In his delicious dissection of the Denver debate, George Will manages to tie Obama’s performance to his self-regard and world-view:

Barack Obama, knight of the peevish countenance, illustrated William F. Buckley’s axiom that liberals who celebrate tolerance of other views always seem amazed that there are other views. Obama, who is not known as a martyr to the work ethic and who might use a teleprompter when ordering lunch, seemed uncomfortable with a format that allowed fluidity of discourse.

His vanity — remember, he gave Queen Elizabeth an iPod whose menu included two of his speeches — perhaps blinds him to the need to prepare. And to the fact that it is not lese-majeste to require him to defend his campaign ads’ dubious assertions with explanations longer than the ads. And to the ample evidence, such as his futile advocacy for Democratic candidates and Obamacare, that his supposed rhetorical gifts are figments of acolytes’ imaginations.

Read the whole thing, particularly for his description of Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board

Back in 2007, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that the day he was inaugurated, the world would look at America differently and the Muslim world would be less hostile to us:

[Because I could not find a way to embed the video without it going on autoplay, I removed it from the post and encourage you to follow the link above to watch it and hear another of Mr. Obama's lofty (and unrealized) promises.]

Once again, Obama’s words as candidate have little relation to his record as president.  The continuing riots in the Arab world, Michael Barone contends undermine

. . . perhaps fatally, one of the underlying premises of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and of his campaign now for reelection: that electing this man president will make the peoples of the world love America and Americans. I make a similar point in my as yet unpublished Sunday Examiner column, which should be accessible here when it goes online. The rioters in Cairo expressly reviled Obama and hailed Osama. They hate America and Americans. They hate our way of life and our freedoms. Obama’s election has made no difference; his campaign bragging about dispatching Osama bin Laden has perhaps got them hating us more. One powerful argument for reelecting him is being refuted by what we see on our television screens.

Emphasis added.  Read the whole thing.  ”Events in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere are not cooperating with Obama’s vision“, quips Barone’s Examiner colleague Byron York. “Must be the movie.”

* (more…)

As I speculated in my post last night, the winds was out of Obama’s sails during his now-widely panned convention speech.  Not only was it a mere rehash of all of the speeches he’s given since 2008, Obama knew about this morning’s awful jobs reports.  It’s not just awful, it is downright disastrous.  It is the worst jobs report of the year and continues a backwards slide.

FACT: We had entered a Recovery BEFORE the 2009 Stimulus was passed.  Ever since that law was implemented, and Obamacare was passed, our economy has been in a long, slow slide into oblivion.  Today’s news confirmed it.  These are the facts, folks.  It cannot be denied.  Obama had full control of the goverment from 2009 to 2011 and so we are living in HIS economic infrastructure. 

And it is an unmitigated disaster.

The number of Americans whom the U.S. Department of Labor counted as “not in the civilian labor force” in August hit a record high of 88,921,000.

In July, there were 155,013,000 in the U.S. civilian labor force. In August that dropped to 154,645,000—meaning that on net 368,000 people simply dropped out of the labor force last month and did not even look for a job.

There were also 119,000 fewer Americans employed in August than there were in July. In July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 142,220,000 Americans working. But, in August, there were only 142,101,000 Americans working.

NINETY MILLION AMERICANS ARE NO LONGER IN THE WORKFORCE?  And someone will try to defend the economic & Obamacare policies as HELPING?  I call “bullshit” from now to November.

But wait, folks…. there’s more!!!  Obama has completely gutted the future of those who believed in him the most in 2008: Young Americans.

For most Americans, today’s jobs report was merely bad. For young people, though, the news was just downright awful.

After declining for most of the summer, the unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 16 and 19 popped up again, rising from 23.8 percent to 24.6 percent. Among 20-to-24 year olds, it hopped to 13.9 percent from 13.5 percent in July.

I honestly was NOT expecting the news to be THIS bad.  I figured another middling employment gain of 150-200K which could bolster the phantom idea that “things are getting better.”

Today, the bottom fell out of Obama’s re-election.  He was already standing on a rotted platform.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Yesterday, Jennifer Rubin began her must-read post, Is the liberal echo chamber a trap?, quoting one of the Gipper’s favorite sayings, “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”

“There is”, she observes,

. . . no better phrase than that to describe President Obama, hermetically sealed in leftist bubble to a greater extent than any Democratic president in history. He doesn’t imagine that there are facts or interpretations that lead his opponents to opposite conclusions. He therefore assumes they are dimwits or liars.

Liberals like Obama believe that a Keynesian “stimulus” must work because that’s what they’ve been taught in college and heard repeated by liberal politicians and policy wonks.  No matter that such stimuli, while working well on paper, tend to work as well in the real world.  (See, e.g,. our recent guest post.)

The liberal worldview notwithstanding, the New Deal did not lift the nation out of the Depression, indeed, FDR’s big-government agenda prolonged it.  Japan’s lost decade wasn’t lost because of spending cuts and regulatory relief.  And Obama’s “stimulus” may well have delayed our recovery from the most recent recession.

And then, there are things which liberals should know about the economy, but don’t — because it doesn’t fit their narrative.  The economy rebounded in the 1980s despite the Gipper’s failure to offer a government “stimulus” and continued to grow in the 1990s despite the successful Republican filibuster of Bill Clinton’s “stimulus.”

Obama refuses to confront these facts, repeating instead his nostrum about Mitt Romney wanting to return us to the failed policies of the past.  Given that Romney’s economic agenda more closely resembles Ronald Reagan’s than it does George W. Bush’s, it would be correct to say that the Republican nominee wants to return to the successful policies of the past. (more…)

Reporting John King’ contention that Mitt Romney “‘stepped on’ [on good polling news] with his Birth Certificate joke“, Ace wonders

. . . if Romney didn’t do that on purpose. Since our unserious, unprofessional, unintelligent, partisan press is determined to talk about distractions (given that all substance favors Romney), why not give them a distraction of your own choosing?

If the choice is between Rape!!! and Birth Certificate, isn’t it better to talk about Obama’s Birth Certificate? Neither is what Romney wants to talk about, but the press is determined to only report on irrelevancies; so give them one that doesn’t much hurt you.

Romney’s joke wasn’t funny, observes Jennifer Rubin, but the media were “hysterical“, giving the word its original meaning.  CNN spent more time on this awkward joke than it did on any issues in the current presidential contest — at least they did in the hour I wanted that I watched while working out.

“From the moment this sentence [i.e., the Birth certificate joke] escaped Romney’s lips,” writes Allahpundit,”it was a metaphysical certainty that it would dominate political coverage for the rest of the day, with MSNBC’s pants-wetting expected to last well into the evening.”

We get 2,410 results when we do a google news search of “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate.”  And when we do a similar search for “It is very rare I come to an event where I’m like the fifth or sixth most interesting person,” we only get 759 results.

A few days ago, the president spoke those words at New York fundraiser which included “numerous basketball luminaries” and added:

Usually the folks want to take a picture with me, sit next to me, talk to me. That has not been the case at this event and I completely understand.

That may well be true, but secure men don’t need say such things.   (more…)

Obama campaign senior strategist David Axelrod appears to have incredible confidence that the legacy media will continue to cover for his candidate.  Yesterday, citing that Chicagoan’s tweets, Erika Johnsen quipped that “the Obama campaign is back with the ‘Romney is the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon’-esque attacks.”

Considering all the documents — not to mention information about campaign donors — the president and his campaign are hiding — or refusing to provide — it is simply amazing Mr. Axelrod would make much of Mr. Romney’s supposed secrecy.

Wonder why it is, say, the legacy media are not running stories wondering about Mr. Obama’s failure to provide his medical records.  As Victor Davis Hanson reminds us:

Given . . . media demands in 2008 that the septuagenarian cancer survivor John McCain should release thousands of pages of medical records for journalists’ perusal, why did not Barack Obama simply release his medical records? The Left had always trumpeted the desire for “full disclosure” and was probably right in wanting McCain to assure us that he was hale; but, again, why was Obama given a complete pass?

Mr. Obama still has not released those records. “We are still perplexed”, Hanson adds, “why Barack Obama for over decade permitted Kenya to be listed as his birthplace on his literary agent’s biography of him.” And we wonder what his undergraduate transcripts might reveal — or what we might learn from those Justice Department documents the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has subpoenaed.

Seems Mr. Axelrod may not know how to run a good campaign defense, but he does have confidence that the legacy media are less interested in the background of Democratic candidates than of Republican ones.

“On August 28, 2008,” The Washington Free Beacon’s Matthew Continetti reminds us, when Barack Obama

. . . officially accepted his party’s nomination and launched [that] fall['s] campaign, he said his presidency would break from the “politics of the past,” diminish the “cynicism we all have about government,” and change “the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and each other’s patriotism.” Politicians who “use stale tactics to scare voters,” who say an opponent is “someone people should run from,” and who “make a big election about small things” had held the American people hostage for far too long. Obama would be different.

Well, he doesn’t seem to have succeeded.  Yesterday on CBS “Sunday Morning,” the Democrat acknowledged that “Washington ‘feels as broken as it did four years ago,‘”:

He says he’s most frustrated by the inability “to change the atmosphere” in the nation’s capital “to reflect the decency and common sense of ordinary people” who want their leaders to solve problems. . . .

Reflecting on more than 3 ½ years in office, Obama said, “I think there’s no doubt that I underestimated the degree to which in this town politics trump problem solving.”

So, we elected a man who had served in the United States Senate and remained clueless as to the way the city worked?

With a bit of snark, Howard Portnoy reminds us that the president acknowledged his own naivete instead of responding to the question whether he “he was on the list of those deserving some of the shared blame“:

So, when Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) raised an objection in January of 2009 to the idea of a tax credit for people who don’t pay income taxes, the president’s haughty response—”I won. So I think on that one, I trump you”—did not in his view fan the flames of resentment or hostility.

Do wonder if anyone can detail what precisely Obama has done to to fulfill his campaign promises to change the tone in our nation’s capital?

Last month, we joined other conservative blogs in reporting how the Obama White House had inserted the incumbent president into the biographies of his predecessors on the White House web-site.

Well, it seems the White House has responded to the outcry.  Over at Reason, Scott Shackford thought the White House had removed the bullet points “promoting Obama’s accomplishments at the bottom of the biographies of other presidents, Democrat and Republican alike.”

But, it turns out, as he soon learned that the Democrat’s web team just reformatted the web-pages:  ”The Obama infoboxes are still there, but they appear to have been redesigned to look less like part of the other presidents’ biographies.”  Seems the redesign was in response to the outcry.

Amazing.  They respond to the outcry, but just can’t remove the talking points.  They just have to politicize everything.*on the White House web-site.

(Via the Anchoress on Facebook.)
——-

*on White House web-page.

Just shy of three-and-one-half years ago, Barack Obama entered the Oval Office with more good will perhaps than any newly-elected president since Jimmy Carter. He had vowed to change the tone in our nation’s capital, a vow welcome after sixteen years (with a brief hiatus just after 9/11) of polarized politics.

And yet a year after Obama’s inauguration, Gallup reported that the Democrat’s approval was the most polarized for any “First-Year President.”

I recalled that abrupt shift yesterday when following the link Jay Cost’s insightful piece on “Obama’s dilemma” (more on that in my next post) to Sean Trende’s article from the previous day “about what Obama could have done differently in 2009“.  That article also merits your time — and attention.

Trende approaches the topic from a slightly different perspective than I did when considering the swift drop in Obama’s approval.  Trende considers the different policy approaches the president should have taken.  Instead of a constant re-pivot to the economy, the Democrat, Trende contends, could have kept his focus on the economy.  I wondered about the incumbent’s tone, whining about the problems he inherited, blaming Republicans for obstruction (or being beholden to the politics of the past).

On one major point, however, Trende’s thinking (approximately) parallels my own:

the president would have been much better off breaking the stimulus up into five or six pieces, spread out over his first 100 days. His presidency would have had a very different narrative attached to it if the first major piece of legislation passed by his administration had been $275 billion in tax cuts — or even better, two or three pieces of tax-cut legislation, grouped by subject — followed a week later by the unemployment compensation, followed a week later by the infrastructure spending, followed a week later by health care and education assistance, finished off with a miscellaneous bill.

For one thing, the headlines would have been dominated by the tax cuts, aid to the unemployed and to education, and so forth. Instead, there was a massive, amorphous “stimulus” with a $787 billion price tag for people to digest.

Quite frankly, Republicans would have supported at least some of the measures — in fact, the “mini-stimuli” approved throughout late 2009 and 2010 almost all passed with substantial Republican support. So it would have been with a “pure” tax-cut bill that kicked off the president’s term.

If he had insisted on breaking up the stimulus, the president would instead of needing to rally his own party for one big vote, would have constantly been reaching out to Congress, likely forging different coalitions for each bill — working with Republicans on several.

We would see him working energetically — over a period of weeks — on measures to stimulate the economy.  And that energetic image would likely have become impressed in Americans’ minds.  They may not supported his every policy, but at least appreciated his constant effort. (more…)

Although the president may not, as Michael Barone reports, listen to Republican politicians or “Democratic members of Congress”, “there is one group of people” he has had “to listen to:”

the people who give him large sums of money. He recently attended his 150th fundraiser. That’s more than the number attended by the last four presidents put together.

Obama has seen enough Architectural Digest-type interiors in Park Avenue triplexes and Beverly Hills mansions, and on the block in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, where every house is owned by a billionaire, to develop an expertise in Louis XV walnut commodes and Brunschwig & Fils fabrics.

He’s also had plenty of chances to absorb the advice of the kind of rich liberals who like to give money to Democratic presidents.

Despite the amount of time the Democrat has spent with rich liberals, his campaign has argued, as Jennifer Rubin wrote yesterday, “that Romney’s lifestyle and wealth make him out of touch with ordinary Americans,” noting that this is “an argument that liberal icons like JFK and FDR would never worry about. Romney in turn says Obama is so ideologically cloistered . . . .”

Ideologically cloistered.  Indeed.  No wonder Obama has yet to grasp the failure of his policies.  And refuses to acknowledge his own responsibility for the nation’s growing federal debt.

By deciding not to campaign for Tom Barrett in the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election, the president showed his fear that should his fellow partisan lose–as then seemed likely and now has happened–it would reflect poorly on him.

This is not the first time he has put his own political interests ahead of those of his party.  Back in March, Politico reported that top Obama aides Jim Messina and David Plouffe told. . .

. . . Democratic congressional leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi . . . that that there would be no cash transfers to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from OFA [Obama for America] or the DNC [Democratic National Committee], at least not before Election Day . . . .

Today, over at Ace of Spaces, the fetching Gabriel Malor reports that Barrett had supported Obama long before his party had coalesced around his candidacy:

Tom Barrett was one of Obama’s earliest, most prominent supporters in the Democratic primaries during 2008 cycle. In fact, Barrett presaged Obama’s eventual 2008 slogan by declaring in 2007 that Obama was the candidate who would “create hope in this country.”

Obama repaid Barrett’s early, crucial support by virtually ignoring him during the recall election. Obama made eight visits to Wisconsin after he was elected, and then abruptly stopped visiting once Barrett’s campaign to defeat Gov. Walker began and despite repeated overtures from Barrett to come to Wisconsin. The president actually played hopscotch to avoid Barrett last week, hitting both Minnesota and Illinois, but jumping twice over Wisconsin.

Via our loyal reader Leah.  So focused is Obama on his own image, his own campaign, that he neglects someone who offered his support when most Democrats assumed Hillary Clinton would be the nominee. (more…)

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 on www.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…)