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Obama Watch

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Courtesy of ZH, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping stand together – away from President Obama.

Other news: Jonathan Gruber, Obamacare’s architect, brags about voter “stupidity” (his word) and how excellently he exploited it:

The conservative group American Commitment posted Jonathan Gruber’s remarks, reportedly from an Oct. 17, 2013, event, on YouTube.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” says the MIT economist who helped write Obamacare. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

Ed Morrissey’s piece gives you the video, and Ed adds:

Gruber goes a little farther than that. He tells the crowd that the bill was written to fake out the CBO — which is the Congress’ own analytical group. “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber tells the audience with a smile. “If CBO scores the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”…

Democrats insisted that CBO’s initial scoring showed that the bill was deficit-neutral in its first ten years, thanks to…dodges like trawling revenue before making outlays a few years later. How much else did Democrats lie to get that initially positive scoring? How much else are Democrats still hiding about the ACA and the HHS implementation of it?

And now HHS tells us that they’re projecting Obamacare’s 2015 enrollment to be kind of a failure.

Last, but not least: Yes, the media helped Obama cover up his flailing on Benghazi.

The day after the Benghazi attack, Obama gave an interview to Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes (CBS) where he pointedly refused to call the attack terrorism. But later, in a debate with Mitt Romney, Obama claimed that he had always been prompt in calling it terrorism. Obama spoke falsely. And CBS helped him, by hiding the relevant interview clip – until after the election.

UPDATE: A report that when Democrat senators need to know White House plans or positions, they ask MSNBC. (Which shows Obama’s isolation, as well as MSNBC’s deep subservience to the White House.) Via Citizens News.

Wait…Who underestimated ISIS?

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Obama says US ‘underestimated’ rise of ISIS, admits ‘contradictory’ Syria policy:

President Obama acknowledged Sunday that U.S. intelligence officials “underestimated” the threat posed by the Islamic State and overestimated the Iraqi army’s capacity to defeat the militant group…

Let’s be clear: Officials who were chosen and supported by Obama. The administration of Barack Hussein Obama underestimated ISIS.

Or else, we can make this entry #39,422 in the files of “Obama pretends that he hasn’t been president all these years”. In the interview, Obama goes on to also blame Iraq’s PM al-Maliki for the problems; never himself.

One more thing. Does Obama still have the U.S. backing the world’s evil dictators? It seems so:

Obama also acknowledged that the U.S. is dealing with a conundrum in Syria, as the U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State is helping Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom the U.N. has accused of war crimes.

“I recognize the contradiction in a contradictory land and a contradictory circumstance,” Obama said…

Bush practically would have been impeached, for saying that. (And Bush wouldn’t have said it because Bush did what he could, to push U.S. policy in the direction of overthrowing the world’s evil dictators.)

One more thing. Has Obama made it a thing of the past, that the U.S. might strike its enemies pre-emptively (or perhaps unilaterally, as the Left calls it)? Not so much:

Obama called the threat from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and other terror groups a more “immediate concern that has to be dealt with…” “…in terms of immediate threats to the United States, ISIL, Khorasan Group — those folks could kill Americans,” he said…

Both groups have been targeted by U.S. airstrikes in recent days…

Barack Obama: Just what the Left always *accused* Bush of being. And of course, the media lets him get away with it.

UPDATE: Some Democrats agree that it was the Obama White House, more than the U.S. intelligence community, which underestimated ISIS.

Former Rear Admiral Joe Sestak, a two-term Democratic member of the House of Representatives…appeared to surprise his MSNBC interlocutor when he noted that the only people who got ISIS wrong work in the Obama administration.

“If you remember back in January and February, the head — the general, the Defense Intelligence Agency, actually testified before the House and Senate that in 2014, ISIS would take over large swaths of territory,” the Navy veteran asserted. “In fact, at the time he testified, they had already seized Ramadi and Fallujah — 35 miles from Baghdad.”

A decade ago, Fallujah was a crucial victory for the Marines (some of whom gave their lives) against an earlier version of ISIS. I guess Obama threw it back.

UPDATE: A report that Obama was warned about ISIS in 2012. As Ed Morrissey puts it:

…the US intelligence community told him of the danger at the same time Obama ridiculed Mitt Romney during the presidential debates…for wanting a residual force in Iraq to prevent exactly what Romney warned would happen.

How the wheel turns!

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We’ve gone from liberals who’d make fun of former GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney (on Russia), to…well…Russians openly mocking President Obama.

Now being remembered, a typical example of liberals who made fun of Romney:

Arianna Huffington
@ariannahuff

So I guess if Romney is elected we can get ready for a new cold war with Russia.
#justwhatweneed
8/31/12, 8:56AM

Romney got in his (well-justified) “I told you so” last weekend:

Why, across the world, are America’s hands so tied?

A large part of the answer is our leader’s terrible timing. In virtually every foreign-affairs crisis we have faced these past five years, there was a point when America had good choices and good options. There was a juncture when America had the potential to influence events. But we failed to act at the propitious point; that moment having passed, we were left without acceptable options….

Meanwhile, Obama’s sanctions on a few individual Russians, and calls to try to make their stock market go down and stuff, have provoked their contempt:

“The US and EU sanctions against Russia are absurd and unreal,” State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Deputy Chairman Alexander Romanovich told Itar-Tass…“This is an operetta, and we can only laugh…”

Ordinary Russians are none too impressed, either.

UPDATE: Russia and China drawing closer together. “The worse Russia’s relations are with the West, the closer Russia will want to be to China. If China supports you, no one can say you’re isolated.” It’s just like Obama, to not get that.

2012 unemployment numbers: the next Obamascandal?

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We know that the Obama administration lied to America during the 2012 election, about Benghazi. And about “If you like your plan you can keep it”, and many other matters, such as the fact that the IRS was helping to stifle Obama’s grass-roots opposition.

Now the New York Post alleges that the declining unemployment rate (announced in the last few weeks of the election) was faked.

It looks like lower-level employees did it; probably tough to blame it on Obama directly. But that touches on a classic ethical question. If the guy at the top is kept in a bubble by people who cheat and lie extensively on his behalf (and don’t usually tell him), is he culpable? At what point?

Also, how much election-year lying does it take to de-legitimize a Presidential election? (If, or since, he only won by giving people false information.) Did President Obama reach that point in 2012?

Thoughts for the day

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“Gaius Gracchus proposed a grain law. The people were delighted with it because it provided an abundance of food without work. The good men, however, fought against it because they thought the masses would be attracted away from hard work and toward idleness, and they saw that the state treasury would be exhausted.”
– Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Politicians get up and promise you all sorts of free stuff. They say, I’ll give you more and more stuff, and you won’t have to pay for it…My own view is that we have to tell people the truth, and we’re going to have to demand sacrifice of the American people. The idea of borrowing a trillion dollars more than we take in [each year] is not just bad economics, it’s immoral. I’m not going to do it, and I’m not going to promise what can’t be delivered.” – Mitt Romney

“We had a chance, in 2012, to elect as president a man who built his entire career and fortune on turning around financially troubled enterprises. But the voters rejected him because Obama claimed he was going to give women cancer and outlaw tampons. That is when I knew our country was f—ed.”
– V the K

What’s with all this talk about a terrorist attack?

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In 2008, certain liberals told me face-to-face that electing a brown-skinned President (Obama) would make the terrorist threat recede, by making the rest of the world like America and feel closer to us.

And in 2012, the Obama administration told us that al Qaeda had been “decimated” and “the War on Terror is over”.

So, why all this public talk of a coming terrorist attack? Is it real, or a distraction from other issues? It doesn’t smell right to me, for several reasons.

One reason is, the public spectacle. I can’t remember the Bush administration closing almost two dozen U.S. embassies. Or them having Congressional leaders disclose intelligence and raise public alarm over a short-term threat, which is usually counter-productive because it tips off the attackers about how much we know. (I except the Iraq war buildup since it was a different animal, a multi-decade debate over a threat that everyone usually conceded to be long-term.)

For another reason, the timing seems odd. We’ve just had bombshells in the Benghazi scandal. It is very convenient, right now, for the Obama administration to NOT have to talk about them. What bombshells?

Speaking of Benghazi, some suggest that Susan Rice may simply be trying now for a Benghazi do-over, erring on the side of caution. (Wait…so…Benghazi really was an al Qaeda attack?)

So, it’s hard to know. But if I’ve misunderstood the situation – if there is a serious terrorist threat here – Please feel free to set me straight in the comments.

Obama promotes a fool-or-liar

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As expected, Obama has promoted Susan Rice to be his national security advisor.

She will head an agency that does large-scale spying on Americans’ phone records.[1] The question is, does she deserve to?

Obama wanted to make her Secretary of State but couldn’t, because that position requires confirmation hearings, at which Rice would have faced uncomfortable questions on Benghazi. Just a reminder, here’s what happened with that:

  1. Four Americans, including one of then-Ambassador Susan Rice’s fellow ambassadors, died in a terrorist attack while Obama did nothing. Obama attended campaign fund-raisers the next day in Vegas.
  2. Ambassador Rice then told the American People falsehoods about how those Americans died. The falsehoods protected an Obama campaign narrative (about their great job against terrorism) at a critical moment in the 2012 election.

The second one is the sticking point. How much chance is there that Rice didn’t know the real story of Benghazi, in the very moments when she was giving us all the fake one to benefit her boss’ campaign? In other words: is Susan Rice a liar, or a fool?[2]

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[1] Whether the NSA spying on so many Americans’ phone records is right or wrong, I will leave open for now. It could be a worthy topic, not least because it ties in with the Obama DOJ’s spying on, and highly selective prosecution of, reporters and officials for national security leaks. You see, NBC reports that the DOJ will investigate this new leak about how the NSA spies on the American customers of Verizon. But the DOJ apparently didn’t care when Leon Panetta, former CIA Director, leaked Top Secret info about Seal Team Six. Wonder why?

[2] Also recall that one of the criticisms of George W. Bush was that he (supposedly) valued personal loyalty too much, in his underlings. Given that Susan Rice must be either a liar or a fool on Benghazi, could Obama have promoted her for any other reason than her loyalty to him? Is this yet another moment of “Obama is actually worse than the Left said Bush was”?

Media angry with Holder?

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From The Hill:

Fox News will not attend a meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder on the Justice Department’s policy of targeting the media in national security leaks investigations if the session is off the record, the network said Thursday…

Fox is just the latest media organization to say it will boycott the meeting if it is off the record. Holder asked for the meetings in an attempt to ensure [sic; assure?] the press corps that its investigations of national security leaks are conducted in a way that respects the First Amendment.

The New York Times, The Associated Press, The Huffington Post and CNN have issued separate statements saying they will not attend because the DOJ is requiring the content of the meetings stay confidential…

Is saying “We will only meet with you on-the-record” the media’s way of saying “We don’t trust you, scumbag?”

By the way – not to change the subject, but: the Obama administration’s violations of press freedoms and privacy rights (far in excess of anything Bush did) has me wondering, did Obama supporters in 2008 and 2012 know what they were voting for? Are they honestly disappointed with his administration now, like “that’s not what we voted for”?

You see, I knew. I didn’t know what specific violations were coming, but already in 2008, I knew that Obama & Co. were worshippers of the State (or of Big Government) who only pretended to care about the U.S. constitution.

It followed that, once in office, the Obama administration would violate people’s rights to freedom and privacy in various ways. Now we have the growing list of scandal revelations, to prove it.

If some Obama supporter claims they didn’t know, then either: (1 – seems less likely) I am smarter than them, or (2 – seems more likely) they aren’t being honest: they saw much of what I saw *and just didn’t care*. Which means they shouldn’t look at the Obama administration now and try to say, “That’s not what we voted for.”