The Conservative Soldier

Questions are arising from political observers on both sides about Barack Obama. These are sobering questions, posed in a different tone from inquiries about his place of birth and the existence of a certificate. Today, the fixation attends to even more fundamental concerns. No longer do we ponder, “Where did he come from?” Now it’s, “How did he get here?”

Is Obama stupid? (Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal)

Is Obama doomed by his incompetence? (Dana Milbank, Washington Post)

Is Obama a loser? (Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal)

Is Obama disappointing supporters? (Maureen Dowd, New York Times)

Is Obama just another dispassionate politician? (Drew Westen, New York Times)

The answers, respected journalistic observers and academics conclude, are the same: Yes.

Taken one by one, you will never fail to find an Obamatron who will dismiss the conclusion by blaming George W. Bush, blaming the Tea Party, or blaming the Japan earthquake. If those don’t win the argument in favor of the Transformational One then, of course, the remarkably resilient race card is produced and the blame is placed squarely on all of the racists who can’t abide a black president.

But we’ve endured the emptiness of the Obama Era long enough to know that his staunchest defenders will never see the light. Many have waited a lifetime to undo American prosperity and military superiority, and they’re not going to give up on their Messiah, their human conduit to economic “fairness” and social justice, no matter the cost.

Those who first feared Obama’s potential to erode the nation’s global standing, and who are now agonizing over the damage that’s been done, sense an eeriness in the air. The points articulated even before the 2008 election, and certainly soon after, about Obama’s lack of experience, lack of political identity and well documented social radicalism are today echoing in the halls of some of the most hard-left media organizations.

Many such as Dowd and Milbank see a nation in such dire economic straits that not only are they no longer sipping from the hope and change trough, heck, they are even mocking the pathetic souls who are left licking the inner recesses of discarded Kool-Aid wrappers.

With his czars, his hard-left inner circle, his mainly compliant media stenographers and his foot soldiers in the House and Senate led by Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi et al, at Obama’s back, the 44th president has failed to keep promises (Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan), pushed the economy to the brink (auto bailouts, stimulus, cash-for-clunkers, drilling bans and Obamacare) and lorded over unemployment stuck above 9 percent. All the while, Obama has allowed (encouraged) Congress to operate without producing a budget. He made the outrageous proclamation that the looming U.S. debt crisis is “manufactured” even as he gleefully has manufactured class warfare. He stokes the embers of future tax increases to punish the “rich” because their fair share (the top 10 percent of earners) has to be a lot higher than the 70 percent of all income taxes they already shoulder.

The web-based Patriot Post reminds us today of the words of American patriot Thomas Paine, who said, “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.”

Who doesn’t? Especially when that man is the president. But what we have in 2011 is a president who wears a scowl, grows weaker by the day and is proving to be a coward. Influential people are catching on, finally joining Dinesh D’Souza, David Freddoso, Charles Krauthammer and Rush Limbaugh who lamented the emergence of an Obamanation early on.

After the Dow went South 635 points on Monday, the Post’s Milbank concluded that “the most powerful man in the world seems strangely powerless, and irresolute, as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency.” Note Milbank is declaring the downfall of Obama’s presidency here rather than suggesting those “larger forces” are a threat to it. He continued:

“He reminded all that the situation isn’t his fault (the need for deficit reduction “was true the day I took office”), he blamed the other side (”we knew . . . a debate where the threat of default was used as a bargaining chip could do enormous damage to our economy”) and he revisited the same proposals he had previously offered to little effect: extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut, and spending more on infrastructure projects.”

The Times’ Dowd, who loathed Bush to her core, yesterday observed that Obama “seems at a loss” to reassure the nation, while proving “spectacularly unable to fill the leadership void in Washington”. In the Journal, Stephens dismisses Obama’s presidency as “a case study in stupid”. In her weekly Friday column for the Journal two weeks ago, Noonan appeared to have come full circle from the pundit who tried so very hard two years ago to embrace the “promise” of Obama’s new approach to politics. Now she sighs, “He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist. He is a loser. And this is America, where nobody loves a loser.”

Obama’s greatest sin against his nation is that he dragging everyone into the loser end of the pool with him. We have a growing population of job losers, investment losers, medical care losers and, worst of all, faith losers. Today a poll indicated 73 percent of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. We assume the other one quarter haven’t been living here for a few years. The 73 percent are tired of Obama’s excuses and deceit, tired of hearing about the mountain of problems he inherited, problems too much for even one who was going to slow the rise of the oceans. A Rasmussen poll finds that just 17 percent of Americans today believe the U.S. government has earned the consent of the governed.

The fact is, according to a Journal editorial on the Standard & Poors downgrade, that even the unfunded military initiatives ordered by President Bush had nowhere the impact on the U.S. economy that Obama’s domestic spending has. “Debt held by the public was only 40.3% of GDP” in 2008 while it “is estimated to hit 72% this year.”

An irresolute, unaccountable, cowardly, rudderless loser, who is willfully managing the decline of our country, doesn’t seem worthy of the security clearance to the Oval Office side door. That is obvious to almost anyone, even Maureen Dowd. The Founders addressed it in Article 2, Section 4 of the Constitution. “The President … shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for … high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Back when Bill Clinton was facing the music in 1998, columnist George Will referenced The Federalist Papers thusly:

“Impeachment, (Alexander) Hamilton argued in Federalist 65, concerns ‘those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.’ “

A member of the U.S. House from Texas this week heartily agreed when the suggestion arose in a public forum that impeachment proceedings should be opened against Obama to paralyze Washington. “It needs to happen,” said Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX). “We need to tie things up.”
Burgess has the right instincts but his premise was too overtly partisan to be taken seriously.

The grounds for impeaching Obama are his repeated violations of the public trust. Let’s not wait to vote him out. Let’s throw him out.

The late management guru Peter Drucker was right about a lot of things including this: “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”

As those who pay attention to current events know too well, a decided lack of leadership measured by undesirable or non-existent results, is the federal government in a nutshell. The propensity of those who govern to disappoint the governed was at the very core of what the Founding Fathers sought to reverse when the foundation of our country was put in place.

Flawed people have occupied the halls of the White House and the U.S. Capitol ever since. Generally, these flaws have been acknowledged, if only after the fact, and kept in check by our Constitution. But what we witnessed in 2008 was a kind of celebration of the flaws that are part of the “transformational package” known as Barack Obama.

He was different. He wrote a book about his Kenyan father. His speeches were intoxicating. People feinted in his presence. They liked his smile. He would demand transparency. Everything would be posted on a people’s web site. He was going to bring all of the troops home. His economic plan was rooted in “green jobs” for anybody who needed one.

The American media’s judgment was that Obama’s lightweight resume — career academic, community “organizer”, state senator, one-term U.S. Senator — and radical prior associations were acceptable.

Unmentioned was that the same media was afraid to scrutinize Obama because he was the first viable black candidate for president in American history. Never mind that the media made him “viable”.

In the 2008 primary showdown between Obama and fellow Senator Hillary Clinton the Clinton campaign famously aired the ad about “the 3 a.m. phone call”. It was Clinton’s final, desperate attempt to force Democrats to ponder the question, “Is this relative unknown, Barack Obama, qualified to be President?”
More broadly, the ad asked, “Is he ready to lead?” Today, politicians on both sides are whispering, “Why won’t he lead?”

The detailed debate about circumstances under which the so-called U.S. debt limit wll be raised, and the more consequential debate about when we’ve had enough of runaway federal spending, stimulating and debt servicing, magnifies the difference between leadership and giving orders.

When Obama green-lighted the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout that led to bin Laden’s death, he was acting based on the breadth and depth of global and U.S. intelligence, and, more importantly, on the readiness and competence of the American military. It was his decision as president, but it was a decision that could be taken with confidence. The people advising Obama were brimming with it.

But saving the U.S. worker, averting default and restoring global confidence in our economy is a different challenge. It is an infinitely complex task. A President can’t “order” the House and Senate to fix it. He tried that during the BP oil spill. “Plug the damn hole” did not result in a magic solution.

Obama is further handcuffed because there are no sage economic “generals” surrounding him. He has bumbling Senate leader Harry Reid and irrelevant House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, trembling Timothy Geithner, his treasury secretary, and a team of lifelong wealth redistribution types, advisors and czars like David Axelrod, Cass Sunstein, Kathleen Sebelius and Carol Browner. Many others have fled, including Harvard economic guru Larry Summers and righthand man Rahm Emanuel.

At this point, is anyone even sure Obama can handle the 3 p.m. phone call?

Lips quivering, pointing his nervous index finger at Chris Wallace, secretary Geithner looked like a basket case on Fox News Sunday this morning. “Things are healing. We are in a much stronger position today as a country than we were three months ago … With time more Americans are getting back to work … American businesses are investing again … This specter of default that Republicans have put over the country is hurting average Americans.”

Some of what he said is misleading. Some of it is simply untrue. This is Obama’s point man. Little wonder, as commentator Bill Kristol noted, there was a surge of “bipartisian willingness to walk away from the President” and place debt negotiations exclusively in the legislative realm.

The President assumed he could “order” House Speaker John Boehner to accept massive tax increases on Americans and their businesses as part of the debt ceiling increase.

After days of hearing orders, Boehner said, “It was time for me to step back. That’s when I finally decided it was time to say no. It was time to reach out … and develop a Congressional plan for this (spending and debt) problem.”

When he emerged as Speaker in 2010, Boehner was derided for being too emotional.

Now who’s crying, and who’s leading?

The free golf and unlimited use of the tricked out 747 must be pretty hard to give up. Otherwise, it is not entirely clear why Barack Obama would want to be president beyond 2012.

We now know that an economic tsunami is building across our nation. It is unsettling on one level to be sure but infuriating on still another because it appears deliberate.

Many have long suspected that Obama, an unapologetic radical, welcomed a chance to manage America’s economic decline at this precise moment in history because it would afford him the opportunity to engage in the massive wealth re-distribution his ilk believes must happen. Columnist Charles Krauthammer warned in 2009 that decline is a choice. Two years later, we are no longer left to wonder what choice Obama made.

But did he really anticipate the domino effect being so pronounced? Housing prices in the numerous markets sinking to their lowest levels since 2000. Unemployment stuck on 9% and likely inching higher. Corporations refusing to unleash billions of dollars in cash because they find comfort in protecting it. Gasoline prices that won’t moderate, partly because of U.S. energy development policies that are non-existent.

Writes National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson:

“We’ve borrowed $5 trillion since 2009 to ’stimulate’ the economy - and seen little upsurge in economic growth, but a lot of evidence of a raging inflation to come on the heels of soaring gas and food prices.”

As disturbing as all of this is, if there is to be an extension of the Era of Obama — and, sadly, probably half the nation’s voters are, today, OK with that prospect — we might find ourselves longing for the good old days of 2011. From where we stand in the here and now, there simply is no way several larger states do not experience economic implosion in the years just ahead.

Again, it is sad to contemplate because one wonders if it could have been avoided. Beyond that, it is maddening because it appears planned.

Let’s take the dysfunctional Wasteland of Lincoln, Obama’s adopted home state. He used the backs of Illinois citizens as his stepping stones to national prominence as an inconsequential state senator and an indifferent U.S. Senator.

But make no mistake, a few years down the road Obama will loathe the day he tied his wagon to Illinois. And it won’t be Illinois alone that goes down. There is likely to be a chain reaction as states like California and New York chart the same suicidal course as Illinois and its Greek mentality — at all costs maintain the entitlement status quo and keep power in union hands.

“lllinois’ pension system is hopelessly insolvent with about $60 billion of assets and $200 billion in ‘legacy’ liabilities (using an appropriate discount rate),” writes the Illinois Policy Institute’s Marc Levine in a Chicago Sun-Times op-ed. “In the May issue of National Tax Journal, nationally recognized pension expert Professor Joshua Rauh of Northwestern estimates that by 2018, all pension assets will have been liquidated! The cupboard will be bare.”

Nonetheless, the union-manipulated, Democrat controlled Illinois legislature decided this week to kick pension reform down the road. But it is finding plenty of enthusiasm for measures to make all of the economic pain go away by approving Chicago’s first casinos.

Gambling on the future seems to sit just fine with the Obama White House, but it is other people’s money that is on the table. When will those “other people” wake up?

Levine suggests one catalyst that is not a long shot by any means.

“Financial markets have closed for sovereign credits like Greece and Ireland; they can close for Illinois as well. This is not just theory; current interest rates indicate Illinois has the highest likelihood to default of any of the 50 states.”

Obama has witnessed Mother Nature’s devastation in Alabama and, this week, in Missouri. Will he have the courage to confront the demise that he himself has orchestrated in states where the buildings are still standing?