Tag: politics

Maureen Dowd is far from the only one to somehow attempt to blame both Bush and Romney for the recent unrest in the Arab world, while refraining from placing any blame on the current occupant of the Oval Office:

You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq — a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How’s that going for us?

After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naïve about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.

The neocons aren’t slithering back. Obama has been going along with their strategic insanity to nearly the same extent as Bush. But that’s not enough for them – one wonders what would be enough – and ominously, Mitt Romney is showing every sign that he will make Bush’s foreign policy look like the humble one it was once promised to be by comparison.

But the media must be truly fearful about the electoral backlash facing Obama as a result of the recent incidents in Libya and elsewhere across the Arab world, considering their desperate attempts to change the subject to Bush, or Romney, or anything but the man who is nominally in responsible for addressing them. And they must be terrified about what he’s going to say next after producing that “I don’t think that we would consider them an ally” gem about Egypt.

When they’re being run by pro-Obama Democrats, it should hardly be surprising that they are wildly inaccurate:

The Pew Research Center and Rasmussen Reports were the most accurate in predicting the results of the 2008 election, according to a new analysis by Fordham University political scientist Costas Panagopoulos. The Fordham analysis ranks 23 survey research organizations on their final, national pre-election polls, as reported on pollster.com.

On average, the polls slightly overestimated Obama’s strength. The final polls showed the Democratic ahead by an average of 7.52 percentage points — 1.37 percentage points above his current 6.15-point popular vote lead. Seventeen of the 23 surveys overstated Obama’s final victory level, while four underestimated it. Only two — Rasmussen and Pew — were spot on.

It’s not an accident that 17 of the 23 polls overstated Obama’s vote margin. And keep in mind that this is a comparison of their final polls, which is when the more egregiously pro-Democratic organizations suddenly start cleaning up their act a little so they don’t get it too noticeably wrong. And where are the Pew and Rasmussen polls today?

Rasmussen has Obama 50, Romney 45. Pew has Clinton 29, Obama 16, and Michelle Obama 15, but their poll concerns who gave the best speech at the DNC so I don’t think there is much to be learned from that. What might be informative would be to look at where the 23 polls were in the middle of September 2008 and compare them with the current polls. I may do that at some point, but not today.

I told you last year that Obama doesn’t really want to win the election. I’ll bet he’s now wishing he’d gone with his original impulse, which was to find some excuse to gracefully evade the nomination and go on the international speech circuit.

Obama at the DNC: That’s it? It would have been better had he not spoken. Seriously. Like an aging rock star, President Obama, in a downsized venue, with downsized proposal and spewing downsized rhetoric only reminded us how far he has fallen from the heady days of 2008. The man, the agenda and the aura are faint imitations of their 2008 incarnations.
– Jennifer Rubin

I was stunned. This is a man who gave one of the great speeches of our time in 2004. And he gave one of the emptiest speeches I’ve ever heard on a national stage… There was nothing in it…
– Charles Krauthammer

The president’s aides understood they could never re-create the power of the past but hoped to convince voters that more has been done than commonly recognized. The “promises kept” theme was intended to address the same swing voters Mr. Romney sought last week to win over. Mr. Obama directly acknowledged the disappointments…. The president appeared to become emotional toward the end of his speech as he spoke of wounded veterans who somehow managed to walk and run and bike on prosthetic legs. He said he did not know if they would vote for him, but added that they nonetheless gave him hope that difficulties could be overcome.
– The New York Times

the president often felt flat, rote, and unconvincing — almost as though he wasn’t quite convinced by his own arguments and promises, and felt a little awkward selling them to us…. I think that while this convention helped the Democrats overall, the president himself delivered one of the weakest major performances of his career.
– Ross Douthat, The New York Times

Rubin, Krauthammer, and Douthat could be dismissed as Republicans simply looking to criticize the rival presidential candidate were it not for the New York Times article saying essentially the same things between the lines. The striking thing about the NYT’s summary of Obama’s speech is the complete lack of superlatives that characterizes their normal coverage of Obama. If they could have found something, anything, to inflate and praise in his speech, they would have done so. But they didn’t, because Obama gave them nothing.

Obama is disengaged and he is too much of a narcissist to throw himself into a campaign that he doesn’t even want to win. All he wants at this point is to avoid an embarrassing landslide in the presidential vote; one potentially informative metric might be to compare how many Democratic candidates for other offices appear on stage with him during the last three months compared to past presidential campaigns. I’ll bet Obama doesn’t appear with half as many candidates this fall as he did in 2008 or George W. Bush did in 2004.

The Democratic Party belatedly realizes that attempting to appeal to less than two percent of the population is not a winning electoral strategy:

Embarrassed by Republicans, Democrats amended their convention platform Wednesday to add a mention of God and declare that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Many in the audience booed after the convention chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, ruled that the amendments had been approved despite the fact that a large group of delegates had objected.

Democrats had approved a platform on Tuesday that made no mention of God or Jerusalem. Instead, it expressed “unshakable commitment to Israel’s security.”

As a general rule, aggravating Christians and then pissing off Jews is not a viable election strategy. The closer the Democrats come to becoming the Atheism+ party, the more they ensure Republican dominance of Karl Rove’s dreams.

The Pew Research Center takes only 11 questions to demonstrate why 74 percent of Americans shouldn’t be permitted to vote.

I got 11 questions correct, along with 13% of voters. Two of them were a little tricky because one has to go with the candidate’s current public positions as opposed to what one tends to suspect their real positions on the subject are and what their probable actions will be. I went back and forth on two of them before finally concluding that it was a news-related quiz and correctly electing to take them at face value. However ludicrous that might be….

Karl Denninger explains one reason why:

From Ron Paul’s July 2012 Campaign finance disclosure:

Cash on hand: $2,497,183.28
Debt: $0.00

From Gary Johnson’s July 2012 Campaign finance disclosure:

Cash on hand: $14,264.95
Debt: $296,201.47

It really is this simple folks. Ron Paul does not believe in fractional reserve lending nor does he borrow against nothing (and since both campaigns are incorporated, there is no “there” there when it comes to campaign “assets” nor can either individual be personally attached to cover obligations) — that is, he walks the talk and has ZERO campaign debt.

Gary Johnson, on the other hand, specifically and personally rejected, to my face, “One Dollar of Capital” (the repudiation of lending against nothing) in February when I was in his guest suite in Orlando, in front of a bunch of other Libertarians and campaign workers. His statement was that getting rid of the ability to create credit out of thin air would “harm the economy.”

Irrespective of what he may now tell you in sound bites in an attempt to try to seduce you to vote for him he has borrowed against hot air to the tune of 20:1 when compared against his cash balance in his own campaign, which means that by his own actions he doesn’t believe in sound money and sound banking — his own campaign is a financial bubble!

Some have noted the irony that I, supposedly one of the Internet’s leading libertarians, does not support or belong to the Libertarian Party. Some have used this to claim I am not a libertarian. I, on the other hand, have always insisted that a number of the Libertarian Party’s policies are expressly anti-libertarian.

I think their choice of a standard bearer in the 2012 election tends to lend support to my perspective on the matter. So, who am I supporting this year? Ron Paul if he runs third party. Otherwise, no one. I don’t vote for evil, no matter what letter appears in front of its name. To quote Mr. Denninger: “I will not be complicit in the furtherance of destruction of our nation’s freedom.”