“Why Are Obama’ Critics So Dumb?” That’s the question posed by Andrew Sullivan in the cover story of this week’s Newsweek.

But you’d have to be stupid, fanatical, and dishonest to argue–as Trig Truther Sullivan does–that Barack Obama’s failures are part of an ingenious “long game” that is destined to succeed.

If this is the best Obama’s supporters can do, Obama’s only hope for re-election is the weak Republican field.

Sullivan, who claims to care about national debt, begins by arguing, contrary to reality, that Obama’s massive $787 billion stimulus (actually, $862 billion) turned the economy around. He offers no proof other than the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy familiar from basic economics. Sullivan also ignores the composition of the stimulus, which shoveled cash to cronies and bloated big states with their massive public sector obligations.

In addition, Sullivan claims that Obama’s auto bailout succeeded–when in fact it pushed aside property rights and subsidized failed “green” cars, rather than allowing car makers to rebuild through normal bankruptcy. He also commends Obama for continuing George W. Bush’s bank bailouts–but does not mention the Dodd-Frank financial “reforms” that enshrine “too big to fail,” hurt small businesses and fail to address Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Next, Sullivan tries to defend Obama on taxes, pointing out that the president passed tax cuts as part of the stimulus. He ignores the numerous new taxes and tax increases that Obama signed into law–from higher cigarette taxes to the many ObamaCare taxes–as well as the glaring fact that Obama has been campaigning for the past several years on the promise to raise taxes on the rich, and would have done so if not for Congress. (more…)

Earlier this month, while South Korean President Lee Myung Bak was visiting the United States, his military commanders were back home watching out for ammunition boxes.

North Korea’s military had moved combat aircraft, mobile ground-to-air missiles and missile launchers to attack positions near the border with the South. Had those ammo boxes – the final step in preparations for an attack – appeared, whether for war-making or simply for live-fire exercises, it might well have triggered a resumption of the shooting war that began in the 1950s and never truly has ended.

Elsewhere recently, a North Korean diplomat at low-level talks at the University of Georgia said war on the peninsula seems closer now than it has in decades, and Iran was linked to a clumsy attempt to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in Washington. The Iranians also are “playing” in hot spots throughout the Middle East – from Syria to Yemen to Egypt and even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and working feverishly to overcome a cyber attack on its nuclear weapons development program.

Clearly, this is no time for the United States to let down its guard on missile defense. Congress – which is under pressure to cut defense spending but maintain capabilities – must show resolve to ensure our nation, troops and allies are protected.

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The Obama administration’s determined effort to reduce America’s missile defense capabilities initially seemed to be just standard Leftist fare — of a piece with the Democratic base’s visceral hostility to the idea of protecting us against ballistic missile threats. A just-unveiled symbolic action suggests, however, that something even more nefarious is afoot.

The former would be bad enough, starting with Candidate Obama’s pledge to block “unproven missile defenses.” Once in office, he cut over a billion dollars from the Missile Defense Agency’s budget.  He cancelled the deployment of interceptors and radars in Eastern Europe designed to defend this country, as well as our allies over there.

Among other reprehensible actions, Team Obama terminated the nation’s only program capable of providing a near-term ability to intercept ballistic missiles early in their flight (i.e., the boost-phase).  This Airborne Laser Program nonetheless was successfully tested earlier this month — destroying not one but two missiles similar to those arrayed against us and our friends today and making the case that such systems should be operationalized and deployed as a matter of the utmost urgency.

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From Guantanamo to Health Care, Obama is certainly seeking to Change America – or more accurately -to accelerate the pace of change from a private enterprise-freedom based civilization to a Big Government-run society.  According to Thomas Paine, “It is the duty of a patriot to protect his country from his government.”  I realize that is a slightly different definition than Joe Biden would use, but nevertheless, in that light, here is my listing of the worst of his policy decisions:

6. Bailing Out GM.  “His policy of public investments prevented necessary liquidations.  The businesses he hoped thus to save either went bankrupt in the end, after fearful agonies, or were burdened . . . by a crushing load of debt.  [He] undermined property rights . . .pushed federal credit into the banks and bullied them into inflating . . .” Historian Paul Johnson wrote that of Herbert Hoover.  You can almost substitute Obama’s name for Hoover’s  in every detail.   By the way, Government Motors sales are declining at 3 times the rate of the industry as a whole.  Hoover would be proud.

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On Feb. 13, 1985, I stood in the Theaterplatz in Dresden listening to Erich Honecker give a speech.  The speech was not simply one of those standard commie stemwinders to which those of us reporting from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were accustomed.  For one thing, we were gathered outside the newly restored Semper Opera House, designed by the architect Gottfried Semper in 1841, rebuilt after a fire in 1869 and long considered one of the glories of 19^th-century musical architecture.  For another, it was bitterly cold, at least twenty below zero on the Fahrenheit scale if not colder.  For a third, all Honecker wanted to talk about – at great length – was the U.S. missile defense system, then under consideration by the Reagan Administration.

This was odd, because the occasion we – and by ‘we” I mean the western press, opera dignitaries, the local nomenklatura (party bigwigs and apparatchiks), the East German Stasi officers assigned to shadow us, and their KGB bosses – were there to witness was the celebratory re-opening of the great opera house, destroyed for the second time on the night of Feb. 12-13, 1945 “by Anglo-American bombers,” as the commemorative poster helpfully reminded us.  (I have my copy, suitably framed, on the wall of my home.)  If memory serves, Honecker, however, had very little to say about Semper or the opera house or the work we were about to hear, Weber’s Der Freischütz, which had been playing the night the city was incinerated.  Instead, the little party boss – I had run into him in the Bellevue Hotel across the river, where the westerners were staying, and was pleased to see that he was as unimpressive in person as he was on television – went on a prolonged rant about die Sternkriege, the so-called “Star Wars” program that even then was setting off protests among the “peace demonstrators” in western Europe, England and, of course, at home as well.

As we stood there, shivering and bored, my colleague and friend, John Rockwell of The New York Times (who, like me, spoke fluent German) leaned over and said: “Personally, I think Star Wars is bullshit, but it really has these guys scared.”  John was right: Star Wars pretty much was bullshit, especially at the time, but it nonetheless terrified the technologically backward Soviets and their satellite marionettes, and it set off the inexorable forces (as Marxists like to say) that just four years later would bring down the Berlin Wall.  Reagan was playing poker with a lot of chips but lousy cards, raising the rear ends off the morally, culturally and fiscally bankrupt Soviets.

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The America in which I was raised always stood for freedom, and not just freedom for Americans but freedom for suffering people around the World.  When I was an exchange student in Germany in 1983, I found myself in endless debates about this, and about my President Ronald Reagan and his desire to build a missile defense system in Western Europe.   I loved the German people.  The kids were so refreshing in many ways, but their cynical views of the motives of my President shocked me.

John Loudon at Berlin Wall

I admit that I am a little unique.   As a fairly young child, I poured through every issue of Time magazine, which is like our version of the German magazine, Die Zeit.  Jimmy Carter was the President.  He talked of peace while cutting our defense spending.  I remember being very scared seeing charts and graphs comparing our defense systems including war planes, ships and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).  The American armaments were blue and the Soviets vastly superior forced were Red.  Here my story gets really odd.  I was 12 years old when I read George Orwell’s 1984.  The year was 1979.  I was so struck by what I read and the parallels to the modern Soviet Union, that I picked up a copy of the Communist Manifesto. What I read made me nearly shriek in fear.

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