, Greece, Spain, and Turkey continue to shortchange the mission in Afghanistan, under-resourcing operations and restricting their troops with nightmare caveats.

During his address to the nation, President Obama stated, “In Afghanistan, we are increasing our troops and training Afghan Security Forces so they can begin to take the lead in July of 2011, and our troops can begin to come home. We will reward good governance, reduce corruption, and support the rights of all Afghans – men and women alike. We are joined by allies and partners who have increased their own commitment, and who will come together tomorrow in London to reaffirm our common purpose.” In order to reach NATO’s goal of handing over security, judicial, and economic responsibilities to the central and local government of Afghanistan, President Obama must first restore stability to Afghanistan. And he will need his Continental partners to support him in doing so. He must rally diplomatic support for the mission at a heads-of-state level, and demonstrate once-and-for-all, that ISAF has the strength, resolve, and staying power to win this war – without arbitrary withdrawal timelines.
- Sally McNamara

Scroll for updates…

President Obama is scheduled to make a public statement this afternoon on the Christmas Day jihadi attack at around 3pm Eastern.

Sure bet: He won’t use the word “jihad.”

Via AP:

The White House says President Barack Obama is preparing to make his first public statement on the Christmas Day terrorist attack and describe U.S. efforts to protect the nation’s skies.

Obama is scheduled to speak soon after 3 p.m. EST about the government’s steps to protect the nation’s travelers and the reviews he has already ordered.

Deputy press secretary Bill Burton said Monday the president believes it is critical that the government learn from the attack on a Detroit-bound airliner and take the necessary measures to prevent future acts of terrorism.

Yes, try to suppress your snort: “Deputy press secretary Bill Burton said Monday the president believes it is critical that the government learn from the attack.”

No word yet on whether the DHS clown-in-chief will appear by his side.

As she insists on the plot being isolated, al Qaeda has formally claimed credit.

The Christmas Day would-be bomber says there are more like him coming.

And Foggy Bottom performed as usual in its visa procedures: Miserably.

Question: Will Obama perpetuate the myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist? Or has he learned nothing?

***

Update 3pm Eastern. Obama doesn’t bother to wear a tie. He hastily reads a belated statement describing the incident like a small-town sheriff’s deputy rather than the leader of the free world. He ticks off investigative steps in a perfunctory, plodding, bloodless manner. “We will continue to every element of our national power to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat the violent extremists…anywhere where they are plotting attacks against Americans.”

Eyes down on his paper the whole time — not looking at the camera and directing his statements at our enemies.

He talks about “resilience” as a foreign concept, not something he believes in in his heart.

Rushes through the end of his statement with a postscript about the violence in Iran.

Couldn’t get off the podium fast enough.

Inspiring.

“We will not rest.” Now, back to his vacation…

From American Power:

Too Little, Too Late? Obama Assailed for Response to Terror Attack

From ABC News, “Did Obama Respond Too Late to Terror Plot? Critics Assail President? Democrats Say the President Reacted Appropriately, Security Reviews Are Important“:

The Obama administration has come under fire from critics who said the president waited too long to address the nation publicly about the Christmas Day terror plot, and that his administration has not been tough enough on terrorism.

The mostly partisan attacks came after Friday’s attempt by a Nigerian national to blow up Northwest Flight 253 as it approached Detroit. Terror plots in the past have tended to unite the two parties, but recent attacks have departed from that norm.

President Obama has ordered a sweeping review of how the suspect managed to board the flight from Amsterdam, but that has done little to appease his critics.

Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, blamed the Obama administration for taking its eye off the threat of terrorism from abroad.

“I think there’s enough blame to go around here,” Hoekstra said Monday in an interview with ABC News. “The bottom line is we ended up with a bomb on a plane with a detonator ready to go off. That’s totally unacceptable. There’s probably failures at every step of the way, in Nigeria, in the Netherlands, and in the overall procedures. Early on in this administration, I think that this administration sent a clear signal that they believed that the threat to the homeland was not as significant as what it really is.”

RTWT at the link.

Plus, at Politico, “Handling Problems the Obama Way.” (Via Memeorandum.)

See also, Michael Goldfarb, “Damage Control in 5 Easy Steps!,” and Flopping Aces, “Is Obama’s Weak Approach to War on Terror Inviting More Attacks?“