Great op-ed by Rep. Lamar Smith in the Politico.

If President Barack Obama could snap his fingers and create 8 million new jobs, would you want him to do it? I would. And certainly the 15 million unemployed Americans would, as well.

The good news is that the president can do just that — implement a policy that opens up 8 million jobs. The bad news is that he won’t.

In this respect, at least, the country would be better off if Obama really did have brilliant oratorical skills.

- Taranto, in discussing the President’s West Point speech (H/T: Instapundit).

Truth of the matter is, while the President is great at inspiring people who want to be inspired, he’s not that good at persuading people who don’t want to be, or who are going to be in opposition to what he wants them to do.  This would be less of a problem for the man if he weren’t a fairly typical bicoastal, Ivy League-educated academic who has been operating in one or another gentle bubble of privilege since the age of ten*.  Said bubbles do in fact teach many valuable life lessons.  Learning to handle fundamental disagreement on core issues is typically not one of them.

Ach, well, it’s not like I need the man to succeed (or fail!) to feel good about myself.

Moe Lane

*Although I do give him props for working in a Baskin Robbins while in high school.  Admittedly, if he’s held a real job since then, it’s news to me.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Here is what Barack Obama said last night:

It’s enough to say that for the next six years, the Iraq war drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention — and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world.

Though filled with other assertions and outright lies that Bush dropped the ball in Afghanistan, Obama was rather respectful.

That was yesterday. My, my how 24 hours makes a difference.

Sent from Barack Obama’s campaign team at barackobama.com, I got this note from Joe Biden tonight about the Obama policy in Afghanistan:

It’s a clean break from the failed Afghanistan policy of the Bush administration, and a new, focused strategy that can succeed.

Graceless, tasteless, and an outright lie.

By the way, wasn’t it Barack Obama who chaired the Senate’s sub-committee dealing with the Afghan War from 2006-2008? And how many hearings did he have on the matter? If you answered zero, you would be correct.

Handed a top-to-bottom review of, and a revised strategy for, this long-ignored front in the Global War on Terror by the outgoing Bush administration, President Barack Obama stepped to the microphone in February and gave a platitudinous speech that echoed precisely what his predecessor had said in the last months of his own presidency. When that speech alone failed to miraculously make the war in Afghanistan simply go away, Obama spent months dithering over whether or not he should give another Afghan strategy speech (as American troops and Afghan civilians were dying at a rate higher than they had been at any point in the conflict).

Finally, when the problem again refused to just go away on its own, Obama succumbed to public demand that he actually say something about the troops, and the war, he has responsibility for in Afghanistan as America’s commander in chief. Fortunately, he had amazing resources (besides brilliant military brass like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal) to rely on in his decision-making process in the form of a host of lessons learned over the last six years in Iraq. With so recent an example of so much not to do in a war, Obama couldn’t help but learn from previous mistakes and make a sound decision on Afghanistan….right?

If only we were so lucky as to have a President who actually recognized that history existed before January 20, 2009 — something that he and his administration simply refuse to do (with the sole exception to that rule being the amazingly unprofessional and unpresidential non-stop banging of the “blame-everything-on-my-predecessor” drum).

Stepping to the microphone last night at West Point, President Barack Obama, Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces (and supposedly extraordinarily intelligent individual), laid out a strategy for Afghanistan that embraced every single thing that went wrong in Iraq over the last six years (particularly the bloody 2004-06 period), and that avoided implementing any of the tactics that actually made that western front in the GWOT the rousing success it is today.

Pull back to large bases and defend only major cities? Check. Send too few troops to protect themselves and the civilian population — let alone to successfully defeat the enemy while building necessary infrastructure and supporting a new, issue-plagued government? Check. (This is yet another major issue, as Afghanistan is geographically larger and more forbidding than Iraq, which is the size of California to Afghanistan’s Texas — not even mentioning the Hindu Kush mountains.) Fail to accompany that increase in troop levels with a workable change in strategy, designed to maximize those troops’ effectiveness and to accomplish a clearly defined mission (rather than simply sending over more American men and women to serve as cannon fodder)? Check. Fail to clearly define the mission in the first place, and to define victory in any way? Check. Demand that members of the indigenous population put themselves and their families at risk standing beside a force that they suspect will be abandoning them to severe repercussions in the near future? Check. Provide timelines to the enemy, so that they know how long it will be before the one superior fighting force in that nation will be departing, and leaving the country to them once again? Check.

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I’ve said before that Google was treading dangerously near to hypocrisy in the contrast between its promoted public policy and its own internal policy, but now the large, wealthy firm has gone well over the line.

Google is a widely outspoken proponent of the Obama administration’s Net Neutrality plan. At the core of this plan are two “principles” outlined by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. First is the principle of neutrality that “would prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management,” as Genachowski has said. The second is the principle of transparency that “would ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.”

Conveniently, the same two principles Google wants private ISPs to meet, Google itself flagrantly ignores, even though Google’s market power gives their actions more effect than the actions of any ISP. Take the case of Studio Briefing to see Google ignoring both principles of the Net Neutrality push.

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Erick wasn’t the only one who noticed that the President’s speech last night contained no use of the word ‘victory:’ Andrew Malcolm over at the LA Times’ blog observed that, too.

President Obama spoke 4,582 words in his primetime Afghanistan war speech at West Point last night.

He said “al Qaeda” 22 times.

He mentioned the “Taliban” 12 times.

And here’s how many times the Democratic chief executive used the word “victory” — 0.

That telling omission says more than anything about Obama’s 322d day in office when he gave his first major address as the United States’ commander-in-chief.

Mind you, I’m not particularly surprised. The ostensible audience for this speech - the cadets - already know more about victory than the President (or for that matter, me) could hope to tell them; and the actual audience (the progressive antiwar Democratic base) reacts to that particular word in much the same way that a traditional vampire reacts to a cross.  Apparently, that means that mentioning ‘victory’ would be superfluous in the first place, and contraindicated in the second.  At least to this administration.

All that being said: Saying “We have been at war for eight years, at enormous cost in lives and resources,” in front of a room full of people who have been taught about Shiloh and Okinawa?  There’s a Presidential speechwriter out there who could use firing.

Moe lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

In another triumph of openness for the Hopenchange™ administration, the secret negotations of the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement (ACTA) continue. And according to Wired, they’re not going well for the President. A note from the EU to the US was leaked and published to a European website, and it exposes two facts. First, Hollywood isn’t content to have gotten two expansions of copyright in the 1976 Copyright Act, which extended copyright about thirty years, and the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which extended it about another twenty years on top of that. It wants to gain, through treaty, even more tilting of the scales of copyright, and according to the EU, the Obama adminstration is negotiating purely with Hollywood’s interests in mind.

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The House GOP Conference sent this along to me.

The White House will convene a “jobs summit” tomorrow against a backdrop of rising unemployment, soaring debt, and declining public confidence in the Obama Administration’s economic program. Washington Democrats staked their credibility on a nearly trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ that was supposed to be about putting people back to work, but has instead produced countless examples of wasteful government spending while more than three million more Americans have lost their jobs. Even the accounting methods designed to keep track of the ‘stimulus’ have been widely discredited. Given the last 11 months of outrageous ‘stimulus’ claims, the American people are right to wonder whether Washington Democrats can be trusted to create jobs and cut the deficit:

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After a week of media ridicule over Barack Obama calling everything he does from flushing the Oval Office toilet to sneering at the press “unprecedented,” he wisely did not use that word in front of West Point graduates — soldiers who have been trained to repel the invading hordes of British soldiers, fight a Civil War, two world wars, etc.

Nonetheless, there was an interesting word choice used by one of Obama’s sycophants in the media. NewsBusters notes Chris Matthews of MSNBC referred to West Point as “the enemy camp.” Matthews said, “He went to maybe the enemy camp tonight to make his case. I mean, that’s where Paul Wolfowitz used to write speeches for, back in the old Bush days. That’s where he went to rabble rouse the “we’re going to democratize the world” campaign back in ‘02. So, I thought it was a strange venue.”

Classy.

President Obama’s big speech announcing, after three months of indecision, that he will give Gen. McChrystal only three-quarters of the 40,000 additional troops the general told Obama he needed to achieve victory in Afghanistan left a lot to be desired.

Like Obama has done with issue after issue, his new “strategy ” for the War in Afghanistan tries to have it both ways. Obama’s strategy is a Bush-like surge, but with a timetable for ending, not winning the war.

I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

I have been an unrepentant supporter of the war, but a war our leaders are not willing to fight to win, is not a war we should fight.

Obama said he made his have it both ways decision because our national security is at stake:

I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

How can the Commander-in-Chief put a time limit on fighting for our national security?

I do not know if I can continue to support a war effort that Obama previously referred to as a “necessary war” and now calls a “vital national interest,” but is nevertheless only willing to continue for 18 more months. If it is necessary and vital should we not be willing to carry on until we are victorious?

Barack Obama spoke at West Point tonight on the issue of Afghanistan. In 4608 words, he did not once mention the word “victory” and the closest he came to using the word “win” was those three letters appearing in the word “withdrawing.”

True to form, Obama spent most of his speech decrying the Bush administration going into Iraq. He said — a lie — that “Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive.” The historic record shows that George Bush never denied commanders in Afghanistan the support they requested.

The historic record shows that Barack Obama is not even granting McChrystal the General’s preferred troop level. McChrystal wanted 40,000 troops to 80,000 troops. So Bush gave the Generals in Afghanistan everything they wanted, despite Obama saying he did not, and Obama is not giving his General what was requested, despite claiming he is.

The historic record also shows that Barack Obama, despite his denials tonight, very clearly dithered on General McChrystal’s request, waiting more than ninety days to make a decision and prolonging action for at least another thirty days — mischaracterizing McChrystal’s request in an effort to save face and, yet again, defend himself from Dick Cheney.

That Obama even had to say “there has never been an option before me that called for troop deployments before 2010, so there has been no delay or denial of resources necessary for the conduct of the war” is proof of just how powerful and resonate Dick Cheney is. How many times now has Dick Cheney gotten the best of Barack Obama? I’ve lost count.

The man who publicly opposed the surge in Iraq is now committing to a surge in Afghanistan, while still attacking the policy in Iraq. The key part of the Iraq strategy that Obama is attacking was the open ended surge in Iraq (nevermind that Obama refuses to use the word “surge”).

Proving yet again that he is a rank amateur, Obama intends to have a surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, but concurrently announce the timeline for their withdrawal. This is akin to announcing to burglars exactly the time at which you intend to depart your house and also announcing you intend to turn off the burglar alarm. Al Qaeda will just wait us out. They’ll only need to wait a year. The men who spent years planning 9/11 are more patient than this President who wants instant gratification in a never ending campaign.

And that is, at the end of the day, what this was — not the speech of a Commander-in-Chief to his troops, but a campaign speech at time of falling poll numbers because of his dithering, trying to blame the other guy.

Only, there is no other guy now. There is only Barack Obama. A man who sees no special role for America in the world and a moral equivalence between good and evil.

Note this curious line from Obama’s speech:

And we must make it clear to every man, woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights, and tend to the light of freedom, and justice, and opportunity, and respect for the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are. That is the moral source of America’s authority.

Notice he is actually saying we will do nothing. We will talk and we will keep the light on — the policy equivalent of operating a Motel 6. Our President views the nation as he is himself — a smooth talker with no actual action. Barack Obama wants an America that talks a good game, but won’t actually get its hands dirty.

Lastly, Barack Obama said, “We have not always been thanked for these efforts, and we have at times made mistakes.” What mistakes exactly? And why tell our soldiers that, in essence, they have made mistakes?

In the years after 9/11, George Bush made sure no terrorist attacks have occurred on American soil. The naive fool who replaced him seems to think the preferable policy is to preemptively announce we have no ambition for victory while broadcasting the code for the burglar alarm.

Since taking office, Barack Obama’s casualty count is nearly DOUBLE that of George Bush’s worst year as Commander in Chief. God help our troops. It’s amateur hour still at the White House.

When I was on Hannity a couple of weeks ago, we got into over the Afghan policy delay and a few other things. I said it was amateur hour at the White House.

These guys have no clue how to run a government or a White House. Brian over at the Conservatives has more.

The White House Social Secretary just sets an extra table at dinners because they never know who is going to show up. Seriously? What part of making a list for security do these people not understand?

We know from Bush admin holdovers who quit in frustration that the White House staff does not care who got in. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn a White House staffer bullied the Secret Service into adding the Salahis couple to the list.

Let’s be clear: this story is not about the Salahis couple. This story is now about just how amateurish the White House is. Barack Obama has done his best to let the world know he does not care about the safety and security of the United States and he is now broadcasting to every John Wilkes, Charles, Leon, and Lee Harvey that he does not care about his own security either.

The sad thing is, in Obama’s self absorption, he forgets there are men and women who surround him who do care about his safety and he and his staff are making their lives even more difficult and dangerous.

A friend of mine told me about a meeting he had with Goldman Sachs’ CEO in Atlanta at the beginning of the year. Someone asked the CEO what he thought of the new Obama administration. The CEO admitted he voted for Obama, but then said how stunned he was at lack of advisors surrounding Obama who had come from the private sector.

In fact, a new study shows Obama has fewer advisors who’ve made a living in the private sector than any other American President in the last 108 years — since the turn of the 20th century when the business of America became business.

This is not to say that the Chief Executive should have private sector experience. And this is not to say that the Chief Executive should employ only people from the private sector. But it is to say that we should not trust a Chief Executive to know how to fix the private sector or “create competition” in health care when there is hardly a person near him who knows anything about job creation.

That is the key. More Americans than every before are on government handouts and the Democrats intend to take over 1/6th of the American economy — health care. This is an administration that has no understanding of and no commitment to the free market and the private sector, both of which are, at best, academic studies to ninety percent of Obama’s top advisors.

The Republican Party should be able to exploit this issue. The American people, at the end of the day, believe in, work in, and want to support the private sector. Contrary to the Obama and New York Times spin that there is no stigma attached to food stamps, the American people do not want to be dependent on the government for their food, health care, or income.

But that is Obama’s solution. To every problem, Obama offers government. He can offer no other because he has surrounded himself with no job creators, no producers, no captains of industry, and no free market champions. That’s not the change the American people were hoping for.

I’ve been held underwater by work lately and am just now catching up with this thing called “posting,” so forgive me if this post is light on links and details, but I want to give you all a heads up on what’s coming down the pipe in the Obama/Google administration. The big project after Net Neutrality is supposed to be a National Broadband Plan.

In theory, the idea of a National Broadband Plan is to give faster Internet access to more people. You see, people frequently think America “lags behind” the rest of the world because certain statistics show America to have worse Internet access than other countries. The problem with those statistics is that they don’t account for population density. A country like Japan, South Korea, or the Netherlands has a much denser, more urbanized population, and so it’s easier to run the wires you need to give them all Internet access.

But all a progressive needs is a good crisis, and they’re calling this a crisis. However, one of the proposed fixes is to give third party ISPs access to wires already laid by ISPs to provide service. Do we see how increased access to wires that already exist with service provided, doesn’t give access to people who don’t have access already?

The real motive of Julius Genachowski, Barack Obama, Google, and the rest of the adminstration’s Internet crusaders is to help freeloaders, which is why the Songwriters Guild of America is against Net Neutrality. Anyone who creates things of value on the Internet has something to lose from the Obama plans. Everyone can see this. The terrible problems with the Genachowski/Obama/Google plans are not theoretical.

Every year the New York Police and Fire Departments face off in an annual football game.  The good-natured but intense contest has been a New York City tradition since 1973. 
 
In 2004, members of both squads visited the Oval Office to present President George W. Bush with a token of appreciation for his response following the attacks of September 11, 2001.  The meeting had special meaning since among the many casualties of 9-11 were 22 members of the New York City Fire Department Football Club. (See bravestfootball.com and nypdfootball.com).   Originally, President Bush was asked to attend the annual game to receive the players’ thanks, but he was unable to do so, so I arranged the visit to the White House for the players.
 
The meeting was scheduled to last about ten minutes.  At the president’s insistence, it lasted longer, in part so he could show the players another recent gift–something he was obviously proud to share with them.  You see, that morning, the warriors who captured Saddam Hussein visited the President and gave him a glass-enclosed gun, the gun Hussein had on him when they dragged him from his rat hole. 

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Update: The Times piece quoted here skates too quickly over the questions of how one qualifies for food stamps, and what requirements are imposed on recipients (particularly with regard to work). Put briefly, most food stamp recipients appear to be required to work, but waivers exist, some still receive benefits without working, and (of course) fraud dilutes the requirements. Check out the comment section for clarifications.

I suppose this is just a testament to how well Obama’s economic recovery plan is going: 1 in 8 Americans is now on food stamps - and 1 in 4 children are. I remember the bad old days of the Bush economy, when millions of Americans were forced to rely on private sector jobs to pay for their food.

Those benighted days are past: now more and more Americans get their food money from Uncle Sam. And who knows - the way things are going, someday soon we all may wind up on the dole:

It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.

Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare…

From the ailing resorts of the Florida Keys to Alaskan villages along the Bering Sea, the program is now expanding at a pace of about 20,000 people a day.

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Noel Sheppard has a great post at NewsBusters about Barack Obama teaming up with the NFL to fight obesity.

Seriously, is nothing sacred? Can we not escape this man at all? People watch sports in general for the love of the game and to escape the daily minutia of life. Barack Obama showing up randomly like a bad rash is annoying.

(Apologies to Irving Berlin)… We knew that Barack Obama was turning DC into a mecca for sucking at the public teat, but it perhaps was not as obvious until recently as to what extent this is occurring.  RedState member Fred Maidment sent this blog entry from The American to me this morning. It illustrates the depth to which Obama is influenced on “governmentalization” of the private sector.  The graphic tells it all:

Unsurprisingly, the low points come during the Democrat(ic) Kennedy, Carter, Clinton and Obama administrations. But the dearth of private sector experience in the Obama cabinet is almost breathtaking. As Nick Schulz notes, “over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector”. Wow.

It shouldn’t be a “wow” moment, though. The Obama administration is promoting exactly what we have suspected it would - elimination of private sector industry in favor of government control. From banking to automotive to health care to “net neutrality” - the government takeover is already well under way. And we shouldn’t be surprised - they’re just doin’ what comes naturally.

Dang.

With President Obama having concluded his trip through one of the fastest-dying regions of the planet, complete with literal prostrations to a symbolic Emperor and metaphorical prostrations to an Emperor in all but name, this is as good a time as any to ask whether his Administration has developed a coherent foreign policy grand strategy yet. The evidence, to date, suggests that Obama foreign policy is like Obama campaign promises: destined to be realized in some shadowy future likely – but not certain – to come, yet already awarded rich accolades merely for promise.

The usual people who don’t understand foreign policy – which is to say, the sorts of people who are well-received, if not employed, by the State Department (which hasn’t understood foreign policy since Kissinger, or perhaps Dulles) – are of course charmed by the President’s playacting on the global stage. This is probably because the kabuki-dance of Metternichian diplomacy, though likely to allow untold millions to die of starvation, rape, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, and imprisonment, is more visually appealing than war and open conflict – not least because all of that starvation, rape, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, and imprisonment tends to happen in countries that don’t allow cameras near the atrocities.

This terrible conflation of form over substance elides the fact that Baron von Metternich developed the balance of power system he did to avoid a repeat of the devastation of Napoleon, and that ultimately, that very system of diplomatic communiqués, bows, negotiations, dinners, and playacting not only failed to avert the First World War, it positively accelerated and worsened the Second. In other words, the modern system is a shell of a remnant of a means of preventing a disaster that has long-since passed, and that failed miserably both times it was really well-tested. It is, in short, a system intended to devolve larger conflicts into smaller, more manageable ones, and is instead a method for preventing small conflicts by accumulating them into larger ones. Perversely, the whole, nominal point of the modern system of international diplomacy is to provide channels through which substantive foreign policy – that is, the real goals and desires of nations and nation-states – can flow without having more wars than necessary. Its loveliness should be secondary to its effectiveness. Applauding what President Obama has delivered – a foreign policy with better aesthetics than President Bush’s, without President Bush’s substance – is like wanting a faster car always stuck in the driveway: There’s no point if it’s not going anywhere.

Go read the whole thing.

We know from Haystack’s earlier post that Barack Obama’s “casualty count is nearly DOUBLE that of George Bush’s worst year as Commander in Chief.”

We know that Barack Obama is dithering while our soldiers and sailors die in Afghanistan. Yesterday, Barack Obama fell back on his typical blame Bush.

At a news conference in the East Room with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, Mr. Obama suggested that his approach would break from the policies he had inherited from the Bush administration and said that the goals would be to keep Al Qaeda from using the region to launch more attacks against the United States and to bring more stability to Afghanistan.

“After eight years — some of those years in which we did not have, I think, either the resources or the strategy to get the job done — it is my intention to finish the job,” he said.

How exactly was George Bush not committed to stability in Afghanistan and stopping Al Qaeda from “using the region to launch more attacks against the United States.”

Just because the guy says it, does not make it so. But there is something more troubling in all of this that is flying under the radar.

In Obama’s “prosecution” of the war and dealing with military issues, he has decided to treat American soldiers and sailors worse than the terrorists.

Fox News is reporting that Navy SEALs have captured the mastermind behind the 2004 Fallujah massacre that saw 4 Blackwater USA employees murdered and mutilated.

What thanks is the Commander in Chief giving to these American heros? He is send them to court martial. Why? Because the terrorist got a bloody lip while detained.

Seriously.

In Barack Obama’s America terrorists are treated better than our soldiers and sailors.