As I was reviewing the transcript of President Obama’s interview with ABC News’s Robin Roberts, I caught this aspect of the Democrat’s attempt to justify his switch on state recognition of same-sex marriage:

Part of the reason that I thought it was important– to speak to this issue was the fact that– you know, I’ve got an opponent on– on the other side in the upcoming presidential election, who wants to– re-federalize the issue and– institute a constitutional amendment– that would prohibit gay marriage. And, you know, I think it is a mistake to– try to make what has traditionally been a state issue into a national issue.

Interesting how this supposedly post-partisan politician felt it incumbent upon himself to further politicize the issue.  He would have served himself — and the cause of gay marriage — better had he just limited his remarks to the merits of the expanded definition of this ancient institution.

It’s not just gay marriage.  The Democrat is trying to politicize American history:

The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography onwww.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax reform advocacy with his “Buffett Rule” gimmick . . . .  Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford).

Ed Morrissey provides “a comprehensive collection of the ‘Did you know?’ sections added to boost Obama, with links to the specific pages attached to the names of the former Presidents“.

You’d think that the incumbent President of the United States would let the biographies of his predecessors speak for themselves, but this incumbent (or his staffers) felt it incumbent upon himself (or themselves) to insert his name intp their life stories, using their record to promote himself.

“Why,” asks the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley writing about the excerpt in Vanity Fair from David Maraniss’s soon-to-be released biography of Barack Obama,

. . . didn’t we know all these details four years ago – even though some of them were published in a best-selling autobiography that was sold to us as if it was a fifth gospel? And yet we knew everything there was to know about Sarah Palin, despite the fact that she was in the race for a much shorter space of time than Obama – and only running for veep.

Via Powerline Picks where John Hinderaker, who has read a good chunk of the excerpt, highlights an event that Obama apparently manufactured for his memoir, Dreams From My Father. Genevieve Cook, a woman he once dated in New York, says he never took her to the theater despite Obama’s claim that he had taken a girlfriend in New York to the show:

No such play, no such dialogue. Maraniss charitably supposes that the event involved a different, later girlfriend in Chicago who was part of the “composite” girlfriend character. But Obama places the play in New York, not Chicago. My guess is that the incident never happened at all: one nice thing about fictionalizing an autobiography and including fake characters is that it gives you license to include events that didn’t happen but, from an artistic standpoint, should have.

When people who read my novel asked if it were autobiographical, I quipped that I changed the facts to make the truth more manifest, but I made clear that I was writing a novel.  I made clear I wasn’t telling the story of my life. By calling his a memoir, Obama indicates that he is telling the story of his.

There is a real question here not just about the misrepresentation, but also about the stories Obama chooses to tell (and apparently invents) to define who he is.

*NB:  Changed the title to more accurately reflect the meaning of the post.

And this story then deserves far greater consideration than inquires into Mitt Romney’s mode of transporting his pet in the early 1980s.  And Ann Romney’s wardrobe.  More on this anon.

UPDATE:  ”The composite girlfriend“, writes James Taranto, (more…)

“Can you imagine“, a 101st Airborne Vietnam vet writes to the Weekly Standard‘s Geoffrey Norman . . .

. . . Ike saying, “I pulled the trigger on D-Day but Stevenson never would have had the guts to do that”?  Or Truman saying, “I dropped the bomb, and Dewey wouldn’t have”?  The response from men in that day and age would have been “Shut up and act like a man.”  And there is the irony: What Obama and his campaigners are doing to bolster the public’s perception of him as a strong president is something that would have had the exact opposite effect 50 years ago.

Read the whole thing.  Via Powerline Picks.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

On Monday, the president said this about the Supreme Court review of Obamacare, “Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”  Emphasis added.

On March 21, 2010, the U.S. House  passed the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” by a vote of 219-212, with 34 Democrats joining 178 Republicans in opposition.  No Republicans vote for the bill.  (That’s a 7-vote margin.)

Fewer than ten months later, on January 19, 2011, the chamber, under new leadership, in large part because of opposition to said Act, acted to repeal the legislation by vote of 245-189, with three Democrats joined the sizable Republican majority.  (That’s a 56-vote margin.)

Would you agree with me that a 56-vote margin is a stronger majority than a 7-vote margin in a legislative body which hadn’t grown any larger between the two votes?

FROM THE COMMENTS: JP offers, “Also for great true ‘Strong Majorities’ see 0bama’s budgets. He got total agreement with no votes at all from BOTH parties. That’s a strong majority.”

UPDATE:  Seems I wasn’t the only one to make this observation.

This past week, I penned two posts on the president’s telling “open mic” comment to Russia’s President on how “he would have ‘more flexibility’ to deal with controversial issues such as missile defense” after the election. As I write this, both posts generated a total of 9 comments.

I wrote one piece on the Travyon Martin/George Zimmerman matter. That post has, so far, generated 80 comments.

Now, to be sure, that story offers a fascinating window into media sensationalism — and has more wrinkles than does the president’s telling comment, but has far less bearing on the state of the union, particularly given the upcoming election and the incumbent’s bid for a second term.

Calling the president’s remarks “a moment of political contempt—for the issues at hand as well as for the demos itself“, Martin Peretz, long-time editor in chief of the left-of-center New Republic, finds the important message to be . . .

. . . that the American people can’t be trusted if the president is honest with them about what he proposes. More bluntly, that the American people are not trusted by their own president. Otherwise the president would tell us the truth about his intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust of his own people to a leader of a nasty foreign government that seeks to thwart our purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. President Obama is in cahoots with the Russian regime against America’s very body politic.

Mr. Obama’s revealing comment, and the question of missile defense, and the question of Mr. Obama’s bizarre desire for coziness with Vladimir Putin, is a matter about which our European allies have great concerns.

Hence, we should be constantly reminding our fellow citizens of what the president said when he thought no one was listening. To that end, the folks at American Crossroads have crafted a clever ad:

(more…)

Citing an article from from New York magazine, November 29, 2009, Jim Geraghty reminds us how after signing the “stimulus,” President Obama turned his attention to overhauling the nation’s health care system rather than focus on the economy, the top issue on America’s minds:

“Barack did the stimulus, and he thought he checked the box and moved on.” Of course, unemployment remained high, and the economy continued to struggle through this year. Obama moved on, of course, to Obamacare, phenomenallyunpopular legislation that may very well be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Read the whole thing.  Seems he was more interested in provided the fundamental changes he sought than in providing the changes for which Americans hoped.

More on this anon.

That thought came to my mind shortly after I read this:

At the tail end of his 90 minute meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev Monday, President Obama said that he would have “more flexibility” to deal with controversial issues such as missile defense, but incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to give him “space.”

It is good to see the legacy media give this story as much coverage as they have as it shows Obama for the showman that he is, masquerading as a moderate, yet governing in an entirely different direction on foreign as well as domestic policy.

I do hope that on January 20, 2013, Obama gets the flexibility he longs for, the flexibility ex-presidents enjoy.

More often that not, our friends in the legacy media are hesitant to report/investigate the president’s “gaffes” in front on open mikes as law professor William A. Jacobson reminds us of those the legacy “media won’t release, like CBS refusing to release the full audio of Obama’s comments about Paul Ryan, and the LA Times holding back the Khalidi tape.”

John McCain minces no words in taking the president to task for his remarks to Mr. Medvedev.

A couple of thoughts (which I’ll try to flesh out if I get a moment, but may not as one of my nephews and a cousin are visiting LA right now).  First, a question:  what does it say about Obama that he’s oblivious to the fact that his candid remarks could be picked up on an open mike (did he really think the media would cover for him?).  And a thought:  striking the leader of a democratic republic would tell the leader of a nation which has banned a number of political parties that he can act differently once he no longer needs concern himself with making his case to the people he supposedly serves.

UPDATE:  ”One message to the voters at home,” quips Jim Geraghty, “an entirely different message to leaders abroad… from a president who declared in 2008 that his true rival in the presidential race was cynicism itself.”

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Benjamin in WeHo offers some insightful quips:

1. When a Russian politician admits to deceiving voters to win an election, it’s “managing democracy.” In the USA, it’s accidentally speaking into a live microphone.

2. Contrast Reagan walking out on Gorbachev over missile defense to Obama lying to American voters about it.

Read the rest.

UP-UPDATE:   Over at the National Review, Peter Kirsanow offers:

What, precisely, are “all these issues” (besides missile defense) that President Obama plans to solve in his second term? Why has he shared them with the Russian president but not the American people?

Why the reference to his “last election?” Would he not be able to do what he wants if he had to stand for reelection?

Emphasis added.

In her post on Friday about President Obama’s speech on energy this past Wednesday, Commentary’s Alana Goodman notes that the Democrat “received some well-deserved mockery for his factually inaccurate swipes at President Rutherford B. Hayes (yes, really) and Christopher Columbus’s contemporaneous critics”, but also finds that his remarks in the speech reveal more about the man than just his historical ignorance:

In Obama’s mind, his critics aren’t just wrong, they’re idiots. Obama, in contrast, is a grand visionary of epic capacity – the type of man who in the past would have ended up on Mt. Rushmore or captaining the voyage that led to the discovery of America.

In that address, the Democrat compared his opponents to flat-earthers and other Luddites throughout history who opposed new technologies.  What Obama failed to mention was that many of his opponents are not opposed per se to the new green technologies he touts, but to using federal subsidies to promote them.

Since he was talking about the telephone, perhaps he should have inquired into Alexander Graham Bell’s sources of funding.  Did that inventor ask for a federal grant so he could continue his research?

Mr. Obama might learn something by reading about a technology pioneer who supported his 2008 campaign.

In his biography of the Apple Founder, Walter Isaacson provides no evidence that that entrepreneur ever sought funding from the federal government (or indeed from any state government).  Fortunately, for that Californian, the federal government hadn’t regulated the computer industry in the 1970s and ’80s as it now regulates the field of energy development.

And there seems to be no evidence that Mr. Obama ever accused Steve Jobs of belonging to the Flat Earth Society.

* (more…)

In a blog post this morning, Jim Geraghty repeated an observation he has made before that the president’s “furious schedule of fundraisers is driven less by a need for campaign cash than by his ego’s need for constant praise and adoration.”

Sometimes, it seems that even the president’s official speeches serve a similar function.  He speaks not so much to defend his policies, but to demonize his political adversaries and, in so doing, elevate himself in the eyes of audiences who really, really hate Republican leaders and conservative ideas.  In a speech today “at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Md., a smug President Barack Obama,” reports Tina Korbe, Obama did just that, smearing “opponents of his energy policies as backward and unscientific in their approach”:

“Now, here’s the sad thing. Lately, we have heard a lot of professional politicians, a lot of the folks who were running for a certain office, who shall go unnamed, they’ve been talking down new sources of energy. They dismiss wind power. They dismiss solar power. They make jokes about biofuels. They were against raising fuel standards. I guess they like gas guzzlers. They think that’s good for our future. We’re trying to move towards the future. They want to be stuck in the past!” Obama exclaimed to cheers from the crowd. “If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they probably must have been founding members of the flat earth society. They would not believe that the world was round!”

Can you imagine George W. Bush leveling those accusations against Democrats?

Korbe points out how the president misrepresents the Republican stance on energy: (more…)

Wonder how Matt Lauer and his colleagues in the legacy media would have reacted had George W. Bush expressed a similar frustration:

I think this is the nature of being President. What’s frustrated people is that I have not been able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008.

Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change that I would like sometimes. But what I have been able to do is move in the right direction. And what I’m going to keep on doing is plot away, very persistent. You know what? One of the things about being President is you get better as time goes on.

Emphasis.  What arrogance.  Assuming people are frustrated because he can’t force Congress to implement his promises?   (Maybe they’d have been frustrated if he tried (and failed) to “force” Congress to act on something he’d been proposing throughout the campaign, you know that “net spending cut“.)

In reality, his party controlled Congress for the first two years of his term.  He was able to “force” the legislature to implement a good chunk of his agenda.  And people were frustrated, frustrated that the Democratic Congress implemented many of his proposals.

Doesn’t he understand that the people elected a Republican Congress in response to such implementation?

Many of us like the system our Founders designed — and they designed it deliberately to make it difficult to bring about the types of changes men like Obama would propose, changes which usurp the liberties of the people and centralize power in a in a far-distant capital. (more…)

US-Egypt standoff worsens (H/t Powerline)

Repeat after me:  “Hope and Change.”

<audience chant>

Now this: “Mmm, mmm, mmm… Barack Hussein Obama.”

<audience chant>

Now read this:

Exactly three years after Aretha Franklin’s hat launched the Obama administration, the Democrat’s annual job approval rating has sunk to his lowest level.

That’s not normally a good sign after 1,095 days in office. But who’s counting? Heading into reelection years, pols want to be at least at the 50% level. A new Gallup Poll just out reveals that the ex-state senator’s job approval for his third full year is 44%.

That’s down from 47% in his second year.

That’s down from 57% in his first year.

It’s also down from the 69% approval he enjoyed on Inauguration Day.

So, the better Americans have come to know the guy and to watch his record, the less they seem to think of him. Of course, what really matters is what they think of him starting with early voting this October and ending the night of Nov. 6.

Gallup’s 2012 results are based on about 175,000 adult interviews during the year, showing a brief high for Obama of 53% in May (can you say Navy SEALs’ success?) and a low two times of 38% in both August and October.

In terms of historical patterns, Obama’s third-year average is the lowest of any modern president except the doomed Democrat Jimmy Carter, who had 37.4%. The highest approval at this stage of a first term was Dwight Eisenhower with 72.1% and George H.W. Bush with just under 70%.

According to Gallup’s analysis:

“Comparing Obama’s third-year numbers with all presidential years in Gallup records, Obama’s 44% average job approval rating is well below average, ranking 53rd of the 68 presidential years measured.”

But this conflicts with what They all tell me: Barack Obama is The Smartest President EVAH!” 

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Via BuzzFeed:

The uncontested primary of an unchallenged incumbent doesn’t mean much, but it can perhaps be taken as some kind of measure of intensity, partisan loyalty, or simple willingness to show up to and be counted.

And by those measures, George W. Bush handily defeated Barack Obama in New Hampshire last night.

Bush’s uncontested 2004 re-election bid received 53,962 votes in the state.

Obama has, with 94% in, received just under 47,000, and is on pace to pick up 49,983 in last night’s uncontested primary, if the pattern holds.

Republican turnout last night, meanwhile, broke records.

Hmmmm.

Hope & change, baby!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

During his “60 MInutes” interview last week, the most humble new kind of politician to occupy the White House since George W. Bush compared his accomplishments to some of his predecessors:

As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.

More work to do on the economy? Why, Mr. President, have you waited so long to address the sluggish economy?  In his insightful piece on the Democrat’s reelection prospects, Jay Cost observes how unlike FDR, the incumbent spent so little time in his first two years in office on the economy:

Obama turned his attention away from the economy far too quickly. This points to another difference between Obama and Roosevelt. FDR essentially threw everything at the Depression, including the kitchen sink; the legislating of 1933 and 1934 was relentlessly focused on the economy, and voters had no choice but to conclude that Roosevelt was, at the very least, doing everything he could think of. Not so with Obama. Having passed their stimulus, this president and his allies in Congress turned their attention to grander social welfare ambitions, something FDR did not begin to do until 1935, when the economy had already started growing at a robust rate.

Via Instapundit.  Emphasis added.  Interesting how quickly Obama, who won election largely because voters trusted him more to face the financial crisis and fix the economy, turned away after his “stimulus” (er, Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed).  It’s as if he believed that his economic team’s forecasts.

Seems Obama is just not interested in matters economic.  His “Jobs Bill” of 2011 shows little imagination, being basically a scaled-back version of the stimulus of 2009.

Yesterday, when writing about candidate Barack Obama’s pledge, if elected to meet, the then-leader of North Korea, Jim Geraghty quipped that many

. . . of us are pleased that this promise reached its expiration date . . . but one would like to think that any future presidents would not need to be disabused of the notion that their personal charisma and reasonableness could win over unhinged hostile dictators.

Geraghty’s quip reminds us yet again that part of the Democrat’s appeal was that his supposedly superior temperament would provide the cornerstone for the change his election would herald.  Only problem is, save for the reactions of those to the charismatic candidate’s speeches, no one could provide much, if any, evidence that this man had ever used the power of his personality to reconcile opposing parties or effect real reform.

And his charm and reasonableness certainly haven’t helped transform hostile dictators threatening the United States and oppressing their citizens into benign despots making peace with the U.S. and relinquishing their control over their societies.

Shortly after posting this piece, I wondered that the president cast Republican opposition to his policies in strictly personal terms.  In his 60 Minutes interview, the Democrat contended the Republican strategy was to oppose anything he’s for:

“Anything Obama’s for, we’re against, because that’s our best chance of winning an election,”

As if it’s all about him and his ambitions.  You’d think a man billed as so bright could appreciate that Republicans may well oppose his programs on philosophical grounds.  Or on financial ones.  As McCain put it, “WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY TO PAY FOR THIS CRAP!”

Well, at least he’s not emulating a rising mafia boss:

Caught this first on Powerline, then on Gateway Pundit. The man who defeated the man heralded by Joe Biden as an economic advisor to the Obama administration at the ballot box in a state Obama won by 15 points lays it out:

Note how all the #OWS folks just repeat their leader.  (Wonder what that says about them).  Christie just laughs at these folks, mocking their anger.

Kudos, Governor!

Yesterday, the president told us that conservative economic policies have never worked. Someone should ask him the same questions about the Keynesian theories that drive his big-spending policies. He — and many of his supporters — really do believe that we need economic stimuli in order to jump-start the economy.

Only problem is that such solutions rarely (if ever) lead to sustained economic growth. The New Deal delayed economic recovery in the 1930s. Japan suffered a “Lost Decade” in the 1990s when its government adopted policies similar to those Democrats would follow in 2009.

Instead of trusting to theories which sound good on paper, we need to turn to policies which have succeeded in practice.  In his book on the housing crisis, Thomas Sowell makes the case for a pragmatism that has eluded the incumbent president:

In housing markets, there have been an abundance of theories and of fervently believed doctrines, but not nearly such an abundance of willingness to subject these theories to the test of evidence.   Politicians would be gambling their entire careers on a roll of the dice, if they were to publicly subject the policies and programs that they have been advocating for years to empirical test of their consequences.

The economy grew after the economic policies similar to those Obama derided yesterday took effect in 1983.  And despite Obama’s success in enacting his policies in 2009, the recovery which followed the Bush-Pelosi-Reid downturn (the one that he “inherited”) has been the most anemic in generations.

Would be nice if the president acknowledged that empirical test of his policies rather than stick to the rhetorical appeal which served him so well in 2008.