Category Archives: Barack Obama

UPDATE III: Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense (Hu Vs. Harry)

Barack Obama, China, Debt, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Inflation

Read these interviews on PBS NewsHour with some remarkably astute students of international politics in Beijing, and you’ll conclude that these young Chinese are as patriotic as Americans, and pretty brilliant in their own right: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june11/chinayouth_01-20.html. Says the one student: “Democracy is an absolute value in U.S., but it might be not that absolute in other countries.”

Then read my new WND.COM column, “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense” (http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=253617) in which I conclude, among other things, that President Obama need not be bashed for holding a state dinner in honor of the Chinese President Hu Jintao. “Civility is not a weakness,” said John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address fifty years ago. Obama was civil, not weak.

Here’s an excerpt from “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense” :

“… It so happens that China’s current financial difficulties are a consequence of a self-defeating devotion to the US dollar. America’s monetary policy, aimed at devaluing the dollar, is hurting China, whose currency is pegged to ours. ‘In order to maintain the peg,” explains financier Peter Schiff, ‘China must continually buy dollars on the open market. But the weaker the dollar gets, the more dollars China must buy.'”

So as to keep purchasing greenbacks, China is inflating its own money supply. However, inflation in China and the attendant price hikes — brought about because of the debased dollar — could threaten the stability of a country that has ‘moved more people out of poverty in the shortest amount of time in the history of the planet.'”

Diplomat that he is, China’s head of state refrained from raising this indelicate matter. For that alone, President Hu Jintao deserves dinner.” …

The complete column is “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATE I (Jan. 22): As an outsider in American society—at least this is the way I’m often treated—I’m more sensitive to the way my fellow Americans treat certain Others, other than browns and blacks. If you are a brown or a black, you have it made. Americans generally feel good about themselves when they patronize needy minorities, into which category the Chinese do not neatly fit.

Our one reader, below, emblematic of most, describes Hu Jintao as the same as our politicians. I see this blanket statement as American chauvinism: an inability to look at other peoples and cultures except through the American prism. It pisses me off as much as that big fat mama pissed me off at the gym, when she spoke slowly at me, as she informed me I had done too many sets on a weight-pushing apparatus. Why did she speak to me as one would to a retarded child? Because I spoke back in a different accent to hers. In other words, if one differs from an American, one might as well be from Deep Space.

Has anyone bothered to read a bit about Hu Jintao? You could indeed argue that he is every bit as bad as our lot; but you’d be wrong to ignore how different are his life experience, work background, and education.

Imagine an American politician that isn’t a slimy lawyer, but a hydraulic engineering from “humble origins,” who excelled at school in singing and dancing? Imagine an American politician whose father “was denounced during the Cultural Revolution?

Why not analyze what these differences portend?

Read about the man before you resort to pat pabulum. Among the Chinese I’ve talked to in the US (American citizens who’ve lived through turmoil back in China), Hu Jintao is viewed as a reformer, slowly shepherding a billion people toward peaceful progress as best possible. Chinese, who tend to be statist, seem to think of Hu Jintao as capitalistic.

As observed in “US In The Red And Getting Redder”: “The picture of China to emerge from behind those pretty Chinese screens is complex. The embodiment of feng shui it is not. The trend, however, is unmistakable: China is becoming freer, America less free. The devil is in this detail”:

China has undergone considerable economic restructuring and market reforms, the consequence of which is a 300 million strong Chinese middle class. Poverty levels have receded from “53 percent in 1981 to 8 percent in 2001. Only about a third of the economy is now directly state-controlled. As of 2005, 70 percent of China’s GDP was in the private sector.” The Chinese financial system is duly being liberalized—banking is diversifying and stock markets are developing. Protections for private property rights are being strengthened as well.

UPDATE II: LOOK WHO’S TALKING. Via LewRockwell.com:

“From TSA feel-ups to ubiquitous surveillance cameras, from email and phone eavesdropping to assassination squads, from torture to secret prisons, from a massive expansion in the police state to bigger government in general, from illegal searches and seizures to illegal wars, President Hu questioned the US human rights record.

Oh, wait a minute. It wasn’t that at all. It was this. (Thanks to Ravindran Kuppusamy.)

UPDATE from Daniel Mahaffey:

Hu didn’t mention the US government’s human rights abuses because either a) he is a gentleman who did not wish to insult his host, b) given his own government’s predilections, he doesn’t see the actions of the US government as abusive, or c) as he said in his prepared remarks, governments should not meddle in the affairs of other governments. I don’t tend to quote Christian scripture often, but among the things Jesus of Nazareth said were these two relevant instructions: 1) Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. John 8:7, and 2) Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. Matt 7:5. Perhaps Mr. Obama is unfamiliar with these concepts.

UPDATE III (Jan. 23): Today, The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard raises the issue I raised here yesterday (see “UPDATE I”):

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Mr Hu a ‘dictator’. Is this a remotely apposite term for a self-effacing man of Confucian leanings, whose father was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, who fights a daily struggle against his own hotheads at home, and who will hand over power in an orderly transition next year?”

Barack And The Biblical Job

Barack Obama, Crime, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Hebrew Testament, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Judaism & Jews, The State

Obama’s prose is flowery and facile. But I am told that this is what appeals to a vast number of Americans. “Healing,” having “national conversations,” hoping and dreaming, reaching for the sky and for the best of America: such meaningless meandering turns this writer’s stomach—at least as much as George Bush’s word salads did.

(By the way, Obama’s remarks in Tucson I read thanks to the New York Times’ civilized habit of providing transcripts. Not even the White House website offers text. So much for encouraging literacy. News sites are becoming a nightmare for those of us who still value the written word over the darting image. “Watch the President’s address” is what you get at Fox News’ website, where print is fast being phased out.)

In any event, the president went light on his base. He did not specifically berate the “blood libel” (a good and appropriate usage by Sarah Palin) perpetrated by the Left against the Right after the Tucson tragedy. I will, however, give him a Brownie point for citing my favorite book among the 39 Books of the Hebrew Bible: Job.

As I wrote in “Job: Jewish Individualist”: “The book of Job is still the quintessential theodicy, precisely because it entertains and reconciles the possibility of a fallible God. Then again, Jews have a tradition of arguing with God. Jacob wrestled physically with the angel of God. And Abraham haggled for the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah because he disapproved of the verdict God pronounced upon them. Job, in a manner, also argued with God and prevailed, a very unorthodox concept, considering the times.”

Obama invoked the righteous Job thus: “Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, ‘when I looked for light, then came darkness.’ Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.”

Palin pointed out that “acts like the shootings in Arizona begin and end with the criminals who commit them.” Unlike Palin, however, whose address earlier today rightly and precisely located the source of evil in the individual perpetrator, Obama here refuses to leave it at that, for this is a man who believes in the role of an interventionist central authority to shape society in politically pleasing ways. If you do not believe in free will, and fail to recognize evil in individuals—then you will be more likely to see a role for the State in the transformation of individuals before the fact:

OBAMA: “We must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.”

Look out.

UPDATE II: Bouncing Off the Walls In Arizona (Barack & ‘The Big Lie’)

Barack Obama, Communism, Crime, Fascism, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

If The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf were indeed Jared Lee Loughner’s preferred pamphlets—then we also know this about the young man responsible for shooting six people to death and wounding 12 “outside of a Tucson, Arizona, grocery store”: He is consistent on matters ideological.

Left-liberals like the former White House communications director Anita Dunn (of the Mao Moment) will tell you that their communist heroes share nothing with fascism’s icons. Not true.

“For many decades,” wrote Ayn Rand, “The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property.”

On the other hand, Loughner, who shot US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat, through the head, also liked some good stuff: Animal Farm and We The Living.

And Loughner’s penchant for this YouTube Disturbia portends anger, alienation, even pain.

UPDATE I: SHAPING THE NARRATIVE. Intoning on CNN, Donna Lemon was keen to shape this crime as a function of the hot-bed of political hatred that Arizona has allegedly become. Pima County AZ Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has furnished the necessary hyperbole:

“But again I’d just like to say that when you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain people’s mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I believe has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

Expect this impetus to gather momentum. “Our Overlords Who Art in DC” are worried sick about their own asses. To wit, Speaker John Boehner has suspended the people’s business: a vote to repeal the hulking healthcare bill. Instead, our sovereigns are likely to follow this crime with a rash of laws guaranteeing their safety against The Great Unwashed—at a great cost to said Unwashed.

The Great Unwashed will go along. Fishermen brave treacherous seas to do a job that is the most dangerous on earth, bar that of farmer (Boer) in South Africa. But, no, our elected representatives must be shielded from the vagaries of their relatively easy jobs. Sacred Cows.

Murder is the ultimate evil. Using the political process to steal from some subjects and give to others is also evil. Let us not discount that moral imperative.

What else to expect:

• Draconian security around The Sacred Cows. If one of them deigns to grace the local store again, it will be with a security detail that’ll shut down the store and the suburbs around it.

• Some kind of harm to law-abiding gun owners. No crime against an official can go without doing damage to citizens’ right of self-defense.

• A renewed war on all things Arizona, including on the eminently reasonable immigration-enforcement law, SB 1070.

UPDATE II (Jan. 9): “THE LEFT CRANKS OUT THE BIG LIE.” Via Larry Auster:

Remember when President Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995? Remember when conservatives were blamed for the supposed rash of black church burnings in the late 1990s? Now conservatives and supporters of enforcing U.S. immigration laws are being blamed for the mass murder in Tucson yesterday.
This is the Big Lie, which Hitler, one of its top practitioners, defined as a lie so colossal that “no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” And here is the particular form that the Big Lie takes in the current instance: falsely blaming one’s target for the very thing that you are doing to him.
The left, through its wild charge that “conservative hatred” is responsible for the Tucson mass murder, is spreading hatred of conservatives. The left is actually doing to conservatives what it falsely accuses conservatives of doing to liberals. That is the Big Lie.

AND:

“The media have not bothered to mention some of the more ‘rude and crude’ comments our esteemed ‘Genius in Chief’ Barry has made over the past couple of years. Lines such as, ‘If they bring a knife to a fight, we bring a gun,’ or, ‘We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back,’ [‘Rosa Parks could not be reached for comment’], or his remark that middle-class white Americans ‘cling to guns and religion and dislike of people who are different,’ or, most recently, his shocking comment to Hispanics that they should look at Republicans who oppose amnesty as their ‘enemies’ whom they should ‘punish.’ Naturally, the media do not suggest that Obama has been planting hatred of white conservatives in the hearts of liberals and minorities.”

TSA Solution: Name ‘Em And Shame ‘Em

Barack Obama, Government, Homeland Security, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Terrorism

This week’s column had been titled “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” After all, it is about The Transportation and Security Administration. Thankfully, writers have editors. The following is from “TSA Solution: Name ‘Em And Shame ‘Em,” my new, and newly named, WND.COM column:

“… If Michelle Obama had experienced a gut reaction to the ordeal inflicted by her husband’s administration (begun under his predecessor) on travelers and their tots — she was not letting on. The First Lady, as you know, is in touch with her gut — and the gut of every kid in the country. The FLOTUS of the fat-based initiatives ‘cares’ enough to decide what America’s bloated babes will ingest, but not enough to weigh-in when their bodies are being invaded by state workers. …

… It’s safe to say that the moms of the Fox News Blond Squad were with The FLOTUS. One of these interchangeable females implied that the interminable complainers at the terminals were no more than an insignificant group of noise-makers. Kirsten Powers, a liberal member of that squadron, expressed her satisfaction with the porn protocol. Her sympathies, she said, go out to TSA workers.

Yes, ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.’ On a more cheerful note, let me suggest a theme song to perfectly capture the TSA’s mission and mien. I give you the hip hop band ‘Three 6 Mafia'”: