http://www.wimp.com/thegovernment/
this is great!! show your kids. (and your less than informed adult friends)
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
Unlevel Playing Field.
So, when liberals burn American flags, smear the military and compare Bush to Hitler, it's free speech.
When conservatives protest excessive taxation & govt spending its offensive.
Got it.
When conservatives protest excessive taxation & govt spending its offensive.
Got it.
Karl Rove is RIGHT (and correct too)!
Flip-Flops and Governance
Our president isn't quite as advertised.
By KARL ROVE
Barack Obama inherited a set of national-security policies that he rejected during the campaign but now embraces as president. This is a stunning and welcome about-face.
For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush's military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an "enormous failure" and a "legal black hole." His campaign claimed last summer that "court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists." Upon entering office, he found out they aren't.
He insisted in an interview with NBC in 2007 that Congress mandate "consequences" for "a failure to meet various benchmarks and milestones" on aid to Iraq. Earlier this month he fought off legislatively mandated benchmarks in the $97 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Obama agreed on April 23 to American Civil Liberties Union demands to release investigative photos of detainee abuse. Now's he reversed himself. Pentagon officials apparently convinced him that releasing the photos would increase the risk to U.S. troops and civilian personnel.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama excoriated Mr. Bush's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, insisting it could not succeed. Earlier this year, facing increasing violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama rejected warnings of a "quagmire" and ordered more troops to that country. He isn't calling it a "surge" but that's what it is. He is applying in Afghanistan the counterinsurgency strategy Mr. Bush used in Iraq.
As a candidate, Mr. Obama promised to end the Iraq war by withdrawing all troops by March 2009. As president, he set a slower pace of drawdown. He has also said he will leave as many as 50,000 Americans troops there.
These reversals are both praiseworthy and evidence that, when it comes to national security, being briefed on terror threats as president is a lot different than placating MoveOn.org and Code Pink activists as a candidate. The realities of governing trump the realities of campaigning.
We are also seeing Mr. Obama reverse himself on the domestic front, but this time in a manner that will do more harm than good.
Mr. Obama campaigned on "responsible fiscal policies," arguing in a speech on the Senate floor in 2006 that the "rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy." In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he pledged to "go through the federal budget line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work." Even now, he says he'll "cut the deficit . . . by half by the end of his first term in office" and is "rooting out waste and abuse" in the budget.
However, Mr. Obama's fiscally conservative words are betrayed by his liberal actions. He offers an orgy of spending and a bacchanal of debt. His budget plans a 25% increase in the federal government's share of the GDP, a doubling of the national debt in five years, and a near tripling of it in 10 years.
On health care, Mr. Obama's election ads decried "government-run health care" as "extreme," saying it would lead to "higher costs." Now he is promoting a plan that would result in a de facto government-run health-care system. Even the Washington Post questions it, saying, "It is difficult to imagine . . . benefits from a government-run system."
Making adjustments in office is one thing. Constantly governing in direct opposition to what you said as a candidate is something else. Mr. Obama's flip-flops on national security have been wise; on the domestic front, they have been harmful.
In both cases, though, we have learned something about Mr. Obama. What animated him during the campaign is what historian Forrest McDonald once called "the projection of appealing images." All politicians want to project an appealing image. What Mr. McDonald warned against is focusing on this so much that an appealing image "becomes a self-sustaining end unto itself." Such an approach can work in a campaign, as Mr. Obama discovered. But it can also complicate life once elected, as he is finding out.
Mr. Obama's appealing campaign images turned out to have been fleeting. He ran hard to the left on national security to win the nomination, only to discover the campaign commitments he made were shallow and at odds with America's security interests.
Mr. Obama ran hard to the center on economic issues to win the general election. He has since discovered his campaign commitments were obstacles to ramming through the most ideologically liberal economic agenda since the Great Society.
Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
A Typical Email to conservOpunk!
Warm thanks to those on the Left who for the last 6 years undermined our national security efforts by screaming at the top of their lungs that we must close Gitmo without thinking about the consequences (for 2 of those years we heard this from the Left's Cheerleader in Chief while as a naive candidate - Hilary's words, not mine).
I am so glad that for 6 years we had to endure derision from the elites and their cohorts claiming that arguments about the importance of certain measures furthering national security were simply "talking points from the knuckle-dragging neo-cons" and that according to them there was no substance to a reasonable debate about the issue - nope, only yelling was allowed - yelling at those of us who understand the threat posed by these terrorists picked up on foreign soil.
Well, this admission by the administration may be called "practical" and "well thought out" by the press - but let's be honest. The Gitmo policy and the tribunals and warrantless wiretapping of foreign commo from known terrorists into the US worked and that's why Obama has not dumped them. And if Obama's practical side thinks they work now and will in the future, then this is an admission by extension that Bush policies did IN FACT keep us safe for the last 6 years (which is a far cry from the string of terror attacks we endured in the 90s under Clinton - since looking back at what previous administrations "inherited" is so in vogue now).
So, now that Gitmo is no longer the political whipping post for the Bush administration, maybe cooler heads will prevail - but the emboldening of our enemies and the lasting damage to our CIA agents' and Gitmo soldiers' morale by those who attacked them from the Left incessantly for 6 years will not go away so soon.
Even if the detention center at Gitmo is eventually closed (which is doubtful because no one wants trained terrorists pulled from a battlefield in their backyard), the Left has no leg left to stand on and scream from regarding this issue.
Hopefully the Left will now stop playing politics with national security. Coming next...Senator Harry Reid (D-We Lost) will retract his 2007 statements that the Iraq war was lost (made before the surge even started) - hah! not really, like those Japanese soldiers found in caves on Pacific Islands in the 80s who thought WWII was still ongoing, Harry (Reid) still thinks we lost the Iraq War.
---------------------------------------
Oh, and a quick 2d topic - just today a federal judge made a ruling, the AP reports:
In his opinion, Bates said he agreed with the Bush administration that "the president has the authority to detain persons that the president determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks.
"The president also has the authority to detain persons who are or were part of Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed (i.e., directly participated in) a belligerent act in aid of such enemy armed forces," Bates wrote.
But he said the Bush administration went beyond the law of war by including in its definition those who "supported" enemy forces.
Oops, my bad, I accidentally changed the President's name, it should read this way:
In his opinion, Bates said he agreed with the Obama administration that "the president has the authority to detain persons that the president determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks.
But he said the Obama administration went beyond the law of war by including in its definition those who "supported" enemy forces. (OMG - the ACLU, Moveon.org, Jon Stewart, et al better march on DC now, wearing those orange jumpsuits of course - that warmonger is overreaching and shredding the Constitution!!!!!! Oh, wait, it's Obama, so I'm sure they're okay with it)
(I'm not holding my breath waiting to see any protests like this during Obama's reign from the double standard, no principled Left)
(On a personal note: I thought about tempering some of what I say here - but no, I, and other like thinkers, had to sit back for 6 years and get yelled at by every quarter of our society, and what I have in this email comes no where near the verbal grenades that were tossed at those of us who support the troops and the mission and the policies)
5/21/09
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