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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Geoff Altman who wrote (53727)	8/8/2012 10:02:47 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

I would laugh but Obama has destroyed this once great nation. It makes me cry to witness his ineptitude.

To: Geoff Altman who wrote (53727)	9/13/2012 9:21:45 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

Let Bush be Victor Davis Hanson Sep 13, 2012 The theme of the president's 2012 re-election campaign is that George W. Bush left such a terrible mess that Barack Obama could hardly be expected to clean it up in four years. In other words, 43 months of unemployment rates above 8 percent, $5 trillion in new borrowing, $16 trillion in aggregate debt, gas prices of nearly $4 per gallon, a dive in average family income and involvement in two wars were all due to George Bush and simply too difficult for anyone else to overcome. So Obama cannot be judged on his record between 2009 and 2012. At first glance, this is a most unusual claim. Gerald Ford followed the mess of Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal and the Arab oil embargo. After serving for less than three years, he failed to win re-election. His successor, Jimmy Carter, seemed to make a bad situation even worse. He exited four years later, tagged with a high "misery index" fueled by rampant unemployment and roaring inflation. Ronald Reagan took office under Carter's baleful legacy but ran for re-election successfully in 1984 based not on "Carter did it," but on the recovery he engineered. Bill Clinton was elected on "it's the economy, stupid" in 1992, and he was re-elected four years later after claiming credit for boom times. George W. Bush inherited the aftershocks of the dot.com meltdown, and a country ill-equipped to respond to terrorist assaults after the nonchalance of the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the 9/11 attacks, Bush was re-elected on the themes of a good economy and a safer country. Blaming or praising presidents for their four years of governance is an American tradition. That is why Obama asserted at the outset that if he could not turn around the economy, his presidency would be a "one-term proposition." Like all presidents, Obama inherited both positive and negative legacies. True, there was a war in Iraq, but the surge -- which candidate Obama opposed -- had by mid-2008 mostly won the peace. That is why Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker had already negotiated a timetable for American withdrawal. Obama followed that settlement; he no more ended the war alone than did he start it. For Obama to claim sole credit for ending the war in Iraq would be about as fair as blaming Obama for making things worse in Afghanistan -- given that more than twice as many Americans have died in that war on Obama's watch than were lost during the entire eight years of the Bush administration. Obama did inherit a terrible economy in January 2009, but one not quite still in full free fall from the mid-September 2008 panic -- which abruptly gave Obama a four-point lead over John McCain in the polls after being down four points. By Inauguration Day 2009, the gyrating stock market had bottomed out, and the Dow Jones industrial average had not dipped below 8,000 in four months. The TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) rescue package had been enacted by Bush in October 2008, stopping runs on the banks and mostly restoring financial stability. Blaming Bush for some of the mess is legitimate in politics, but the housing bubble and collapse -- the catalysts for the September meltdown -- were a bipartisan caper of pushing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to underwrite risky subprime loans to the unqualified who had no business buying homes at inflated prices. Washington insiders ranging from Clintonite Rahm Emanuel (Obama's former chief of staff) and Franklin Raines (a Clinton administration grandee) to Tom Donilon (the current national security advisor), James Johnson (an Obama campaign bundler) and Jamie Gorelick (deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration) got in on the Freddie/Fannie profit-making despite thin banking resumes. Even with the last four months of crisis, Bush still averaged a 5.3 unemployment rate for his eight years in office. Obama should be congratulated for ordering the successful hit on Osama bin Laden. But the intelligence apparatus and antiterrorism protocols that provided much of the expertise for the mission were well established when Obama entered office -- despite his own prior verbal attacks on Guantanamo Bay, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention and the Patriot Act, all of which he almost immediately embraced without a nod of thanks to his predecessor. Obama, for example, inherited the controversial Predator drone program, an anathema to liberals during the Bush administration. But Obama expanded the drone missions and in four years approved the killings of seven times as many suspected terrorists as Bush had in eight -- to the sudden silence of the antiwar Left. It is past time for President Obama to forget Bush, and, like all of his predecessors, make the argument that things are better than when he entered office almost four years ago, and that he deserves the credit for the turnaround. Voters will weigh that claim. And history will judge George W. Bush on his two terms -- as it will judge Barack Obama's own four (or eight) years in office. townhall.com

To: Geoff Altman who wrote (53727)	9/21/2012 11:33:31 PM
From: greatplains_guy	Respond to of 71588

Obama Has No Clue on Middle East Madness Middle East Madness By Victor Davis Hanson September 20, 2012 Last week, Muslim mobs took to the streets to murder the American ambassador in Libya and three of his staffers. American embassies were attacked from Egypt to Yemen. Embarrassed White House press secretary Jay Carney and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice insisted that these assaults were just reactions to an insensitive video that disparaged Islam and was circulating on the Internet. As embassies burned, we were assured that there was no animosity directed at America in general, or at this administration and its foreign policy in particular. That is hogwash. The weeks-old video was a mere pretext, in the manner of the Danish cartoons that Islamists used to stir up mobs in their war against the West. The street rioting was long ago synchronized across the Middle East to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Apparently, the administration was left stunned and without a clue about the latest Middle East madness. President Obama chose not to support nearly a million Iranian dissidents in 2009. Two years later, he belatedly offered encouragement to the revolutionaries who overthrew Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak. Yet those snubbed in Iran were far more likely to oppose radical Islam than were the protesters who later put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Cairo. Who, exactly, were we “leading from behind” in Libya? Moammar Qaddafi was a monster, but also one in a sort of rehab who was seeking better relations with the West. As for Syria, the Obama administration had called dictator Bashar Assad a reformer. Then he became a mass murderer who had to step down. Then we called in Kofi Annan and the U.N. to practice soft-power diplomacy. Then we threatened to intervene. Now we have backed off. As a candidate and as president, Obama assumed that his own multicultural politics, his familiarity with Islam, his novel transracial personal story, and his repudiation of George W. Bush would all combine to win over the Middle East. Supposedly, Middle Eastern dislike of America had little to do with longstanding existential differences that did not start with Bush and won’t end with Obama. Obama’s al Arabiya interview, Cairo speech, and loud reset diplomacy sent mixed messages. He gave the impression that Middle East anger was largely either America’s fault or due to misunderstandings that the sensitive Obama alone could mitigate — as he distanced himself from the supposed pathologies of prior American policy in the region. That myth-making is now discredited. But it still makes it hard for the administration to admit that hatred in Egypt is deep-seated and irrational — and has very little to do with a silly video. Those in the Arab street hate the West and America because they are told daily that our supposed godlessness and decadence should not make us so rich and powerful — especially when such pious believers as themselves are so poor and impotent. But rather than addressing the real causes of their present misery — tribalism, misogyny, statism, corruption, authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and religious intolerance — amid rich natural resources, Islamists scapegoat. Sometimes they fume at American support for Israel, at other times at an obscure video, cartoon, or rumor of a torched Koran. We only feed these adolescent tantrums when America wrongly apologizes for the occasional insensitivity of a few of our citizens, who enjoy free speech under the U.S. Constitution. America looks even weaker when this administration sends confusing signals about U.S. power. The Obama administration too often spikes the ball — whether it is Joe Biden bragging about killing Osama bin Laden, the president joking about Predator assassination missions, Hillary Clinton high-fiving over the death of Qaddafi, or unnamed top officials disclosing classified secrets about the cyber-war against Iran. Yet at other times, amid promised defense cuts, the Obama administration loudly announces a strategic pivot away from the Middle East toward Asia, or derides the very antiterrorism protocols — Guantanamo Bay, renditions, tribunals, and preventative detention — that it later embraced. Nothing is more dangerous in regard to the contemporary Middle East than misunderstanding the source of Islamist rage. Speaking loudly while carrying a small stick only makes that confusion worse. What can we do? Start developing vast new oil and gas finds on public lands here at home. Get our financial house in order. Quietly cut back aid to hostile Middle East governments. Put travel off-limits. Restrict visas and call home ambassadors — at least until Arab governments control their own street mobs. Develop a consistent policy on the so-called Arab Spring that applies the same criticism of illiberal dictators to the theocrats who depose them. Keep quiet and keep our military strong. Don’t apologize for a few Americans who have a right to be crude. Instead, condemn those pre-modern zealots who would murder anyone of whom they don’t approve. Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing ] [url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/09/20/obamas_middle_east_myth-making_115512.html]http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/09/20/obamas_middle_east_myth-making_115512.html