Q. What drives the members of the democrat party to support governments abroad that have complete distain for everything the left believes in… ie, gay marriage, gay life style, abortion, premarital sex, a smaller military, women’s rights, etc?
A. The left doesn’t really believe in any of those issues, at least not in the way you think. Overall the “Left” as we know it is more a loose coalition of interests put together namely to win elections and secure power, not because of any particular principles. A gay person need not be an environmentalist and a feminist need not support gay marriage. Our own liberal President certainly doesn’t. Blacks and Latinos by and large do not support abortion. And so on. This makes for a very flexible party, and that flexibility allows them to embrace countries and governments that reject some of their platform. In their mind, a Communist country need not have women’s rights as long as it provides free health care.
Lefties also hate America. More specifically, they hate and resent American power, and consider it the reason for all of the unrest throughout the world. If only Americans were nicer, less materialistic, and less capitalistic, they say, there would be peace on earth. Instead of having pride in American exceptionalism (Reagan), they redirect it into guilt and self loathing (Obama’s apology tour). This creates a sort of “the enemy of my enemy” kind of situation, where anyone who opposes America becomes someone you embrace. Examples of this include Fidel Castro (whom Michael Moore fawned over in Sicko) and Hugo Chavez. If a dictator is seen as providing for his people, then gosh darn it he’s just a benevolent dictator.
Lastly, Lefties like to fight for whomever they consider to be the “underdogs” and for “social justice”, so when they see Palestinians taking on the big bad Israeli army with rocks or being shuttled from their homes, their hearts bleed. Of course that sentiment is strangely absent when a bomb goes off in a crowded Israeli shopping center.
When they see our government pouring water on the faces of “freedom fighters” during interrogations, they forget about the huge crater we have sitting in lower Manhattan.
When they see radical Islamists beheading their wives and daughters, an organization such as NOW will instead vilify Chris Brown for beating Rihanna.
When a party exists solely to win elections, it won’t ever back anything on principle. Since Iraq was Bush’s war, the left needed it to be a failure. Since Conservatives support Israel, the left roots for the Islamists. Since Conservatives support missile defense, the left opposes missile defense. Since Conservatives oppose a nuclear Iran, the left accepts it as inevitable.
This is why principles do matter.
Q. Why do you think there’s so much confusion in the polls regarding Obamacare? 80% of Americans are happy with their coverage but 80% want health reform. How is that possible? What does this mean for the prospects of Obamacare?
A. The confusion in the polls is the result of one thing: biased polling.
Some polls simply ask if they’d like everyone to have health insurance. Obvious answer? Sure! I’d love a free Benz in the driveway and an extra 6 weeks vacation, too! Others ask if they’d like Universal Health Insurance. If you’re going to pay for me to go to the doctor, sure! Why not?
Once they start asking if they’d be willing to pay for it, however, the numbers take a big dive. Once they start asking if they’re interested in a public option if it would eventually lead to a single-payer system, the numbers drop some more. Once they ask if we’d be willing to have our taxes raised to fund it, the numbers fall further. Once they start asking if we’d be willing to let the government assign us plans and doctors the numbers plunge. Once they start asking if we should cover illegal aliens, the numbers vanish altogether.
Most people are happy with their plans, but are annoyed at the bureaucratic red tape they have to go through. Doctors are annoyed at the way Medicare/Medicaid shortchange them for everything. Specialists are annoyed at paying 6 figure malpractice insurance costs. Insurance companies are annoyed with having to raise rates on customers to compensate for the shortfalls in Medicare/Medicaid. There is a clear need to fix what we have. Unfortunately, whether that solution is yet ANOTHER government program depends on where you lean ideologically.
Once you parse all the polls, the actual number for ObamaCare – assuming that illegal aliens are excluded- starts off with an approval rating below 28%.
21% of this country self-identifies as “liberal.” That means that, outside of a core Democrat constituency, pretty much nobody else in the entire country wants ObamaCare. So this is really a program being pushed by the extreme left. How could it not be? Everyone else knows what happens when you unleash a new government entitlement program on society.
My best guess is that once the budget numbers come out, as well as the the final funding proposals for this plan, you’ll see all but the most ardent Obamabots railing against this bill. The money just isn’t there.
They might end up passing a completely watered down piece of legislation that does nothing and hail it as the second coming to try to make Obama look good. Fine by me, as long as I keep my plan and don’t have to worry abut single payer, more bureacurats, or covering illegals.
Q. You seem a little too eager to write President Obama off. It’s only been 6 months. What if you’re mistaken about him?
A. I’m not mistaken. In order to really understand why he’s flopping so far, it’s important to stop nursing the “narrative” of Obama that the media has forced upon you for so long and see him for what he really is. Within a 6 month span, he’s shown a propensity for behaviors and habits totally unsuited for a POTUS.
1) He has no eye for talent.
I can understand one cabinet member slipping through your vetting process and being exposed as a tax cheat…but 6? That’s just sloppy, and reflects very poorly.
Shouldn’t he have at least checked to see if Joe Biden could tie his own shoe laces first?
How confident does Tim Geithner make you? Or Larry Summers, the architect of the stimulus? They’re now the ones running the economy.
What about Robert Gibbs and his inability to run simple press conferences…even with a media IN THE TANK FOR HIS PRESIDENT??
Or Hillary the human foreign policy gaffe machine. Her career may need a “reset/overcharge”
Or Christina Romer, the one in charge of figuring out how many jobs he’s “saved or created”. She must have the most useless job in government.
How about Napolitano over at Homeland Security, who decided that Conservatives and our own troops were terror suspects and that it was the CANADIAN border that actually needed strengthening.
Take it all in folks. You’re not going to see another lineup this awful for 50 years.
The problem with liberals is that they tend to equate where you went to school with how smart or capable a person you are. Liberals will pick a Harvard PhD who was the darling of the classroom with no actual business experience to run a company over someone with a Bachelors from a state school with years of experience and a successfully ran company of their own.
Academics are good for thinking within bubbles, and for kicking around all sorts of interesting theories, but ultimately useless once they find the real world is a lot different from the one in their flowcharts and graphs.
Not to say you can’t be a brilliant ivy leaguer or vice versa. Bill Clinton, for all his faults, was one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever seen and an Ivy League Rhodes Scholar. He had a masterful command of facts, policy, and minutiae and could stand there and engage on any subject with considerable depth-while putting it into laymen’s terms. He was a human Google. Reagan was no ivy leaguer but had a very clear understanding of how to pick talent and tons of experience and common sense-which served him pretty well I’d say.
To simply assume an ivy leaguer has the goods solely because of their Ivy League background, well…that’s elitism of the highest order, and there’s no shortage of that in the Democrat party. It goes a long way towards explaining why Obama’s cronies are all flaming out on everything from the stimulus to simple diplomacy.
2) He’s a thin skinned narcissist.
Presidents are very busy people, and because of the magnitude of their jobs, should not have ample time on their hands to pick fights with private citizens, TV networks, ex VPs, or Junior Senators. Can you imagine Reagan taking on the Huffington Post? It’s laughable.
Obama doesn’t take kindly to criticism, and has a habit of trying to engage anyone who says anything unflattering. Unfortunately, when a sitting president does this, it not only diminishes the office from where he/she sits, but it RAISES the visibility of the person he’s trying to marginalize, putting them and their ideas on a similar mantle.
Rush Limbaugh ended up nearly tripling his ratings, and galvanized the GOP opposition before Obama backed off.
Dick Cheney spanked Obama so bad that his approval went from the 20s to the high 30s- low 40s in only 3 days and Americans eventually took HIS side on the Guantanamo and enhanced interrogation debate.
Fox news is up about 40% in ratings since January and climbing.
And now he’s got his sights set on Jim Demint, a JUNIOR SENATOR.
If Obama spent as much time brushing up on policy as he did going after his perceived enemies, he might actually be getting somewhere.
3) He doesn’t understand economics.
Most liberals don’t. But his ignorance of the subject is astounding. Panicking the country and selling his 800 billion dollar stimulus as a jobs creator was probably the most foolish thing he could have done. Every economist in the country said it wouldn’t work to produce jobs. Even radical leftists like Paul Krugman.
Unfortunately, he lacked the political experience to realize that once states were in possession of any money, they would use it to shore up their budgets instead of pouring any capital into “shovel ready” projects. He also seemed clueless about the prospect of people increasing the savings rate w/ the sky falling all around them and holding on to their “tax credits”. With unemployment hovering at around 10%, it’s pretty safe to say he “misread” the economy.
The stimulus and porkulus (combined over 1.2 trillion) was also really an excuse to blindly spend on every single liberal wish list project of the past 40 years. Some of the programs that ended up with money, such as studies on flies and marsh rats, were ridiculous. Again, he should have known this would happen when he allowed Pelosi to write his legislation for him. She routinely stuffs his bills w/ more pork than a Haitian barbeque.
His 50 billion dollar mortgage bailout is a bust so far. In fact, foreclosures have gone up in recent months. Why do you suppose he didn’t anticipate that people who WERE paying their mortgages would simply stop once they knew the government would cover them? He must have missed the lesson on “free riders”.
After throwing away 60 billion on GM, it went bankrupt anyway. Did he not realize that pouring 60 billion into a badly run company would not suddenly make it better? Now he owns it and it will likely continue to bleed our tax dollars away. Making expensive green cars we don’t want.
Noticing a pattern here? He is either completely ignorant or is doing this stuff on purpose. Americans will not respond well to either revelation, and the polls are starting to show it.
It’s why his credibility on the health care issue is waning. Once that 1.6 trillion dollar price tag came out, it was inevitable that Americans would be thinking long and hard about entrusting him w/ that kind of coin for any reason, let alone their health.
4) He doesn’t understand the legislative process.
I know he’s the President. But you have to admit, without that huge majority in Congress, he’d be a pretty ineffective leader. Anytime he needs legislation passed, he goes on the stump, panics everyone, strong-arms it through Congress, and forces it through with NO support from the opposition whatsoever or any kind of deliberation.
This is now coming back to bite him in the rear because when you pass legislation in such a fashion, you claim sole responsibility for it, and if it backfires- you use up political capital at a far faster rate. Any President will tell you that.
Due to the backfire of the Stimulus, Congressional democrats in conservative leaning districts are no longer willing to stick their necks out for him as the country continues to sour on his policies and the unemployment rate continues to rise. He’ll be in the negatives by January, likely sooner, and at that point, there will be political payback for all of his strong arm tactics. Congress has re-election to worry about and will discard him once there are no more coattails to ride.
He’s also starting to feel the pushback on health care reform AND cap and trade-even from members of his own party. Neither of those bills holds up well under scrutiny, so he’s resorting to the same typical Chicago thug tactics. He’s delaying the mid year budget report (I’m guessing the outlook isn’t too rosy), running ads against wavering Democrats in his own party, holding conference calls with liberal bloggers and attack dogs, and fighting w/ junior senators. The law of diminishing returns is starting to kick in for these methods, but I wouldn’t expect anyone with his paltry knowledge of economics to see that. He should also know that trillion dollar deficits over the next decade will make it exceedinlgy difficult to pass any more big spending legislation, which is what he lives by.
5) He’s just not that smart.
Sure he gives a hell of a speech, and has the best teleprompter loaders money can buy. And the Media loves his Ivy league “credentials”. But take a closer look at his resume and you won’t find any legal, professional, or legislative distinctions or accomplishments of any kind. He’s never even run a lemonade stand. Never had to worry about payroll, taxes, compliance, budgets, employees, human resources, or anything remotely business related. His public service skills are even less impressive, having never actually authored any pertinent legislation (he’s a serial co-sponsor). His career has simply been making demands on behalf of the “community” and giving speeches. The best you can probably offer up is that he’s an excellent campaigner.
But what exactly is in his head? How does he do once he’s out of range of that teleprompter?
Watching him struggle at a town hall meeting on health care with a favorable audience, preselected questions, in a primetime slot, with no opposing viewpoints, on a friendly network, I was struck by how tough a time he had defending his own ideas.
It then occurred to me that aside from memorizing the talking points he needs for an issue, he really doesn’t have a clue what actually constitutes whatever it is he’s pushing. It makes sense, of course. He’s never really needed to know anything. His articulate rhetoric always carried him through the day. He’s a front man. Make the speeches, smile for the cameras, and “sell” whatever it is he wants. Aside from properly annunciating “foreign” words and names, he pays ZERO attention to detail, and gets exposed for his lack of depth at the most awkward times. Democrats in Congress have even indicated they have no idea what to rally around on Health Care because he has not given them any direction or firm points on anything. I suspect he doesn’t have any to give.
He might be awesome in a classroom, but he seems pretty ignorant of how things generally work, like Congress, the Stock Market (“it’s a tracking poll”), bankruptcies (Chrysler), markets of any kind, diplomatic protocols (too many gaffes to list), government programs, taxation (more taxes in a recession = stupid), small business, and the economy (deficits, stimulus, cap and trade).
6) He’s a complainer
He has the White House, a filibuster proof Senate, and 59% of the House. He has a fawning media. He’s got a lovestruck Hollywood, and 55% approval.
Yet he’s still blaming Republicans for his failures since taking office. In his mind Republicans are responsible for the stimulus, and for the quagmire in his health care battle. No one likes a whiner as President, especially when that whiner come equipped with EVERYTHING at his disposal to get the job done.
I have a feeling that when the dust settles, Obama will have taken down the entire Democratic brand.
