So concludes Michael Barone in his Saturday column as he considers Ryan Lizza’s recent New Yorker piece on the president:
Now, in an article based on leaked White House memos marked up by Obama, Lizza has done it again [writing “a story that makes his subject look bad”]
Contrarian liberal blogger Mickey Kaus sums it up: “The president’s decision-making method–at least as described in this piece–seems to consist of mainly checking boxes on memos his aides have written for him.”
A $60 billion cut in the stimulus package? “OK.” Use the reconciliation process to pass the health care bill? A check mark in the box labeled “yes.”
Include medical malpractice reform in the health care bill? The man who as an Illinois legislator often voted “present” writes, “We should explore it.”
According to Lizza, Obama prefers getting information and making decisions by staying up late and reading memos rather than meeting with people — a temperament that’s a liability because face time with the president is one of his major sources of political capital.
Read the whole thing. Barone notes further than Lizza provides “minimal” evidence that “that Obama ever seriously considered Republican approaches”, adding “Obama seems to live in a cocoon in which Republicans are largely absent, offscreen actors that no one pays any attention to.”
The impression I had reading Barone’s piece yesterday and Kaus’s piece (via Instapundit) last week is that Obama doesn’t really like being president. When Clinton faced off against a Republican Congress in the second half of his first term, he delighted in the game. Obama stays aloof from it.
Sometimes, it seems, the Democrat doesn’t want a second term as president, but instead just to be vindicated at the polls.
There is something that bothers me about Barone’s analysis. Why would Obama take huge political hits to please Robert Redford and the rich designer clad liberal women who want abortion rights enshrined?
The level of chaos delivered by opposing the pipeline and sucker punching Catholics leads one to examine whether the chaos is not the actual goal.
During the daytime hours while the chipmunks churn out the memos with little boxes to check, what is Obama actually doing? Ceremonial stuff, campaigning, golfing, and, apparently, avoiding substantive Presidential type meetings. Oh, he gets his briefings, but does he make a decision or set it aside to ponder? Remember, he had to be pressured to finally tell the snipers it was OK to shoot the Somali pirates.
So, just maybe, Obama takes his memos and goes upstairs and gets his directions from somewhere else: from the chaos crowd that is working on the fundamental transformation of America. John Podesta comes to mind. Also a lot of other people who work within the ultra left wing web on Soros funded groups who see the Constitution as an aging and mostly useless document.
I think it is far more likely that Obama is promoting an oil shortage in the spirit of chaos than it is likely that he just can’t say “no” to Robert Redford. Furthermore, in the religion of statism and socialism, abortion is a holy sacrament. And since that religion of moral relativity and anti-ghost in the sky elite reasoning opposes all other religions, why not kick the Catholics in the most fundamental of all issues?
In the world of statist socialism the state must control life. The socialist state must be able to kill life that is not productive for the socialist state.
We have three unalienable rights named in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Life is necessary for the other two and therefore life is the most important right.
If one is bent on state control, the place to start is with determining who shall live and who shall not. Obamacare is revealing itself more and more each day to have been designed to cut off health services for the elderly who, coincidentally, no longer fully serve the state purposes and cost the state a lost of money.
Barone’s column is a good one, by I am skeptical about his lightweight cynicism. I don’t think he has the nerve to “think in print” beyond Obama trying to please Robert Redford and rich female contributors.
I think that’s because, Heliotrope, to think that way moves Obama from being a lightweight affirmative-action-induced dunce to an actual malevolent force. Conservatives, especially, have an inherent and built-in revulsion to turning into mirror images of Obama, Levi, Rob Tisinai, and the others who were screaming continuously from 2000 through 2008 that George W. Bush was the puppet of some sinister internationalist business cabal that was building concentration camps for gays, blacks, and abortionists in Montana.
But perhaps you are right. To use the Godwin comparison, the reason the Nazis were able to get away with as much as they were for as long as they were is that people simply refused to believe that anyone could be that brutal, that vicious, and that evil. We in particular are inured to this because, for eight years, the Obama Party and the Obama left bombarded us with lies about Bush and the government, so we are loath to automatically assume the worst about anyone.
And hence the problem. We don’t know. And we are fundamentally decent people who don’t want to think the worst. But the signs are certainly there, especially given the overwhelming leftist proclivity to project onto conservatives what they themselves are practicing.
I think you can find instances of that, but not these instances.
Fast and Furious, for example, was probably intended to create chaos that would stampede the public into support for gun control. Obamacare was, I believe, intended to create chaos that would herd the public (over time) into the left-libs’ ultimate goal of government-run health care. And you can make an argument for the administration’s ‘work’ to ensure higher oil prices, too, as a way to stampede people into ever more government control of the economy.
But Obama has nothing to gain here by pissing off the Catholic Church. Not all anti-abortion catholics are conservatives; many leaven their politics with economic leftism. Obama can gain nothing by pissing off that part of his base in an election year. Hence, whatever calculation led him to that decision was “off”.
Nails it. For me, this goes back to the fact that fascism, like all secular Big Government movements, was a socialist (i.e. left-wing) movement. Modern left-liberals can never admit, and cannot afford to let anyone notice, that they are essentially fascists (people who get off on controlling/punishing others). So they put huge amounts of energy into obscuring issues, deflecting attention elsewhere and accusing others (e.g., Republican conservatives) of being nazis.
Why should anyone be surprised by this? I know I’m not. Anyone who reason’s by checking boxes off memos is the perfect embodiment of our post-modern, anti-intellectual culture. People are trying to assume that Obama has some hidden agenda and is trying to sabotage the country. How about he is an incompetent hack, whose been molded under the marxist framework(K-12 education has been infiltrated with this anti-conceptual education thanks too good ole John Dewey), and was ushered into the White House because he is black, period.
Let’s use the Keystone pipeline example. It’s plain as day that this project would not only create jobs(union jobs at that), it would begin to reduce our dependency on terrorist muslism nations’ oil. The impact would be gradual, but there would be a beneficial impact nontheless. Yet, the leftist environmental wackos, with their hatred for technology, and human progress as such protested incessitantly about this project in front of the White House. Since he’s leftist, this is a constituency that he has to appease in order to get their money and votes. So he kills it.
In the same breath, he talks endlessly about everyone having to sacrifice and paying their “fair share” in taxes. That he wants the help the middle class get back to work. Yadda, Yadda, Yadda!!! How is this possible when: 1) he killed a major project that would have brought in all kinds of taxes from the companies involved, and from the workers on the project??!?!? 2) Creating an environment that is hostile to business with arbitrary rules and regulations. And 3) Making it difficult for the middle and working class citizens to work???!!! DUH!!
As you can see, the man is delusional. His entire life has been about flouting reality. His goal is power for its own sake. He’s on a power trip. Only a mediocrity wants to feel like a big, powerful man, in the highest office in the land, if not the world. So ignoring the checks and balances of our republican system, and watching an intellecutally emaculated Republican party; he can do whatever he wants, which has been irrational and nonsensical because he is the President of the United States of American. I really believe Valerie Jarrett is running the show in the White House.
The United States is the largest importer of crude oil, yet refined fuel is now the top United States export for the first time in 60 years.
The world is extremely thirsty for refined fuel. That means that the US driver and the US transportation industry is paying a internationally competitive price for fuel. Add all the various taxes on the fuel and you can find the variation of “pump” prices from state to state and country to county.
Turning down the Canadian oil pipeline does not change the equation concerning oil prices in the United States. For Obama, the price of fuel is the same no matter where the crude oil comes from which our petroleum firms refines.
That, of course, is all based on the belief that there is no need for strategic crude oil supplies. All the United States needs to do is go out and buy crude. The people of the United States will just have to absorb the rising prices associated with ever increasing fuel prices.
However, all of this ignores “how and why” a barrel of crude oil fluctuates so much. (It is over $100 a barrel again and only a few years after breaking the $80 barrier, an event which until recently was thought would throw the world into depression.) For all the strutting and preening Congress has done on investigating our petroleum industry, the Democrats have always found that rising fuel prices are caused by greed in the petroleum industry, but only when prices spike while a Republican is in the Oval Office.
Rising prices and inflation hit those on “the edge” the hardest and first. Rising fuel prices spread through the economy like the Norwalk virus on a cruise ship and they takes down wide swaths of the most vulnerable.
If you favor the chaos of the “occupy” group, the fastest way to upset the country at large is to meddle with fuel prices.
Obama shut down oil exploration in the Gulf. He allowed the oil rigs to decamp and go looking for work elsewhere. He has done what he can to tie up the North Dakota fields. Hydraulic fracturing (“tracking”) is under scrutiny, as it should be, but the man-made global warming harpies are being given time to organize. Obama has sent US government “investment” funds to Brazil for oil exploration. ANWAR is still off limits.
I smell a lot of chaos in all of this. I remember when the crowd crowd was beating the random victim, Reginald Denny, to a pulp in Los Angeles that they were chanting: “no justice, no peace.” Now the Oakland occupiers are chanting “ACAB” and “SAC”. (“All Cops Are Bastards and Stab A Cop.)
Dictators arise from this form of chaos. Read Alinsky. 47-48% of the US population pays no income taxes and is in some manner dependent upon the state directed transfer of wealth through the state controlled entitlement/welfare system.
Yeah, I see a pernicious motive at work in “enabling” the pitchforks and torches crowd in their window breaking (kristallnacht) class dividing chaos.
So, why piss off the Catholics? Because the pro-choice Catholics have demonstrated the profound weakness of Catholicism. The Catholics could not mount a crusade to stop euthanasia, infanticide, or much of anything including persecuting gays. Obama smells the decay among Catholics and laughs in their faces. And, in my opinion, he is safe in doing so. What better “symbol” to back into a corner than “the Pope in Rome” and the ancient and often corrupt Catholic Church?