Category Archives: Republicans

Correction, Gov. Christie: It’s Obama The Liar Talking

Barack Obama, Education, Healthcare, Intelligence, Media, Morality, Propaganda, Republicans

“That’s Barack Obama the lawyer talking” was the crappy Chris Christie’s explanation to the attempts of the president to finesse the lies he told at least 24 times about his subjects’ ability to hang on to their health-care.

Correction Gov. Christie: It’s Obama the liar talking.

CNN knows who to go to in order to bolster the narrative that the nitwork has been promoting: The Anointed One merely misspoke when he roared repeatedly, from 2009 through to 2012:

“If you like your health care plan, you will keep it. Or, “If you got health insurance and you like your plan and like your doctor, you will keep your plan, you will keep your doctor.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper is obviously—and energetically—collecting affidavits for his nitwork’s favorite man. Who else to galvanize but a character like New Jersey Gov. Christie, who is an expert at lying about lying? Here’s what that mountain of opportunistic flesh told Tapper:

“Don’t be so cute,” Christie said. “And when you make a mistake, admit it. Listen, if he was mistaken in 2009, 2010 on his understanding of how the law would operate, then just admit it to people. Say, ‘You know what? I said it, I was wrong. I’m sorry and we’re going to try to fix this and make it better.’ I think people would give any leader in that circumstance a lot of credit for just, you know, owning up to it.”

Tapper referenced Obama’s revision last night of his “if you like your plan, you can keep it” pledge.

“Don’t lawyer it,” Christie continued. “People don’t like lawyers. I’m a lawyer. They don’t like ‘em. You know? Don’t lawyer it. When I saw that this morning—I saw that this morning for the first time, and I thought, he’s lawyering it. That’s Barack Obama the lawyer.”

I love the way everyone reverentially alludes to the president’s former profession, as though he was anything but a lawyer with no private-practice or scholarly achievements, and a subpar university teacher with bad ratings from students:

During his 12 years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Law School, [Obama’s] student-approval ratings were low. In fact, he was one of the lowest ranked professors in his last 5 years at the university. As we already know … [Barack Obama] left no record of legal scholarly writings.

Curse of Chucky Krauthammer

Media, Neoconservatism, Republicans, War

Fox News is energetically marketing the neoconservative warmonger, Chucky Krauthammer. A generally “fair and balanced” newsman, Fox News’ Bret Baier turned positively obsequious in his Krauthammer coverage, making a song-and-dance of disclosing their close friendship. It’s all so incestuous, isn’t it?

When it comes to spying on Americans, Charles Krauthammer sees Obama’s NSA, 4th Amendment infractions as a vindication of Bush’s. The columnist has invited Democrats now excusing Obama to pardon Bush and … party on.

“After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer quickly scolded ‘the media” for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown. Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer.”

Like all “neocon artists”—they were once radical leftists and are still hardcore Jacobins—on the invasion of Iraq, Krauthammer dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage. Neocons had dismissed and maligned the Old Right (that’s us) and rubbished generals and government officials who warned against that war: Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Secretary of the Army Thomas White, former general and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft; former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf; former NATO Commander Wesley Clark; former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, and Marine Corps Commandant James Jones: all were cool to the war. Retired General Anthony Zinni, distinguished warrior, diplomat and card-carrying Republican, warned Congress against the “wrong war at the wrong time.” The neocons dismissed them all as “yesterday’s men.”

From anti-discrimination legislative attacks on private property and First Amendment rights to the promotion of “large-scale Third World immigration” that displaces “Western core populations by groups that are culturally different and, in some cases, openly antagonistic”—the neocons are in philosophical tandem with The Left.
… these “illiterate leftists posturing as conservatives,” as Paul Gottfried has dubbed them, have been partial to—even complicit in—the historical elevation of Martin Luther King Jr. above the Founding Fathers. Neocons are always eager to conflate the messages of the two solitudes, even though the founders’ liberty is related to King’s egalitarianism as neoconservatism is related to traditional Republicanism—never the twain shall meet.

About the “sage of Fox News,” Jack Kerwick has reminded me of Krauthammer’s admission, as late as the eve of the 2008 election, that neither he nor George Will could figure out who Obama was: a centrist or a leftist. This, ventures Kerwick, speaks volumes. How anyone could’ve doubted that O was anything but a radical leftist, especially after the Jeremiah Wright thing blew up, is unfathomable. Jack thinks “Krauthammer and co. have zero business doing what they’re doing if they are that blind. And, of course, they got the country into Iraq.”

As to Chucky’s prose. He writes decently enough, but I am never curious enough to complete a column of his. It’s as unexciting as he is.

Chucky Krauthammer is a failed “expert,” for whom public goodwill runs eternal. “So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while neoconservative false prophets are called back for encores?” This last question was posed and answered in “PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!”:

The answer will not please admirers of the late James Burnham, who blame scheming elites for any popularly accepted project they dislike, be it unwarranted wars or welfare. Contrary to Burnham, elites, media included, can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please – not inform – the populace.

UPDATED: Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work

Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Objectivism, Private Property, Republicans

“Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

At every opportunity, Jedediah Bila, a regular among the pig-ignorant panelists paraded on the Fox News and Business channels, parroted Bill O’Reilly’s “not ready for prime time” line. The premise of that fatuity is that given time, Obamacare could be readied for prime time.

A “scandal” bleated another cipher in a skirt—a Republican, naturally—about the error-riddled Obamacare website, when she should have been explaining that HealthCare.gov not working is no more a “scandal” than waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid, perpetrated by program administrators, program recipients, elected and unelected officials alike.

Failure and fraud is business as usual in government.

Liberals are incapable of grasping economic truths. That goes without saying. But why are “conservatives” every bit as dumb about the dynamics in a nationalized enterprise as opposed to the workings of a market society? Republicans appear incapable of articulating why it is that centrally planned systems fail.

The gold standard for stupid is this Republican riff: “Government would work much better if it were run like a business.” It is in violation of the Law of Identity. A is A. Things are what they are. Government is government; it is not business. The task of a rational man, advised Ayn Rand, is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it.

Rep. Fred Upton does Jedediah Bila one better. “Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars [have been] spent for a system that still does not work,” complained the Republican from Michigan.

Wrong. Government spends trillions of taxpayer dollars on systems that don’t work (the military included). That’s what government does by definition; by virtue of being government.

The problem is not so much the 55 contractors involved in designing Barack Obama’s signature Web portal, but the Central Planning Board that selected inept coders—and the kinky incentives to which any federal agency in charge will subject any and all contractors under its control.

The same web developers generally do a great job on each of our personal computers; in other words, when handling private property. If they don’t …

Read the complete column. “Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work” is now on WND.

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UPDATE (10/24): To add to the litany in “Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work,” show me a company in the private sector (which is not the recipient of government handouts) that is shielded from bankruptcy. An audit would reveal that most government departments, the Obamacare bureaucracy included, are insolvent. Yet the fact that the taxpayer is forced to bankroll them indefinitely with tax dollars, immunizes these systems against all forms of accountability, fiscal and other.

You have to be a dimwit to want care from such an establishment.

The Goldberg Variation*

Conservatism, Debt, Neoconservatism, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Republicans

This response, written by National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, arrived in my email In-Box. This is the first time I’ve received a mass mailing from Mr. Goldberg. It would appear that Jonah Goldberg was somewhat exercised about the reactions to his expected flippancy about the tea party’s “quixotic debt-ceiling showdown.”

Although he harps on the responses aimed at him on Twitter, those are not worth a straw. Pat Buchanan’s veiled allusion to Mr. Goldberg’s ilk, on the other hand, is likely a different matter. In “The ‘We Can’t Win’ Wimps Caucus,” Pat writes the following:

“We told you you would lose!” wail the beltway bundlers of the Republican establishment.

“We told you you would lose!” moan neoconservative columnists from their privileged perches on the op-ed pages of the beltway press.

“Look at what Ted Cruz and these tea-party people did to us,” wails the GOP establishment. “Look what has happened to our brand.” And 2014 was looking wonderful.

What a basket of wimps.

My column, of course, mentions names:

Media conservatives and liberals were agreed. The Republican brand, as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg put it, had been damaged by the debt-ceiling standoff.

Chuckie Krauthammer, another phony conservative, concurred. After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer scolded “the media” for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown.

Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer

Read “What If The Media Were Moral?” on Economic Policy Journal, the preeminent libertarian website.

*****

* “The Goldberg Variations”: “‘The Goldberg Variations’ is the last of a series of [sublime] keyboard music Bach published under the title of Clavierübung …”