Afghanistan and the Future of the War Against Islamism

Mark Noonan15 Comments

With the shocking rise of “green on blue” attacks in Afghanistan – incidents where Afghans trained and armed by us murder our troops in cold blood – it is time (probably way past time) to completely re-assess our goals in this war.  Long time readers will remember that my basic premise for supporting the war was a conviction on my part that the average, everyday Muslim pretty much wanted what the average, everyday non-Muslim wanted:  peace and prosperity and a bright future for the children.  Given this premise, I felt that if we could get in to several Muslim countries and overthrow their corrupt, cruel governments and give the Muslims a genuine choice, they would choose correctly.  I do believe, ultimately, that this is the correct view – but given the nature of American politics with our liberals determined that any use of military force is wrong, it is not practical for the United States to pursue it.  Liberals gum up the works – war is a brutal, hard business and part of the process is killing and humiliating people.  Liberals insist that we never humiliate and kill only in impossible conditions.  The liberals have won, again; just as they won on the Vietnam issue.  Congratulations, liberals!

Given our inability to properly fight the war, the fall of old tyrannies in the Muslim world has eventuated not in a hoped-for improvement, but an increase of barbarism.  Our weakness – insisted upon by liberals – has led to a convincing propaganda line for the Islamists:  “see, we beat these weakling Americans; follow us to Islamic glory”.  The upshot of our failure is a dramatic and disgusting rise of Islamist barbarism – more and more Muslims murdered and oppressed but, also, non-Muslims subjected to ever more horrific torments.  In the past week I’ve read stories of a Christian doctor nearly beaten to death because he took a drink of water during Ramadan (forbidden during the day to Muslims,  but the guy wasn’t a Muslim) and of a 12 year old Christian girl who is under threat of the death penalty because a Muslim boy she refused to sleep with cooked up a blasphemy charge against her.  That is just two drops in a hideous ocean of persecution.  I see no way forward at the moment for our military to secure what would be American victory – we’ve tied ourselves in to too many knots, we’ve handed the Islamists too many trump cards and we’ve entirely lost the momentum of victory we once had.  Obama will just stumble along in his blind, ignorant way – what Romney will do remains unknown.  My view is that it is time to withdraw as swiftly as possible – taking with us any Muslims who want to live a civilized life, but getting out in the shortest possible time with the least amount of fuss.

After we do get out, this is going to get a heck of a lot worse before it gets any better.  Sorry, liberals, but the reason the Islamists act as they do is not in response to our actions but in service of their Islamist goals – they are hate-filled, greedy, corrupt barbarians.  They are just like that and will remain like that until killed.  Already Islamists in Libya are destroying works of art deemed un-Islamic while in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood government starts to implement Islamism…and none of us know what horrors will emerge in the post-Assad regime of Syrian.  The Taliban will likely come back to power in Afghanistan (probably invited in to power by Karzai who seems these days mostly interested in preserving himself in power, cost what it might).  The mullahs of Iran continue to flex their muscle.  In the final analysis as Islamism grows and gets a tighter grip on the Muslim world we can expect an eventual attempt to attack us here at home.  Actually, a lot of attempts.  Most will be thwarted.  Eventually, they will get through and we’ll have some sort of replay of 9/11.

And then the war will resume – and when it does (not if, but when – its as certain as night following day) then it is to be hoped that we’ll do it differently.  In hindsight, the primary failure of the Bush war policy was a failure to attack all of Islamism at once.  On September 12th he should have asked a joint session of Congress for declarations of war on Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan – take on the whole problem and not try to treat it as a series of separate, country-by-country events; the Islamists don’t view the Muslim countries as in any way legitimate and so neither should we.  By so doing we would have unified all Islamists against us, except for the fact that they already were…but we would have had the great advantage of being able to attack all of them at once as well as raising an army large enough to physically conquer the entirely of Islamist territory thus preventing one Islamist area from supporting Islamist insurgency in an American-controlled area (which was our problem in Iraq and is now our problem in Afghanistan).  If the Islamists attack us at home again, that is what we must do (though we can now add Egypt to the list of nations to declare war on as they have gone Islamist):  declare war on them all, fight them all, kill and humiliate them all.  That is the way wars are fought and won – and by doing it in such a manner we’d prevent liberalism from gumming it up (we’d be moving too fast on too many fronts without any apparent stagnation to allow liberalism to make its absurd case against war).

That will be as it will – but the main thing for now is to get out.  Unless we want to pour in 100,000 more troops and start exterminating Islamists in great, big bloody batches, I don’t want our soldiers to remain in Afghanistan.  They’ve done magnificent work and almost made even Obama’s slipshod policy a success.  But there’s nothing for it, now:  Obama won’t do what is necessary to win and it is unlikely that Romney will be able to, either.  If troops can’t fight for victory, better to not fight at all.  Bring them home.

Anyone Else See A Disconnect Here?

Leo Pusateri38 Comments

Barack Hussein Obama:

  • Voted three times to allow a child who survived an abortion to die on a gurney.
  • Allowed the trafficking of guns into the hands of Mexican drug lords via Operation Fast and Furious, knowing they would be utilized in the commission of crimes and murders, sending hundreds of people to their deaths, including U.S. Border Agent Brian Terry.
  • Forced Catholic and other Christian institutions to violate their consciences by attempting to force them to fund birth control and abortifacients.
  • Imprisoned a Marine for speaking his mind on Facebook
  • Shut down hundreds (1000s?) of GM dealerships and put thousands out of work.
  • Prevented tens of thousands of United States workers from finding gainful employment during the worst recession since the Great Depression- by blocking the Keystone Pipeline Project.
  • Is the consummate narcissist, assigning credit to no one but himself, assigning blame to EVERYONE but himself.
Now, can you please tell me again why you think he’s a “nice guy?”

The False Narrative

Cluster55 Comments

One of the biggest obstacles conservatives must overcome is the false narrative being pushed by the DNC and the Obama regime with a lot of help from their sycophants in the media. So “what we have here, is a failure to communicate”, on behalf of the RNC and I am hoping that this week we can turn that around. The false premises that are being pushed out there include, but not limited to:

– Medicare – Obama wants us all to believe that Medicare “as we know it will end” under Romney’s plan, and will unnecessarily hurt seniors, which is just completely false. Romney’s plan to give people under 55 a choice to remain on the current program or choose another option, does not effect seniors one bit, and actually strengthens Medicare for future generations. Obama’s plan to do nothing ensures it’s bankruptcy.

– Abortion – The party with the extreme position on abortion is the democrats. They currently support federal funding, partial birth, and live birth abortion, and essentially the right to kill the unborn without question at anytime. This position is far out of the mainstream, and voters need to know this. Conservatives support life with the rape/incest exception, which is optional, and that position is actually the real pro choice position.

– Racism – Honestly the political party that harbors racists, are the democrats. Most of them simply believe that people of a darker skin color are victims of this society solely because of their pigmentation, and that without government help, they are incapable of living a productive life. This mindset is deplorable and offensive. They also believe apparently that they need to be the protectors of our first black President, because obviously he is unable to withstand criticism of most any kind, due once again to the color of his skin.

– War on Women – Once again, the political party that is waging war against women is the democrats. How offensive is it for most women to know that Obama and Sandra Fluke believe that women are incapable of providing for their own contraception needs? How hypocritical is it for liberal feminists to say “keep your hands off my body” but then expect us to pay for their abortion and healthcare needs? How denigrating is it to believe that a pregnancy is an obstacle in a woman’s life? The fact is, women are incredibly strong and more than capable of determining, and paying for, their way through life without anyones help.

Since Obama can not run on his economic performance, the DNC is hoping to push the false narrative on these social issues to win the election. Let’s not let that happen. In 2012, Conservatives need to take a page from Obama back from 2008:

“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.”
— Barack Hussein Obama, addressing Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)

Get in their face indeed.

GTFO 2012!

Calling all military, former military ,retired military and their families and friends

Retired Spook81 Comments

I never plagiarize another person’s words or ideas without attribution, but there was no source on this email that I received this morning from another retired military friend. This is short and to the point and dead on in it’s importance and relevance to this most vital election in our lifetimes.

From: Subject: Please forward to everyone you can

Date: August 24, 2012 4:43:47 PM EDT

More than 1,000 America soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan in the last 27 months. This is more than the combined total of the nine years before. Thirty have died in August. The commander in chief is AWOL. Not a peep, although he ordered the White House flag flown at half mast for the Sikhs that were killed. There is a deep disgust, a fury, growing in the ranks of the military against the indifferent incompetence of this president. It has taken on a dangerous tone. No one knows what to do about him, but the anger runs deep as the deaths continue with no strategic end in sight to the idiocy of this war. Obama has had 4 years to end this futile insanity, during which time he has vacationed, golfed, campaigned, and generally ignored the plight of our men and women in uniform. But, there is now a movement afoot in the armed services to launch a massive get out the vote drive against this president. Not just current active duty types, but the National Guard, Reserves, the retired, and all other prior service members. This is no small special interest group, but many millions of veterans who can have an enormous impact on the outcome of the November election if they all respond. The million military retirees in Florida alone could mean an overwhelming victory in that state if they all show up at the polls. It might not keep another one hundred U.S. troops from dying between now and November, but a turn out to vote by the military against this heart breaking lack of leadership can make a powerful statement that hastens a change to the indifference of this shallow little man who just lets our soldiers die.

In many countries around the world a problem such as ours would be solved by the military simply forcibly removing such a threat to national security, sovereignty and economic liberty.  The principles of honor and duty and the rule of law prevent that from happening in this country.  Still, Obama needs to be disposed of in a way consistent with our Constitution.  November 6th is only 72 days away.

Neil Armstrong, RIP

Mark Noonan60 Comments

From ABC News:

 Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who became first to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 11, has died. He was 82 years old.

He was born in the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, on Aug. 5, 1930.

On July 20, 1969, half a billion people — a sixth of the world’s population at the time — watched a ghostly black-and-white television image as Armstrong backed down the ladder of the lunar landing ship Eagle, planted his left foot on the moon’s surface, and said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”…

Symbolic of a nation which used to be able to do everything – Armstrong’s death reminds us of what we used to be, and should inspire us to be that nation, again.

A Liberal Whine: Obama Not Playing Race Card, Enough

Mark Noonan49 Comments

From Ta-Nehisi Coats in The Atlantic:

…From the “inadequate black male” diatribe of the Hillary Clinton supporter Harriet Christian in 2008, to Rick Santelli’s 2009 rant on CNBC against subsidizing “losers’ mortgages,” to Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during Obama’s September 2009 address to Congress, to John Boehner’s screaming “Hell no!” on the House floor about Obamacare in 2010, politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama. But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion. So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte. This fear continued with demands that he keep his distance from Louis Farrakhan and culminated with Reverend Wright and a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition.

Thus the myth of “twice as good” that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—­enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors. Of course, very little in our history argues that those who seek to tell bold truths about race will be rewarded. But it was Obama himself, as a presidential candidate in 2008, who called for such truths to be spoken. “Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” he said in his “More Perfect Union” speech, which he delivered after a furor erupted over Reverend Wright’s “God Damn America” remarks. And yet, since taking office, Obama has virtually ignored race…

The article is quite long and it just goes on and on like that – America is and has been a hopeless, racist hell and Obama hasn’t been doing enough to pay whitey back for his transgressions.  Obama is just playing the white man’s game, as it were, for fear that an enraged black man will awaken the racist within us all and thus defeat him on November 6th.  The underlying premise of it all is that all white people are guilty and until they confront their terrible crimes, we can’t get past the race issue in the United States.

The reality is a bit different, of course.  The true issue of race in America is that it is dead as a doornail except for those who need it for fun and profit.  The fact that Obama has been treated just like anyone else doesn’t enter in to liberal minds – it was my (very white) wife who first clued me in to the Obama phenomena.  She was quite taken with this well spoken, good looking man who was clearly ambitious for higher office.  I, too, could not escape immediately the charm of Obama.  While I wouldn’t have voted for him under any circumstances this was entirely due to his standard-liberal positions on the issues.  That he is a black man was, is and always will be entirely irrelevant.  It wasn’t until the Jeremiah Wright issue came up that I became aware of the dishonesty underneath the surface of Obama – and while an author like Coats clearly admirers people like Wright, anyone who is not committed to the con-job which is race in America these days would immediately be offended by someone who lives well off America and yet condemns it in such hateful terms.  And as Obama and team started going “Jeremiah who?” it really just told us that Obama is dishonest – he sat in the man’s church for 20 years and could not reasonably argue that he was unaware of Wright’s raving lunacy.

Obama’s 2008 persona, though, carried him through to victory – just as anyone else with that sort of persona and given that set of political circumstances would likely have been carried in to the White House.  In other words; treated just like anyone else.  The problem for Obama is that his management style (probably the worst decision-maker we’ve ever had in the White House) coupled with the disastrous policies normal to liberalism have ensured complete failure of his Administration.  And just like any other person who is failing in the job of President, he’s getting hammered in popular approval and will likely lose on November 6th.  He wasn’t elected due to race in 2008, won’t be defeated in 2012 because of race – he was elected because of his personality and circumstances and will be defeated because of his policies.  But if this narrative is accepted as true then all the racial con-artists out there (people like Wright and Farrakhan and Jackson and Sharpton) would shortly be out of work.  A certain segment of the population (which does include a very large number of white people, of course) needs to have race to be a painful, divisive issue now and forever more.

It will be funny – not to me, as I’ll be dead right around that time – in 30 or 40 years when America is no longer a white-majority nation to see the successors of these people.  How will they keep the race hustle up?  Don’t doubt that they will try – Mugabe in Zimbabwe is still blaming the white people of Zimbabwe for his problems even though there are hardly any white people left in that country.  It’ll just be entertaining to watch the mental back flips these people will have to do to convince people that whitey is still keeping the black man down.   Think of it like this – the race-hustlers of 2052 will be trying to convince a panel of 1 (aged) white guy, two Latinos, two Asians and three mixed-race people that we still need racial set-asides to clear up the racial disparities of the Jim Crow era.

The sad part of it is really the way these people feel the need to keep hate alive.  We all know the truth of our past – the glory and the sins; slavery will always be a stain upon the Great Republic, as will segregation.  But it is also very much long past, now.  There are no slaves left.  No children of slaves, either.  I doubt we even have a great-grand-child of a slave alive in the United States.  The Jim Crow laws have been a dead letter since the mid-60’s.  Black people serve at all levels of American society and no one would ever dream of barring anyone from any position simply based upon their skin color.  More and more of us, also, have mixed race families – while I’m sure there are still some hill-apes out there who don’t want their daughters to marry a black man, they are few and far between (and getting ever fewer by the day); people just don’t care about it any longer.  All we want is decent people who obey the law and do the right thing – skin color is irrelevant.  But here are our liberals – so fearful that the race-baiting gravy train may come to an end that they will do whatever is necessary to keep old hatreds inflamed.

Pray for them.  Don’t get mad about it.  Hopefully they will wake up from their befuddlement in the by and by.

 

Gambling for “The Children”

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Geesh:

…Emanuel said Thursday that he doesn’t want the revenue a casino would bring for city coffers, but would rather divert it to schools.

“As I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, if we were to get a casino, I’d like to direct all the resources to school modernization and school improvement so our kids will be in modern school buildings with a full school day and full school year,” Emanuel said…

Haven’t seen anything like this since, well, this…

The Decline and Fall of College Education

Mark Noonan35 Comments

From Market Watch:

Late summer is when parents bring their children to college. As they drive to campus they’re worried about tuition increases, the burden of student debt and whether their children will find jobs when they graduate.

Some parents and high-school students are beginning to question the value of a four-year college degree in this post-Great Recession world.   And you can certainly understand why they have these concerns…

…The job market for recent college grads is grim and incomes are down. The unemployment rate for all college graduates over 25 years old is currently 4.1%, less than half of the national unemployment rate of 8.3%.  But a recent Economic Policy Institute study reports that the unemployment rate is 9.4% for college grads ages 21 to 24 (not currently seeking a post graduate degree), and the underemployment rate for this group is 19.1% (this includes part-time workers who want full-time jobs). In 2011, those grads lucky enough to have a full-time job earned an average of $35,000 a year, a 5.4% inflation adjusted decrease from 2000 average income.   Finally, it is estimated that nearly 4 of 10 grads are working in fields that don’t require a college degree (the college-grad barista syndrome)…

The article details far more than that about what is wrong with getting a college degree – and then, in typical (for modern times) Alice-In-Wonderland mode, still goes on to claim that getting a degree is worth it.  I hold, though, that it is only worth it if you are going for a degree in medicine or one of the hard sciences (I don’t even count law school as worth it any longer as we have a glut of lawyers in the United States).  We have, in our higher education system, far too many people pursuing far too many degrees of doubtful immediate utility and the whole thing is financed with a trillion dollars (and growing) of student debt which is increasingly impossible for the college grads to repay.  What happened?

Government happened.  Government (lobbied by the education establishment) decided that everyone should go to college and so set up education systems designed to feed colleges as opposed to educate kids.  Government then set up a student loan program (initially via the private sector under government control, not entirely under government control) which provided easy funding (literally, an 18 year old with no income and no credit rating can borrow tens of thousands of dollars to go to college) for anyone who is willing to put his butt in a college seat.  Colleges love this because they get the money up front so it doesn’t matter if the kid ever graduates or whether the kid learns a marketable skill.  Colleges additionally love it because by providing loans the government allows the colleges to continually hike tuition rates outside of market variable – the kids aren’t thinking of having to pay that back four years later (four years to an 18 year old is forever in the future) and so aren’t actually calculating the loan cost against possible future returns; they are just told by guidance counselors that a college education will allow them to make more money than a non-college education.  No one ever tells them that there are college educations and then there are college educations…and education in medicine will immediately allow you to make a bucket of money per year while an education in post-feminist studies not so much.  As is typical whenever government gets in involved a tiny elite profits (in this case the education system) while the people get screwed.

In addition to that, except for those learning a hard science (in other words, those who are really in nothing more than a high-grade trade school), the kids aren’t even being educated.  100 years ago, a college education included learning Latin and Greek, just to tip-of-the-iceberg what isn’t being done in schools any longer.  We’ve massively dumbed-down college education to the point where I hold it mostly in contempt – because after all that time and money in the class room, I see no ability of a college graduate which is superior to my abilities.  I don’t know Latin or Greek, either…and I’d stack my non-college education knowledge of history, economics, philosophy and theology against anyone who graduated college in the last 50 years.  For most kids, it would be better if they went to a trade school rather than college – it would be cheaper and, for instance, if you are a tool and die maker you are in massive demand, even in this down economy.

When Obama talks about how he wants to spend more on education all he’s really saying is “I want to subsidize this massive failure because it provides campaign funds for me”.  The Education people know which side butters their bread – they know that as long as they keep the donations flowing to the Democrats the Democrats will keep the money flowing to the education system, no matter how lousy the product is and no matter how many poor kids are burdened with massive debt (nothing like starting out in life as a debt slave, huh?).  Its all a crock, a scam and a national disgrace – end the student loan program and you’ll pull the lynchpin out from under this rotten edifice.  It’ll collapse in a heap if there’s not a flow of loan money in to colleges – they’ll have to cut staff (and the staff most likely to be cut is the heavily liberal areas, such as the aforementioned feminist studies), cut tuition and start offering a more meaty education program which provides something you can’t get in high school or trade school.  We’ll also cut off a huge source of funds for the Democrat party and the larger left.  There’s no downside to eliminating student loans – certainly not for the kids who won’t be $30,000.00 in debt for a useless degree.

But, will we?  Not yet.  We’re still in a cowardly phase where we’re afraid of a Democrat “Republicans hate education” attack line.  But the fall of college education proceeds apace and maybe when we’ve got kids sitting under $2 trillion in worthless education debt there will come the will to change.

 

The Pretender

Cluster63 Comments

I have never before in my lifetime seen such divisiveness emanating from a Presidential campaign then what we are currently seeing from the Obama camp. I am offended by it and digusted by it. Romney nailed it the other day when he said Obama is hoping to tear people apart and cobble together 51%, which is quite a departure from his unity, hope and change message of just 4 years ago. Nearly everyday he, or his surrogates, are out on the stump or in the media personally attacking either the rich, people of Faith, big corporations, the republican congress, white people, or any other person, or group du jour. How anyone can get behind this campaign and vote for this fraud is beyond me.

Now of course liberals will whine and moan about the birthers, and to be fair, there was a faction on the right that went a little over the top even for me. But that IS a legitimate issue that Obama could have put to rest real quickly, instead Obama chose to play it out and allow the issue to become even a bigger issue so that he had a wedge issue he could rally his base around. Just another cause to divide people with and it certainly did divide us. In fact this country is more polarized today than at anytime I can ever remember. And it shouldn’t be. We have some serious issues to confront and it will take serious people to resolve them and one thing I have learned about Obama, is that he is anything but serious. He refuses to reconsider his policies despite obvious and proven failures. He is prepared to double down on another stimulus, is prepared to throw away more money at the green industry which isn’t even close to a mass produceable platform, is still trying to slow down fracking despite the demonstrable success in North Dakota, is still denying the Keystone Pipeline, is still standing behind the Dodd Frank Act which Is strangling the credit that use to be easily accessible by small business, and is still wanting to raise taxes which by his own previous admissions is not the right thing to do in a recession.

On the social side, if anyone has an extreme position on abortion that should be reconsidered and is outside the main stream, it is the democrats. They still support federal funding for abortion and partial birth abortion, which according to most polls is opposed by the vast majority of Americans. In fact, Obama still hasn’t backed away from his support for a live birth abortion. I wonder why the media hasn’t called him out on that? Just kidding, I think we all know the answer to that. Folks, these are serious times and we need a President that will be serious. Not a President that prefers to golf, campaign and hang out with Hollywood.

Hit the Road, Barack

Retired Spook48 Comments

Bill O’Reilly was a guest on Glenn Beck’s radio show this morning, and in response to Beck’s question of who he thought was going to win the election, O’Reilly said, according to confidential sources of his, internal polls in BOTH campaigns indicate that, if the election were tomorrow, Romney would win.  One of the main reasons for that could well be Niall Ferguson’s article in Newsweek, which is raising a lot of eyebrows this week.  As Ronald Kessler noted at NewsMax yesterday, Ferguson’s devastating article could be the turning point in the campaign.

The financial crisis a few weeks before the last presidential election was enough to push Barack Obama over the top. This week’s Newsweek cover slamming President Obama could have almost as much impact.

“Hit the Road, Barack — Why We Need a New President” the cover says. “Obama’s Gotta Go” the article inside says.

Journalists are not idiots. They recognize that Obama, as the Newsweek cover story documents, has been a failure. But they are also lemmings who will not depart from their traditional support of Democrats unless given permission by their peers. The cover story in Newsweek, one of the most liberal-leaning publications in the country, does just that.

Because of support by the press, Obama became president in the first place and has held his own against Mitt Romney in polls.

Three months before the story of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.’s connection to Obama finally broke in the mainstream media, I began writing stories as chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com about Obama’s close association with his America-bashing minister.

The media, which had known generally about Wright since Obama announced his candidacy in February 2007, ignored the stories. If the media had picked them up then, Obama likely would not be president today.

According to pollsters, largely as a result of the stories the press finally ran about Wright, Obama’s double-digit lead over Hillary Clinton vanished. At the same time, John McCain shot up in the polls, and Hillary began winning the primaries. But by then, Obama was ahead, and it was too late for her to overcome his previous lead.

Indeed, David Remnick’s “The Ridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama” quotes an unidentified Clinton aide as saying, “If Jeremiah Wright had dropped in January [2008], it [Obama’s candidacy] would have been over.”

Today, the media largely ignore Obama’s daily distortions and record of failure, all documented in the Newsweek article. In contrast, after President Bush gave his 2003 State of the Union address, the press attacked him mercilessly for weeks over his 16-word statement that the British government had learned that Saddam Hussein sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

In fact, the statement was true. After the British House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee reviewed the MI6 intelligence about the claim involving Niger, it concluded in September 2003 that the British intelligence service was justified in continuing to say that Hussein had tried to obtain uranium from that country. The press then ignored the report showing that Bush’s statement was indeed accurate.

But when Obama says the private sector of the economy is doing fine, belittles success, claims the Supreme Court cannot overrule a law passed by Congress, says he is not divisive even as he attacks Republicans, gratuitously injects race into his comments, or claims Romney and Paul Ryan would end Medicare as we know it, the press gives the president a pass.

None of this is lost on the public.

A recent Rasmussen poll found that 59 percent of likely U.S. voters believe Obama has received the best treatment from the media so far. Just 18 percent think Mitt Romney has been treated better.

Having been a reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, I know how susceptible journalists are to the herd instinct. The Newsweek cover story in effect tells journalists it’s OK to begin telling the truth about Obama and expose his presidency as the failure Newsweek says it is. For that reason, it could be a turning point in the election.

One of the biggest problems the Obama campaign has (actually two related problems) is the inability to dig up some really harmful dirt on either Romney or Ryan coupled with the inability to portray either of them as the bad guys.  And the more the Dems try, the nastier they come off.  Say what you will about the American people, they just really don’t like “nasty”.