Obama's Con

The Con continues - Foreign Policy edition

Kevin — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:11:53 +0000

Image by stevegarfield via Flickr

Jonah Goldberg points to the cognitive dissonance involved as Barack Obama picks his cabinet:

Barack Obama’s signature issue in the primaries was his “good judgment” to oppose the Iraq war. He invoked this more than any other qualification in his early battles with Hillary Clinton. She may have experience, he’d charge, but she lacked the wisdom to oppose the war. Indeed, the whole Democratic establishment was somehow corrupt or out of touch for not opposing the war, according to the Obamaphiles. So now Barack Obama is going to appoint Hillary Clinton to be the chief architect of his foreign policy. Moreover, he picked Joe Biden to be his running mate and “partner” in the White House explicitly because of his foreign policy experience and judgment. But wait: Joe Biden, too, supported the war. Meanwhile, at Defense, it looks like he will keep George W. Bush’s man, Robert Gates. Admittedly, Gates has always been more nuanced about the war than, say, Don Rumsfeld. But surely keeping Bush’s SecDef is not exactly what the anti-war Dems had in mind as “change we can believe in.” Heck, Joe Lieberman’s sitting pretty and he endorsed McCain. It will be interesting to see how long Obama’s charisma can paper over reality.

Megyn Kelly versus Bill Burton.

Moe — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:08:14 +0000

Via Ace of Spades, and pretty much over once Kelly noted that Burton had gotten the narrative wrong from the start about what Fox had been reporting. Mind you, a distressingly increasingly-common subset of Obama supporters would disagree, but that’s mostly because they apparently have difficulty grasping the notion that a mere woman could possibly be effective against one of their candidate’s spokesman (Allahpundit says “spokestool,” which is of course mean of him).

Anyway, enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Vicious young Obama supporters

Kevin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:22:01 +0000

***This is satire, in case that wasn’t obvious***

Precocious Youngster Sells Cookies To Buy Attack Ad

Obama’s priority: abortion on demand

Kevin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:17:18 +0000

Repeat after me: Obama is not a moderate, Obama is not a moderate…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Barack Obama and The Integrity Gap

Kevin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:07:07 +0000

We can now add Dan McLaughlin to Stanley Kurtz as someone who took the time to diligently document Obama’s troubling past. Dan has a lengthy series on Barack Obama and The Integrity Gap
that really is must read material.

Start with the link above and just keep reading. Well worth your time.

How subtle is “Goddamn America!”?

Kevin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:06:22 +0000

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Thomas Sowell is on to the Obama con. He notes how tempting people find Obama’s words:

Barack Obama is much smoother. Instead of issuing explicit denials, he gives speeches that sound so moderate, so nuanced, and so lofty that even some conservative Republicans go for them. How could anyone believe that such a man is the very opposite of what he claims to be — unless they check out the record of what he has actually done?

But when it comes to deeds things are very different:

In words, Obama is a uniter instead of a divider. In deeds, he has spent years promoting polarization. That is what a “community organizer” does — creating a sense of grievance, envy, and resentment — in order to mobilize political action to get more of the taxpayers’ money or to force banks to lend to people they don’t consider good risks, as the community organizing group ACORN did.

After Barack Obama moved beyond the role of a community organizer, he promoted the same polarization in his other roles.

That is what he did when he spent the money of the Woods Fund bankrolling programs to spread the politics of grievance and resentment into the schools. That is what he did when he spent the taxpayers’ money bankrolling the grievance and resentment ideology of Michael Pfleger.

When Barack Obama donated $20,000 to Jeremiah Wright, does anyone imagine that he was unaware that Wright was the epitome of grievance, envy, and resentment hype? Or were Wright’s sermons too subtle for Obama to pick up that message?

How subtle is “Goddamn America!”?

As Sowell points out, however, raising any of these issues is seen as divisive and distracting from the issues. And he notes how this leads to the Obama con:

Does anyone in real life put more faith in what people say than in what they do? A few gullible people do — and they often get deceived and defrauded big time.

That is what is at the heart of this election. Are we going to take what Obama says over what he has actually done? Are we going to take his word when he has consistently proven himself untrustworthy?

The media doesn’t want to have these questions asked, but they are necessary and valid. It is up to the voters to ask them and think about what the answers mean.

ACORN Voter Registration Fraud Watch: Lake County, Indiana.

Moe — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:43:35 +0000

Out of the first 2,100 (of about 5,000 submitted, all in the last few days before the deadline) handed in by notorious Democratic ally ACORN, all of them were fraudulent. Not my word choice: CNN’s.

CNN is now mocking ACORN for this.

Mocking:

Click here to view the embedded video.
Extra fun is watching the ACORN attorney try to weasel out of this.

Obama’s Tax Cut Con

Kevin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:41:59 +0000

Today’s must read is the The Wall Street Journal’s editorial exposing Obama’s deceptive tax rhetoric.

The Journal says of Obama’s promise to cut taxes on 95% of families:

It’s a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he’s also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%.

And he has been pushing this angle very hard in key battleground states. The Journal, however, takes a closer look at his proposals and finds that Obama is up to his old tricks:

There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of “tax cut.”

For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase “tax credit.” Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand no fewer than seven such credits for individuals…

Here’s the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer — a federal check — from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this “welfare,” or in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign a “Demogrant.” Mr. Obama’s genius is to call it a tax cut.

So we have massive wealfare disguised as tax cuts. But it gets worse:

There’s another catch: Because Mr. Obama’s tax credits are phased out as incomes rise, they impose a huge “marginal” tax rate increase on low-income workers. The marginal tax rate refers to the rate on the next dollar of income earned. As the nearby chart illustrates, the marginal rate for millions of low- and middle-income workers would spike as they earn more income.

Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of “making work pay,” but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you’re a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year.

There is not an issue where Obama isn’t using sleight of hand if not outright deception to sell his policies. But these type of debates are hard to get across to the average voter.

As the Journal notes, McCain needs to find a way to explain the reality of Obama’s policies and their effect on voters. Obama is a talented con man, McCain has to find a way to break the spell of America is in for a harsh awakening.

The Reality Based Community Strikes Again

Kevin — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 02:01:47 +0000

A picture is worth a thousand words and all that . . .

Records not rhetoric

Kevin — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:39:45 +0000

Jennifer Rubin jumps of the Rick Lowry column I noted below to make the argument that a politician’s record should trump their rhetoric:

The surest clue to a politician’s intentions is his record, not his campaign rhetoric. Obama’s is fairly clear. Up through 2002 he sat on the Woods Fund and gave out money to a hodgepodge of left-leaning groups including ACORN and the Arab American Action Network. As a state senator he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and favored strict gun control. As a U.S. Senator he was rated the most liberal (with some pretty liberal competition) — voting to cut off funding for troops and against both Justices Roberts and Alito and supporting the Democratic party line on everything from taxes to offshore drilling. He has been exquisitely sensitive to Big Labor’s agenda (e.g. opposing the Colombia Free Trade agreement, helping to sink immigration reform, and favoring the Orwellian-sounding Employee Free Choice Act).

In short, this is a very, very liberal fellow. Maybe with a Democratic Congress he’ll practice superhuman restraint. Maybe the economic crisis leaves him little chance to enact taxes and a raft of new programs. Maybe a savvy Secretary of State will sit him down and explain that he’s just not going to woo rogue state dictators. (Who will that be — Madeline Albright? Tony Lake? The mind reels.) But perhaps he’ll do what he has done his entire political career: pursue an immoderate and ultra-liberal agenda. It seems obvious that’s what he’d prefer to do.

The question is how you cut through the noice and chaos of an election and the headlines of the financial crisis to make the broader point that Obama is too liberal for the country?

Voters don’t seem as open to this line of argument as they were in the past. I think you have to tie the liberalism into the inexperience to make a argument that Obama is not prepared to lead. It can’t just be “liberal, libeal, liberal.” It has to be his policies will hurt not help; that he has not learned the lessons of the past.

A number of pundits have argued that McCain should run against an unpopular Congress; argue for divded government in essence. I think this is a good idea given the unpopularity of both Bush and Congress and the general centrist inclinations of the country, but it is easier said then done. Can voters be made to understand the danger of a united leftist government? We shall see.

Obama's Con

The Con continues - Foreign Policy edition

Related Reading:

Megyn Kelly versus Bill Burton.

Related Reading:

Vicious young Obama supporters

Related Reading:

Obama’s priority: abortion on demand

Related Reading:

Barack Obama and The Integrity Gap

Related Reading:

How subtle is “Goddamn America!”?

Related Reading:

ACORN Voter Registration Fraud Watch: Lake County, Indiana.

Related Reading:

Obama’s Tax Cut Con

Related Reading:

The Reality Based Community Strikes Again

Related Reading:

Records not rhetoric

Related Reading: