Columnist.
Waters' list of insults, vulgarities and blame-whitey scapegoating easily makes her the Al Sharpton of Congress. Let's go to the videotape: Waters once said of the then-sitting president: "I would like to ... say ... very clearly that I believe George (H.W.) Bush is a racist." She routinely refers to the Republican Party as "the enemy." She also referred to Republican former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan as a "plantation owner."
Just when you thought the disgruntled-about-Obama lefties gave up on the "let's replace Obama with Hillary" nonsense, it's back like "Rocky VI." Maybe even in 3-D. Check out this recent newspaper subhead: "President Barack Obama is facing mounting doubts within his own party about his re-election prospects, with fellow Democrats beginning to ask if Hillary Clinton would have made a better president." Well, with favorability numbers in the low 40s and 73 percent of Americans believing America is on the "wrong track," doubts do tend to sort of creep in. But Hillary?!
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney wants to be president. And a plurality of Republican voters want him to be president. Recent polls show Republican nominee Romney beating President Barack Obama. Three big issues, however, threaten to implode the GOP front-runner's nomination, let alone general election victory: RomneyCare, RomneyCare and RomneyCare. Few things unite the tea party, the GOP caucus/primary activists and the knock-on-doors, hang-the-signs, ring-the-phone volunteers more than their universal hatred of ObamaCare. Most Americans want ObamaCare repealed, some because it lacks a "public option." But the tea party-like Republicans -- and even regular Republicans -- overwhelmingly support ObamaCare repeal. It is up there with the worst legislation ever signed.
So, who "won" the debt ceiling standoff? President Barack Obama -- for two reasons. First, the tea party-influenced GOP stopped his job-killing bucket list: higher taxes, more "stimulus," union card check, and cap and trade, among the items. Whatever the economy does going forward, it will be better than had Obama and the Dems not been whacked. The policies of the last two-and-a-half years -- ObamaCare, "stimulus," bailouts, regulation, "green technology investments," "quantitative easing" (or as normal people would say, printing money), taxing and threatening to raise taxes further -- have failed. The debt-ceiling debate -- plus the new Republican majority in the House and the Democrats' loss of their Senate supermajority -- changes the game for the rest of his presidency.
To hear Democrats tell it, two things cripple the chance for a budget deal: the dastardly tea party, and the GOP's failure to understand that its beloved Ronald Reagan was actually militantly pro-tax. Gag me. The same we-won-the-election-and-elections-have-consequences lefties now cry out for "bipartisanship." Those who cheered the bulldog way that ObamaCare became law now want the resurgent Republicans to "reach across the aisle," "set aside partisan rancor" and "put the country first."
For those who voted for President Barack Obama expecting him to bridge America's "racial divide," a question: "How's that working for you?" Black U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, says "the minority community" blames racism for the Republican refusal to increase the debt limit without conditions. She did not, to be fair, flat-out call Republicans sheet-wearing, Ku Klux Klan-supporting, Jim Crow-loving, poll-tax-imposing, back-of-the-bus crackers. Instead, she took to the House floor with the subtlety of a woodchipper: "(O)nly this president ... only this one, has received the kind of attacks and disagreements and inability to work, only this one. Read between the lines. ... I do not understand what I think is the maligning and maliciousness (toward) this president. Why is he different? ... In the minority community, that is a question that is being raised. Why is this president being treated so disrespectfully?"
1) Incredibly weak recovery: President Barack Obama's tax/spend/regulation policy -- "stimulus"; continuation of TARP; bank, insurance company and auto industry bailouts; "quantitative easing" (aka the printing of money); cash for clunkers; minimum wage hikes; new regulatory rules on businesses; tripling of the deficit; addition of $4 trillion to the debt -- failed miserably to produce jobs and grow the economy at the historical rate expected after a deep recession. 2) ObamaCare: President Barack Obama promised it would "bend the cost curve" and that "if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan." The chief Medicare actuary said neither of those claims is true. Two-thirds of doctors believe that ObamaCare will lower the quality of health care.
"When the chief justice read me the oath," President Franklin D. Roosevelt said to a speechwriter, "and came to the words 'support the Constitution of the United States,' I felt like saying: 'Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy -- not the kind of Constitution your court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.'" FDR's statement vividly illustrates the Big Divide between (most) Republicans and Democrats, free marketers and collectivists, Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman. It's the line separating those who believe in the power of individuals from those who believe in the power of government -- so long as they're the ones in power. It's the line that separates those who believe in the welfare state from those who not only believe that the federal government recklessly spends more than it takes in, but also spends it on things not permitted by the Constitution -- and the country is worse off for having done so.
Ronald Reagan did nothing. Barack Obama saved the nation from total collapse. How else to explain the absence of jobless pitchfork-wielding Americans storming the White House? How else to explain the contrast between the explosive Reagan Recovery and the dud on our hands right now? Fortunately, the left is up to the task. "The secret of the long climb after 1982 was the economic plunge that preceded it. By the end of 1982 the U.S. economy was deeply depressed, with the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression. So there was plenty of room to grow before the economy returned to anything like full employment," said left-wing economist, Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in 2004. Oh.
The White Man made him do it. Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan recently unmasked the reason for President Barack Obama's unpopular, non-congressionally authorized, War Powers Resolution-violating decision to bomb Libya, a country that poses no imminent threat to the United States. "We voted for our brother, Barack," said Farrakhan, "a beautiful human being with a sweet heart, and now he's an assassin. They've turned him into them."
On Jan. 21, 2009, President John McCain took office. We strongly editorialized against McCain's election. After all, it was he who said, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should." So not only did we warn you -- he warned you. We urged American voters to set aside their racist fears of electing to the presidency the son of a Kenyan sheepherder and a white woman from Kansas. We contrasted McCain's tired, discredited vision for the American economy with that of the young, dashing senator from Illinois by way of Hawaii, Barack Obama. We predicted that under McCain's stewardship our severely ailing economy would get worse. In fact, we underestimated how bad things would get -- and how quickly.
Dead man texting. This describes the eventual fate of Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y. Weiner's I-won't-resign press conference aside, he'll soon quit -- shoved out by his party, whose members do not want to see the word "Weiner" in their 2012 opponents' attack ads. The real story here is the initial refusal of the so-called traditional media to take Weinergate seriously. Certainly the story contains juicy, hot-button interest points -- power, politics, a big-name principal married to a top aide of a powerful Cabinet member, the allegation of an online criminal hacking of the Twitter account of a congressman. Potent page one, above-the-fold stuff, right?
"Today the court affirms what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation's history." So began Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's enraged dissent. Release up to 46,000 convicted felons, the court recently ordered the state of California. In a 5-4 decision, the court gave California two years to reduce its prison "overcrowding" -- or set tens of thousands free. The ACLU, which brought the suit, successfully argued that poor prison conditions violated the prisoners' rights as a class, not individually, thus the threat of mass premature release.
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney make me think of Dorothy Jones. "Aunt" Dorothy, my mom's closest friend, was a warm, smart, comedienne-quick funny woman from a large family. Unlike my mom's other friends, Dorothy was single and remained so until she died. I once asked her, in the rude way only children can, why she never married. "You know," she said while pointing, one by one, at four imaginary men lined up in front her, "if you took the best qualities from all my sisters' husbands and rolled them up into one man -- you'd still come up short."
Rapper "Common" recently performed for "poetry night" at the White House. "Objection!" said the out-of-touch, Golf Channel-watching, Pat Boone-loving right-wingers, who called Common unworthy of an invitation to the People's House. The Comedy Channel's hip Jon Stewart ridiculed the unhip for their outrage. Who's right? White House press secretary and apparent rap-o-phile Jay Carney, who hails from the mean streets of the Lawrenceville prep school and Yale -- where he majored in Russian and Eastern European studies -- defended Common as "socially conscious."
"When President Obama was faced with the opportunity to act upon this," said Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan, "the President had to evaluate the strength of that information and then made what I believe was one of the most gutsiest (sic) calls of any president in recent memory." One of the gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory? On what basis, and by what measure? Americans wanted Osama bin Laden -- dead or alive, preferably dead. "How important," asked a 2006 Gallup poll, "do you think it is to the U.S. that Osama bin Laden be captured or killed?" The percentage of Americans who considered the apprehension or killing of bin Laden "somewhat important" to "extremely important" totaled an overwhelming 86 percent. Obama acted in accordance with popular opinion.
Osama bin Laden was a) killed by a unit overseen by what New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh denounced as Vice President Dick Cheney's "executive assassination ring," which was b) sent into action based on intel derived from the now-outlawed "enhanced interrogation techniques," which were c) used on detainees captured during the George W. Bush administration, who were d) being held in now-outlawed "secret prisons" or in the intended-to-be-closed Gitmo. President Obama's deputy national security advisor, John Brennan, confirmed that the death of bin Laden resulted from "a mosaic (of intelligence) appearing over time and by ... people who have been following bin Laden for many, many years." This explains why 81 percent of Republicans give former President George W. Bush "at least some of the credit" for bin Laden's death. U.S. security forces tracked and were able to kill bin Laden through the use of the discredited, maligned, and -- in some cases -- the discontinued terror-fighting policies and practices of Bush.
Here we go again. A Republican official, this time a member of the Orange County, Calif., GOP central committee, stands accused of -- racism! Her crime? She forwarded, to a circle of friends, an email depicting an image of a family of chimpanzees, with the superimposed face of President Barack Obama over the baby chimp's face. The caption read, "Now you know why no birth certificate." The national media soon picked up the story with the implicit "GOP-is-bigoted" story line.
Donald Trump isn't going to run for president. He is rich, enjoys himself, says bold and often stupid things, trades his wife in for a younger model every few years, and calls Rosie O'Donnell a "big fat pig." What's not to like? But President The Donald Trump? Really?! He couldn't take the scrutiny. Given his swashbuckling life and the media's heightened scrutiny of things Republican, Trump would spend his entire campaign putting out fires. Whether it be shady-side-of-the-line business deals, "bimbo eruptions," tax shenanigans, enemies looking to get even, or Lord knows what else, he'd barely have time to round up enough B-listers to keep "Celebrity Apprentice" afloat.
Suppose President John McCain, as with President Barack Obama, justified military force in Libya to avert "a humanitarian crisis." But then gave no thought of using the military to stop the human slaughter in places like the Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe and the Congo. How long would it take before the Congressional Black Caucus and the Rev. Jesse Jackson call him "racist"?
