First, my girl Monica responds to Veep Biden’s genius statement about having misread how bad the economy was, leaving us to wonder who’s stupider, the economic-catastrophe-mongers or the American people?
Boy, Do They Think We’re Stupid
By Monica Crowley
On this weekend’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous,” Vice President Joe Biden said: “We misread how bad the economy was.”
He and Obama “misread” how bad the economy was?!
Pardon me, but weren’t they elected on the basis of their self-touted ability to manage the economy back to relative health? Didn’t they slam into Senator John McCain as inept on economic issues, as a man incapable of reading the economy and crafting appropriate policies to bring it back? Didn’t The Bama position himself as the Only One who could fix it? Didn’t he promise to deliver results, such as keeping unemployment to 8% if he were elected and his policies implemented?
And how.
And yet, here we are, at 9.5% unemployment and rising, home foreclosures at record levels and climbing, and multiple industries—including those which have received hundreds of billions of dollars in federal bailout money, from banks to the auto industry—in collapse and/or in bankrupcy.
The trillions of dollars The Bama and his socialist posse have already spent have accomplished absolutely nothing. In fact, all of this government intervention has made things worse.
The Biden says they “misread” how bad the economy was? You “misread” how many calories are in a Snickers bar. You don’t “misread” how bad the economy is, ESPECIALLY when you have spent almost an entire year telling us what a “catastrophe” the economy is, what an epic “crisis” we are in, and how it’s “the worst economic crisis than the Great Depression.”
From all of that apocalyptic rhetoric, it sure SEEMED like Team Bama read the economy just right. Unless, of course, they were trying to sow panic in order to get their massive spending plans through. But they wouldn’t do such a thing, would they??
Now The Biden says all of that over-the-top crisis rhetoric wasn’t ENOUGH. That the economy was WORSE even than that. Which means, of course, they are going to try to spend TRILLIONS MORE on payouts to their Democratic constituencies, disguised as additional “stimulus” spending.
They really think we’re buying this elaborate tap dance of lies and corruption. But then again, if it’s not stopped through our outrage and our own community organizing, then they have every reason to continue thinking it.
Next, Peter Ferrara at the American Spectator argues:
The Bush Doctrine Is Still Working
By Peter Ferrara on 7.8.09
A central theme of President Bush’s administration was to promote democracy in the Middle East. He argued that establishing a full fledged democracy in Iraq in the heart of the Middle East would have transforming effects throughout the Muslim World. Even though the promotion of human rights and democracy had been a central theme of liberal foreign policy for decades, the Left ridiculed Bush’s policy as hopelessly naïve. Even some on the right echoed this criticism.
But recent trends throughout the Middle East show that this policy is now producing a growing, very powerful effect in countering Islamic extremism and terrorism, just as Bush originally envisioned. The most recent example of this is the elections in Lebanon, where the pro-Western coalition in power there was reelected last month with a slightly increased majority over the Islamic extremist Hezbollah coalition, despite Iranian funding estimated in the billions for Hezbollah.
When the pro-Western coalition was first elected in Lebanon in 2005, it soon chased the Syrian army out of the country, ending the occupation started over 20 years ago during the Lebanese civil war. That was a huge victory for America and the West for which Bush received no credit. […]
Absent democracy, the roughly 10% of the public in Middle Eastern, Islamic countries willing to shoot their way into power in the name of Allah seems dominant. Actual elections reveal them to be fringe, extremist groups, greatly diminishing their power in favor of reasonable, secular leaders. As a result, the Bush doctrine of advancing democracy and human rights is now increasingly successful in combating terrorism and Islamic extremism.
Now we are seeing these same results in Iran. Where did the people of Iran get the idea that they were entitled to an honest election? They haven’t had an honest election there in over 50 years. Maybe it comes from watching their Shiite brothers voting in honest, free elections in neighboring Iraq. And maybe it comes as well from watching the same in neighboring Afghanistan, which had formerly been seen as hopelessly backward for centuries.
Iran’s recent sham election fiasco is the biggest victory of all for America and the West, again courtesy of the Bush doctrine of promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East. All of a sudden, the Islamic theocracy in Iran has been discredited and exposed as illegitimate. Now that the ruling mullahs have had to turn to shooting their own people in the streets to stay in power, it is only a matter of time until their theocracy falls, and the popular will regains power. That result will be enormously beneficial for America, because Iran’s theocratic regime is the central power in the Middle East supporting and spreading Islamic radicalism, terrorism, and continued war against Israel and the West. Once Iran’s theocracy falls, and is replaced by a secular government, peace between Israel and the Palestinians will be possible and increasingly likely over time.
In this environment, the right policy for America would be to do what it can to promote regime change in Iran. Organizing an international gas embargo would greatly undermine the security forces by creating a shortage of fuel for their vehicles, as Iran has minimal refinery capacity and must import virtually all of its refined gasoline. International sanctions and isolation for the theocratic regime would also help. Covert financial and even military aid to the rebels may be desirable as well
But President Obama is committed to the opposite course. He is committed to still negotiating with the mullah dictators to get a deal to stop Iran’s nuclear program. There is zero chance any such negotiations will succeed. The mullahs have already said they are not interested in the materialist incentives of aid and trade packages, or concerned about the materialist harm of sanctions. They are committed to their extremist religious views, which call for wiping Israel off the face of the earth, as they have put it (Holocaust 2.0). President Bush actually carried on diplomatic negotiations with Iran for years regarding its nuclear weapons program through a European coalition and in other forums, and all this did was enable the Iranians to buy time to develop their nuclear weapons.
All Obama’s negotiations will achieve is provide legitimacy to the mullah dictators as the real government of Iran, which will delay their fall for years. This reveals the fundamental weakness of Obama’s foreign policy. It is weak on the traditional liberal theme of democracy and human rights. Obama’s foreign policy is more like Nixon’sRealpolitik in its willingness to negotiate and deal with reigning dictators, from Iran to Russia to China to Venezuela, and around the world.
The Honduras Fiasco
Indeed, while Obama did not want to “meddle” in Iran for fear of offending the mullahs, whom he intends to sweet talk out of their nuclear weapons, he was quick to meddle in Honduras as soon as the people acted to defend their democracy from a rogue president, Manuel Zelaya, allied with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Despite what you have heard from the Democrat party-controlled press, there has been no military coup in Honduras. It is still ruled today by a civilian government, not the military, and free elections are still scheduled for November for a new president and government. […]
Obama’s Nuclear Disarmament
Even worse for America, however, is President Obama’s American nuclear disarmament policy, which he is pursuing this week in Russia through a nuclear deal with the Putin dictatorship. In his foreign policy speech in Prague earlier this year, Obama called for worldwide nuclear disarmament, suggesting that American nuclear weapons are no more acceptable than Iranian nukes, and that the rest of the world would agree to give up its nuclear weapons if America would give up its own. This is an extreme left policy.
North Korea responded soon thereafter with nuclear tests and the firing of new missiles. While Obama responded with bluff and bluster about real consequences, nothing much happened. Meanwhile, Obama’s budget, passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress, substantially cuts funding for missile defense. When Japan suggested North Korea would fire missiles at Hawaii on the Fourth of July, the Obama Administration rushed available missile defense assets to the islands. But the action seemed hollow given Obama’s long range funding plans for missile defense.
Now President Obama has agreed with the Russians to complete a deal that would cut U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals by another third, reducing America’s nuclear warheads down to 1500. It is not clear how we can be sure that Russia will comply with its side of the bargain.
But this arms control initiative reveals how badly Obama’s thinking is frozen deeply in the past, analogously to his unreconstructed Keynesian economic policies from the 1930s. We no longer live in a bipolar world, with America and Russia the only relevant nuclear superpowers. China is now a more powerful threat than Russia with its own nuclear arsenal, and India, Pakistan, North Korea, and soon apparently Iran also pose nuclear dangers. A nuclear deal with Russia alone is not remotely adequate to protect America, even if we could be sure of Russian compliance. Indeed, if we don’t successfully counter North Korea and Iran, and President Obama does not seem to be up to that, nuclear proliferation will spread to Japan, South Korea, and throughout the Middle East. In the face of these threats, cutting our own nuclear arsenal down to 1500 warheads, or even less as Obama ultimately advocates, may leave America vulnerable, particularly to attacks aimed at taking out our nuclear arsenal. Joining that policy with cutting missile defense and halting further development of Reagan’s SDI initiative reflects a blinkered commitment to hopeless left-wing ideology and could not be more reckless and risky for America’s national defense. […]
While Bush’s foreign policy doctrine of promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East is still working to produce huge victories for America and the West, Obama’s foreign policy doctrine of negotiating deals with the world’s dictators, combined with his flower power nuclear disarmament philosophy, may be the gravest threat America faces today.
Finally, at Front Page Mag’s Newsreal blog, John Perazzo has some critical words for Al Sharpton, who delivered an abominable race-baiting eulogy at Michael Jackson’s funeral yesterday and then continued his bloviating later that evening on Larry King Live:
Al Sharpton: A Lifelong Racist Eulogizes Michael Jackson
The late Michael Jackson, Al Sharpton told CNN’s Larry King last night, “expanded,” on “a cultural level,” the work that “[Martin Luther] King and Jackie Robinson and others had done” to elevate the status of blacks in American society. “Michael made people comfortable with each other,” said Sharpton, asserting that, thanks in part to the pop icon’s influence, Americans at large eventually “grew up to be able to be more comfortable making political and other moves that they may not have made without that cultural comfort.”
Sharpton’s remarks to King were an extension of the eulogy he had delivered earlier yesterday at the L.A. Staples Center, where he proclaimed that Jackson had “broke[n] down the color curtain” and “brought blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos together” – thereby setting the stage for the day when Americans would be “comfortable” enough “to vote for a person of color to be the President of the United States.”
Yes, Al Sharpton chose to turn his eulogy for Michael Jackson into a monologue about race. No surprise there. For Sharpton, everything, however grand or trivial, is ultimately about race.
He is, after all, the same Al Sharpton who, in the late Eighties, knowingly abetted a 15-year-old black girl in falsely charging that a mysterious gang of white racists had abducted and gang-raped her; according to ex-Sharpton aide Perry McKinnon, Sharpton did this specifically for the purpose of cultivating an atmosphere of racial division that could help him advance what he called his “movement.”
Yes, we are talking about the same Al Sharpton who, a few years after that, helped foment some of the ugliest anti-Semitic riots in living memory when he falsely depicted a Brooklyn, New York car accident (which had killed a 7-year old black child) as a racially tinged homicide perpetrated by a Hasidic Jew.
He is the same Al Sharpton who orchestrated a grotesque 1995 boycott against a Jewish-owned clothing shop in Harlem, New York, where a throng of black picketers — under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton – shrieked, entirely without cause, that a cabal of “greedy Jew bastards” and white “crackers” had been mistreating them. This crusade, too, ended badly, when one of the protesters eventually shot four whites in the clothing shop and then set the building on fire — killing seven people.
And who could forget the skillful manner in which Sharpton has repeatedly turned handsome profits by using threats of racially charged boycotts and negative-publicity campaigns to shake down a host of corporate CEOs eager to avoid controversy.
Indeed, he is the same Al Sharpton who once lavished an audience of students and professors at New Jersey’s Kean College with references to “crackers” and “Greek homos” who, from a historical perspective, were still “in the caves [of Europe] while we [black Africans] was building empires” and developing “philosophy and astrology and mathematics.”
By inviting this vile bigot to speak at yesterday’s memorial service, Michael Jackson’s family demonstrated that for whatever gifts and talents they may possess, good judgment is not among them.
The same can be said of Larry King, who, in tortured syntax, concluded his interview with Sharpton by fawning: “There wasn’t anyone there [at the memorial service] today who could not say that you were anything but brilliant.”
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