Columnist.
Otherwise sane people speculate that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will resign her post and challenge President Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2012. But Hillary's futile challenge would have a far more damaging effect than that inflicted on Al Gore by persona non grata Ralph Nader in '00. After Dems get through blaming her for Obama's fall '12 defeat, neither Bill nor Hillary would be able to get a table at Fatburger. Here are the 10 reasons why she won't do it.
Dear George, The Gulf oil spill opened my eyes. As with Hurricane Katrina, it happened suddenly. I barked out orders. I pounded my desk. But the oil kept flowing. Worse, the nation watched it all on television and said: "Why doesn't the President do something? Doesn't he care?" From then on, I fully understood both the expectations and the limitations of this job. I ran on "hope and change." I said I would bring the sides together. The American people, I told Republicans who opposed my stimulus plan, have spoken. And "I won."
"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation," then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said in December 2007. What a difference a change of job title makes. "Let's just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates three weeks before President Obama ordered a no-fly zone over -- and other military action against -- Libya.
"Why no video of looters in Japan?" Japan's prime minister calls the 9.0 earthquake and the following tsunami the greatest crisis in Japan since World War II. Ten thousand people are feared dead. Millions are without power, and millions sleep outdoors in cold weather. But we haven't seen looting. So I posted this question on Facebook and Twitter.
Charlie Sheen, at least, has an excuse. He's on a drug he calls "Charlie Sheen." But what powerful hallucinogen inhaled by the left induces the mental fantasy that makes them believe: Spending nearly a trillion dollars in "stimulus" money "created or saved" 3.5 million jobs? A "tax cut" means giving checks to the nearly 40 percent of the workforce that pays no federal income taxes?
"Racist!" shouted some Columbia University students at an Iraq War vet. Other students reportedly "hissed and booed." Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who spoke at Columbia three years earlier, received better treatment from the audience. The subject of the students' scorn? Former Army Staff Sgt. Anthony Maschek. The 28-year-old Columbia freshman and Purple Heart recipient served in Iraq. During an attack, he was shot 11 times, suffered two broken legs and sustained injuries to his abdomen, arm and chest. He spent two years at Walter Reed, where one leg was amputated. He uses a wheelchair.
"'ObamaCare' ... is a disparaging reference to the President of the United States. It is meant as a disparaging reference to the President of the United States. It is clearly in violation of the House rules against that," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. "ObamaCare," according to several blogs, is the new "n" word. When did "ObamaCare" become a slur? Proponents, after all, boast that President Barack Obama succeeded in signing "universal care'' legislation when every Democratic president since Harry Truman failed to "get it done." Why isn't President Obama flattered to have his name attached to his signature achievement and a now-fulfilled campaign promise? Was there a hissy fit over "HillaryCare" or the widely used "RomneyCare"?
Learning nothing from his party's November "shellacking," President Barack Obama offers a 2012 budget that proves, yet again, he believes in government as fervently as President Ronald Reagan believed in the individual. Obama ignores the recommendations of his own bipartisan deficit-reduction commission, as well as polls showing voters want smaller government, and smugly proposes more spending, higher taxes and even bigger government. Obama then holds a press conference and, with a straight face that would have shamed Baghdad Bob, claims his budget "will not be adding more to the national debt."
Ronald Reagan "tortured" blacks. Tavis Smiley, the PBS television host, once said this about the former president. NBC's Bryant Gumbel and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, among many others, consider Reagan a racist. "There they go again," as Reagan might have said. The economic lot for blacks and Hispanics improved far more than it did for whites after Reagan's steep tax cuts. In late 1982, Reagan's second year in office, the unemployment rate for blacks was 20.4 percent. By 1989, his last year, the black unemployment rate had fallen to 11.4 percent -- a 9 percent drop. In late 1982, the unemployment rate for Hispanics was 15.3 percent. By 1989, it had fallen to 8 percent -- a drop of over 7 percentage points. White unemployment, by contrast, fell "only" 4 percentage points.
How should the United States respond to the demonstrations against Egypt's president of three decades, Hosni Mubarak? Scholars, experts and pundits disagree on what to do next, which group or leader to support. The fear is that the post-Mubarak regime could resemble Iran's Islamofascist "republic" after the fall of the Shah. No one really knows what will happen next.
"This will be the last edition of your show," MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, on the air, claimed he was told by management. What to make of Olbermann's abrupt departure, an apparent firing? Did post-Tucson concern over "vitriolic rhetoric" cause Comcast, MSNBC's new owner, to recoil at Olbermann's greatest hits? They include, but are by no means limited to: Calling opposition to ObamaCare the equivalent of "terrorists ... killing 45,000 people every year"; blaming Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing; calling the tea party-backed Republicans racists who would bring back "Jim Crow ... bread lines ... robber barons" and "hanging union organizers"; calling now-Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., a "homophobic, racist, reactionary ... teabagging supporter of violence against women"; accusing columnist and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin of engaging in "morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred without which (she) would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it"; accusing President George W. Bush of "urinating on the Constitution" and of committing "panoramic and murderous deceit"; exclaiming about Bush, "You're a fascist!"; asserting that Bush "lied us into a war and, in so doing, needlessly killed 3,584"; calling Fox News' Chris Wallace "a monkey posing as a newscaster"; and saying of the then-Whitewater prosecutor, "It finally dawned on me that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of facially all this time was Heinrich Himmler ... a persecutor as opposed to a prosecutor."
"Black man's burden," read the headline in the Los Angeles Times piece. "African-American men," read the subheading, "are still often judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character." It must be MLK Day. This is when the guilt-ridden, blame-seeking, personal-responsibility-avoiding, racism-under-every-rock, oh-so-sympathetic, victicrat media tell us about Martin Luther King's "unfinished" legacy. Never mind that America, two years ago, elected a black president.
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik took time from gathering the facts about the Tucson, Ariz., shooting to denounce the "vitriolic rhetoric" that he claims played a role in the carnage. He insisted, without any evidence, that Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' support for ObamaCare helped trigger the shooter's wrath, resulting in six dead and 13 wounded, including Rep. Giffords, who was shot point-blank in the head. "I think it's time as a country," said Dupnik, "that we ... do a little soul-searching, because I think it's the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business, and what we see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised, that this has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in, and I think it's time that we do the soul-searching."
The biggest political "lie" of 2010? The winner is: the Republican assertion that ObamaCare is a "government takeover of health care." A website called PolitiFact based this on the votes of 4,000 of its readers. ABC's "Nightline" featured PolitiFact's editor, and "Nightline" reporter Jake Tapper heartily agreed this was the "biggest lie of the year." Tapper, normally pretty sane, concluded the piece by saying, "Way to deceive the public"!
Five dollars per gallon of gas by 2012! A former president of Shell Oil considers this likely. The average price on Christmas Day for a gallon of regular gas reached $3.28 in Los Angeles County, the highest price since October 2008. In one month, the price rose 13 cents, up 35 cents year to year. Where are the calls to sic Obama's Justice Department on Big Oil to hold the oil companies accountable for "market manipulation"? Why aren't we hunting down the amoral "oil speculators" responsible for repealing the law of supply-and-demand in order to line their pockets?
For the past 50 years, the Democrats -- and many Republicans who should know better -- have been wrong about virtually every major domestic policy issue. Let's review some of them: Taxes. The bipartisan extension of the Bush tax cuts represents the latest triumph over the "soak the rich because trickledown doesn't work" leftists.
A mere nine years ago, 12 Democratic senators voted for the current tax rates, as well as for a complete phaseout of the estate tax. Twelve! By contrast, ObamaCare and the $800 billion "stimulus" package secured votes from zero Republican senators and zero Republican senators, respectively. The media call them the "Bush tax cuts" or the "Bush-era tax cuts" -- but never the "bipartisan" Bush-era tax cuts. Had President Barack Obama crossed The Aisle to attract 12 Republican Senate votes, the Commission to Chisel Obama's Face on Mount Rushmore would be interviewing stonemasons.
The WikiLeaks de facto declassification of privileged material makes it case closed: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- and intended to restart his program once the heat was off. President George W. Bush, in the 2003 State of the Union address, uttered the infamous "16 words": "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
President Obama's fiscal commission supposedly offers an "aggressive prescription" to reduce the federal deficit. It's not just the debt and deficit, stupid. It's the size, scope and bloat of the federal government. Here's my plan: 1) Accept the political reality that a) taxes cannot be raised, and b) entitlement spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) cannot be cut for current or near-future beneficiaries. Voters will not vote to raise their taxes. Voters will not vote to cut off their money. And politicians want votes.
President Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office in January 2009 during a severe economic downturn led by a meltdown in housing prices -- and promptly made things worse. By bailing out banks, insurance companies and auto firms -- done to a lesser extent by the previous administration -- Obama rewarded poor performers and punished their better-managed competitors. Prevented from pouncing on wounded rivals and thus increasing market share or buying the assets of the wounded at fire sale prices, Ford, for example, watched GM and Chrysler get a cash infusion from taxpayers. Despite GM's recent "successful" public offering, taxpayers lost billions of dollars.
