Democrats

The Makings of a Progressive

Cluster33 Comments

If you believe, as I do, that we are living in surreal times, then you only need to consider that the reason why is because we are dealing with a surreal political opponent. The conservative opponent, the progressive, is made up of many moving parts, none of which have any moral grounding, feeling of shame, or basis in principle. To be a progressive, you must consider personal intent as the only measure of political success, you must have the ability to lie to yourself and your audience with no compunction whatsoever and with zero impunity, you must never hold a fellow progressive accountable, and you must subscribe to consensus through conformity. There is very little room for dissenting opinion in progressive circles and those who do stray from the consensus are shamed and humiliated and called “uncle Tom’s” or “extremists”. It’s quite easy to be a progressive actually and that’s the appeal of the movement. It doesn’t require any real critical thinking as the “group think” phenomena of the movement will form your opinion for you, It doesn’t require any personal accountability because there is always someone else to blame for your actions whether that be “old white Christian men”, or “unseemly corporate profits” otherwise known as social and economic justice, and it doesn’t require any admission of fact because results simply do not matter. If you had the right “intention”, well then the results of those intentions are not of material concern – you simply lie to yourself and those in front of you and move forward with nary a concern. This phenomena has been on full display throughout the entire Presidency of Barack Obama (if you like your President, you can keep him), and is seen very often in the actions of Harry Reid (he who refuses to bring any House GOP legislation up for debate yet blames the GOP for obstructionism), Nancy Pelosi (we must  pass it to find out what’s in it), Joe Biden (they’re going to put y’all back in chains), and Hillary Clinton (at this point what difference does it make). They are shameless, reckless, and lie as easy as they breathe.

Consider the progressive media echo chamber, MSNBC, and this excellent article which succinctly points out the alternate reality progressives live in. MSNBC has taken the art of political spin and demonization to new level, and shamelessly supports a political party in a manner that rivals only that of possibly the North Korea News Agency, or Pravda. And honestly, I have seen more objective reporting from Pravda.

It is impossible to have a coherent debate with any progressive simply because we are grounded in reality and they are not. We hold ourselves accountable, they do not. We have respect for the truth, they do not, and we subscribe to independent critical thinking through the issues, and of course they do not. In fact, the responses from progressives have become so predictable that any debate is simply an exercise in redundancy. To defeat this destructive monolithic movement will not be easy as their masses are wide and their allegiance’s are strong, but it must be defeated. Debate and compromise are pointless.

The Art of Redundancy

Cluster78 Comments

If it is one thing the Democrats are very good at, and one thing that their legions of progressive sycophants depend on – it’s redundancy. The Democrats bleat on endlessly over contrived issues and the repetition thereof results in an allegiance amongst their base that rivals that of the most famous Tyrants. It’s at a level now that I have never seen before and the most recent Paul Krugman article is a great example. You may remember Paul Krugman – the Nobel prize winning progressive economist who decries the inequities of a capitalist society and whom recently accepted a six figure position with an institution of higher progressive learning for offering his valued opinion on matters of import, yet not required to lower himself to the masses and actually teaching in the classroom. This latest Krugman article perpetuates the infrastructure redundancy that progressives seemingly fall back on every time they need an economic issue to distract voters with. You may remember the Obama proclamation of 2008 wherein the great orator decreed:

“We will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s. We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a simple rule – use it or lose it. If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they’ll lose the money.”

Subsequently, in March of 2009, the single greatest stimulus package was passed and funds were given to the administration to use where they sought fit. Strangely, the infrastructure still seems to be a problem, and an issue of which progressive elites like Krugman feel that they can foam up the base with one more time:

“In prosperous times, public spending on roads, bridges and so on competes with the private sector for resources. Since 2008, however, our economy has been awash in unemployed workers (especially construction workers) and capital with no place to go (which is why government borrowing costs are at historic lows). Putting those idle resources to work building useful stuff should have been a no-brainer.”

Now, did Krugman forget his Messiah’s 2008 proclamation and subsequent spending spree, or is he being purposely deceitful? I will leave that to your own imagination, but you can all easily imagine is what Krugman’s answer is to this on-going infrastructure problem – more taxes of course:

“It’s hard to think of any good reason why taxes on gasoline should be so low, and it’s easy to think of reasons, ranging from climate concerns to reducing dependence on the Middle East, why gas should cost more. So there’s a very strong case for raising the gas tax “

The progressive Democrats have yet to find a problem, real or contrived, that can’t be resolved by raising taxes. The problem for them is that these issuess are never resolved despite how many taxes they raise, and fortunately for those of us in “realville”, the majority of voters are starting to come to that realization. One thing is for certain though, you can expect this issue, , and the other redundant issues of climate change, and the patently absurd “war on women” to be part and parcel to the Democrats 2014 and 2016 agenda.

Progressives Were For Religious Freedom Before They Were Against It!

tiredoflibbs24 Comments

Of course, this comes as no surprise – the flip flopping of Progressive (pRegressive) politicians who will say anything for political expediency. pRegressive politicians and their Praetorian Guard in the mainstream media have their panties in a bunch over the correct Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision. Driven by either agenda or ignorance, they don’t even remember that at one time they were all champions of the same religious freedom they are now against.

The SCOTUS ruling is NOT about contraception. Instead, it affirms a law dating back to 1993 – The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). This law, “to protect the free exercise of religion,” according to the U.S. Senate. Specifically, the purpose of the law is “to provide a claim or defense to persons whose religious exercise is burdened by government.” That is the crux of the Hobby Lobby claim. Congress passed this law almost unanimously.

The RFRA was introduced following an unpopular SCOTUS decision curbing the religious freedom of Native Americans to use peyote. Congressman Charles Schumer introduced the bill in March 1993, a time when liberals were strongly in favor of religious freedom. The bill was cosponsored by many of the same pRegressives screeching the loudest about the SCOTUS decision, including Rosa DeLorio, Luis Gutierrez, Nancy Pelosi, and Maxine Waters. The Senate passed this bill by a vote of 97-3.

I am sure you will recognize some of the names:
Mr. KENNEDY (for himself, Mr. HATCH, Mr. BENNETT, Mr. BOND, Mr. BRADLEY, Mr. BUMPERS, Mr. CAMPBELL, Mr. DANFORTH, Mr. DASCHLE, Mr. EXON, Mr. FEINGOLD, Mrs. FEINSTEIN, Mr. GRAHAM, Mr. HARKIN, Mr. HATFIELD, Mr. JEFFORDS, Mrs. KASSEBAUM, Mr. KERRY, Mr. LAUTENBERG, Mr. LEVIN, Mr. LIEBERMAN, Mr. METZEN- BAUM, Ms. MIKULSKI, Ms. MOSELEY-BRAUN, Mr. MOYNIHAN, Mrs. MURRAY, Mr. PACKWOOD, Mr. PELL, Mr. REID, Mr. RIEGLE, Mr. SPECTER, Mr. WELLSTONE, Mr. WOFFORD, Mr. KOHL, Mr. SARBANES, Mrs. BOXER, Mr. DECONCINI, Mr. SASSER, Mr. INOUYE, Mr. BROWN, Mr. COHEN, Mr. KEMPTHORNE, Mr. PRYOR, Mr. KERREY, Mr. MCCONNELL, Mr. DODD, Mr. DURENBERGER, Mr. AKAKA, Mr. GLENN, Mr. GREGG, Mr. NICKLES, Mr. COATS, Mr. LUGAR, Mr. BREAUX, Mr. DORGAN, Mr. ROCKEFELLER, and Mr. MACK) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

What a difference a new pResident and a new agenda make (despite the fact that the Constitution has remained the same)! Senate Weasel Harry Reid was in favor of religious freedom before he was against it. Voting FOR the RFRA in 1993, he is now indignant that the SCOTUS upheld the same law he voted for. Ditto for Nancy Pelosi, who is fussing about “a gross violation of workers’ religious rights.” What religious rights are being violated (must be the fact that progressivism and intrusive government is a religion to these people)? Are the Hobby Lobby employees members of a religion with a commandment, “Thou shall be provided abortifacients paid for by someone else”? Or is it the employer whose religious rights are being violated – “Thou shalt not kill” – by making him or her purchase these drugs for the employees?

Hillary Clinton also found the Hobby Lobby decision “deeply disturbing.” How ironic that her co-president husband, in November 1993, signed the RFRA into law, and when upheld 20 years later, she finds it “disturbing”. At the signing, then-President Bill Clinton remarked, “We all have a shared desire here to protect perhaps the most precious of all American liberties, religious freedom.” He also noted that “our laws and institutions should not impede or hinder but rather should protect and preserve fundamental religious liberties.” Commenting on the Founders, he observed that they “knew that there needed to be a space of freedom between Government and people of faith that otherwise Government might usurp.”

Protecting “religious freedom” was politically expedient 20 years ago. But now the dumbed down talking point is the “war on women”. It serves its purposes for speeches and fund-raising, especially when you have a captive audience of mindless drones. The RFRA passed almost unanimously, while obamacare barely passed along party lines in the House and was rammed through the Senate using budget procedural methods rather than proper voting procedures.

Don’t expect the Praetorian Guard (media) to acknowledge the flip-flops by our pRegressive politicians – after all it is an election year. The must mindlessly continue the propaganda.

The Progressive Clerisy

Cluster28 Comments

I wrote about this issue a while back, and just recently read this excellent article by Joel Kotkin speaking to the same, very real and very disturbing phenomenon which is hurting our country. First, a brief history:

“The very term Clerisy first appeared in 1830 in the work of Samuel Coleridge to described the bearers of society’s highest ideals: the intellectuals, pastors, scientists charged with transmitting their privileged knowledge to the less enlightened orders”.  

We see this phenomenon every day in print, on TV, in entertainment, in the digital media, and on the progressive blogs and certainly with the progressives that frequent B4V. Group think rules their world and if you stray from the orthodoxy, there are consequences. One small, but very revealing example was when one of the progressives over at AllPolytics misunderstood a post by a fellow progressive, he responded in a condescending, corrective tone. A response of which led the original poster to quickly clarify his comments. The subsequent response by the “correcting” commentator was priceless – he said, “you’re forgiven”. I had never seen anything quite like it, but it is a real and disconcerting phenomenon that this country must overcome. Joel provides another great example of this phenomenon including the cancellation of recent commence speeches by Condi Rice and Ayaan Ali Hirsi, to name a few.

The concentration of wealth and power is what fuels the Clerisy, and that also is a very real trend despite the flowery rhetoric of Obama’s endless speeches. Joel mentions that the number of federal workers earning more than $150,000/yr has more than doubled since 2007, and since 1990, the number of government workers has grown from approx. 5 million to approx. 20 million, “a growth rate roughly twice the population as a whole”. And while stock values and real estate holdings continue to increase in value and the portfolios of the rich, the country is realizing an historically low labor participation rate and a record number of people on welfare. And what is the response by the ruling elite to the current plight of the proletariat? Is it to tap into the vast reserves of domestic energy resources and ignite a boom of good paying jobs as seen in North Dakota? Is it to build the Keystone pipeline and create many well paying union jobs dotted throughout the interior of the US, and to keep that oil from going to China? Is it to reform the tax code and repatriate trillions of corporate dollars in an effort to encourage domestic corporate expansion and employment? NO! The ruling class answer to what ails the millions of people still looking for work, or of whom have simply given up is to raise the minimum wage to $10.10/hr. That’s what the progressive elite feel that they are worth, and if you oppose this effort, well then there will be consequences. A recent quote by Obama re: the Bergdahl release pretty much sums up the thinking of the ruling elite:

“It was a unanimous decision among my principals in my government and a view that was shared by my– the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And this is something that I would do again and I will continue to do wherever I have an opportunity,”

This current societal phenomenon won’t be easy to defeat, but it must be defeated if we are to ever get back to sensible healthy debates that move our country forward. And this means that we must do everything we can to defeat Hillary Clinton – she is the Queen of the Clerisy.

 

 

The Anticipated Demise of the Democratic Party

Cluster12 Comments

Aside from President Obama, the second most dangerous person to the health of our country both economically and socially would without question be Harry Reid. Harry has been on a tear lately explaining how the Koch Bros. are responsible for everything wrong in the world, while at the same time, extolling the virtues of other politically engaged billionaires like Tom Steyer. Harry is quickly becoming a national joke but as conservatives, we should applaud his efforts and urge him to continue. Take for example his recent denial of the Keystone Pipeline despite bi partisan and union support:

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., used a parliamentary maneuver to block a bid by pipeline supporters to include the pipeline measure in an energy efficiency bill moving forward in the Senate.”

Harry will almost single handedly assure GOP victory in November, but let’s not discount past efforts by that mental giant Nancy Pelosi and of course our fearless leader, including but not limited to:

Obamacare – recent findings have discovered that many duplicate enrollees have been counted helping boost enrollment figures, and that only 80% or so of those enrollees have actually made a payment. Even still, the ACA remains as unpopular as ever, and will probably decline in popularity considering events that still have yet to unfold – namely the employer mandate:

“Local business owners might be hoping the Affordable Care Act’s insurance mandates cover sticker shock. The law’s employer coverage mandate doesn’t take effect until 2015, but early plan renewals are starting to roll in. And for some businesses, the premium jumps are positively painful. Local insurance brokers are reporting spikes ranging from 35 percent to 120 percent on policies that renew from July to December.”

Benghazi – despite the left’s very vocal efforts to stop everyone from paying attention to this, last week’s email discovery resulting in this week’s special committee is not good news for the Democrats. The fact is that Benghazi was over run by terrorists, and because of previous attacks earlier in the year on the consulate, and that other ally countries had pulled out of the area, we knew an attack was pending, we failed to protect our people, and then the administration lied about it for political reasons.

IRS – not a good week for Lois Lerner, nor the administration and it will soon become public knowledge that there was a concerted effort to deny conservative groups tax exempt status that goes very far up the chain, and when Obama tried to pin it on “just a few rogue agents in Cincinnati” making “boneheaded decisions” – he was being less than truthful, which seems to be a pattern with this administration.

Add these three major issues to the .1% first quarter GDP growth, the loss of 800K people in the labor pool, the historically low labor participation rate, high gas and food prices, and the foreign policy mess, and it’s easy to see that the demise of the current far left Democratic party is imminent and that is a funeral I look forward to.

As If…

Image Leo Pusateri42 Comments

Dear Speaker Boehner:

There is nothing I’d like better than to keep the United States House of Representatives in *conservative* hands.

Regarding that issue, we wholeheartedly agree.

In that spirit, could you kindly resign your tenure as Speaker of the House?

Under your leadership, Obamacare is still the law of the land. Those responsible for allowing four Americans to be murdered in Benghazi are yet to be held accountable. The Constitutional abuses of the IRS scandal, the “Fast & Furious” federal gun-running scandal, and NSA scandals continue to go un-investigated, and Obama continues to be held unaccountable. Under your ‘leadership,’ the Republicans in the House of Representatives have done nothing to hold the Obama administration accountable for their overreach and malfeasance and assaults on our Constitutional liberties. You supposedly practiced brinkmanship when Obama forced a government shutdown, but then acted like you owned it, and ran with your tail between your legs. It’s been “go along to get along” ever since.

And now you want to cave and give special treatment to those scofflaws who ignore our immigration laws.

Your team put up a nice graphic on Facebook today in response to President Obama’s “I have a pen” comment, to which you replied, “We have the Constitution.”

However, as much as you hold up the Constitution and parade it around like a golden calf, you have displayed no real intention of upholding it. As your actions and inaction have clearly demonstrated, to you, the Constitution is nothing more than window-dressing in a photo-op.

Speaker Boehner, you have on many occasions taken a solemn oath and promise to uphold the Constitution.

After taking those solemn oaths, on multiple occasions, you have demonstrated that your promises are as empty as must be your conscience.

If you really believe that the Constitution must be kept in conservative hands, I call upon you to resign your office as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Whether or not your constituency in the 8th District of Ohio continues to re-elect you to as their representative in Congress is their business.

The office you hold as Speaker, however, is *our* business. You have lost the trust and confidence of those of us in the Republican Party.

You have lost the trust of the nation.

Time for you to resign, Mr. Speaker.

Sincerely,

Leo Pusateri.Boehner

Sarah Palin Vindicated – There are Death Panels in Obamacare

tiredoflibbs89 Comments

Tell us something we did not already know!

The Affordable Care Act contains provisions for “death panels,” which decide which critically-ill patients receive care and which won’t, according to Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time magazine.

“It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled,” Halperin told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/11/25/mark_halperin_obamacare_contains_death_panels.html#ooid=8zZ25waDoa-OQmTBjFMWJwiJssrg_QuXhttp:// 

MALZBERG, HOST: A lot of people said you weren’t going to be able to keep your health care, but also they focused on the death panels, which will be coming, call them what you will, rationing, is part of it…

HALPERIN: No, I agree, and that’s going to be a huge issue, and that’s something else on which the president was not fully forthcoming and straightforward.

MALZBERG: So, you believe there will be rationing, a.k.a. death panels?

HALPERIN: It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled.

Halperin went on to say that he believes the country “can’t afford to spend so much on end-of-life care,” but those judgments need to be made by individuals and insurance companies rather than the federal government.

Did he have a moment of clarity?  ”…rather than the federal government”?

Remember when Sarah Palin was trashed and mercilessly attacked by the left (typical) for revealing the fact of Death Panels?  This is more evidence by the obame administration that obamacare was sold on a pack of lies.  I am still waiting for my annual premiums to be lowered by $2500….

…. I won’t hold my breath.  Wait until the end of the year when corporate health insurance policies will be subject to the minimum federally mandated standards…. The cancellations seen at the end of last year won’t compare to those that will be cancelled this year.

“If you like your insurance you can keep your insurance.” “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.”  obame (obay me) knew the lessons learned from Hillarycare.  If people could not keep their insurance and doctors they would reject his plan like they did Hillary’s.  The need to lie was necessary to get it passed…just like the one that said “this is a penalty and not a tax”.

…. but the low information voters on the left (and they still troll this blog) will still be as ignorant as ever (voluntarily) and defend obAMATEUR while still maintaining he did not lie.

UPDATE: Obamacare continues to be the massive failure that we know it is and the pRegressive low information voters continue to deny.

The mindless drones continue to defend obamacare and regurgitate the talking point of millions have signed up.  However, signing up on a dysfunctional web-site and actually getting insurance are two different things.  Many are finding out that after signing up insurance companies through the website (when it doesn’t crash) have no records with the targeted insurance company of such an enrollment.

Now before you pRegressive drones screech about the link, notice that the article is from the Associated Press.  But we all know, you will latch onto that common pathetic tactic rather than address the real point of the post.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/09/Some-find-health-insurers-have-no-record-of-them

White House is Staging A Bloodless Coup!

Leo Pusateri21 Comments

OK, folks–here’s the deal- I don’t think too many people are realizing this:

1. We currently gather TEN TIMES the amount of revenue required to service our debt, EVERY MONTH.

2. The 14th Amendment states that WE MUST honor and service our debts; meaning that paying and servicing debt MUST COME FIRST.

3. Barack Obama has been threatening that we WILL DEFAULT on our debt if the debt ceiling is not raised in two days.

4. The ONLY way this can happen, is if Barack Obama IGNORES the 14th Amendment and REFUSES to service the debt. This means that Barack Obama MUST OPENLY DEFY the Constitution to bring about what he threatens will happen.

5. Understand also that I believe that Barack Obama FULLY INTENDS to carry out his threat. I believe that Barack Obama MEANS, in direct opposition to the 14th Amendment, to ALLOW the United States to go into default. Like a terrorist with his finger on the button of his suicide vest, he is threatening to DESTROY THE FULL FAITH AND CREDIT OF THE UNITED STATES, placing our economy in RUIN, unless Congress meets his every demand.

6. In effect, Barack Obama is staging what amounts to nothing less than a COUP– a complete usurpation of the power of the purse that IS EXCLUSIVELY THE PURVIEW of the duly and locally elected United States House of Representatives.

7. In completely and WILLFULLY ignoring his Constitutional responsibilities with respect to the 14th Amendment, Barack Obama has effectually denounced the primacy of the U.S. Constitution. He is effectively governing by EXECUTIVE FIAT.

In other words, Barack Obama HAS THROWN AWAY THE CONSTITUTION and is in effect GOVERNING AS A DICTATOR!

UNDERSTAND THIS, PEOPLE–THIS IS NOT HYPERBOLE!

Democrats Who Are for Action in Syria Don’t Want the pResident Humiliated

tiredoflibbs20 Comments

Dem Congresswoman: Only Reason I’d Vote for Syria Attack Is Loyalty to Obama

It goes to show that Democrats can’t think for themselves and their actions are a result of partisanship.

HOLMES NORTON: So I think he’ll be in real trouble if he then does it anyway. No president has done that.

PRESS: It’s not an easy decision for any of you, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton.

HOLMES NORTON: Oh, and I’d like to say, Bill, that if he gets saved at all, I think it’ll be because, it’ll be because of loyalty of Democrats. They just don’t want to see him shamed and humiliated on the national stage.

PRESS: Yeah, right.

HOLMES NORTON: At the, at the moment, that’s the only reason I would vote for it if I could vote on it.

Wow, she has said it all.  It is a shame that a pResident who claimed to “restore our world image” is an utter failure at that as well.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan

You want to know just how we got ourselves in to this mess?  Where, here’s the level of stupidity in the Obama Administration:

…Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, hoped that a team of UN investigators — many of whom, presumably, have a longstanding relationship with Iranian leaders — could write a report that would convince Iran to abandon its ally at the behest of the United States.

“We worked with the UN to create a group of inspectors and then worked for more than six months to get them access to the country on the logic that perhaps the presence of an investigative team in the country might deter future attacks,” Power said at the Center for American Progress as she made the case for intervening in Syria.

“Or, if not, at a minimum, we thought perhaps a shared evidentiary base could convince Russia or Iran — itself a victim of Saddam Hussein’s monstrous chemical weapons attacks in 1987-1988 — to cast loose a regime that was gassing it’s people,” she said…

So, here goes the “thinking” – if we can just get the Iranians to see that Assad is a bad guy, they’ll get on board with us against him!  Genius, I tell ya!  Just where to heck to we get such idiots?  Well, Tom Elia on his Facebook page details it:

Yale undergrad; journalist; Harvard Law School; Pulitzer Prize winner (non-fiction book); professor, Kennedy School; diplomat.

We get it from the Ruling Class – the privileged elite who are supposedly just oh, so well educated and oh, so much smarter than us knuckle-dragging teabaggers.  That’s where we get it from.  Ms. Powers, a little clue for ya from the dummies:  people who hang people for being gay and stone women to death because they were raped are unlikely to have an attack of conscience over gassing people.  Its just not that likely, ya see?  In fact, people who do that sort of thing might even be in favor of gassing people…I know, shocking; but there it is.  Some people are just like that.

Update:

Now anti-war Hollywood chimes in with the most unintelligent reason for not opposing action in Syria:

Ed Asner: “They don’t want to feel Anti-Black”

Wow.  Now I have heard it all.  I am 100% positive if the President was a African-American Republican, Hollywood would have no problem “feeling Anti-Black” in that case.  Again according to the left, if you criticize the pResident you are a racist…. a bigot…. a hater.

UPDATE III, by Mark Noonan:

In between bouts of blaming Bush, I guess someone over at Team Obama realized that Team Bush could at least drum up and sustain support for war – even when things got really rough.  And, so, Team Obama sent some former Bush people to lobby House GOPers:

Top Bush administration officials have mobilized to sway a skeptical Republican party to authorize military intervention in Syria. As National Review Online reported, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley and former undersecretary of defense for policy Eric Edelman this week led a briefing on Capitol Hill for Republican legislative directors and chiefs of staff…

…Their argument: If you hope to have a negotiated settlement with Iran, they only way you are going to get there is if the Iranians actually believe the use of force lies behind America’s efforts to negotiate. Hamstringing the president’s effort to use force against Syria now will “absolutely cripple and destroy” the chance to reach a diplomatic settlement with Iran…

The idea is that if we fail to sustain Obama on Syria, then when he does go to talk to the Iranians about their nuclear program, the Iranians will know in advance that there is no credible threat of US action if Iran refuses to forgo nuclear weapons.  Its a nice theory, but it is based upon a premise that to this moment Iran believes that we’ll do something about their nuclear program.  If they do, then they are too stupid to figure out how to build an atomic bomb…or even a firecracker, for that matter.

Obama’s credibility will not be destroyed by failure to sustain him on Syria – Obama’s credibility has been destroyed for ages.  If the Assad government did use chemical weapons it is because they were convinced that no great punishment would be meted out if they did.  And, they’re right – even if we sustain Obama, he’s just going to lob a few missiles in to Syria.  Twenty or thirty more large explosions added to the scores of large explosions happening there every day.  Not exactly the sort of thing to convince a bloodthirsty dictator fighting for his life that he’s in trouble.  No war in Syria – not now; not while Obama is President.

Time for a Special Prosecutor and a Select Committee

Mark Noonan68 Comments

Not, I must stress, because impeachment is on the table – that, my friends, is just about impossible.  To convict President Obama here in 2013 would require the votes of at least 22 Democrat Senators, and that is presuming that all 45 GOP Senators showed some backbone.  Ain’t gonna happen.  But, we still need the Special Prosecutor and the Select Committee.  Here’s why:

As far as the Special Prosecutor goes, because it is appears that quite a lot of law-breaking has been going on in the Obama Administration and we simply cannot trust Attorney General to enforce the law.  Heck, we can’t be certain Holder even knows what a law is (no indications that Obama knows what a law is, either).  When people break laws – and especially when they break laws in positions of public trust – then just must be done.  It is the only way to ensure that the American people have confidence that their government, on the whole, is honestly run.  If rampant criminality is allowed to flourish, then the remaining shreds and tatters of respect for the government will fall – and just about anything can happen, at that point.  Tyrants rise upon the ruins of corrupt governments, my friends – a Special Prosecutor empowered to investigate all of the Obama scandals (especially the IRS, Fast and Furious and voter intimidation issues) will go a long way towards convincing people that crime is punished, even among the powerful.

For the Select Committee, the task is to figure out just how Obama and Co have managed to subvert our government institutions and then to propose legislation to fix the problem.  Clearly, the President has far too much latitude in carrying out the duties of his office and it is time the Imperial Presidency is reigned in and brought firmly back under the rule of law.  Severe criminal penalties must be enacted for even the lowest-level government officials who engage in partisan political activity – this to prevent the bosses from getting the troops to do things, then claiming that it was just low level staffers out of control.  But a 25 year jail term on doing things like the IRS agents did and they’ll pause before following orders.  These days, Congress writes vague laws and leaves it up to the Judiciary and Executive to sort them out – that must stop.  Very specific laws need to be written clearly defining the responsibilities of personnel all up and down the federal chain of command and clearly stating what they may or may not do, especially as regards partisan political activity.  A Select Committee would be able to find out who is doing what, why and how it may be stopped.

Of course, we also need to reign in the power of Congress, and the Courts, as well – but right now it is the Executive (greedy, corrupt and incompetent) which is threatening the liberties of the American people and it must be brought to heel.

And don’t forget, if you really want to know what has happened in the past four years, pick up your copy of 150 Reasons Why Barack Obama is the Worst President in History, today.

UPDATE:  Seems that the White House, getting at a loss, has decided to go with a “we’re idiots” defense regarding Benghazi.  No, you didn’t read that wrong:

“We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots,” said one Obama administration official who was part of the Benghazi response. “It’s actually closer to us being idiots.”

I still think they are liars, too.