and here’s who we got:
My thanks to my gifted fellow C4P contributor Seth Adam Smith for creating this video.
Category Archives: Politics
Gas prices: onward and upward
I argued in a post last Wednesday that gas prices will be Barack Obama’s Achilles heel, but that post was incomplete. I argued that speculation in oil futures (which played a major role in the surge in gas prices after Nancy Pelosi took the speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives) will once again be a major factor, given that the Democratic Congress and administration have foreclosed the possibility of expanded domestic drilling, which was the most important element in driving the price of oil futures down. I left out a couple other reasons, though.
First, tied to this, one reason why the current administration and congressional leadership are opposed to energy development (aside from, as noted, wind, solar, and the like) is that they don’t think higher gas prices are a bad thing. Ideologically, they’re committed to reducing fossil-fuel consumption by whatever means they can find to hand, and they recognize that higher prices mean lower usage; therefore, while they’ve been chary about coming out and saying it where people can hear them, they’re all in favor of gas prices going up. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be pushing their “cap and trade” bill (that Rep. Henry Waxman, who’s leading the charge on this, hasn’t even read) so hard; after all, let’s call a spade a spade here, what is this thing? It’s an energy tax, and when it passes (it might take a while, but they’ll figure out a way to get it through Congress), it’s going to boost the price of gas even more.
Second, President Obama has allies in this effort to push gas prices up—allies with names like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chávez. It is very much in the interests of oil-producing states like Iran and Venezuela to see gas prices go back up so that they will have more money—which their tin-horn-tyrant rulers will then use, not to better the lives of their people, but to fuel their geopolitical ambitions (which is, not so incidentally, not in the interests of America). As such, they’re going to do whatever they can to return oil prices to the highs they saw last summer. It’s an effort in which they will no doubt be grateful for the help they get from the U.S. government; one wonders how long it will be before they start channeling Lenin and talking about “the useful idiots in the White House.”
Dick Cheney’s ratings rising
According to a recent CNN poll, the number of Americans with a favorable opinion of Dick Cheney has risen eight percent since he left office; his ratings are still lower than NBC’s, but they have at least improved significantly. The obvious explanation for this is his media tour; now that he, freed from the Bush administration’s shackles, has begun publicly defending himself and the administration and pleading the case for its policies and actions (as in the speech he gave this week at the American Enterprise Institute), people are listening. Now that someone is actually presenting the defense for the Bush administration—something President Bush never did, and doesn’t seem to have wanted anyone else to do—it’s having an effect. In particular, I suspect he’s giving people reason to see the distinction between himself (and President Bush) and Barack Obama in a different light.
Of course, the media don’t want to admit this. CNN polling director Keating Holland said (and you can almost hear the sniff),
Is Cheney’s uptick due to his visibility as one of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration? Almost certainly not. Former President George W. Bush’s favorable rating rose 6 points in that same time period, and Bush has not given a single public speech since he left office.
As a response, this is, quite frankly, pathetic. If Vice President Cheney were defending himself to the exclusion of President Bush, this would be logical; as it is, it doesn’t pass the smell test. A far likelier explanation is that the vice president’s media tour is the cause of the rise in both their favorable ratings, because he’s addressing a major cause for the negative view of both of them.
The politics of personal destruction, intra-GOP edition: take 2
R. A. Mansour, explaining the reason and purpose for the founding of Conservatives4Palin, wrote,
Sarah Palin wasn’t able to return home from the campaign. The campaign continues, and she is forced to fight a war on two fronts—the local and the national. As long as the campaign continues, we’ll be here to watch her back.
This continues to be true; and the most frustrating part is that each of these fronts in turn has two fronts, as she is assailed both by liberals, from whom one would expect no better, and also by other conservatives. I have to think that Reagan would be infuriated by the way in which his Eleventh Commandment (“Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican”) is routinely ignored when it comes to Gov. Palin; I also think that he would have no trouble diagnosing the reason. President Reagan famously had a plaque on his desk that read, “There is no limit to what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit”; these people who are attacking her, and cloaking their attacks in the language of conservatism, aren’t doing so for reasons of principle, but because they care who gets the credit. They care very much, and they don’t want it to be her.
What they fail to understand is that when you care who gets the credit, that sharply limits what you can accomplish—and the more you care, the more limited you are. Hurting Gov. Palin may well increase the chance that Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush or Tim Pawlenty wins the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, but even more, it increases the chance that Barack Obama wins the 2012 general election. The only politicians who profit from attacks on Sarah Palin are Democrats, and the only party that is helped is the Democratic Party. Republicans of influence, be they in office or in the conservative media, need to grow up, shut up, and stop trying to run down Gov. Palin, because not only is it wrong, it’s only going to hurt them and their preferred causes, not help them; the knife they plant in her back is the knife in their own. Republicans acting like Democrats only profits Democrats.
Barack Obama’s Achilles heel
I commented earlier today on the latest attempt by the OSM (Obama-stream media), in the person of New York Times gossip columnist Maureen Dowd, to pre-emptively defend their adored idol, Barack Obama, by asserting that any terrorist attack during his time in office won’t be his fault, it will be Dick Cheney’s fault. This is, as I noted, not an isolated thing, but part of a broader campaign to ensure that any bad event or outcome is blamed on the Republicans, and primarily on the Bush administration; though a superficially appealing approach, I argued that it infantilizes President Obama and renders him unworthy of respect, because it essentially says that he can’t be held to the same standard as other presidents. It makes him less effectual, powerful, influential, and important than his predecessor (and even his predecessor’s VP!), and thereby makes him a lesser figure.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I also don’t think people will buy it; we’re too accustomed to the Harry S Truman (“The buck stops here”) approach for many people to swallow “It’s not my fault” coming from our president. We’ll take a lot of things, but I don’t believe avoidance of responsibility will be one of them. However, let’s suppose for a moment that I’m wrong. Let’s suppose that when the first batch of folks the Obama administration releases from Gitmo turn around and help nuke the World Series, or turn a superbug loose on the Washington Mall on the Fourth of July, or whatever they do, that the American public in fact exonerates the president and buys the line that it’s all Dick Cheney’s fault. Let’s suppose that a year from now, the voters still pin the problems in our banking system on the Bush administration and hold Barack Obama blameless for the failure of his programs. Let’s suppose that the polls reveal the attitude that if things are getting worse, it’s just because George W. Bush did such a lousy job.
There’s still one thing that the president won’t be able to duck, and it’s something no one seems to be thinking about: gas prices. For whatever reason, all the prognostications I’ve seen are ignoring them, effectively assuming that they’ll remain where they were at the beginning of the year—and they won’t. Indeed, they already haven’t. Three or four weeks ago, gas prices here were below $1.90 a gallon; right now, they’re sitting at $2.459, and they’re only going to keep going up. It won’t be long before they’re back over $3 a gallon, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them back over $4 a gallon by Labor Day.
Why? Because gas prices were driven up in large part by speculation in oil futures, and the biggest thing that drove the price of futures down was Congress’ action in letting the offshore-drilling ban expire. The prospect of a dramatic expansion in American domestic oil production exerted considerable downward pressure on oil futures, which brought down the price of oil, and thus the price of gas. That prospect is no longer in place, thanks to the policies of the new administration, which is resolutely opposed to any sort of energy development except for those forms which are supposedly “green.” That means that the conditions are back in place for oil and gas prices to rise, which they’re already doing; that in turn means that speculating in futures, betting on them to continue to rise, will once again be a profitable activity. With so many people who are now a lot poorer than they used to be and so few means available for them to correct that situation, it seems likely to me that we’ll once again see speculation start to drive up the price of oil futures, and that the price of gas will once again follow suit.
And if I’m right, there will be no earthly way for Barack Obama or any of his media stooges to blame George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or anyone on the Republican side of the aisle for that—but there will be a great many Republicans, led by Sarah Palin, to say “I told you so.” It will be all on him, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and the rest of the Democratic cabal now running this country, and no way for them to avoid the blame.
The OSM (Obama-stream media) theme song
Consequence Free
Wouldn’t it be great if no one ever got offended?
Wouldn’t it be great to say what’s really on your mind?
I have always said all the rules are made for bending;
And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?Chorus:
I wanna be consequence-free;
I wanna be where nothing needs to matter.
I wanna be consequence-free,
Just sing Na Na Na Na Na Na Ya Na Na.I could really use to lose my Catholic conscience,
‘Cause I’m getting sick of feeling guilty all the time.
I won’t abuse it, yeah, I’ve got the best intentions
For a little bit of anarchy, but not the hurting kind.Chorus
I couldn’t sleep at all last night
‘Cause I had so much on my mind.
I’d like to leave it all behind,
But you know it’s not that easyChorus
Wouldn’t it be great if the band just never ended?
We could stay out late and we would never hear last call.
We wouldn’t need to worry about approval or permission;
We could slip off the edge and never worry about the fall.Chorus out
It’s a catchy song, and the video (which is below, if you’re interested) is the sort of fun, goofy piece that Great Big Sea likes to do. It’s also, as I’ve said somewhere, one of the stupidest song lyrics I’ve ever run across. What does it mean when our actions are consequence-free? When our actions have no consequences, we say they’re inconsequential; that means they don’t matter, which is why inconsequential is a synonym for unimportant or insignificant. If nothing we ever did had consequences, if none of it ever mattered, then we wouldn’t matter; if all our actions were insignificant, it would mean that we would be insignificant, our lives would be meaningless. As I wrote last fall,
The key is that our actions matter because we matter. Indeed, we matter enough to God that he was willing to pay an infinite price for our salvation; and so our actions matter greatly to him, both for their effect on others (who matter to him as much as we do) and for their effect on us. Our actions have eternal consequence because we are beings of eternal consequence; it could not be otherwise.
Only a fool could wish for insignificance; it’s profoundly foolish even to feign a wish for such a thing.
Now, it’s hardly a new or shocking idea to suggest that our media establishment is composed largely of fools, but they’re so far in the tank for Barack Obama that it’s taking them to new and surprising depths of folly. We see this particularly in the ongoing effort by the MSM—who would be better called the OSM, the Obama-stream media; they’re so deep in his pocket, they’re nothing more than pocket lint at this point—to render the president consequence-free, at least when it comes to negative consequences: if anything bad happens, it’s all that evil Bush’s fault, or that evil Cheney’s fault, or the fault of some other evil Republican. The deepest depths of this drivel (so far) have been plumbed by Maureen Dowd, who wrote in the New York Times,
No matter if or when terrorists attack here, and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan, red/blue state timetable, Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.
In other words, it doesn’t matter when it happens, or what happens, or how it happens, or what could have happened, or what the president and his administration have done, or what they haven’t done, or what they could have done, or what they should have done—according to Maureen Dowd, if terrorists ever do anything here again, no matter what, it’s Dick Cheney’s fault.
Now, to a superficial mind, I can see the appeal of this: it preserves the “blame everything on the GOP” strategy that got the Democratic Party to power, wherein it is asserted that only the GOP can do or cause bad things, while all good things are solely to the credit of the donkeys. What Dowd apparently fails to see, however, is the way in which her assertion completely emasculates President Obama and his administration. What she’s essentially saying is that Barack Obama is fundamentally inconsequential and ineffectual, at least by comparison to the previous administration. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the ones with the real power, the ones who really matter; Barack Obama just can’t be expected to compare, or to have the same kind of effect on the world. He can’t be held responsible if al’Qaeda or somebody else attacks us, because, um, it can’t possibly be his fault, because, uh, well, he just can’t be; there has to be someone else to blame. The buck doesn’t stop at his desk; that’s above his pay grade, or something.
I’m sorry, but when people start saying things like that about the President of the United States, that’s just pathetic. But hey, at least he can dance around and look cool, like these guys:
Gov. Palin and the abortion shift
About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed
from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship.”
—Ephesians 19:23-27 (ESV)
Recent polling on American opinions on abortion has shown some interesting results. According to American Thinker,
In [August] 2008, overall support for keeping abortion legal in all or most cases, was at 54%, a clear majority. This year, however, Pew polling found that support for legal abortion is down to 46%, while support for making the procedure illegal in most or all cases rose from 41% to 44%. . . .
Support for keeping abortion legal in most or all cases among the 18-29 year olds has fallen a full 5% since last August. In August 2008, legal abortion support among 18-29 year olds stood at 52%; this April it’s down to 47%. Support for making abortion illegal in most or all cases has risen 3% and is now at 48%. . . .
The most notable decline in the support for legal abortion has been among those highly-cherished, sought after Independent voters. As Pew notes:
There has been notable decline in the proportion of independents saying abortion should be legal in most or all cases; majorities of independents favored legal abortion in August and the two October surveys, but just 44% do so today. In addition, the proportion of moderate and liberal Republicans saying abortion should be legal declined between August and late October (from 67% to 57%). In the current survey, just 43% of moderate and liberal Republicans say abortion should legal in most or all cases.
The most recent Gallup polling backs up this shift:
A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.
The new results, obtained from Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002.
The May 2009 survey documents comparable changes in public views about the legality of abortion. In answer to a question providing three options for the extent to which abortion should be legal, about as many Americans now say the procedure should be illegal in all circumstances (23%) as say it should be legal under any circumstances (22%). This contrasts with the last four years, when Gallup found a strong tilt of public attitudes in favor of unrestricted abortion.
Americans’ recent shift toward the pro-life position is confirmed in two other surveys. The same three abortion questions asked on the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey were included in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from May 12-13, with nearly identical results, including a 50% to 43% pro-life versus pro-choice split on the self-identification question. . . .
The source of the shift in abortion views is clear in the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey. The percentage of Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) calling themselves “pro-life” rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essentially no change in the views of Democrats and Democratic leaners.
Clearly, there has been a significant shift in the electorate on this issue—not overwhelming, but significant—since last August. R. A. Mansour offers, I believe, the key explanation for this shift:
A sharp decline since last August? Hmmm, what happened last August?
Oh, yes. Hurricane Sarah happened. And she introduced the nation to her beautiful and perfect son Trig.
It seems to me that the pro-abortion lobby depends for its success on people not looking too closely at abortion or thinking about it too deeply; that’s why they fight tooth and nail any effort to require doctors to give women considering abortion any information about what will be done to them (beyond of course the minimum: “You will no longer be pregnant at the end of it”). With any other surgical procedure, the law requires that patients be fully informed so as to be able to give appropriate consent—but not with abortion, because giving women more information might cause them to change their mind and choose not to have one after all. The pro-abortion lobby doesn’t want them to make that choice, and so it seeks to keep them uninformed.
Gov. Palin’s abrupt appearance on the national scene, however, got a lot of people thinking about abortion in a way they hadn’t before; Pew and Gallup are now showing us the consequences of that fact. It’s no surprise, then, that the likes of Demetrius in our own day are stirring up a riot; you can almost hear them talking amongst themselves:
“Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Alaska but across America this Palin has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that Abortion is not really good. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Abortion may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Hollywood and the world worship.”
For all their sneers and smears, it’s really Gov. Palin’s opponents who are on the side of ignorance, because they’re the ones who profit from it.
This is an absolute crime
Read this—it’s beyond belief. I don’t know what part of the president’s economic policy is supposed to justify the illegal seizure of a man’s business, or to excuse forcing him into bankruptcy and rendering his 50+ employees abruptly unemployed, but this is completely infuriating. This goes against everything this country is supposed to be about.
Barack Obama tries to duck accountability . . . again
This from Andy McCarthy on the current state of the argument over releasing more photos from Abu Ghraib. The Obama administration is claiming to have come up with a new argument against the release, when in fact (as they surely know full well) they’re advancing the same argument made by the Bush administration:
As the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision last September in ACLU v. Dep’t of Defense relates, back in 2005, the Bush Justice Department first argued, in the district court, that the release of the photos “could reasonably be expected to endanger the physical safety of United States troops, other Coalition forces, and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The judge rejected this argument—incorrectly in my view, for what that may be worth—despite acknowledging the “risk that the enemy will seize upon the publicity of the photographs and seek to use such publicity as a pretext for enlistments and violent acts.” (Opinion at pp. 4-5). Then, as the three-judge Second Circuit panel noted, this national security argument became the Bush Justice Department’s “lead argument on this appeal.” (Id., pp. 8 & ff.) It’s simply false for Gibbs to contend otherwise.
Why all the legerdemain? Because, as I said in the lead argument made in Tuesday’s column (and on which I will elaborate in a new article later today): Obama is using this litigation as a smokescreen. He’s now getting plaudits for reversing himself and his Justice Department (which, in contrast to the Bush Justice Department, didn’t want to fight this case at all—just wanted to release the photos). But he is still trying to get away with voting present—which is to say, he is hiding behind the judges.
McCarthy explains,
It is in Obama’s power, right this minute, to end this debacle by issuing an executive order suppressing disclosure of the photos due to national security and foreign policy concerns. As I’ve noted, there’s no need to get into a Bush-era debate over the limits of executive power here. In the Freedom of Information Act, indeed, in FOIA’s very first exemption, Congress expressly vests him with that authority. See Title 5, U.S. Code, Section 552(b)(1)(A) (FOIA disclosure mandate “does not apply to matters that are …specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and . . . are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order”).
Besides being simple, issuing such an order would be a strong position and the screamingly obvious right thing to do. But it would also be a fully accountable thing to do, and that’s why President Obama is avoiding it. He realizes—especially after he surrendered details of our interrogation methods to the enemy—that he can’t afford to undermine the war effort again so quickly and so blatantly; but his heart is with the Left on this—that’s why he agreed to the release of the photos in the first place and why he is trying to prevent mutiny within his base. So here’s the game: Obama tells those of us who care about national security that he is taking measures to protect the troops and the American people, but he also tells the Left that he hasn’t made any final decisions about the photos and that the question is really for the courts to decide. That’s why he carefully couched yesterday’s reversal as a “delay” in the release of the photos.
Alternatively, of course, if the president really believes that releasing the photos is the “screamingly obvious right thing to do,” he could just go ahead and order it done; but that would also be a fully accountable thing to do, and so would not answer his core objective. McCarthy goes on to note that the administration has not elected to invoke the executive-order provision in its FOIA defense, but rather “a section relating to the withholding of records ‘compiled for law enforcement purposes,'” presumably leading with a weaker argument to increase the odds that the court will order the release of the photos. That way President Obama can get what he wants without actually having to do it himself and thus take responsibility for it.
Of course, all this involves trying to manipulate the court, and as McCarthy notes, that may not go over well:
I can assure you that federal judges don’t like to be toyed with. Supreme Court justices may not mind if the administration treats the media like a lap-dog and the public like we’re a bunch of rubes; but, regardless of their political leanings, the justices have goo-gobs of self-esteem, and they will not take kindly to being treated like pawns in the Obamaestro’s game. The Solicitor General should expect some very tough questions about why the busy justices should waste their valuable time grappling with a tough, life-and-death legal issue when Obama could simply issue an order—regardless of how the Court rules—suppressing the photos. This, of course, is the question the media should be asking. Unlike the White House press corps, the justices will take the time to understand what’s happening and they will not roll over.
Political fairy tales never end right
Once upon a time, there was a politician who said,
Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a VP. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. . . .
You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and you know teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits. . . .
Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I ever thought that it was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that—they’d be fired.
That politician was very good at saying things that made people think highly of him, and so in the fullness of time, he grew up and became President of the United States. But along the way, he picked up a traveling companion, a Scarecrow named Joe who said whatever came into his mind, including using Gov. Palin’s youngest child to score political points; and the politician didn’t fire him, or stop him, or tell him to back off. And this was a sign that maybe he didn’t mean what he said after all. And the press continued to do what he’d told them not to do, and he said nothing further; and this was another sign.
And then after the politician became president, there came the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at which it is traditional to have a comedian make fun of the president, to show that the president can laugh at himself and take a joke. But since this politician didn’t like laughing at himself and taking jokes, they had a comedian to make fun of his opponents instead, including a crude “joke” about Gov. Palin and her family. The comedian told this joke right in front of the politician who had once said,
Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics.
In any proper fairy tale, this should be the cue for the politician to step up and say, “I said this was inappropriate, and I meant it. I said we need to respect those with whom we disagree, and I meant it. I said we need to base our politics on political issues, not on character assassination, and I meant it. Stop this nonsense right now.” This should be the cue for the politician to defend the one unjustly abused.
Did he? No . . . he laughed. All his words about the good, the true and the beautiful were just words.
Political fairy tales never end right.