Public Prefers Obama To Bush Policies

America, Barack Obama, Bush, Economy, Government, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Yet more proof that Americans love a big government: “According to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center, 46 percent said Obama’s path would do more to improve economic conditions in the next few years, compared to 29 percent who said policies put in place by Bush would.”

Don’t take my statement vis-a-vis statism to mean that Bush was less one than is Obama. Not true. The two men exist on the same continuum of statism. Obama has picked up where his buddy Bush left off. My point is simply this: Americans have no aversion to the president who is perceived as more of a big government guy, and is certainly no less of a central planner than was Bush.

In a really strong column I covered the other day, Anne Applebaum encapsulated the singular statism from which Americans suffer:

“…When, through a series of flukes, a crazy person smuggled explosives onto a plane at Christmas, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible. When, thanks to bad luck and planning mistakes, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible again.

In fact, the crazy person was stopped by an alert passenger, not the federal government, and if the oil rig is ever fixed, it will be through the efforts of a private company. Nevertheless, each one of these kinds of events sets off a chain reaction: A new government program is created, experts are hired, new machines are ordered for the airports, and new monitors are sent beneath the ocean. This is how we got the Kafkaesque security network that an extraordinary Washington Post investigation this week calls, quite conservatively, ‘A hidden world, growing beyond control.'”

…this hidden world, with its 1,271 different government security and intelligence organizations and its 854,000 people with top-secret security clearance, is not the creation of a secretive totalitarian cabal; it has been set up in response to public demand. It’s true that the French want to retire early and that the British think health care should be free, but when things go wrong, Americans also write to their representatives in Congress and their commander in chief demanding action. And precisely because this is a democracy [when it was meant to be a republic], Congress and the president respond, pass a law, put up a building.”

[SNIP]

Applebaum’s position, it goes without saying, has been my own for as long as I can remember.

A View Of The Nation

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Feminism, Gender, Media, Pop-Culture

Must I cover the president playing figurative footsie with the nation’s Delphic dames? You already know how much I dislike these idiot women—even more than BHO, whom I find quite funny when he steers clear of things about which he knows nothing: economy, liberty, etc.

Nevertheless, the “charmer-in-chief” (Drudge’s moniker) prattling, as he did on “The View,” about family, race, and pop-culture to these friendly, foolish females (that includes harebrained Hasselbeck) made headlines today. So, it’s news.

One juicy tidbit I did find interesting was BHO’s disclosure that he was not invited to witness the Clinton wedding.

The Death Heads Are Just Dandy

Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, The State, War

The New Individualist’s Spring 2010 edition doesn’t carry one of my columns (The Winter issue featured two), but it has a good, much-needed photo-journalism spread titled “This is War.” Iraqi family homes flatted by SCUDS (ours), streets in the aftermath of stupid bombs (from the US with love), the purest of the pure—the body of a beautiful little girl—washed for burial (“we love ya, democratized Iraqis”).

Scrutinizing the ever-so sad images of war brought back those horrible years during which, in vain it seemed, I pelted my readers with non-stop facts and doses of reality, the kind these images transmit with such ease. I tried the power of the Jewish teachings; these instruct Jews to robustly and actively seek justice; Just War Theory, developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the libertarian axiom, which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors. And I mentioned over and over again the natural law, and what the Founding Fathers provided: “A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition,” I wrote in March 12, 2003, doesn’t, cannot, and must never pursue what Bush is after—a sort of 21st-century Manifest Destiny.”

If you have a moral compass I ask you to patronize moral writers (provided they have talent, of course), not the apologists who supported this wicked foray, and are still unapologetic about it. All of them, I wager, are doing well—walking around, grins on their smug, death-head mugs, their claws dripping with blood, their wallets stuffed with wads, the Empire’s counterfeit currency. Incitement to murder and war profiteering are lucrative occupations in fin de siècle America.

The blowhards and blonds who slithered on their bellies for Bush (still do)—why do you read them? Buy their sick-making “Obama-this; Obama That” Micky-mouse books? (Okay, some like Coulter and Malkin have real talent, but the rest? Nothing but a T & A show all.)

It’s the story of Job, that Hebrew individualist, all over again; the wicked and the foolisher prosper, the righteous suffer, isn’t it?

War Party Inc. Rages At WikiLeaks

Foreign Policy, Glenn Beck, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, War

Here’s how you know the Republicans are the enemies of liberty and justice. Not a word have their megaphones among the media said about “the deaths of tens of thousands,” often at the hands of our forces, revealed in the release, by WikiLeak, “of over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.”

FoxNews focuses on the obscure Iran-extremism connection. Fox would never jeopardize an occupation.

The Washington Times took the side of the administration by choosing to belabor its warnings about the potential harm the truth could do “to those that are in our military, those that are cooperating with our military, and those that are working to keep us safe” (namely the networks of criminals, terrorists, and warlords we are nurturing in that blighted part of the world).

Similarly—and predictably—The War Street Journal zeroed in on the administration’s hunt for a culprit, “Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst charged this month with leaking [the] classified information”— “thousands of military documents published Sunday by WikiLeaks.

I had to switch Glenn off; his sermons sans information are fit for packaging in a cheap, motivational DVD box set. But no, I heard nothing from him either that would indicate that he favored pulling back the curtain to show the facts of this war.

In fascistic fashion, other NEOCONSERVATIVES called for the arrest of the founder of WikiLeaks. “Julian Assange, once described as the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel of cyberspace, is uncompromising in his scrutiny of big business and big government.”

Kudos to Rachel Maddow’s program which told it like it is, with no regard for Obamby’s feelings.

“The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.”

“THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ BEGINS TO EMERGE FROM THE SHADOWS,” writes war correspondent Eric Margolis.

And that’s a good thing.