posted December 17, 2009 07:33 PM            

quote:

---

well there's no fallacy in that. or hadn't you heard that fetuses and children need physical and emotional nurturing to thrive?..katatonic

---

Just want to make certain you actually believe a new born baby is not a human being...at birth katatonic...before I melt you right down to your toenails.

posted December 17, 2009 11:38 PM              

a child who is not nurtured will not survive. this is a fact. i said nothing about babies not being human. though as i said, i do see what you're getting at.

those who see the absolute worst in others' utterances make life miserable for themselves first and everyone around them second. if that is your idea of the way to live i pity you.

posted May 12, 2010 09:42 AM            

One thing you will never see from the lying Socialist radical O'Bomber and the lying Socialist demoscats in Congress.

A Truth Commission.

May 12, 2010
The shameless, shocking hypocrisy and lies of President Obama
Rick Moran

Peter Wehner of Commentary has done us a service. He has written a piece that goes into detail about what can only be construed as Obama's numerous and continuing outright lies.

Too numerous to list here, a sample will have to do:

Mr. Obama is also the person who, when he was running for the presidency, promised all health-care negotiations would be broadcast on C-SPAN (They weren't.), that he would accept public financing for his campaign (He didn't.), that he would put an end to "phony accounting" (He hasn't.), that lobbyists will not work in his White House (They do.), that he would slash earmarks by more than half (He has not.), that he opposed giving Miranda rights to terrorists (He favors them.), that he was against an individual health-care mandate (He supported it.), and that he would resist the temptation "to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long" (He succumbed to the temptation.).

Where, I wonder, does Mr. Obama rank these statements on his cherished Truth Meter?

And what are we to make of the fact that the very paragraph from Obama's speech where he laments the lack of truth in public statements includes - you guessed it - a false statement by Obama?

In his commencement address, Obama insists he doesn't know how to work an iPod. But here's an item that appeared on the Huffington Post on June 25, 2008:

WASHINGTON - Bob Dylan. Yo-Yo Ma. Sheryl Crow. Jay-Z. These aren't musical acts in a summer concert series: They're artists featured on Barack Obama's iPod.

"I have pretty eclectic tastes," the Democratic presidential contender said in an interview to be published in Friday's issue of Rolling Stone.

Is that distant sound we hear the Truth Meter going off again?

Ed Lasky adds to the list:

He lies all the time; he lied about how often he attended services at Jeremiah Wright's church; he lied about how his parents met; how his uncle liberated Auschwitz; how his dad came to this country-the guy just lies about his own background and life. What a phony...and, btw, for someone who decries people's use of IPODs -why did he give on to Queen Elizabeth as a diplomatic gift-one filled with his own speeches-how priceless!

Obama appears to save his most consistent lying, as Ed points out, in his background information. He knows that if his ordinary, unremarkable life were to be exposed, the mystique he has so carefully built up over the years would be damaged, perhaps even destroyed.

That, and the almost dead certainty that Obama was a student radical during his college years. He may - or may not - have moderated many of his views. But his continued flirtation with radical leftists in the way he chooses his friends and associates would give the American people pause to re-elect him - if the press could ever bring itself to do its job.

Read the rest of Peter's piece. It will make you wonder if this guy ever tells the truth about anything.

posted May 12, 2010 09:46 AM            

In his commencement address at Hampton University, the president once again decided to act as if he were America’s Media-Critic-in-Chief. In Obama’s words:

You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — (laughter) — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.

Later in the speech, Obama added this:

So, allowing you to compete in the global economy is the first way your education can prepare you. But it can also prepare you as citizens. With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, and on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all; to know what to believe; to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not. Let’s face it, even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I’ve had some experience in that regard.

There are several things one can take away from the president’s remarks.

The first is that there’s a certain irony in being instructed by Obama about avoiding arguments that “don’t always rank that high on the truth meter.” This instruction, after all, comes from a man who, throughout the health-care debate, repeatedly made false and misleading arguments about the effects of ObamaCare on bending the cost curve, on the deficit and debt, on whether people will be forced to leave their employer-based policies, on whether his plan advocated Medicare cuts, on whether it would subsidize abortions, and much else.

Mr. Obama is also the person who, when he was running for the presidency, promised all health-care negotiations would be broadcast on C-SPAN (They weren’t.), that he would accept public financing for his campaign (He didn’t.), that he would put an end to “phony accounting” (He hasn’t.), that lobbyists will not work in his White House (They do.), that he would slash earmarks by more than half (He has not.), that he opposed giving Miranda rights to terrorists (He favors them.), that he was against an individual health-care mandate (He supported it.), and that he would resist the temptation “to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long” (He succumbed to the temptation.).

Where, I wonder, does Mr. Obama rank these statements on his cherished Truth Meter?

And what are we to make of the fact that the very paragraph from Obama’s speech where he laments the lack of truth in public statements includes — you guessed it — a false statement by Obama?

In his commencement address, Obama insists he doesn’t know how to work an iPod. But here’s an item that appeared on the Huffington Post on June 25, 2008:

WASHINGTON — Bob Dylan. Yo-Yo Ma. Sheryl Crow. Jay-Z. These aren’t musical acts in a summer concert series: They’re artists featured on Barack Obama’s iPod.

“I have pretty eclectic tastes,” the Democratic presidential contender said in an interview to be published in Friday’s issue of Rolling Stone.

Is that distant sound we hear the Truth Meter going off again?

By now Obama has spoken out against the New Media often enough to know that he both despises it and is obsessed with it. For all of his talk about his eagerness to listen to others, “especially when we disagree,” as he put it on the night of his election, Obama clearly resents being challenged. He gets especially exasperated and condescending when his challenger has made the better argument. That is, in fact, a trait of Team Obama; we see that attitude on display almost every day in the person of Robert Gibbs, the snidest and least likable press secretary in our lifetime.

The president and his aides are clearly used to being cosseted. They seem to believe the American public should treat them as reverentially as staff members of the New Yorker do.

posted May 22, 2010 08:56 AM            

May 21, 2010
The Baehr Essentials
Richard Baehr

The Democrats now have to deal with what appears to be a serial liar: Richard Blumenthal, their candidate for Senator in Connecticut. The current count is five public statements in which he lied about serving in Viet Nam. He also lied about being captain of the Harvard swim team. What is next- that he gave all of his salary to the Make A Wish Foundation?

In addition to his mendacity (a word I always liked after seeing "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), Blumenthal was a thug as an Attorney General, as the story below describes. His idea of job creation was to create wealth for trial lawyers.

From the New York Times (not Fox News) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/nyregion/19veterans.html?hp

Blumenthal's "service" as Attorney General. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703691804575254424061 921614.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

And then there is Joe Sestak, the Democrat who took down the hapless Arlen Specter. As pathetic a figure as Specter was his last few years, he was always a solid supporter of the US Israel relationship. Joe Sestak cannot make that claim. He is the House member who spoke to CAIR events, criticized Israel over its actions in Gaza, and loyally signed on to the J-Street agenda. The contrast with Pat Toomey, his Republican opponent on Israel policy , could not be sharper. Will Jews in Pennsylvania care?

Sestak and Israel http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/tobin/296516

The White House, with another example of its exquisite light touches, tried to bribe Sestak and get him out of the race against Specter a few months back, by dangling in front of him the Secretary of the Navy job. Sestak can't seem to give a straight answer now on the subject, though he made the bribery charge earlier, and of course Robert Gibbs is not interested in the subject either. Sestak now seems as tongue tied on this embarrassing event as Rand Paul is on the subject of civil rights law.

The utter depravity, and failure of the Obama foreign policy is a sight to behold. In the past few days, we have the following:

The Administration's Deputy National Security Advisor, John Brennan, who may soon get the top job, calls Jerusalem Al Quds, and indicates he wants to work with the moderate elements in Hezbollah.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.6280/pub_detail.asp

The Administration expresses its embarrassment to that human rights champion China over the new Arizona immigration law, and allows Mexico's President, whose country enforces a far tougher law on illegals than the US or Arizona, and facilitates the movement of illegals into the U.S., to lecture us on the subject. http://townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2010/05/21/getting_lectured_on_human_ rights_by_mexico

The Administration is unjustifiably proud of its agreement with China and Russia on very weak new Iran sanctions at the U.N. One problem, though is a giant loophole that allows Russia to ship missiles to Iran that would of course be used to fire at Israeli attack planes or missiles.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/21/russia-can-send-missiles-to-iran/

Marty Peretz thinks the new sanctions, the product of 16 months of diplomacy and negotiations, are feeble.

Marty is on a roll, commenting on Brennan, whom he charitably labels a nitwit.

Charles Krauthammer on how countries behave when they sense weakness. Turkey and Brazil, unsurprisingly, align with Iran. As Dennis Ross assured an audience at the University of of Chicago last year, the Obama foreign policy would be transformational. It has been- he has driven away allies (Britain, the Israel, India) kissed up to the worst nation in the world, and pushed the neutrals off the fence to the other side.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/05/21/the_fruits_of_weakness_105676.html

An interview with Elliot Abrams on the failure of the Administration's Middle East peace processing. http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/episodes/2010/05/middle-east-peace-elliott-abra ms-one-on-one.html

Greece was told that if it wanted a bailout, it would need to consider privatizing its health care system, to bring down the cost. The new British government says it has to take on and greatly reduce the cost of public union entitlements. Even the New York Times, says the municipal unions are bankrupting the state of New York. And while this is going on , Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress are rapidly expanding entitlement spending, and trying to move the US closer to the decaying, unsustainable and slow growth welfare state model in Europe. Is this the change 52.9% of American voters thought they were getting in 2008?
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2010/05/14/guess_what_greece_has_to_ jettison__98467.html

The New York pension mess. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/business/economy/21pension.html?hp

Mort Zuckerman on the bankrupting of America. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315404575250610059801620.html

Nicholas Sarkozy announcesd a three year public spending freeze.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/05/the_baehr_essentials_8.html

Real spending cuts coming in Great Britain. http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE64F0S420100516

White House advisor Paul Volcker says the deficit and entitlement spending must be cut. http://preview.bloomberg.com/news/2010-05-19/volcker- says-time-running-out-for-u-s-to-tackle-deficit-social-security.html

In the last two days, two unions pledged to spend over $100 million in the 2010 campaigns in order to re-elect a Democratic controlled Congress, which of course will insure that all of the publicly funded goodies awarded to them continue to pile up (and destroy the country's financial future). ***Hey, if these clowns have 100 mil to spend electing demoscats..then let them bail out their own pension funds.

posted May 22, 2010 11:02 AM              

and yes of course the new CONSERVATIVE govt of britain wants greece to privatise...we must all walk in step if we are to expect our neighbours to help us out RIGHT?? never mind that when the conservatives are in children forget what their parents look like (they are so busy trying to put dinner on the table) - and never mind that the conservatives only got in because the LIBERALS scored 10% of the vote and labour took the hit...

posted May 22, 2010 01:11 PM            

I notice the idiot Woody Allen is against Polanski getting what he deserves too. Do you agree with Woody that O'Bomber needs to act like the petty little tyrant he really is and act like a dictator...you know, so he can get more done against the will of the American people?

posted May 22, 2010 02:23 PM              

i don't give a hang what woody allen thinks nor do many people. the fact that he has made some brilliantly funny movies does not give him carte blanche to decide what the government does. a non-starter. i am capable of separating the idea from the thinker.

and yes i think the victim should have some say in the "justice" received. isn't that what the law is for? the case is so far in the past and half the people involved are dead already. this is being done a) to fleece a wealthy newsworthy person b) to use his newsworthiness to make the state prosecutors look efficient. not likely they will be able to establish the true facts at this point especially with an unwilling victim.

now if they want to try BP for negligence or the government for letting them get away with it, they can be my guests.

posted May 24, 2010 09:46 AM            

Polanski needs to go to prison for what he did. There is no possible excuse.

posted May 24, 2010 10:02 AM            

Sestak insists he was offered an administration job if he would quit the race for the Senate.

Don't look now but that's a felony committed by someone high enough in O'Bomber's administration to be taken seriously by Sestak.

Either that, or Joe Sestak is a liar. No known liar should ever be elected to any federal office...or any other.

Right now, no investigation is in progress on what is a federal felony offense. I wonder what Holder at Justice and the O'Bomber White House staff think is going to happen if Republicans win the House of Representatives and/or Senate in November.

Look for Sestak, Holder and high level White House staff to be invited to a party or parties at the House and/or Senate of the United States where they will be put under oath and questioned at length to get to the truth.

May 23, 2010
Sestak confirms WH job offer to get out of Senate race

Rep. Joe Sestak, winner of the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary, is refusing to provide more information on what job he was offered by a White House official to drop of that race, although he confirmed again that the incident occurred....

posted May 24, 2010 10:46 AM            

It began last November in statewide races in Virginia and New Jersey. Then it swept through Massachusetts in a stunning U.S. Senate special election this January. Most recently, it has spilled over into primary battles in Utah, Kentucky and Pennsylvania – growing more potent as the calendar year advances toward a climactic November 2010 showdown.

“It” is the ongoing, unequivocal public repudiation of the agenda of President Barack Obama – a seismic shift in the thinking of the American electorate regarding the sort of “change” they want for their country. In several races “it” is also a direct rejection of Obama himself – as evidenced by the deaf ear voters turned to his personal appeals on behalf of Massachusetts’ Attorney General Martha Coakley and party-switching Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter.

Both Coakley and Specter enjoyed commanding leads over their opponents prior to Obama’s active engagement in their races, with Specter enjoying a 21-point cushion over Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak as recently as last month (Sestak ended up defeating Specter by a 54-46 percent margin). Similarly, Sen. Scott Brown trailed Coakley by 17 points just two weeks before pulling off his improbable five-point upset victory.

In both races, Obama appeared in radio and television ads on behalf of the losing candidates – and in the Massachusetts race he paid a last-minute visit to the Bay State in an unsuccessful effort to rally Coakley’s faltering campaign (similar to his failed last-ditch effort to revive the flagging candidacy of New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine).

There was no eleventh hour visit for Specter – but only because Obama’s political advisors read the handwriting on the wall and were desperate to avoid yet another embarrassing image of their boss with his arms draped around another losing candidate. Accordingly, after pledging to give Specter his “full support,” when Election Day rolled around Obama was nowhere to be found – and wasn’t even following the race “all that closely,” according to his spokesman.

How’s that for loyalty?

Also worth noting was the tremendous shot in the arm that Sestak’s campaign received when he revealed that the Obama administration (in typical “Chicagoland” fashion) offered him a high-paying federal job in exchange for dropping his primary challenge against Specter – a charge which has yet to be properly investigated, but which served as a turning point in the race.

Meanwhile, halfway across the country in Kentucky another repudiation of Obama was taking place – albeit one that rattled the cages of a completely different set of Washington insiders. There, Kentucky ophthalmologist Rand Paul – son of Texas Congressman Ron Paul – trounced establishment Republican Trey Grayson in a race that demonstrated the growing political clout of the Tea Party movement.

Paul defeated the GOP’s hand-picked candidate by a 24 percent margin – even after Grayson received endorsements from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Vice-President Dick Cheney. Similar to Obama’s last-minute shunning of Specter, McConnell also fled the scene of his anointed candidate’s downfall – ostensibly to attend to “Washington business.”

Paul’s win was the second demonstration of Tea Party power in as many weeks, coming on the heels of Utah Republicans’ refusal to re-nominate incumbent U.S. Senator Bob Bennett. Additionally, ten other U.S. Senators and twenty U.S. Representatives are retiring from politics in advance of the 2010 elections.

What’s fueling this “wave?”

The convenient answer is “voter angst,” but the truth is that each of these elections represents a mixture of prevailing national sentiment and more regionalized root perceptions. In Pennsylvania, for example, Democrats rejected Obama’s personal appeal to support a party-switcher – while in Kentucky, Republicans rejected their party’s chosen nominee to support a candidate who they believe will be more aggressive in taking the fight to the Obama regime.

In both cases, Obama loses. And while the mainstream media continues to portray the Tea Party as part of the “fringe” of America’s political spectrum (while relying on a generic “anti-incumbency” foil to insulate Obama from the dramatic electoral defeats), the truth is the roots of this new limited government movement are deeper and stronger than anyone previously imagined. Also, reversing Obama’s harmful policies not only remains the movement’s raison d’etre – but its source of popular support.

For example, two months after its passage, the latest Rasmussen reports poll shows that 56 percent of Americans favor repealing Obama’s socialized medicine law – which is actually a higher number than Rasmussen recorded in the aftermath of Congress passing the legislation.

posted May 24, 2010 01:50 PM              

then you can say hi to the new boss, same as the old boss. change is not in the faces on the campaign posters. whoever gets in will be subject to the same pressures by big money. YOUR candidate is a camera-besotted cheerleader. that doesn't give me much hope for change.

posted May 24, 2010 04:03 PM            

O'Bomber ran as a traditional centrist democrat, not as a radical Marxist Socialist.

His policies are being repudiated by America, including the Independents...especially the Independents who helped elect him.

posted May 29, 2010 06:57 PM            

Steve Wynn says Americans are afraid. He’s just angry.

“Washington is unpredictable these days,” declares the CEO of Wynn Resorts. “No one has any idea what’s next…the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it’s delaying the recovery.”

Wynn spoke to CNBC in Las Vegas from the new Encore Beach Club opening for the Memorial Day weekend. He created the $69 million pool club and bar area after tearing down a brand new $13 million entrance to the Encore which looked out on Las Vegas Boulevard.

Turns out the view wasn’t good. Across the street are a slew of half finished developments which stalled in the downturn. Wynn didn’t want his guests to see that. “There were going to be 10,000 rooms across the street and they all went bust.” So he changed the whole front of the resort to close it off and create a sensual adults-only escape.

Pool clubs like the one he’s built are the hottest new trend in Vegas. “This generation…they have a different attitude,” Wynn says. “Instead of sitting and watching something, they want to be a part of it…they’re very hedonistic and sensual.”

As we spoke, scantily clad waitresses in barely-there orange bikinis prepared for one last practice run-through. “They’ll make north of a hundred grand apiece,” annually he says. The jobs pay well, and the tips are great. But wearing those bikinis isn’t easy. “If one of those girls gains two pounds, it goes from being really adorable to not so adorable.” (One other note: he lectures them about wearing hats and sunblock.)

Wynn is passionate about the prospects for the beach club.

He’s even more passionate about where this country is headed.

Wynn speaks of “wild, uncontrolled spending,” and “unbelievable, unsustainable debt”. As he plans to split his company headquarters between Las Vegas and Macau, with a bigger emphasis on Macau because of its tremendous profitability, he has no qualms about dealing with the Chinese government.

“Macau has been steady. The shocking, unexpected government is the one in Washington.”

posted June 02, 2010 10:33 PM            

Oil is spewing from beneath a British Petroleum oil rig into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of about 1 million gallons a day. There's no end in sight -- although White House officials have made it clear their goal is to stop the leak before the midterm elections in November.

Obama now spends at least half of every day answering pointed, increasingly aggressive questions about the oil spill, most of them from his daughter Malia.

The president finally went down to take a look at the oil disaster last week –- which is weird because I didn't even know there were golf courses near the Gulf. To show his concern, Obama is thinking about returning some of the nearly $1 million the oil industry donated to his campaign.

Ha, ha -- just kidding. He's not returning any oil money. But the situation has gotten so urgent that Obama did take time off from his golf game to praise the Phoenix Suns for protesting Arizona’s new immigration law.

He really did endorse the Phoenix Suns, which -- like most of his endorsements -- has resulted in their being eliminated by the Los Angeles Lakers over the weekend. (Did I dream this, or was it just yesterday that President Obama was congratulating Al and Tipper Gore on their long and happy marriage?)

The media have been crowing that Republicans will lose the Hispanic vote forever if they support enforcing laws against illegal immigration, such as the Arizona law. To great fanfare, a poll was released last week showing that 67 percent of Hispanics oppose the Arizona law.

The headline on that poll should have been: "One-Third of Hispanics Support Arizona Immigration Law Despite Frantic Media Campaign to Convince Them It’s a Racist Plot Against Hispanics."

Incidentally, 67 percent of Hispanics also vote Democrat. The exact same percentage of Hispanics who oppose the Arizona law voted for Obama over John McCain -- who was championing amnesty for illegals.

Suck up to Hispanics with insane amnesty proposals; get one out of three Hispanic voters. Do the right thing and defend the country's borders; get one out of three Hispanic voters. ... Promise to make every Tuesday "Ladies' Night"; get one out of three Hispanic voters. Offer them a choice between "Extra Crispy" and "Original Recipe"; get one out of three Hispanic voters.

Indeed, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday, only 52 percent of Hispanics oppose the law, while 37 percent support it. In other words, more Hispanics support the Arizona law (37 percent) than voted for John McCain (31 percent) -– which is the strongest argument for amnesty I've heard in my entire life.

Overall, 66 percent of voters support enforcing the border before discussing amnesty. A plurality -- 48 percent to 35 percent -- would like their own states to pass a law just like Arizona's, despite the strong likelihood that the mainstream media will accuse them of being Nazi police states.

The New York Times' Linda Greenhouse recently compared the Arizona law to Hitler's policies toward the Jews. You remember how Jews were constantly sneaking across the border into Nazi Germany?

Finally, in keeping with the White House tradition of only releasing really good news on the Friday afternoon before the Memorial Day weekend, last Friday the White House announced that no one in the administration offered Rep. Joe Sestak a job to drop out of the Senate primary against Arlen Specter, despite Sestak's claims to the contrary.

After a 10-week investigation, the Obama White House concluded that Bill Clinton, acting on his own, offered Sestak a nonpaying, advisory job with the administration.

It sounds like something Bill would tell Hillary after sneaking back into the house in the wee hours of the morning. "Honest, honey, I wasn't out with a tawdry cocktail waitress. I was offering some guy I barely know a job at the Obama White House."

So yeah, I know it sounds fishy, but if Bill Clinton says this is how it happened, that's good enough for me. Why, Clinton hasn't lied under oath in front of a federal grand jury for more than a decade.

Incidentally, why do so many Bill Clinton stories end with the words "nothing improper happened"? As I recall, the definition of "proper" gets pretty elastic when you're talking about Bill Clinton.

It's too bad Sestak turned down the offer, because if he had said yes, Obama could claim to have created at least one job, albeit unpaid.

I have mixed feelings about Obama trying to get Sestak out of the way in order to help Arlen Specter. As far as I'm concerned, the only good thing Obama has done so far is to endorse Specter, thus ensuring his defeat.

posted June 03, 2010 07:58 AM            

A few years ago, the film Catch Me if You Can told the story of Frank Abagnale, Jr., an extraordinary con man who managed to successfully impersonate a pilot, a doctor, and a legal prosecutor all before the age of nineteen. I've noticed a number of similarities between Mr. Abagnale and our president. But when it comes to being a Great Pretender, Obama is sorely lacking.

Like Mr. Abagnale, Mr. Obama has been playing multiple parts ever since he came on to the national stage. Unlike Mr. Abagnale, the president is a lousy actor. The key to being a confidence man is the ability to inspire confidence. Confidence that you really are what you are pretending to be. Before embarking on the big con, President Obama could have used Frank's advice. For example:

Obama pretends to be a brilliant scholar. He successfully accomplished this during the campaign by sticking with a cool, calm persona and shutting up when the teleprompter was off. His acolytes in the press and Democratic Party were so eager to be conned that they did not notice that Obama never provided any evidence of a stratospheric IQ. College transcripts were safely locked away. The candidate started appearing nowhere without his teleprompter or glued to his campaign staff, especially after performances such as this and his chat with Joe the Plumber.

It's very easy to pretend to have all the answers during a campaign when no one actually expects you to solve anything. The funniest display of Obama's low-wattage brain power was during the foreign policy debate with Senator McCain, where the most frequent sentence he uttered was "I agree with John." It reminded me of the scene in Catch Me if You Can where Frank covers his lack of medical knowledge by asking one resident doctor what his diagnosis and plans for the patient are and then turning to another resident and asking repeatedly, "Do you concur?"

Remember when Senator McCain suspended his campaign to rush to Washington, D.C. and tend to the financial meltdown? Unfortunately for McCain, the Democrats had arranged for Obama to play leader at the meeting of the legislators with President Bush. The media was so busy swooning at Senator Obama that no one noticed that he contributed absolutely nothing of substance. His entire performance was the Obama equivalent of "Do you concur?"

The problem the president is running up against now that he pulled off the ultimate con job is that if you're going to continue this performance, you have to have people around you who are actually competent. Unfortunately, the White House is filled to the brim with incompetent fakes, all stumbling around and asking each other "Do you concur?"

Obama pretends to like people. It's impossible to pull off a successful con keeping your marks at arm's length. For example, look at all the congressmen who are re-elected over and over despite boorish, unethical, or even criminal behavior. John Murtha actually called his own constituents racists and rednecks. When he was reelected a short time later, conservatives were quick to credit all the pork that the congressman had brought home. But it took a lot more than goodies from D.C. to inspire that kind of loyalty. I believe that over the years, Murtha convinced his district that they were his family. And most families believe that while it's perfectly okay for them to criticize a family member, they resent hearing it from outsiders.

President Obama can pull off the messiah pose during a campaign, but he has a lot of difficulty pretending to care about individual people. He gave it a try early in his presidency at a town hall meeting where he attempted to comfort a homeless woman, Henrietta Hughes. Watch the Youtube. The president asks her name, pledges to help her, then approaches her to offer solace. I've seen patients approach the exam room in a proctologist's office with more enthusiasm than Obama walking toward Henrietta. Then he bends and gives her a very European peck on the cheek.

Now, close your eyes and imagine Bill Clinton at the same event. He would have soaked three hankies just listening to her story. Then, after mowing over two reporters and Monica Lewinsky, he would have enfolded Henrietta in a huge bear hug and most likely kept her firmly by his side for the rest of the meeting. Now that was pure, unadulterated talent.

Obama pretends to work. So far, Obama's approach to being president has appeared to be: 1. Make a speech outlining a policy (health care, stimulus). 2. Hand everything to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. 3. When the negative public reaction reaches critical mass, threatening passage of the legislation, spend the last two days before the vote twisting arms and making offers to Democrats. 4. Pass the legislation on a strictly party-line vote. 5. Make another speech taking full credit for whatever ended up passing.

Unless reading a teleprompter can be considered work, it's obvious that anything that can be considered an achievement of this presidency is due to Pelosi and Reid, with honorable mention in the arm-twisting category to Rahm Emmanuel. And in the rare instance where a goal of the president does not involve Congress (think the Chicago Olympics), Obama's "read a speech" approach to hard work is shown to be an utter failure. If there is even a tiny glimmer of light in the Gulf oil spill disaster, it's that the Obama con that he actually is working and involved has been exposed, even to mind-numbed Obama zombies like Chris Matthews and James Carville.

A fascinating illustration of Obama's work ethic can be seen in this article by Jack Cashill, who has done exhaustive research on the dubious authorship of Barack Obama's autobiography. Apparently a "hopelessly blocked" Obama gave all his notes to his friend Bill Ayers, who "helped" produce a manuscript. Exchange Nancy Pelosi for Bill Ayers, and we see that Obama's modus operandi toward actual work has not changed. Fellow Americans, we have elected Maynard G. Krebs.

Obama pretends to be a uniter. Millions of Americans were inspired when candidate Obama said, "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America." Since winning the presidency, however, Obama's actions have spoken much louder than his rhetoric. He referred to white Cambridge policemen as "acting stupidly." And in the ultimate act of division, he has excoriated one of our states, Arizona, for passing anti-illegal immigration legislation that his left-wing base does not like.

President Obama played the Big Con and became president by perfecting the art of appearing cool, calm, intellectual, and competent. Unfortunately, this seems to be the extent of his repertoire of emotions. My daughter is a talented theater director. I remember assisting her at an audition for a community theater production. The actors ran the gamut from hopeless to amazing. I perfected my poker face while watching my daughter attempt to coax emotion out of some of the more hapless auditioners. "Try reading the line like you're afraid," she'd suggest. The actor would then read the words exactly as he had previously. "We'll let you know," my daughter would say -- my cue to call in the next auditioner.

posted June 09, 2010 09:52 AM            

Well yes, but then O'Bomber is merely exhibiting the very same arrested personality development of pubescent narcissistic teenagers which is the hallmark of leftists everywhere.

Why should anyone be surprised? O'Bomber's personality disorder has been on display as far back as his campaign for the Illinois state senate.

No one can now say they weren't told and didn't know.

June 09, 2010
Narcissist in Chief?
By Eileen F. Toplansky

As Charles Krauthammar has pointed out, Obama "has never been overly modest about his own powers." Obama certainly has an inflated sense of his own importance. After all, he declared that history will mark his ascent to the presidency as the moment when "our planet [began] to heal."

I was reminded of Obama's exaggeration of his own self when my freshman literature class began to analyze Willa Cather's well-known story entitled "Paul's Case." Our analyses led us to discover a piece in Studies in Short Fiction entitled "Paul's Case: A Narcissistic Personality Disorder, 301.81-Critical Essay," by Rob Saari. In this article, Saari makes the case that the protagonist of Cather's story reflects many of the "essential features of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder." Some of these include the following:

•Pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy

•Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

•Believes that he is "special" and unique and can be understood only by other special or high-status people

•Has a sense of entitlements

•Is interpersonally exploitative -- i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

•Lacks empathy and is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

•Shows arrogant, haughty behavior.

As I read the above in preparation for our class discussion, I had this disturbingly eerie feeling that I was actually reading about Barack Obama, and not a mere fictional character of Cather's. Obama's lack of empathy has been quite apparent in the Arizona immigration situation, in the current appeals for more immediate action in the Gulf, in his hasty appraisal of the "stupid" cops involved in the Gates affair, and in his ongoing indifference to the genuine needs of the besieged state of Israel.

Furthermore, even when the American people consistently indicate their displeasure with the health care reform law, Obama simply shows his arrogance and takes no notice of the people's desires. Instead of accepting the free flow of information from the people he is supposed to serve, he resorts to adding "teabagger" to his public lexicon. His contempt for America is staggering. His haughtiness towards the American electorate and his puffery with dictators in a bid for their admiration is breathtaking.

Furthermore, the president intimates that we are not capable of understanding and clarifying issues -- Joe the Plumber could not possibly be accurate when he correctly asked if Obama's ideas were, in fact, socialist. What does a guy who works with a wrench know about such things?

Obama accepts the notion that he is the messiah -- that he and he alone can fix this country and, for that matter, the world. If ever there was an exaggerated achievement without commensurate accomplishment, the Nobel Peace Prize given to Obama would be it. He expects to be recognized as superior even when he has achieved nothing positive to show it. He ignores the evidence about global warming and man's alleged interference because this simply does not comply with his demands -- details be damned.

There are no substantive examples of his school achievements. His portfolio is razor-thin, and there is evidence that he did not author his own books, yet he rides on the crest of all-consuming power and privilege.

Author Rob Saar states that "people with narcissistic personalities tend ... to deprecate and treat with contempt those from whom they do not expect anything (often their former idols). Their relations with others are often exploitative ... Beneath a surface that is often charming and engaging, one senses coldness and ruthlessness."

How often have we been privy to that allegedly cool demeanor of Obama's turning into a dismissive disdain for anyone who does not agree with him and/or stands in his way? He distanced himself from his pastor of over twenty years because that relationship hurt his ends. He has knifed companies in the back that once financially supported him. He seems obsessed as he constantly bashes former President Bush and rails, yet again, against the oil companies and others. All of these entities receive derision and abuse from this man.

He can do no wrong in his own eyes, as he views "others as objects to be manipulated." Arrogantly he dismissed a reporter's question at a press conference that was supposed to be about the Daniel Pearl Freedom of Press Act!

He exploits all issues, making everything into a crisis, and yet when he accomplishes nothing to ameliorate the difficulty, he turns and blames it on everyone else. And no wonder: "Devaluation of others (DSM-IV 658) is yet another symptom of the narcissist's grandiose self-image."

posted June 09, 2010 02:18 PM              

and he might add, no basis in fact for any of the above article. just because a black man walks tall and doesn't apologize, just because he recognizes a landmark election when he sees one, doesn't make him a narcissist. in the eyes of anyone who is not bound and determined to be "right" both politically and idealogically.

but if you continue to chase your own tail it gets pretty dizzying after a while.

posted June 09, 2010 05:49 PM            

I've considered you a dizzy tail chaser since you started your jihad against Sarah Palin.

Remember?

Sarah Palin indicted in Alaska.

posted June 09, 2010 05:58 PM              

and if i have been conducting a jihad against palin then i guess we have nothing to fear from al qaida whatsoever. she is just like you - full of complaints and hot air. if she really cared about what was going on she would be hoofing it to someplace where she could give some constructive help. perhaps she could stick her finger in the busted pipeline spewing in alaska instead of reminiscing about her one moment of glory where she sold alaska's complicity with big oil for 1000 bucks a head.

she claims alaska is the biggest state in the union. however its population? not so big. and the secession movement there indicates it is not so much a part of the union as all that.

how's that conservative takeover going for you hun?

posted June 10, 2010 07:34 AM            

First, Sarah Palin is no longer Governor of Alaska and isn't responsible for the small oil leak in the oil pipeline.

Second, O'Bomber is prez and has told America he IS in charge of correcting the problems of oil spewing into the Gulf and the cleanup operation.

Alaska IS the largest state in the United States. Flunk geography 101 did you katatonic?

Alaska also supplies about 20% of the oil and natural gas produced in the United States.

For permitting oil and natural gas companies to extract the oil and gas found under Alaska lands...which belong to the people of Alaska..Palin made companies pay a royalty to the States...which was/is then distributed to the citizens of Alaska. Last I heard that royalty amounts to nice little boost to incomes of Alaskans.

Finally, Sarah Palin has given O'Bomber constructive advice. O'Bomber...as well as other leftists just aren't intelligent enough to know what Palin is talking about and even if they were, they aren't experienced enough in management to know where to start.

As for O'Bomber himself, he remains a sick, sick, sick man.

June 10, 2010
The Man Who Would Be King
By Steve McCann

Over the heads of some of the sycophants in the mainstream media there appears to be the proverbial light bulb turning on. After sixteen months of the Obama presidency, questions are being asked about not only his competency, but what motivates this putative savior.

The current President of the United States, acting in a way that would make Nero proud, continues to fiddle while not only the United States burns, but the rest of the world begins to spin out of control. The economy and the financial future of the country are in shambles. The oil spill in the Gulf was allowed to spread with no plan, central authority, or leadership in place to prevent its destruction of the Gulf coast. American weakness and lack of resolve has sent a signal and emboldened our enemies to press their hegemonic strategy throughout the globe and to attack our allies, such as Israel.

The country is in this position because all President Obama wants to do, and is capable of doing, is half his job.

Barack Obama has been the number-one topic of conversation among many of my friends and associates in London. His incompetence and narcissism, and the danger he poses to the interests of the United States and its allies in Europe, are startling people. I was asked, "How does Obama view himself as President?" We happened to be sitting in a hotel which overlooked Buckingham Palace, and the answer to the question came to me.

In the United Kingdom and many other countries with a parliamentary system, there is a distinction between the head of state and the head of the government. In some countries, such as Denmark, Spain, and the United Kingdom, the monarch, either a king or queen, is considered the head of state, and with that office goes all the trappings of royalty. The mundane responsibility of running the government falls to the elected parliament and their chosen prime minister.

Of the world's major democracies, only the United States merges both functions into the office of president.

Barack Obama views himself as the head of state only, and he has no concept of what leadership is -- thus, he cannot be bothered with the day-to-day responsibility of governance. He is, in his narcissistic world, above all that; therefore, he delegates the writing of the Stimulus, health care, and other major bills to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid; appoints czars with power to spend and set policy; prefers to let others, who can be conveniently blamed, solve the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; and continues to castigate the previous administration for all manner of ills, as certainly no one as preordained as he to rule could ever be truly responsible for any failure.

As head of state, President Obama can concentrate on golf, state dinners, White House receptions, travels overseas, backslapping other politicians and world leaders. He can be breathlessly addressed as Mr. President by a fawning media and star-struck citizens. Above all, he can fly to wherever he chooses and have the Secret Service and police part the sea of humanity as he passes through.

Obama's responsibilities as the head of government having been assigned to others, who in many cases are not answerable to the American people, has created untold chaos in Congress and apprehension and fear among the citizenry as reflected in the lack of job creation and polling on major legislative issues. Yet the president appears not to care, as his interests are in promoting his socialist ideology and himself.

The presidency of the United States to Mr. Obama is nothing more than a stage on which he, in his convoluted sense of destiny, can act as head of state for the world. He is much too busy enjoying the trappings of royalty, despite his oft-declared disdain for that class, to be bothered about the dismal long-term future of the United States if the left-wing policies of his government are enacted.

It appears that President Obama also believes, as the "titular" world head of state, that he can, by sheer force of his will, charm, persuasive power, and denigration of his country, convince the most brutal of global adversaries to live in peace. His mere words, well-delivered via his teleprompter, will solve not only the ongoing global financial crisis, but also longstanding international disputes.

The rest of the world has begun to see through Obama's unrestrained self-absorption. The rejection of the Olympics for Chicago despite Obama's personal intervention and some of the published comments of Nicholas Sarkozy and the whispers in the backrooms of Europe and other world capitals are just the tip of the iceberg; the real consensus of opinion is slowly but surely beginning to reflect the reality and danger of Obama's incompetence and unrestrained vanity.

However, President Obama's makeup is such that he will never accept any criticism as valid when directed toward him, and he will instead seek any excuse to explain away what is said or done as the result of the failings of others.

Notwithstanding the determination of the founding fathers to avoid having a "monarch," we now have one, at least in his own mind. Unfortunately, it comes at a most dangerous time in world affairs, and with the economic future of the United States hanging in the balance.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/the_man_who_would_be_king.html

posted June 16, 2010 09:08 AM            

The reason we now have an empty suit dunce in the White House is that far too many people who wanted freebies from government at the expense of everyone else voted for O'Bomber.

That's the Socialist model. Vote for us and we'll take care of you...cause we're intellectually, morally and spiritually superior beings.

No sale.

June 15, 2010
The Unbearable Lightness of Zero
James Lewis

To show he "cares" about the oil blowout in the Gulf, Obama flies Air Force One to Louisiana to get photographed eating seafood on the beach. PR done, back to golf. Meanwhile Governor Jindal gets the Louisiana National Guard to build sea berms eight miles out from the beaches. It may not work, but he's trying.

To show his machismo in the face of the UN's announcement that Iran has enough uranium for two nuclear bombs, Obama gets a fatuous UN resolution for the softest sanctions, with the help of the most corrupt and genocidal regimes in the world -- Sudan and Libya among them -- who were duly elected to the Human Rights Commission.

But just for balance, Obama also gets the UN to condemn Israel for stopping a boat full of Turkish suiciders.

Got oil trouble? Yell real loud against British Petroleum, so millions of British retirees will get scared. Their small retirement incomes depend on BP. Or pick "six of the best minds in science" to solve the oil spill -- like Dr. House, Kildare, and Spock. It doesn't matter. They are the smartest in the world, straight from Harvard. What more could you want?

The Current Occupant overreacts so badly to the spill, that just for a week's headlines he shuts off all deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, except by Cuba, China and Vietnam. Now watch the oil prices go up. He has again struck out against the wrong malefactors, doing more harm than good. But since the people must be idiots it doesn't matter what he does. If he's not getting rock star adulation somebody else must be wrong.

Unemployment is flat, or artificially inflated with temporary Census hires. So when the lickspittle media get on his nerves, no more press conferences. Just golf.

And when the mad radicals in this administration shoot themselves in the tender parts again, blame whatzisname, the last guy before the Messianic Age of O. There's an aloof isolated snob hunkering down in the people's house and nobody's in charge. All the messianic fantasies have gone poof! Even liberals are starting to get it.

What we are left with is a president so lightweight, so empty headed, so stuck in his fantasy world, that he is no longer in hailing distance of reality. The United States has lost the will to shape events. Even the media are grokking it, because they are shut out. At the NYT Mo Do is finally yelling. Obama couldn't care less. Come back next year.

posted June 29, 2010 09:58 AM            

What do Gen. McChrystal and British Petroleum have in common? Aside from the fact that they're both Democratic Party supporters.

Or they were. Stanley McChrystal is a liberal who voted for Obama and banned Fox News from his HQ TV. Which may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone: They'll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades. The management of BP were unable to vote for Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their "Beyond Petroleum" marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-Left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of cap-and-trade. BP was the Democrats' favorite oil company. They were to Obama what Total Fina Elf was to Saddam.

But what do McChrystal's and BP's defenestration tell us about the president of the United States? Barack Obama is a thin-skinned man and, according to Britain's Daily Telegraph, White House aides indicated that what angered the president most about the Rolling Stone piece was "a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year." If finding Obama "not engaged" is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?

Only the other day, Florida Sen. George Lemieux attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America's overpaid, overmanned and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their "super-skimmers": Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Sen. Lemieux found the president unengaged, and uninformed. "He doesn't seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers," reported the senator.
He doesn't seem to know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't care. "It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no heart at all," wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post last week. "For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human-rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia.
The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

"This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?"
Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.
And even today Cohen is still giving President Whoisthisguy a pass.
After all, whatever he feels about "China's appalling human-rights record" or "continued repression in Russia," Obama is not directly responsible for it. Whereas the U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan are happening on his watch – and the border villagers killed by unmanned drones are being killed at his behest. Cohen calls the president "above all, a pragmatist," but with the best will in the world you can't stretch the definition of "pragmatism" to mean "lack of interest."

"The ugly truth," wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, "is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it."
Well, that's certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you'll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats' war, the one they allegedly supported, the one the neocons' Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction from. Granted the Dems' usual shell game – to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you're opposing – Candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.
Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Friedman puts it, "no one knew how to get out of it." The "pragmatist" settled for "nuance": He announced a semisurge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It's not "victory," it's not "defeat," but rather a more sophisticated mélange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, "quagmire" would seem to cover it.

Hamid Karzai, the Taliban and the Pakistanis, on the one hand, and Britain and the other American allies heading for the check-out, on the other, all seem to have grasped the essentials of the message, even if Friedman and the other media Obammyboppers never quite did. Karzai is now talking to Islamabad about an accommodation that would see the most viscerally anti-American elements of the Taliban back in Kabul as part of a power-sharing regime. At the height of the shrillest shrieking about the Iraqi "quagmire," was there ever any talk of hard-core Saddamite Baathists returning to government in Baghdad?

To return to Cohen's question: "Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?" Well, he's a guy who was wafted ever upward – from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator – without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. "Who is this guy?" Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. "What are his core beliefs?" It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It's the "nothing else" that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing.
Wasn't he kind of unengaged by the health care debate? That's why, for all his speeches, he could never quite articulate a rationale for it. In the end, he was happy to leave it to the Democratic Congress and, when his powers of persuasion failed, let them ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Likewise, on Afghanistan, his attitude seems to be "I don't want to hear about it." Unmanned drones take care of a lot of that, for a while. So do his courtiers in the media: Did all those hopeychangers realize that Obama's war would be run by Bush's defense secretary and Bush's general?
Hey, never mind: the Moveon.org folks have quietly removed their celebrated "General Betray-us" ad from their website. Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing against Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of coverage when she protests Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the "anti-war" movement was really an anti-Bush movement, and that they really don't care about dead foreigners after all. Plus change you can believe in, plus c'est la même chose.

Except in one respect. There is a big hole where our strategy should be.
It's hard to fight a war without war aims, and, in the end, they can only come from the top. It took the oil spill to alert Americans to the unengaged president. From Moscow to Tehran to the caves of Waziristan, our enemies got the message a lot earlier – and long ago figured out the rules of unengagement.