With the GOP debates mercifully coming to an end, the nation is getting ready for the 2012 elections starting with the Iowa caucuses in January.  At this point, President Obama appears likely to face Mitt Romney (seemingly no one’s first choice within his own party), former Speaker Newt Gingrich who miraculously resurrected his once moribund campaign or Ron Paul whose libertarian views we highlighted in a prior essay.

Has either party been faithful to a consistent set of principles?  The Republican frontrunners have fallen all over themselves in internecine warfare accusing each other (not without good reason) of flip‑flopping.  Meanwhile, the President has escaped the spotlight on the issue of his own constancy of principle.  In point of fact, as the incumbent, he should be closely monitored on this subject, since his principles can translate quickly into active government policy.

The criteria used for making appointments to Administration jobs might be a pretty good measure of presidential principle.  Given that Congress is totally dysfunctional, and that the single-digit approval rating our federal legislature has earned from the American people is overly generous, we might have expected the President to be particularly judicious in his appointments to the various executive branch positions that wield such influence in both domestic and foreign affairs.

While it is not unusual for Presidents to reward campaign donors with prestigious federal appointments, many Obama supporters expected better of this President. They were confident that Obama would be as repulsed as they were by the approximately 200 federal appointments of donors and bundlers Bush had made during his eight years in office. Not so.

According to I-Watch, the on-line publication of the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity, President Obama had, at the mid point of his first term, matched Bush’s eight-year record of doling out Administration jobs to donors and bundlers. Overall, 184 of 556, or about one-third of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took “key administration posts,” as defined by the White House. More than half the 24 ambassador nominees who were bundlers raised $500,000.

The big bundlers had broad access to the White House.  In all, during Obama’s first two years in office, campaign bundlers and their family members account for more than 3,000 White House meetings and visits. Half of them raised $200,000 or more.

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There is a long 20^th century history of Wall Street protests in America.  After all, Wall Street is the financial center of the country. Today, we’re in a financial crisis so Wall Street (or its financial center equivalent in other cities) is the logical place to protest, right?

Actually, we think it’s a poor second to Lafayette Park across from the White House — where the current crisis was hatched and nurtured.  No, this isn’t an anti Obama screed.  His predecessors (several of them) are far more to blame for the current economic disarray in which we find ourselves, although we think his proposed remedies are anything but remedial.

“Occupy Wall Street” and “Wall Street Greed” are great memes.  They are highly memorable and easily passed on as a rallying cry. Unsurprisingly, President Obama and the left has sought to adopt them.  Of course, the protestors are an outgrowth of the wider sense of entitlement many young people have developed (including quotas disguised under the term “diversity”).  As George Will stated in his column in The Washington Post on October 13, 2011:

“Demands posted in [Occupy Wall Street’s] name include a ‘guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment’; a $20‑an‑hour minimum wage (above the $16.00 entry wage the UAW just negotiated with GM); ending ‘the fossil fuel economy’; ‘open borders’ so ‘anyone can travel anywhere to work and live’; $1 trillion dollars for infrastructure; $1 trillion dollars for ‘ecological restoration’; ‘free college education’, and forgiveness of ‘all debt on the entire planet.”

But abuses by Wall Street are an affect, not the cause of the current economic disarray. As anyone who has read our essays knows, we carry no brief for Wall Street excesses or those of the various Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE’s) that are the real culprits. But Wall Street was simply the vehicle by which the White House, Congress, the Fed and the Washington bureaucracy carried out very ill advised objectives. As is well known by now, the seeds of our current discontent were sowed a quarter century ago when President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).  This legislation and the regulatory policies that it set in motion may have been well intentioned, but as history teaches, roads paved merely with good intentions often lead where no one wants to go.

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There were a lot of things wrong with the presidency of Bill Clinton. I would have much rather preferred a second term of Bush 41. But comparing the Obama presidency to Clinton’s accomplishments of the 1990s, and it’s easy to see why the travails of President Clinton were good “problems” to have.

I never thought it would come to this. I never imagined a time post 2000 when I would actually lament a return to the past. But here we are, facing a recession as deep and even longer than the one in the early 1990s. A recession that ushered in none other than the Comeback Kid – President William Jefferson Clinton.

His was a presidency that brought us DNA samples; Don’t ask, Don’t tell; school uniforms; and wagging fingers regarding a certain intern.

But set all that aside (if you can), and recall some of the fiscal successes of his presidency, and it’s easy to long for those days again.

Yes, the United States enjoyed years of growing surpluses during the Clinton presidency – many of which could be attributed equally to the Republican Congress – but pair them together, and it’s easy to see why the country could use another Bill Clinton in place of the current Oval Office occupant. Here’s why:

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Big Journalism’s Larry O’Connor yesterday highlighted New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s unhinged screed that marked the 10th anniversary of 9/11 — an attack on common decency for which Krugman (conveniently) refused to allow any comments. But in his mean-spirited and wholly inappropriate post, Krugman revealed more than he realized about the state of liberal/leftist thought in America today — and the frustration leftists foster about the current state of our politics.

To quickly recap, Krugman wrote:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te [sic] atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

Such a passage makes me wonder if liberals of Krugman’s ilk even hear themselves? I know Krugman thinks Bush is a “fake hero,” because he hates him with a blinding passion. But he wedges W in there as almost an afterthought among his parade of “fake heroes” — ” … and even George W. Bush.” Before that, Krugman calls Rudy Giuliani a “fake hero.”

Now, Giuliani would be the first to reject the “hero” label, because he knows who the REAL heros are. He saw many of their dismembered bodies in the rubble of the WTC. He went to funerals for months on end. But what Giuliani did was of enormous value to the city of New York and the nation: He stayed calm in the face of enormous chaos and fear. And he acted as a leader — as did Bush.

Giuliani suffers in the measure of Krugman (as did Bush) for the same reasons. Both men were non-liberals (non-Democrats) who earned the admiration of the people. Krugman thought he’d be able to belittle Bush for the entirety of what he thought would be one quick term as a “pretender” who “stole” the election from Gore. Only now, of all days (but without comment), does Krugman feel the urge to scratch that long-neglected itch.

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It’s civility week!  Another Twitter montage of #NewTone was just sent our way this afternoon.  Good timing, too, on the heels of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa Jr.’s warm remarks yesterday.

Lets not forget the lessons in civility that our dutiful media and President Obama conveyed in the wake of the Tucson tragedy. The vitriol does not seem to have died down.  Perhaps this video will help remind people what’s lurking out there on the Twitter public timeline about all you “Sons of Bitches” and “Hobbits” of Terror.

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We all have fears.  They rise up out of the muck of our subconscious and exert extraordinary power over us.  Some fears are perfectly rational, others are strictly irrational.  Irrational fear arises out of 1) deep-seated knowledge that the other side is right (the ego perceives a threat to a well-entrenched belief), 2) a projection of one’s more unpleasant qualities onto the “Other” (the Jungian Shadow), or 3) Plain old-fashioned ignorance.

I’ve noticed that many of my Liberal friends constantly harped on George W. Bush’s faith in Jesus.  They wrung their hands in terror that something would be implemented that would…be really bad.  Ultimately, they just didn’t like his religion being foisted on them, although when pressed, they had trouble specifying exactly what would result from the President’s faith.

Now, we’re seeing the same fears being sounded over Gov. Perry’s faith. The message is that Liberals don’t want to be forced into believing something they don’t want to believe in, or that some religiously-driven policy will be enacted against their own interest, or that it will somehow restrict their personal freedom.

That is perfectly reasonable, and I agree with them completely.

The irony is that the Liberal approach to policy in general is cloaked behind its own ideological philosophy.  It may not be an established religion, but Conservatives and Libertarians are equally opposed to some policy being put in place that restricts freedom, that forces them to believe something they don’t want to believe in, or that is against their own interest.

And I naturally agree with them, as well.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Pejman Yousefzadeh and Elizabeth Blackney to discuss the GOP presidential debate in New Hampshire, and John Mearsheimer’s new book, “Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics.”

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Bachmann, Gingrich, and Romney. Oh My! And Then There’s Rick Perry.
Exciting Things About Tim Pawlenty
The Awful, No Good, Very Bad Republican Presidential Debate
A tweet from Ben Domenech about the debate
CATO Speech: Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics
Why leaders lie
The Case of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer

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Follow Elizabeth on Twitter

The Washington Post had a story on Sunday titled, in its print edition, “Obama’s return to Europe in a changed world”. It chronicled how “the dominant themes of the president’s European tour, set to begin Monday, highlight how much the world has changed over that time. As he enters the second half of his term, security issues, in South Asia and the broader Middle East, have replaced the economy as the chief shared interests of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful allies.”

Er…what? The absence of a certain ‘greatest threat facing mankind’ is a bit of a red-flag for someone who has chronicled the establishment press having thrown in completely with (selective) political hysteria over the climate issue, and the havoc that ’skeptics’ of the computer model projections and the policies have allegedly caused. And, incidentally, with no interest in the havoc the actual models have caused here in the real world through policies premised in them.

I scanned the full-page article for mention of Obama’s swift reversal of Bush’s alleged recklessness or, barring that, of the now surely worsened climate crisis and the stalled Kyoto process, that Obama didn’t, in fact, rush to ’sign the Kyoto Protocol’ as Bush supposedly neglected per the media for eight years (Clinton signed it; Bush never unsigned it), comfortable I would find no such cheerleading, or keening.

That is of course because of the uncomfortable truth that political realities led Obama to continue the Bush policy of continuing the Clinton-Gore policy of not seeking ratification of Kyoto. And, further, he continued the Bush rejection of the Kyoto model, agreed to by Clinton-Gore to the great foreign policy and otherwise political detriment to the U.S. in ensuing years.

And, on cue, a story in a trade press outlet yesterday writes:

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Saturday morning, a hail of bullets took the lives of five Americans, including a federal judge and a nine year old girl.  19 others were injured, including Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  For most, Saturday was a day of tragedy – a day of reflection.  Well, Saturday morning, at any rate.  By Saturday afternoon, the left-wing brain trust had shifted into high gear.  By Sunday, every tired, worn out, leftist mouthpiece, from Jane Fonda to MoveOn.org, had shuffled down from their lofty intellectual perches, determined to educate the masses.  Their hypothesis was obvious to anyone smart enough to comprehend it.   Clearly, the Arizona bloodbath was the end result of two years dominated by conservative vitriol, hatred, and “elevated rhetoric.”

It’s an assertion that left wing luminaries have made before, most memorably when New York City Mayor Bloomberg told Katie Couric that the Times Square bomber was probably a white male Tea Partier, likely disenchanted with Obamacare.  He was later forced to eat those words when the would-be terrorist turned out to be a Muslim extremist.  Still, he had exposed a truth: the left has been desperate for a situation that will allow them to hang a crazed killer around the neck of the Tea Party.   With Arizona gunman Jared Loughner, they seem to feel that their ship has finally come in.

In order to make Loughner work as their right-wing poster child, all they have to do is deny reality and ignore their own history.

First of all, the idea of Loughner as the consummate tea-partier is laughable.  The left has always described the Tea Party movement as a collection of under-educated, flag-waving weirdos who ineptly fetishize freedom, American exceptionalism, and the Constitution.  A quick look at the killer’s MySpace and YouTube pages reveals an image of a barely coherent madman, fascinated by flag burning, Mein Kampf, and the Communist Manifesto.  His classmates have described him as “anti-flag” and a “Left-wing Pothead.”  In fact, he was arrested in 2008 on misdemeanor drug charges. Somehow, because he made some vague, rambling statement about the gold standard, we’re supposed to ignore his previous arrest, turn a blind eye to the flag burning, forget about his love of fascist and communist literature, and accept the Loughner-as-conservative fallacy?

Well, yes, apparently we are.  If we don’t, the left will have trouble moving on to the next phase of their plan: controlling political speech in the media.

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It was only a matter of time before the nutroots at Huffington Post would resort to desperation and utter ridiculousness in their frenzied Bush-bashing; behold, the unintentionally comical headline atop Huffington Post:

Before we go into the nitty gritty, can I just note the delicious irony of a website of repeatedly accused plagiarist like Arianna Huffington – who settled out of court for, what else, plagiarism! – falsely accusing another of plagiarism? Remember this?

Seemingly plagiarizing Larry King transcripts so she could crow about having a Clooney byline. The result was an embarrassing smackdown from an A-list celebrity and loss of credibility.

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I sat chuckling all through Obama’s immigration speech Thursday. Forgive me, but that has been my recent response whenever I listen to Obama’s speechifying. I am somewhat surprised at my recent response to his outlandish rhetoric, but he makes such a mockery of his very words, of America, and of capitalism, that he is, invariably, comical.

He recited Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” which is engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty, yet he has disparaged American exceptionalism and prides himself on being post-American. How can you not bust a gut?

So I listened to his speech on immigration and chuckled as he lectured us, yet again, on what America is — as if he had a clue about what America is. His contempt for us is so palpable. As if he had any respect for what makes America great – free speech, individual rights, entrepreneurship, and privacy rights. As if he had a clue as to why legal immigrants come here — to escape tyrants and would-be tyrants like him.

I understand why he must ram immigration through now. And why he is taking this issue on now after destroying the American healthcare system. He has no shot of re-election without a base of amnestied illegal immigrants voting for Democrats. It is his only motive — but I digress.

What about the Gulf? This is a catastrophe of unfathomable proportions, the decades-long repercussions of which have not yet begun to be understood or calculated. What about those people, those communities? Whole swaths of coastline, entire towns, even entire counties may face evacuation.

Why isn’t the President of the United States working on the problem 24/7? I want to know why the nation’s Chief Executive has not been holed up in a war room, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the past 72 days, working with the world’s finest scientific minds and oceanographic and energy experts to solve the oil spill crisis.

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From today’s Politico:

As the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history has played out on Obama’s watch, the environmental movement has essentially given him a pass — all but refusing to unleash any vocal criticism against the president even as the public has grown more frustrated by Obama’s performance.

About a dozen environmental groups took out a full page ad in the Washington Post Tuesday – not to fault Obama over the ecological catastrophe but to thank him for putting on hold an Alaska drilling project. “We deeply appreciate your decision. . .,” the ad says to Obama.

“President Obama is the best environmental president we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt,” Sierra Club chairman Carl Pope told the Bangor Daily News last week. “He obviously did not take the crisis in the Minerals Management Service adequately seriously, that’s clear. But his agencies have done a phenomenally good job.”

Some say there’s little doubt that if a spill like the one in the Gulf took place on former President George W. Bush’s watch, environmental groups would have unleashed an unsparing fury on the Republican in the White House. For their liberal ally, Obama, they seem willing to hold their tongues.

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The President of the United States is looking for an ass to kick.

“I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar,” he said Monday, “we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

He is so embarrassing. What president talks with such false braggadocio? Would a Republican dog catcher get away with such vulgar invective? He is a disaster, and he lashes out when he is called out on any of his too-numerous-to-recount-here failures.

Bush was eviscerated, crucified for showing more competence in his pinky toenail during Katrina than Obama has demonstrated in the whole of this short, painful presidency. The media’s silence on his fumbling and stumbling is absolutely corrupt. If anyone should be impeached, it ought to be those useful idiots and fellow travelers. It is now a 24-hour bash BP news cycle.

Sarah Palin said:

50 days in, and we’ve just learned another shocking revelation concerning the Obama administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill. In an interview aired this morning, President Obama admitted that he hasn’t met with or spoken directly to BP’s CEO Tony Hayward. His reasoning: “Because my experience is, when you talk to a guy like a BP CEO, he’s gonna say all the right things to me. I’m not interested in words. I’m interested in actions.”

Sounds as if Obama doesn’t have much confidence in BP. He is right about that, since BP has been responsible for a large number of accidents in the last few years. The Washington Post reports this: “BP has had more high-profile accidents than any other company in recent years. And now, with the disaster in the gulf, independent experts say the pervasiveness of the company’s problems, in multiple locales and different types of facilities, is striking.”

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If you’ve been watching the fiasco surrounding the oil spill in the gulf, you already know the mainstream media meme that has cropped up around it. “Yes, President Obama has failed to stop the spill thus far,” the press tell us. “Yes, he’s demonstrated that his promises of supreme competence were overblown. Yes, his leadership has become so questionable that even James Carville has attacked him for it. Yes, some of the alternatives being offered in spite of all of this are being ignored, and yes, President Obama has failed to inspire confidence among everyday Americans about his ability to handle this crisis. But one thing we will not deny is that President Obama cares. He is a man of deep humanity, and deep empathy (and where have we heard that word before) for the suffering of those affected by the spill, and he cares.”

What I am about to ask will require readers to engage in a supreme act of charity: Despite all the evidence to the contrary, all the evisceration which Rush Limbaugh and every other conservative commentator have piled on this administration, all the evidence that the media will never believe anything but the very best about this President even as he takes this country down the road to serfdom at a speed that would make Dale Earnhardt Jr feel queasy, and despite all the emotionless, meaningless, platitude-laden babble that the President has been spewing since the spill began, I want the readers to assume, just for the sake of argument, that the media is telling the truth. Despite what appear to be severe rhetorical and emotional shortcomings in his speeches and his own bearing, imagine that underneath the hyper-rational mask, President Obama really does care.

So what?

Has that “caring” done anything to stop the spill? Has it given President Obama one single, solitary constructive idea about how to solve the problem (other than “Plug the Hole,” that is)? Does President Obama have the ability to fly out to the Gulf Coast and, like Ma-Ti in Captain Planet, dissolve the oil with nothing but the magically empathic effusions of his beating heart? And if not, then even if we concede that President Obama cares about those affected by this crisis,  how is that remotely relevant to his ability to solve it? As per the usual liberal tag line, we are expected to believe that President Obama’s good intentions alone should assuage us of his competence, but have they done anything at all? The answer is as devastating as it is obvious: No.

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In August 2003, then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a press statement demanding to know from President Bush, “Where Are the Jobs?” The statement was released in response to the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report, which, at that time showed that over 400,000 Americans had given up looking for work and had left the labor force. It should be noted that today, every job measurement she cited is worse now than it was in 2003. We must have overlooked her similar question for President Obama.

From Pelosi’s statement:

Washington, D.C. — House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ announcement that 470,000 people abandoned their job searches in July and that 3.2 million private sector jobs have been lost since President Bush took office:

Of course, in December 2009, almost twice as many (929,000) had “abandoned their job searches” on Speaker Pelosi’s watch and with a Democrat in the White House.

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Many of us had no idea the Republican Party had it in them, but to devise and implement such a plan was ingenious. Think about it; party leadership acting totally inept while a charismatic young Democrat presidential candidate captures the imagination of the normally lethargic youth vote, captures the senior vote, women, and even sends a thrill up the leg of the media.

And within a few short months after attaining the presidency, he conducts himself in a manner (personally and in office) that had not only invigorated his political opponents, but has them so energized they take to the streets and even march on The Capitol (more than once). One would have to conclude Barack Hussein Obama is either the most politically clueless president ever, or… is really a stealth Republican destroying the Democrat Party from within.

Is Barack Obama a Republican plant?

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Say what you will about the health reform bill introduced by Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), and the Left is having a field day attacking it, but at least it is a plan. President Obama has spent months talking about what he wants out of a bill, but when the chips are down and the polls are crashing, all we get from him is a two and half page outline.  Why would he offer such weak leadership?

One possible answer, for you cynics out there (and I may be one), is that he has zero leadership experience and this is simply his way of voting “present” one more time. But that’s too easy and too amateurish for someone so politically savvy.

The only logical answer is he doesn’t want to be pinned down on any specifics.  Sure, he’s talked about what he’d like in a bill, but he’s pretty much disavowed everything he’s said he supports too. He wants a public option one day, but doesn’t need one the next, then explains how it is vital to “real reform.” It literally can’t be both but that hasn’t stopped him from having it both ways.

So at this point, whenever anyone criticizes Obamacare the White House has the perfect defense, “There is no bill.” You can’t win a shadow boxing match, you can’t pick a lock with mashed potatoes, and you can’t pin any unpopular proposals on the President.

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Today NPR took notice of the most recent ACORN scandal. Credit to Frank James for covering this story in a fashion that puts most of the MSM to shame so far.

“Instead of wasting its funds on lawsuits, ACORN might want to consider doing more intensive training of its workers and testing them with its own undercover testers.”

Unfortunately, Mr. James concludes his piece by indulging in what George Bush (or one of his speech writers) so eloquently referred to as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

“It’s also important to keep in mind that ACORN’s workers are coming from the same low-income neighborhoods the organization serves, with all that entails — poor schools, high crime and the sorts of social problems that have been documented for decades.”

“So the flaws conservatives are pointing out about ACORN are not so much problems associated with that organization per se but more about the problems of being poor and minority in urban America.”

It’s true that the neglect of school children in the inner cities and elsewhere is morally wrong and possibly criminal. It is arguably the systemic root of much of what ails America. And it’s true that liberal government policies dating back three generations have served to warehouse the poor while creating perverse financial incentives to underachieve, i.e. welfare policies that encouraged the poorest to forgo savings, to ignore career and college ambitions and to have multiple children outside of marriage. Even so, it is sick and condescending to assume that the poor and disenfranchised lack any moral compass. The aforementioned behavior, financially speaking, is perfectly rational — thanks to our government. The implicit suggestion that these people “don’t know better” than to abet child prostitution is the height of racism and arrogance. (more…)