Unlike JFK, who, as a means of soothing his back, famously incorporated a rocking chair into the Oval Office decor, Barack Obama shoots hoops, swims, and can occasionally be seen on the cover of a tabloid, abs and all.  The time President Obama spends golfing and vacationing with his family is unprecedented for presidents—and he is only halfway through his first term.

Given all of these luxurious comforts Obama is enjoying, one can only assume that however easy he has it (as the President), his family has it even better.  That being the case, it is shocking to hear the First Lady’s reputed description of her White House role:  “It’s hell,” adding, “I can’t stand it.” 

Apologies in advance for echoing what others in the conservative media have already asked, but the question takes on fresh relevance:  Is Barack Obama in over his head?  True—the president himself is not the one who supposedly uttered said words, but given the indulgent lifestyle President Obama and his family are known to be leading in the White House, such an egregious complaint from her must reflect something worse for the president.  If the First Lady’s own despondent sentiments do not cross president’s mind, they are most likely emanating from there.  Someone is bringing their work home, and all of the vacations in the world cannot alleviate the burden.

I want to put forth a prediction—not with a significant degree of certainty, but something to ruminate on.  Could it be that Barack Obama has already pledged to himself a swift end to this misery?  I could envision—á la LBJ-style—the president taking a long hard look at the disarray of his own party, the falling approval ratings, and David Letterman’s mockery, and deciding it’s just not worth it.  Remember—thin-skinned Obama knew only euphoria and baseless praise as he ascended the halls of power.  The president’s psychological makeup simply is not conditioned to handle the onslaught of criticism that began to crescendo in 2009.  He got healthcare passed, it’s time to move along. 

The First Lady’s words were not just a shallow reference to her having been given the wrong bottled water—they are indicative of familial and occupational strife for not just her, but her husband as well.

In the years to come, it will become undeniably clear that Andrew Breitbart was just as integral to the healthy evolution of conservatism. 

In much the same way as National Review gave a voice to wandering thinkers like Russell Kirk and Whittaker Chambers, Andrew Breitbart’s Internet savvy has afforded a megaphone to a disembodied grassroots movement—the Tea Party.  Most importantly, however, Breitbart has exposed the existing liberal media structure as being rigged and elitist.  Although he has boldly made this claim for quite a while, all doubt was removed following the recent exposure of JournoList. 

Through his book Hollywood, Interrupted and  his site bighollywood.com, Breitbart lifts the veil on a film industry teeming with intolerance and spite for those who would dare to question its warped value system—he has provided a voice to those actors and actresses whose very livelihood is threatened with blacklisting, should they express an iota of conservative thinking.

Personally, I would venture to say that it was not until the ACORN scandal that the Left perceived Andrew Breitbart to be a problem.  Why?  It was because Breitbart took an organization which purported to speak out for the defenseless, and exposed it to be a political vehicle for fraud.  You see, ACORN’s voting “activism” was integral to the electoral victory of one of its former attorneys in 2008, as well as many other Democrats over the years.  Most of the elites probably assumed ACORN would be around to commit the same frauds in 2010.  Fortunately for those of us who like fair elections, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe—with the critical outlet of Breitbart’s Internet savvy—exposed ACORN to be rotten from the inside. 

Did he realize the bulls-eye he was painting on himself?

The running theme of Andrew Breitbart’s cultural presence seems to be twofold: 1) he helps to illuminate institutionalized prejudice and intolerance where it exists and 2) he aggressively speaks out on behalf of those who simply cannot curry favor with Keith Olbermann or fit into the ideological mold of the DNC (a.k.a., the defenseless).

True, Mr. Breitbart:  MSNBC, the NAACP, and countless others are at your throat right now.  It’s just that they’ve been desperate for the opportunity to seriously malign you for quite a while.  After all, if the Left’s power structure is to persist, it cannot afford for someone like you to continue galvanizing Americans into a higher political awareness. 

Keep up the good work.

Fast forward to mid-2010.

“What do we owe you?” asked Vice President Joe Biden, ice cream cone scepter in hand.  The small business owner replied, “Don’t worry, it’s on us.”  The working class man followed up quickly with a statement that was surely in jest, but nonetheless motivated by a sincere concern about the welfare of his business:  “Lower our taxes, and we’ll call it even.”

The Vice President, secure in his incumbency, replies:   “Why don’t you say something nice instead of being a smartass all the time?”

To be honest, I miss the days when Vice President Cheney would tell an ensconced senator to f*ck off. Instead, our current VP believes it fitting to dish it out onto a struggling small business owner.  Since when did the modern Democratic Party become the party of such unabashed disdain and elitism? 

Was it when Nancy Pelosi inferred that citizens who attended townhall meetings were of the National Socialist persuasion? It’s participatory democracy when the Left does it (broken windows and all); it’s the Triumph of the Will when you do it, astro-turf tools.

Maybe the Democrat’s superiority complex first appeared when America’s first black Attorney General (in the wake of his appointment by the first black President) declared, “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as a ethnic melting pot  in things racial, we have always been and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.  Take note, citizenry.  Cowardice is not a trait of the worst fringes of America.  Cowardice is the essence of America.  Idiots.

Perhaps the change occurred when former President Jimmy Carter, during the ObamaCare debate, stated that most of the opposition to Obama’s policies is motivated by racism.  Essentially, Jimmy Carter believes that no matter how studiously you may have studied the healthcare legislation and its adherence to constitutional principles (or lack thereof), you are ultimately motivated by racism in your opposition to such policies.  It’s not your fault, though.  This racist tendency is subconscious, and you are too inept to control it, America.  You big dumb animal.

One could argue Michelle Obama manifested early symptoms of condescension when she told a room full of college students, “…sometimes it’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions; it makes you feel justified in your ignorance.  That’s America.“     

To sum up, the citizenry of the United States is steeped in ignorance to the extent that it cannot even fathom its racial ignorance.  In Rumsfeldian dialect, one could say America has no idea about the racial unknown unknowns. 

Thankfully, our Democrat-controlled government is here to fill us in on those unknowns.  The complaints and fears of citizens like Joe the Plumber and the ice cream shop owner are the primal worries of a stupid populace.  Are the unwashed masses begging for tax relief and reduced fiscal burden?  Screw them.  They don’t know what is best.

In the words of an insightful conservative friend who perfectly articulated the principle of the matter, “Let them eat ice cream.”

Yes, strange parallels indeed, particularly the push for cap-and-trade.  Few would think that Enron—an energy company now synonymous with “free markets run amok” and “Republican cronyism”—would seek the enactment of such an industry-crippling policy; the interest of a leading investment house like Goldman Sachs in cap-and-trade is also not too obvious.  However, if one will look at cap-and-trade’s pre-Obama history, it quickly becomes apparent that the scheme is little more than corporatism disguised as environmental concern.

Enron revealed depths of unethical corporate behavior which few had seen before.  Executives encouraged pensioners and shareholders to continue their investment in the company, knowing full well of the imminent collapse.  This is all laid out beautifully in the book, Smartest Guys in the Room.  What is never spoken of, however, is Enron’s push for a regulatory novelty known as “cap-and-trade”. 

Enron, known for its dislike of regulation, ardently pushed for industrial regulation in the form of cap-and-trade.  Of course, all of this took place during President Clinton’s time in office, circa 1997.  Few will recall that it was Ken Lay whom Bill Clinton appointed to the Council on Sustainable Development.  Specifically, Lay was a co-chair on the “International Task Force”.

Of the group’s ten goals, the first is to “Ensure that every person enjoys the benefits of clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment at home, at work, and at play.”  Its third goal, “Equity,” is aimed at making sure “all Americans are afforded justice and have the opportunity to achieve economic, environmental, and social well-being.”

John Palmisano was the head of environmental policy at Enron, and was the other Enron executive involved with the Council of Sustainable Development.  Regarding agreements over emissions trading reached at the Kyoto Protocol, Palmisano stated the following in a memo to other Enron executives:

If implemented, this agreement will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States…

…a carbon emissions trading system will be developed.  While the trading system will be implemented in 2008, I am sure that reductions will begin to trade with 1-2 years.  Finally, Enron has immediate business opportunities which derive directly from this agreement.

I predict this agreement will have very significant influences on the energy sector within OECD and transitional economies and will accelerate renewable markets in developing countries.  This agreement will be good for Enron Stock!

As you can see, Enron was more than simply a giant corporation that sought deregulated markets and political favors from the Bush Administration.  These statements also make it quite apparent that cap-and-trade is not a socialist policy aimed at hurting Big Business.  Rather, cap-and-trade is a cash cow for whatever businesses manage to get in on the action.

We all know what happened to Enron a few years later; but what about the cap-and-trade idea?  Like a tumor, the scheme lay dormant for years, until certain conditions emerged that allowed it to resurface:  the election of Barack Obama and a Democrat-controlled Congress.

Anti-corporate as Obama’s rhetoric may be, he has his favorites.  Goldman Sachs was the president’s biggest political contributor in the 2008 election.  The kernel of Goldman Sachs’ interest in carbon trading is summed up nicely in Matt Taibbi’s excellent article on Goldman Sachs’ involvement in every economic bubble since the Great Depression:

Goldman wants this bill.  The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure they’re the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice.  Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues.  (One of their lobbyist at the time was none other than [Mark] Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.)  Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank’s environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation.

In explaining cap-and-trade’s popularity within the culture of Wall Street and high finance, Taibbi says the following:

…the ‘cap’ on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year.  Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time.  The volume of this market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

The overlap between politicians and officials who appear to be against one another’s interests is mind-boggling.  Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, Treasury officials such as Hank Paulson, Robert Rubin, and Mark Patterson—they’re all promoters of cap-and-trade, in one capacity or another.  At one point, a crook like Ken Lay stood to benefit from this agenda.  Lay is out of the picture, and someone like Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein fills the vacuum.  (In all fairness, Barack Obama did refer to Blankfein as being a “savvy” businessman, even though the Justice Department is now investigating Goldman Sachs for marketing securities that were simultaneously being shorted.)

Do you see why those in high office have no problem with accusations of socialism?  Ron Paul got it right when he corrected those who would call Obama a socialist; in practice, the president behaves like a corporatist.  It is somewhat amusing that those who supported ObamaCare believe President Obama has really “stuck it to those greedy insurance companies.”  No, in actuality, he has just mandated that the entire population must buy their product.  With cap-and-trade, the result is similar.  Most people have absolutely no idea that the system is only an ingenious way to funnel money to the very class it purports to despise.  It’s the perfect crime.

Once again, the Left betrays a lack of faith in the individual’s ability to discern between the good and the bad, the healthy and the unhealthy, the wise and the foolish.  During a commencement address at Hampton University about a week ago, President Obama blamed the Information Age for a proliferation of pettiness, falsehoods, and lies, telling the crowd that because of the abundance of technology, “information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.”  As a result of so much information being at the disposal of the public, “it is putting new pressures on our country and our democracy.”

Remember, this is coming from the same guy who set up a federal cyber-repository for e-mail addresses and websites that were critical of ObamaCare (under the guise of weeding out misinformation, of course). 

Flawed argumentation, emotional appeal, and factual distortion have always baited the desperate, suffering, and ideologically-inclined (hence the Obama Administration).  Those willing to reason and be objective, on the other hand, tend to be somewhat inoculated against disinformation—or at least willing to perform a degree of research before buying into anything. 

The implication of the speech is this:  the problem is not the intellectual laziness and unwillingness of the individual to sift through available information; it is the instantaneous (and unprecedented) accessibility of the information.

No, instead of acknowledging the fact that people choose their own sources, the president inferred that such sources are suppressed, and that people are involuntarily inhibited from acquiring such sources.  Hence, the Supreme Court nomination of those who believe in a government-directed redistribution of speech.  Hence, the need for government to make decisions for the simplistic population, which cannot separate the wheat from the chaff.

The Internet is one of the last domains untainted by government regulation and influence (and that is debatable).  This realm is now being attacked from angles.  Whether it is an FCC czar who admires Hugo Chavez’s takeover of the media during an “incredible democratic revolution”, Obama’s nomination of “speech redistributionist” Elena Kagan, or Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller’s suggestion that the danger of the Internet may overwhelm its benefits, free speech lovers have much to fear regarding the administration’s policies regarding the media and information control. 

The supporters of the Right seem to have the same lackadaisical attitude about who is afforded the soapbox.  Consider Mitt Romney—winner of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference straw poll—combs his hair like Ronald Reagan.  Romney is also the guy who is often credited with developing the framework for ObamaCare while serving as Massachusetts governor.  Conservatism incarnate!

In one last fit of ObamaCare criticism, John Boehner proved himself to be Oscar-worthy when he dramatically screamed,  ”Hell no, you can’t!” in answer to his own rhetorical questions about whether Congress can really defend its tax-raising benefits.  Although ObamaCare is suspected of costing nearly a trillion dollars, the House minority leader had no problem voting to spend over half a trillion in 2003, when the GOP expanded Medicare to include Part D.

Then there is John McCain—you know, the guy whose objective in 2008 was not to win, but to bring dignity to the election.  The “maverick” of the lot.  In July, 2001, he voted to make it harder to declare personal bankruptcy.  In October, 2008, he voted to provide $700 billion to the financial corporations—in essence, ensuring that these companies would not run the risk of having to undergo bankruptcy, a fire that the senator feels a non-CEO is significantly more capable of walking through. 

Finding real leadership is going to be tough these next couple of months, and into 2012.  The Tea Party has genuine grassroots momentum behind it—and the GOP would love to have that energy be completely focused on the Democratic Party.  That is because the Tea Party represents a threat to the establishment.  Fox News, the RNC, and other figureheads of the Right will do all they can to subtly change the Tea Party’s focus from the Right to the Left.  Take notice of which politicians appear on Fox News, the Mark Levin Show, Greta van Susteren, etc. as the savior of the Right.  Take a look at what they’re railing against, and check out their voting history.  Personally, I have been led to believe that most Americans lack a political memory prior to 2008/2009.  I am convinced that, for the most part, the Right needs to run unknowns, from the top down.  The lesson?  Be careful who you give the conservative megaphone to.

Even given this pattern of populist rhetoric and selective corporatism (Goldman Sachs, GE, Caterpillar, JPMorgan, and Bank of America come to mind), I believe that there is a very good chance Obama is putting the power of the free market to work.  Not in terms of his domestic policy, but elsewhere.

I want to suggest that the Left-appeasing disarmament agreement with Russia is, in actuality, Obama’s attempt to use the free market to stabilize relations with Russia.  In March, the infrastructure research firm CG/LA released a report stating that the potential for investment in Russian infrastructure could be close to a trillion dollars.  The president of CG/LA, Norman Anderson, presented this to the United States-Russia Business Council—composed of members such as Alcoa, Apple, Inc., Bank of America, Caterpillar, General Electric, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase Bank, Microsoft,  Pfizer, and other Fortune 500  names.

Did the Russian government agree to grant these companies broadened access to that trillion dollar market if Obama would sign off on the disarmament agreement?  If so, does the president believe (without saying so, of course) that by allowing U.S. companies to become entrenched in the development of Russia’s dilapidated infrastructure, that he can stabilize long-term relations with Russia?  In other words, are the hawks who lament the reduction in nukes turning a blind eye to what may be a superior display of American might—the export of our technological knowledge? 

Reagan won the Cold War because he successfully bankrupted the Soviets in an arms race.  Perhaps Obama is using Russia’s recession-weakened condition to create a circumstance of economic or industrial reliance with Russia.  Such Industrial involvement acts as a kind of diplomacy; in the long term, it may end up being more effective in crafting a sustained policy than the threat of nuclear buildups and defense shields, which can whimsically be undone and redone by any future administration.