Dead Man Walking: The President Obama won't be reelected thread. - Page 4

Originally Posted by jimmac

So you think it's going to be a Republican in the Whitehouse next time? May I quote you later?

Originally Posted by Drew63

I think a lot of people are vastly over-estimating the appeal of the likely Republican nominees.

This is a problem they don't really understand. Watching Fox News all the time has a habit of warping your sense of reality.

While its true that many on the left are somewhat disappointed by Obama, that doesn't mean that they are going to sit the election out - especially when confronted by the possibility of President Mitt or Newt.

I think a "sensible", decent, 1970s or 80s era Republican, of the Bob Dole or George H.W. Bush school, would have very good odds of beating Obama. The nut cases and fools I saw pandering to the Israel lobby on TV the other night? Not so much.

And like it or not, Obama can point to some pretty significant accomplishments. Mitt Romney is going to have a lot to explain how making himself rich as Croesus while laying off thousands of workers qualifies him as an expert on Job Creation. And Obama's poll numbers against Gingrich make him a shoo-in for re-election. It'd take a Watergate/Monica Lewinski style scandal to turn them around.

Jus' Sayin'

Originally Posted by Drew63

If you don't see the inherent flaw in this argument, then I predict some severe disappointments in your future.

Originally Posted by FloorJack

God is a socialist anyway trump'

Originally Posted by jimmac

You keep drinking the Kool-Aid and we'll talk after it's over.

The fact that the creation of a liberal dream state coincided, in his view, with the diminution of advancement might make a more reflective man stop and think. Not our president.

The federal government already runs a sprawling, massively redistributionist system of taxes and benefits. The top 1 percent earns about 17 percent of all income and pays about 37 percent of all federal income taxes. By the reckoning of the Heritage Foundations Robert Rector, the welfare system has paid out roughly $16 trillion since the beginning of the War on Poverty. According to Cornell economist Richard Burkhauser, once tax policy, transfer payments and the like are taken into account, all income groups have gained since the late 1970s.

But President Obama implied that some people are poor because other people are rich, an assumption of class antagonism antithetical to the American idea and tenuously connected to the evidence.

Consider a concrete example. The presidents former top budget official, Peter Orszag, departed the administration to work at Citigroup for $2 million to $3 million a year. Putting aside the seemliness and the merits of Orszags pay and that of his cohorts on Wall Street, how does his paycheck make it harder for anyone else to get ahead? Orszags income doesnt increase out-of-wedlock childbearing, incarceration or lack of work effort all significant obstacles to advancement up the income scale.

If inequality were foreclosing opportunity, wed have seen steadily declining mobility since the late 1970s. Scott Winship of the Brookings Institution, an expert in this area, says that, as near as we can tell, the data dont bear that out. We are sticky at the bottom, meaning we have trouble getting people out of the bottom fifth, but that has been a long-standing failing. Its not the product of a new zero-sum dynamic where Reverse Robin Hoods are pillaging the poor.

Originally Posted by Drew63

In January of 1983 Ronald Reagan had a positive Job Approval rating of 37%. And yet he went on to win one of the biggest re-election landslides in history.

In January 1991, George H.W. Bush had a stratospheric positive approval rating (79%) - and yet he was defeated that fall by Bill Clinton.

Lesson: Don't slice up polls a year ahead of time and come up with a conclusion that is, to quote Nate Silver, is "bigger than the sum of its parts." Don't take isolated facts (ie. people are unhappy about the economy and the direction the country is going) and decide that Obama is toast. A lot can happen between now and next November. And most importantly, remember that the election basically comes down to a personal "hiring decision" made by millions of Americans. They have to decide between someone who may not, in their opinion, have done a very good job - and somebody who may - again in their opinion - make things worse. If the history of Presidential Elections tells us anything (71% re-election of sitting Presidents of either party) is that a lot of people make the choice to stay the course.

Once the Republican nominee is decided, and there is more "granular" polling data, showing the preferences of likely voters on a state-by-state basis, is the time that one can start making more scientific predictions.

Originally Posted by SDW2001

It's unwise to underestimate him, though. There are many things going for whomever the GOP nominee is, but Obama has several advantages of his own:

1) The media is running a "full court press" for him (trump's term).
2) He's going to spend $1 billion dollars on his campaign.
3) He will claim that he saved the economy from recession and that unemployment is coming down. 4) He will take credit for victories on terrorism, bin Laden and such.

All that said, the economy, unemployment, debt and deficits, foreign relations (particularly with Israel) and his personal demeanor are all major negatives. If the GOP candidate runs a good campaign and there are no major unforseen events (like Ron Paul running as third party candidate, or a large geopolitical event) Obama is likely to be a one-termer.

A year ago this week, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered. He died protecting his country from brutal Mexican gangsters. Two AK-47 assault rifles were found at his death site. We now know the horrifying truth: Agent Terry was killed by weapons that were part of an illegal Obama administration operation to smuggle arms to the dangerous drug cartels. He was a victim of his own government. This is not only a major scandal; it is a high crime that potentially reaches all the way to the White House, implicating senior officials. It is President Obamas Watergate.

Operation Fast and Furious was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and overseen by the Justice Department. It started under the leadership of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Fast and Furious enabled straw gun purchases from licensed dealers in Arizona, in which more than 2,000 weapons were smuggled to Mexican drug kingpins. ATF claims it was seeking to track the weapons as part of a larger crackdown on the growing violence in the Southwest. Instead, ATF effectively has armed murderous gangs. About 300 Mexicans have been killed by Fast and Furious weapons. More than 1,400 guns remain lost. Agent Terry likely will not be the last U.S. casualty.

Mr. Holder insists he was unaware of what took place until after media reports of the scandal appeared in early 2011. This is false. Such a vast operation only could have occurred with the full knowledge and consent of senior administration officials. Massive gun-running and smuggling is not carried out by low-level ATF bureaucrats unless there is authorization from the top. There is a systematic cover-up.

Congressional Republicans, however, are beginning to shed light on the scandal. Led by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Rep. Darrell Issa of California, a congressional probe is exposing the Justice Departments rampant criminality and deliberate stonewalling. Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, who heads the departments criminal division, helped craft a February letter to Congress that denied ATF had ever walked guns into Mexico. Yet, under pressure from congressional investigators, the department later admitted that Mr. Breuer knew about ATF gun-smuggling as far back as April 2010. In other words, Mr. Breuer has been misleading Congress. He should resign - or be fired.

Instead, Mr. Holder tenaciously insists that Mr. Breuer will keep his job. He needs to keep his friends close and potential witnesses even closer. Another example is former acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson. Internal documents show Mr. Melson directly oversaw Fast and Furious, including monitoring numerous straw purchases of AK-47s. He has admitted to congressional investigators that he, along with high-ranking ATF leaders, reassigned every manager involved in Fast and Furious after the scandal surfaced on Capitol Hill and in the press. Mr. Melson said he was ordered by senior Justice officials to be silent regarding the reassignments. Hence, ATF managers who possess intimate and damaging information - especially on the role of the Justice Department - essentially have been promoted to cushy bureaucratic jobs. Their silence has been bought, their complicity swept under the rug. Mr. Melson has been transferred to Justices main office, where he serves as a senior adviser on forensic science in the departments Office of Legal Policy. Rather than being punished, Mr. Melson has been rewarded for his incompetence and criminal negligence.

Mr. Holder and his aides have given misleading, false and contradictory testimony on Capitol Hill. Perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power - these are high crimes and misdemeanors. Mr. Holder should be impeached. Like most liberals, he is playing the victim card, claiming Mr. Issa is a modern-day Joseph McCarthy conducting a judicial witch hunt. Regardless of this petty smear, Mr. Holder must be held responsible and accountable - not only for the botched operation, but for his flagrant attempts to deflect blame from the administration.

Mr. Holder is a shameless careerist and a ruthless Beltway operative. For years, his out-of-control Justice Department has violated the fundamental principle of our democracy, the rule of law. He has refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panthers for blatant voter intimidation that took place in the 2008 election. Career Justice lawyers have confessed publicly that Mr. Holder will not pursue cases in which the perpetrators are black and the victims white. States such as Arizona and Alabama are being sued for simply attempting to enforce federal immigration laws. Mr. Holder also opposes voter identification cards, thereby enabling fraud and vote-stealing at the ballot box. What else can we expect from one who, during the Clinton administration, helped pardon notorious tax cheat Marc Rich and Puerto Rican terrorists?

Mr. Holder clearly knew about Fast and Furious and did nothing to stop it. This is because the administration wanted to use the excuse of increased violence on the border and weapons-smuggling into Mexico to justify tighter gun-control legislation. Mr. Holder is fighting ferociously to prevent important internal Justice documents from falling into the hands of congressional investigators. If the full nature of his involvement is discovered, the Obama presidency will be in peril.

Fast and Furious is even worse than Watergate for one simple reason: No one died because of President Nixons political dirty tricks and abuse of government power. But Brian Terry is dead; and there are still 1,500 missing guns threatening still more lives.

What did Mr. Obama know? Massive gun-smuggling by the U.S. government into a foreign country does not happen without the explicit knowledge and approval of leading administration officials. Its too big, too risky and too costly. Mr. Holder may not be protecting just himself and his cronies. Is he protecting the president?

A new national poll of 18- to 29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics released Thursday showed that in an open-ended question --- meaning without prompting by the question -- 74 percent of respondents cited the economy as the most important issue.

On that issue, only 32 percent approve of the way President Obama is handling the economy.

- Obama’s job performance rating among America’s 18- to 29-year-olds is at its lowest point since the IOP began polling on the Obama administration in 2009.

- The president still leads the generic Republican nominee in a mock matchup by six percentage points, but that lead his shrinking.

- Mitt Romney does best among the Republican presidential candidates in a general election matchup against the president, but still trails Obama by 11 points.

- Only one-third of 18- to 29-year-olds are closely following Occupy Wall Street, and even fewer -- about one-fifth -- support the movement.

We are all Americans, all endowed with an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, and most of us with aspirations to the American Dream of upward economic mobility. When you hate your neighbor because of his success, you shred our national fabric. Barack Obama may want to go down that road, but most of the rest of the nation properly finds his intentional attempts to divide us somewhere between dubious and abhorrent.

As Gallup notes, "Americans as a whole are no more likely to see the country as divided into haves and have nots than at any time in the past two decades." This is bad news for Barack Obama and other Democrats running for reelection in 2012. Their siren song of divide-and-conquer is falling flat on the ears of the majority of Americans. But the annoying political tinnitus is awakening the real sleeping giant -- those Americans who recognize that our nation did not become great by thinking like V.I. Lenin, Che Guevara, or Chairman Mao.

Originally Posted by jazzguru



As long as people continue to prefer "comforting lies" to "unpleasant truths", we won't get the leadership we need in this country.

Originally Posted by tonton

What, comforting lies, like there's no global warming, or that cutting taxes and deregulation isn't what led to this mess we're in? Yeah, good luck with that!

Originally Posted by tonton

This post shows just how irreversibly divided we are. You think Obama's foreign policy decisions with regard to bin laden and Pakistan are praiseworthy, and I think they're condemnable.

You praise him for extending the Bush tax cuts and I think that's his absolute fucking worst domestic polcy decision, and went totally against what he promised to do.

You think the stimulus failed because that type of measure doesn't work, and I (and most notable economists) think it failed because it wasn't enough.

You think he failed at keeping troops in Iraq and I think he failed at getting them out earlier. You think Obama is too tough on Israel and I think he's been a fucking pussy against that evil government. You think he didn't lead on Lybia, and I think the Americans seeded the resistance movement and should never have done that and in fact should have kept the fuck out of Lybia. You say tomato and I say toe-fucking-bullshit.

We can never agree when there's so much division. The country is fucked.

That his brilliance is a myth was not just revealed by the weekly lapses (whether phonetic [corpse-man], or cultural [Austria/Germany, the United Kingdom/England, Memorial Day/Veterans Day] or inane [57 states]), but in matters of common sense and basic history. The error-ridden Cairo speech was foolish; the serial appeasement of Iran revealed an ignorance of human nature; a two-minute glance at an etiquette book would have nixed the bowing or the cheap gifts to the UK.

In short, the myth of Obama’s brilliance was based on his teleprompted eloquence, the sort of fable that says we should listen to a clueless Sean Penn or Matt Damon on politics because they can sometimes act well.

The truth? The Obamites — Jarrett, Axelrod, Emanuel, etc. — were hard-core partisan dividers, who had a history of demonizing enemies, suing to eliminate opponents, and leaking divorce records, in addition to the usual Chicago campaign protocols.

If one were to collate the Obama record on race (from Eric Holder’s “my people” and “cowards” to Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” and Van Jones’s racist rants), it is the most polarizing in a generation. The Obama way is and always was to create horrific straw men: opponents of health care reform are greedy doctors who want to rip out your tonsils; opponents of tax increases jet off to Vegas to blow their children’s tuition money; skeptics of Solyndra-like disasters want to dirty the air; those against open borders wish to put alligators and moats in the Rio Grande as they round up children at ice cream parlors.

The notion that there was anything in Obama’s past or present temperament to suggest a political reformer was mythological to the core. Almost all his prior elections relied on a paradigm of attacking his opponents rather than defending his own record, from the races for the legislature to the U.S. Senate. He shook down Wall Street as no one had before or since — and well after the September 2008 meltdown. He was the logical expression of the Chicago/Illinois system of Tony Rezko, Blago, and the Daleys, not its aberration — from the mundane of expanding his yard to melting down opponents by leaking sealed divorce records.

We will never know much about Fast and Furious, and even less about Greengate. Obama — and this was clever rather than brilliant — gauged rightly that not only would liberals’ hysteria about ethics cease when he brought them to power, but in a strange way they would grin that one of their own had out-hustled the supposed right-wing hustlers.

There was never a peep that Obama’s present anti-terrorism protocols — Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, Predators, the Patriot Act, preventative detention — came from George Bush. Much less did we hear that had Bush for a nanosecond ever listened to the demagoguery of then state legislator and later senator Obama, none of these tools would presently exist. How did what was superfluous, unconstitutional, and possibly illegal in 2008 become vital in 2011?

Ditto the Iraq War. We went in a blink from the surge that failed and made things worse and all troops must be out by March 2008 to Iraq was a shining example of American idealism and commitment. It was as if the touch-and-go, life-and-death gamble between February 2007 and January 2009 in Iraq never had existed. Bombing Libya was not warlike, and those who sued Bush on Iraq and Guantanamo now filed briefs to prove that we were not at war killing Libyan thugs. We hear only of reset; never that Obama has now simply abandoned all his “Bush-did-it” policies and is quietly going back to the Bush consensus on Russia, Iran, Syria, and the Middle East in general. We will not only never see Guantanamo closed or KSM tried in a civilian court, but never hear why not. Are we to applaud the hypocrisy as at least better than continued ignorance?

On the domestic front, we are forever frozen on September 15, 2008. There is never an Obama sentence that the Freddie/Fannie machinations (both agencies were routinely plundered for bonuses by ex-Clinton flunkies) gave a green light to Wall Street greed — much less that both empowered public recklessness either to flip houses or to buy a house without credit worthiness or any history of thrift. Did we ever hear that between the meltdown and the inauguration, there were four months of frantic stabilization that, by the time of Obama’s ascendancy, had ensured that the panic had largely passed? Instead, blowing $5 trillion in three years is to be forever the response to the ongoing and now multiyear Bush crash, all to justify a “never waste a crisis” reordering of society.