October 04, 2010
New Column: The Fruits of Obama's Muslim Outreach
I realize it's unfair and, according to some, even racist to hold President Obama accountable for his failed economic policies and cynical campaign promises, but could we at least raise a question or two about his foreign policy boasts?
Was it not President Obama who said that President George W. Bush had tarnished our image in the world and that he would restore it by reaching out to the Muslim world and not "engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush"?
Obama wasn't alone. The conventional wisdom on the left, both at home and abroad, was that America's policies were partially responsible for incurring the wrath of jihadists that led to the 9/11 attacks and that President Bush's aggressive response to the attacks had exacerbated the problem.
Shortly after Obama was elected, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town and 1984 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Desmond Tutu said that Obama's very election had turned America's (abysmal) global image on its head. He wrote in The Washington Post, "A few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, we had our first shock, hearing your president respond not with the statesmanlike demeanor we had come to expect from a U.S. head of state but like a Western gunslinger." Tutu then proceeded to list the many alleged sins of the United States under Bush: our abuse of prisoners, rendition, torture, "hostility to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases," our refusal to assent to the authority of the International Criminal Court, and "the arrogant unilateralism (we have) employed in declaring to be enemies any countries (we) deemed 'against us' because they were not 'for us.'" The "Bush administration," wrote Tutu, "has riled people everywhere. Its bully-boy attitude has sadly polarized our world."
Reading this makes me wonder whether Tutu has been one of Obama's speechwriters. All the talking points are there. Could anyone read Tutu's words, which should be revolting to patriotic Americans, and deny that they mirror Obama's both on the campaign trail and during office? It's all there, from the cowboy references to torture to unilateralism to rendition and prisoner abuse to environmental wackoism to America's "arrogance."
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 04:41 PM | Printer Friendly
September 30, 2010
'Finding $700 Billion Is Not Easy' -- if You're a Socialist
A couple of back-to-back statements by President Obama at a town hall rally in Des Moines, Iowa, tell us all we need to know about his economic philosophy and that we aren't going to climb out of his recession and begin to slow the growth of the national debt as long as he's calling the shots.
Voters, he said, tell him to "cut government spending." But "most spending is for veterans, for education, for defense. ... Finding $700 billion is not easy."
Yet a few minutes earlier, in response to criticism over illegal immigrants getting health care in the United States, he had said, "It is very important that we have compassion as part of our national character." (How about compassion for future generations of Americans?)
Does anyone see the disconnect here? If Obama believes our national character is deficient unless we expand the welfare state to illegal immigrants, then how could he ever preside over a balanced budget?
His wildly inaccurate statement about where the money is spent is equally revealing. For fiscal year 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and other sources, benefits for veterans constituted about 3.5 percent of the budget; education expenditures were 3 percent; and defense and security totaled about 20 percent.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 10:37 PM | Printer Friendly
September 27, 2010
What Is a Narcissist To Do?
With news of President Obama's plan to swarm the heartland this week to re-energize his base, one wonders whether he's finally heard the message that mainstream America is repulsed by his agenda. Is his direct appeal to "the young and minority voters" an admission that he's beyond electoral redemption with the rest?
Well, a new George Washington University Battleground poll indicates that only 38 percent of Americans believe he deserves to be re-elected. His personal approval rating is higher -- mystifyingly -- but that is doubtlessly small comfort to Democratic congressmen, whose political fortunes are on the line in just five weeks.
Unfortunately for Democrats, the midterm elections will be nationalized like never before (including 1994), and the primary issue at play in these so-called "local" elections will be the president's agenda, just as it was with the U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts. The Republicans were smart to introduce their "pledge" notwithstanding its flaws, but even without it, the congressional elections would have been nationalized.
The Washington Post reports that Obama is focusing his efforts on his "surge" voters -- "the roughly 15 million Americans who voted for the first time in 2008" -- because the polls are "showing independent voters swinging toward Republicans in Wisconsin and the nation's other battlegrounds."
But even Obama's 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, acknowledges that though many of these voters still strongly approve of the president, "a lot of them aren't showing enough predilection to vote."
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 07:10 PM | Printer Friendly
September 23, 2010
GOP Pledge Is a Step in the Right Direction
The Republicans' "Pledge to America" is an encouraging step on the road back to recapturing America. It's not enough for Republicans merely to stop Obama's disastrously destructive agenda in its tracks. This pledge is their acknowledgment that they have heard the grass roots, too -- that they are not exempt from scrutiny or accountability merely because they are the anti-Obamas.
Rep. Paul Ryan conceded as much in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos when he said that the Republicans have lost their way in the past and that with this pledge, they are embracing bold steps to get this nation back on track.
That said, Ryan made clear that Republicans are not trying to reinvent the wheel. Rather, he said, "We are here trying to reclaim our country by rededicating ourselves to those timeless principles that made us exceptional." The pledge, he said, contains the basic building blocks to get us back on the right track.
Precisely correct. This is not rocket science. It's a matter of rolling back government, radically reducing spending, ensuring that taxes are not so high that they smother economic growth, repealing and replacing Obamacare, bolstering our national defense and embracing traditional values.
These are not complicated ideas, and they don't need to be. We just want to restore government to its intended role under the Constitution. These timeless principles -- not some gimmicky ideas designed by faux conservatives to appeal to "moderates" -- are what allowed America to be exceptional.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:04 PM | Printer Friendly
September 20, 2010
Paradigm Shift in Politics Lost on Establishment
My immediate response to liberals who emerge from their Ouija boards to denounce Christine O'Donnell as a one-time dabbler in witchcraft is: At this point in our history, I'd vote for Elmira Gulch before I'd vote for another statist masquerading as a Republican.
The fact that O'Donnell might have done some things in her past she's not particularly proud of would make her fairly normal. I'm more concerned with where she is now, and she seems like a reliable Christian conservative with her head on straight about both religion and politics. In her television appearances, she's been quite impressive -- energetic, articulate and right on the issues.
But Christine O'Donnell isn't really the issue here. The more interesting and relevant stories arising out of her primary victory are: 1) the liberals' efforts to paint her -- along with other mainstream conservatives, including the entire tea party movement -- as extreme and, frankly, a bit wacko when the real extremism resides in the Democratic Party; 2) the liberals' efforts to fabricate a major schism in the GOP when, in fact, the real dissension of consequence is occurring in their own Democratic Party; and 3) establishment Republicans disgruntled over their inability to control the selection of candidates going forward, their apparent anxiety about the entire tea party phenomenon as rocking their world, and their resulting collusion with the liberal establishment to discredit the upstarts, who are beyond their power to manage and manipulate.
The mentally sedentary and complacent establishment types haven't figured it out yet; our nation is under a formidable assault that differs in kind, rather than degree, from the gradual liberal march toward statism we've witnessed for the past 50-plus years.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 04:43 PM | Printer Friendly
September 16, 2010
Extremists Calling Mainstreamers Extremists
I'm surely not the only one who notices the persistent efforts of the leftist establishment and certain establishment Republicans to portray mainstream conservatives, especially those inhabiting the tea party movement, as radicals and extremists. The more they push this theme the more they marginalize themselves.
You'll remember that Obama's Department of Defense released a manual identifying "protests" as a form of low-level terrorism. His Department of Homeland Security issued a report characterizing protesters as potentially dangerous right-wing extremists and racists, being sure to slander disgruntled veterans returning from duty overseas as part of that frightful mix. Also unforgettable is Obama's categorical derision of small-town people as bitter clingers.
We can learn a lot about people from their dislikes, as well as their likes. They reveal a great deal about themselves when they call "extremists" patriotic Americans who believe in the American ideal, lower taxes and fiscal responsibility, originalism, the rule of law, blind justice, equal protection under the law, strong national defense, limiting government to its assigned constitutional functions, the Second Amendment, the nondiscriminatory application of freedom of speech and expression, the free exercise clause, a reasonable -- not unduly expansive -- interpretation of the establishment and commerce clauses, protection for the unborn, judicial restraint, federalism, the separation of powers, the free market, racial colorblindness, the existence of good and evil in the world, equality of opportunity rather than of outcomes, law and order, immigration control and border protection, motherhood and apple pie.
That's a fair summary of a typical tea partier's credo. By definition, then, in America at least, tea partiers are not extremists. For approximately two times as many American voters identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals, and conservatives mostly believe in those things I've referenced.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 08:50 PM | Printer Friendly
September 13, 2010
Obama's Tiresome Tolerance Lectures
Why did President Obama choose tolerance as the subject of his speech at the Pentagon ostensibly to commemorate the victims of 9/11? Why is it that he insists on making this the overarching point at such events rather than, say, express our deep regret for the lost lives of the murdered Americans and repeat our national resolve to "bring to justice" those behind the massacre?
Then again, we are talking about President Obama here, the man who also believes the primary lesson we should learn from the Islamists' beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl is that the freedom of press is alive and well. Speechless here.
Obama's the guy who, instead of somberly lamenting the killing of 12 soldiers and a security guard by U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, began his remarks with a detached "shout-out" to Dr. Joe Medicine Crow, leaving the world to wonder just how warm the blood flowing through his veins is.
But it's not Obama's curiously bloodless behavior and strange disconnectedness (as British journalist Toby Harnden put it) that most concerns me about his Pentagon speech and the others. It's his reflexive instinct to lecture Americans, when they're not the ones who need lecturing.
His first reaction, for example, when Americans protested the building of the ostentatious mosque at ground zero was to assume Americans were being intolerant and bigoted. He came out strongly in favor of the mosque and the importance of religious tolerance. He later pretended he was talking about the Muslims' and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's First Amendment rights, but no one was suggesting they didn't have the right to build.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 07:43 PM | Printer Friendly
September 09, 2010
Barack Obama's 5 Cacophonous Notes
I never expected President Barack Obama to be promoting my new book, "Crimes Against Liberty," but that's virtually what's happened with his recent speeches on the economy. It's as if he's determined to validate every premise I assert in "Crimes Against Liberty."
All the elements are there: his thin-skinned narcissism, his deceit, his militant partisanship, his bullying and his dogged adherence to his disastrous policy agenda against all evidence of its failure and against the express will of the American people.
His full-throated class warfare was on clear display. With him, it's always us against them. He praised "Wisconsin's working men and women," that is union members, as if no one else works or contributes to the economy or society.
Expanding on this theme, he paid homage to the middle class -- the people whose taxes "in any form" he promised he would never raise -- before signing the excise tax on tobacco, trying to pass the cap-and-trade bill, shoving through Obamacare and its 14 to 19 new taxes, which will total some half a trillion dollars over the next decade and fall hardest on middle-income groups. A value-added tax is even on the table.
He claims to be the middle class's greatest champion but fails to explain why his economic policies -- not George W. Bush's, not John Boehner's -- are devastating that very group and bankrupting our children's futures.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:53 PM | Printer Friendly
