The Patriot Post® · Brief

The Foundation

“Public affairs go on pretty much as usual: perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be.” –John Adams

Editor’s Note

The debt-ceiling “deal” agreed to by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), and President Barack Obama over the weekend is Washington politics at its finest: Cut $2 trillion from federal spending over a decade in return for adding $2.4 trillion to the current $14.3 trillion debt this year. That’s enough that the debt ceiling debate won’t have to occur again until after the 2012 elections, throwing Obama a life preserver. What a deal! (Yeah, we know. You could cut the sarcasm with a knife.)

We’re not the only ones who aren’t happy, either. The New York Times editorialized against the “hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists,” and Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver (D-MO) called it a “sugar-coated Satan sandwich.” If they feel that way about cuts in growth rates over 10 years, just imagine what they would say if spending were actually cut. Fortunately, the deal includes no tax hikes, and that’s a Tea Party victory that will help the economy.

All things considered, this deal is just about as good as we could hope for without controlling the Senate or the White House, and it’s a launching pad for gaining just that in next year’s election.

Government

“House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) told GOP members on a conference call Sunday evening that he had reached a deal with congressional leaders and the White House, but that it wouldn’t happen ‘unless we have membership on board.’ It remains to be seen how many House Republicans will end up supporting the final package, but members on the call told National Review Online they thought it would ultimately pass with bipartisan support. … Members described the tone of the call as overwhelmingly positive, with many praising Boehner’s efforts in the negotiations. … According to sources, Boehner said the deal was ‘the best that we could get.’ In particular, he thanked the 87 freshman members for their input, without which ‘we wouldn’t have gotten this far.’ … Freshman Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R., Ind.) told NRO that with ‘the most liberal president we’ve ever had’ occupying the White House, the Tea Party and the conservative movement have done all right for themselves. ‘I think the Tea Party needs to take credit for changing the dialogue in Washington to be about cutting spending,’ he said. ‘But whether I vote for this plan or not, it’s not enough. This isn’t the end of the fight.’ … Boehner told members he would like to vote on the plan as early as Monday night, and apologized for the short notice. Leaders will meet with the entire conference Monday to further discuss the details of the plan.” –National Review’s Andrew Stiles

Reader Comments

“Based upon Mark Alexander’s essay What Power to Tax and Spend?, nearly everything our president and Congress are doing is unconstitutional. It’s time to impeach all of them and start over.” -John

“The solution is simple: elect (put in office) those people who believe in the Rule of Law and limited government.” –Thomas

“Great article from Mark Alexander. We must reverse the spending pattern; freezing it will not be enough. The Dems/socialists are determined to keep expanding government and spend us into oblivion, and the sooner we admit this, the better. What in the world do people think Obama meant when he said he was going to fundamentally transform our country?” –Gerald

“In response to Friday’s Digest, the American people think congressmen mean actual spending cuts when they refer to spending cuts. All the spending cuts they are planning and arguing over are cuts to future spending plans, accommodations to the ever-expanding government bureaucracy. Nine hundred billion dollars over ten years is a meaningless drop in the budget. Democrats, bureaucrats and Obama can then continue to spend trillions every year? What a joke, no, an insult. It’s really time to first, freeze spending, then start eliminating departments.” –Patricia

Essential Liberty

“Government by the elected representatives of the people is coming to be government by two (or three or four) men in a secret room pronouncing the new law that will be rubber-stamped – or else! Accepting such a process as normal is a new phenomenon, but it is becoming in Washington an acceptable procedure. … Even the smartest, best-informed presidents and speakers … cannot possibly know the fuller implications of all the agreements they are making. … The top leaders are incapable of drafting a big technical bill. The details will get written by staffers and regulators after the bill is enacted into law. That is why now, for example, a year after the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law was passed, more than 200 regulations – all the teeth of the bill – have yet to be even drafted by regulators. That is why when regular order is followed and laws are enacted as they have been for 200 years – both in Congress and the executive branch – hundreds of highly specialized staffers have to be called upon to explain what broad-brush numbers will mean in real life. … Each time we have one of these secret deal negotiations – instead of regular order – the magnitude of the proposed change in our way of life gets bigger, and the process gets more exclusive and sloppier. This is not only bad legislating but also dangerous to our constitutional process.” –columnist Tony Blankley

Opinion in Brief

“[N]obody loves Obama. This is amazing because every president has people who love him, who feel deep personal affection or connection, who have a stubborn, even beautiful refusal to let what they know are just criticisms affect their feelings of regard. … The secret of Mr. Obama is that he isn’t really very good at politics, and he isn’t good at politics because he doesn’t really get people. … The fact is, he’s good at dismantling. He’s good at critiquing. He’s good at not being the last guy, the one you didn’t like. But he’s not good at building, creating, calling into being. He was good at summoning hope, but he’s not good at directing it and turning it into something concrete that answers a broad public desire. And so his failures in the debt ceiling fight. He wasn’t serious, he was only shrewd – and shrewdness wasn’t enough. … So he is losing a battle in which he had superior forces – the presidency, the U.S. Senate. In the process he revealed that his foes have given him too much mystique. He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist. He is a loser. And this is America, where nobody loves a loser.” –columnist Peggy Noonan

The Gipper

“Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, ‘Well done’? Can anyone compare the state of our economy when [this] administration took office with where we are today and say, ‘Keep up the good work’? Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, ‘Let’s have four more years of this’?” –Ronald Reagan

Re: The Left

“While Obama seldom misses an opportunity to blame his problems on the situation he inherited from President Bush, he says nothing about all the hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus money he inherited from the Bush administration. Incidentally, this ‘stimulus’ money did not do any more stimulating under George W. Bush than under Barack H. Obama. Nevertheless, Obama is an accomplished master at playing the blame game. Having gotten all the political credit for the money he has showered on his favorites from coast to coast, he now seeks to share the blame for the resulting financial crisis with Republicans, by maneuvering them into a position where they have to help solve the debt crisis that Obama created. He has done this in great part by simply speaking of spending cuts mostly in the abstract, leaving it to the Republicans to be specific, and thus have them face the wrath from the constituencies who support the programs they want to cut.” –economist Thomas Sowell

Political Futures

“The Pew Research Center showed Democrats with a 51 percent to 39 percent party identification edge over Republicans in its 2008 polls. Now Pew Research has come out with figures for 2011. They’re not good news for Barack Obama and the Democrats. The Democratic Party identification edge has been reduced to 47 percent to 43 percent. … The Pew analysts note, as if they were analyzing a growth stock, that the Republicans’ numbers haven’t improved since 2010. But the 2010 numbers yielded a 52 percent to 45 percent Republican lead in the popular vote for the House. If – and it’s always a big if – Republicans can maintain that standing in party identification, they should be in fine shape in November 2012, even with increased presidential year turnout.” –political analyst Michael Barone

For the Record

“The New York Times wasted no time in jumping to conclusions about Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who staged two deadly attacks in Oslo last weekend, claiming in the first two paragraphs of one story that he was a ‘gun-loving,’ ‘right-wing,’ ‘fundamentalist Christian,’ opposed to ‘multiculturalism.’ … This was a big departure from the Times’ conclusion-resisting coverage of the Fort Hood shooting suspect, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. Despite reports that Hasan shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’ as he gunned down his fellow soldiers at a military medical facility in 2009, only one of seven Times articles on Hasan so much as mentioned that he was a Muslim. … True, in one lone entry on Breivik’s gaseous 1,500-page manifesto, ‘2083: A European Declaration of Independence,’ he calls himself ‘Christian.’ But unfortunately he also uses a great number of other words to describe himself, and these other words make clear that he does not mean ‘Christian’ as most Americans understand the term. … In fact, at several points in his manifesto, Breivik stresses that he has a beef with Christians for their soft-heartedness. … He goes on to say that a ‘Christian fundamentalist theocracy’ is ‘everything we DO NOT want,’ and a ‘secular European society’ is ‘what we DO want.’ … Breivik says he is ‘not an excessively religious man,’ brags that he is ‘first and foremost a man of logic,’ calls himself ‘economically liberal’ and reveres Darwinism. But Times reporters had their ‘Eureka!’ moment as soon as they heard Breivik used the word ‘Christian’ someplace to identify himself.” –columnist Ann Coulter

Faith & Family

“Texas Republican governor and potential presidential candidate Rick Perry will headline a ‘Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis’ on Aug. 6 at Reliant Stadium in Houston. … While wringing their hands and even threatening legal action against the Aug. 6 gathering … the ACLU of Texas and its fellow ideological travelers have said nothing about another prayer meeting that took place last week in the White House. Here is how Jim Wallis of the liberal Christian magazine ‘Sojourners’ described that meeting on his website: ‘I, along with 11 other national faith leaders, met with President Obama and senior White House staff for 40 minutes. We were representing the Circle of Protection, which formed in a commitment to defend the poor in the budget debates. Sitting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, we opened in prayer, grasping hands across the table, and read scripture together. We reminded ourselves that people of faith must evaluate big decisions on issues like a budget by how they impact the most vulnerable.’ … If this had been a prayer meeting hosted by conservative evangelical leaders with President George W. Bush in attendance and the prayers were about conservative social policies, one can safely predict how liberals would have reacted. But since this was about maintaining government spending for social programs favored by liberals, these prayers were no problem for them.” –columnist Cal Thomas

The Last Word

“[B]ack in 1953, the NAACP waged a campaign against CBS and the Blatz Brewing Company. The purpose of the proposed boycott was to get ‘Amos 'n’ Andy’ knocked off the tube because, the pinheads complained, it portrayed blacks in a stereotypical fashion. The network and the beer company caved, and just like that, black cast members Spencer Williams, Amanda Randolph, Johnny Lee, Nick Stewart and the marvelous Tim Moore, joined the ranks of the unemployed. Yet, here it is, 58 years later, and you don’t hear the NAACP griping about such embarrassing stereotypes as Maxine Waters, Bobby Rich, Barbara Lee, James Clyburn, Melvin Watt, Jesse Jackson, Jr. or Sheila Jackson Lee, serving for decades in the House of Representatives. If, as I’ve heard, a nation of sheep breeds a government of wolves, I think it’s fair to say that a nation of black sheep breeds a government of really ignorant, self-serving, wolves.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
The Patriot Post Editorial Team