Reality Wrecks The Obama Presidency In Three Weeks

*The Obama Momma: The Original Leftard Assclown

Never in my wildest dreams did I expect "The Magic Negro" -- our Grand & Glorious El Presidente and The Lord Messiah Obama -- to crash and burn in less than one month after taking office. But it would appear he has accomplished the difficult task and Republican minded Americans can surface for air again because this guy is an assclown wimp and Leftard (Leftist + Retard) without the drive, cunning and intelligence of old line Leftists like Stalin and Lenin.

The Republic is saved. I've always heard that God favors fools, drunks and the United States. A real hardcore Commie could have destroyed the USA in a few short years; an assclown Leftard like Obama is very likely to destroy the Democrat Party and Leftist hopes of ever electing another Democrat President or Congress in a few years.

The author below relates the gory details:

1. Reality Sets In at the Press Conference Three weeks into the Obama presidency, and as the "hope" hype continues to fade, reality is beginning to set in.

From an intellectual perspective, reality is beginning to set in about Obama's reputation as a profound leader and "great communicator." I'm not the first to observe that Obama's highly touted speeches are long on inspirational rhetoric and short on intellectual depth. But I think I may have been the only one to observe the irony of the way in which the past two presidents are generally viewed:

Bush is viewed as an inarticulate dolt, but he hired excellent writers who frequently produced good, thoughtful, substantive speeches, which he then marred with a flat and uncomfortable delivery. By contrast, Obama has a great reputation for eloquence—because he is adept at giving a smooth, charismatic delivery to the oratorical equivalent of Hallmark greeting cards.

At his first big presidential press conference Monday, which was largely regarded as an unimpressive performance, the reality began to set in: Obama is an empty suit without serious, persuasive arguments to offer for his policies. This has even the liberals beginning to grumble, as in the article below.

Meanwhile, the reality is also beginning to set in that when he chose Joe Biden as his vice-president, Obama was not strengthening his administration by enlisting a Washington sage and elder statesman. Instead, he was saddling his administration with a notorious windbag who can be counted on to say embarrassing things. Here is the latest from Biden, talking about the Obama "stimulus" plan:

If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, if we stand up there and we really make the tough decisions, there's still a 30 percent chance we're going to get it wrong.

Oddly, this quote turns out to be the most honest and insightful thing Biden has ever said, except that he greatly underestimates the administration's chances of failure. So naturally, this prompted Obama to disavow Biden with a patronizing chuckle, as if to say, "What can you expect when that nutty guy opens his big mouth?"

It is still very early, and as Tony Blankley points out, Obama still has the benefit of uncritical press adulation: "I don't recall a single news conference in which there were no follow-up questions, no challenges to anything the president had said recently, no assertions of fact that the president was challenged to deal with." That means that there is still a long way to go for reality to fully set in—and a long way for Obama to fall.

"Impressed Me Not," Walter Shapiro, The New Republic, February 10 Through most of his inaugural primetime press conference, Barack Obama seemed like he was channeling a particularly loquacious combination of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and the ghost of Hubert Humphrey. The president's response to the first question from the Associated Press about the risks of sounding too apocalyptic about the economy ran (or, to be more accurate, crawled) for nearly 1,200 words—and ended with Obama saying "Okay" with an implicit question mark as if he were requesting permission to keep on talking. A national poll from the Pew Research Center released Monday afternoon found that 92 percent of Americans described Obama as a "good communicator." There is a suspicion that those astronomic numbers had dipped by the time that Obama exited from the East Room of the White House….

Obama radiated the sense of a leader who has digested too many economic briefings and memorized too many talking points in preparation for his primetime rendezvous with the public…. What shone through the entire press conference is how irked the president is with laissez-faire conservatives who believe, even now, "that the government has no business interfering in the marketplace" and that "FDR was wrong to intervene back in the New Deal."…

The president's strongest answer was in response to the evening's fluffiest question, about Alex Rodriguez's confession that he had taken steroids….
Obama's maiden presidential press conference (complete with a question from Helen Thomas) was orchestrated to revolve around what the president called "the most profound economic emergency since the New Deal." The president clearly wanted to mobilize his supporters who have been languidly following the congressional maneuvering over the stimulus package. But there was little in Obama's remarks that spoke to issues that the congressional conference committee will soon be squabbling over.

2. Reality Sets In on Wall Street From an economic perspective, the place where reality is really setting in is on Wall Street, where traders pushed the Dow down by more than 300 points (and the S&P 500 by about 5%) as they listened to a speech by Obama's new Treasury Secretary.

The immediate reason for this reaction is summed up in Larry Kudlow's commentary on the speech:

According to Merriam-Webster, a "plan" is "a detailed formulation of a program of action; a method for achieving an end." But Mr. Geithner had none of this. As a result, stocks plunged about 250 points. Prominent investment strategist Ed Yardeni described Geithner as an empty suit with an empty plan.

The article below does an even better job of naming the exact reason for the new downturn: continued uncertainty. From the beginning, the biggest problem with the bailouts has been their ever-shifting, arbitrary character, as Treasury bureaucrats like Tim Geithner have decided ad hoc which firms get bailed out and which firms fail, and as Hank Paulson proposed bailout plans only to abandon them, seemingly starting again with some new brainwave every week.

Investors were no doubt hoping that the Obama administration would finally pick one plan and stick to it. Even if it was a bad proposal, it would be something that investors could plan around. There would be a stimulus bill and a new version of TARP, and then maybe the geniuses in Washington would stop coming up with new ideas for a little while, making it possible for investors to make rational calculations about where to put their money.

That is why Geithner's speech yesterday hit the market so hard. It was a clear message that everything will still be in flux for months to come. So Tracinski's Law of Bailouts still applies: government money drives out private money, because government decision-making thwarts private decision-making.

"Five Reasons the Markets Don't Like the Bank Bailout," Jeff Cox, CNBC.com, February 10 Wall Street's message to the Obama administration was clear Tuesday, even if the plan to save the banking industry wasn't.

Unhappy with a lack of clarity in Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's new financial rescue plan, investors launched a massive stock selloff, raising further questions about when confidence would be restored to the market….

For someone who ran last year as an agent of change, President Obama's plan for banks seemed to represent more of the same. While investors were looking for some concrete moves on how distressed assets would be taken off banks' books, they instead walked away from Geithner's speech with no indication of how the assets would be priced or who would be buying them.
And as one of Wall Street's oldest maxims goes, the market hates uncertainty….

With so many details left unsolved, much more work will have to be done, again creating uncertainty for investors.

"It's going to be fine-tuned many times over," predicts Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at The Hartford….

The market is clamoring to know how the government will be able to help banks with their toxic assets while also protecting investors and taxpayers from getting blindsided if the fixes don't work….

With the government unable to stem the tide of uncertainty bedeviling stocks, convincing people to buy will prove all the more difficult.

3. Reality Sets In on Capitol Hill From a political perspective, Barack Obama was supposed to be the popular, likeable figurehead who put a fresh, idealistic face on the tired old doctrines of the left. Instead, he let a bunch of unpopular, non-likable, tired old Democratic politicians take charge of the first big legislative initiative of his presidency.

The result is the bloated monstrosity of the "stimulus" bill, which serves to remind the American people why they stopped voting for Democrats thirty years ago. Nancy Pelosi is the more accurate representative of the left's politics, and that is the reality that is beginning to set in.

The article below captures this trend, and its first two paragraphs alone make it worth reading.
"Pelosi's Indefensible Bill," William McGurn, Wall Street Journal, February 10 Historians tell us it was Roman custom to place a slave in the chariot behind a conquering hero, there to whisper warnings about the fleeting nature of fame amid the accolades of adoring crowds.

Barack Obama is no stranger to the cheers of roaring crowds. If his prime-time press conference last night is any clue, moreover, he intends to use this personal popularity to help Congress get a stimulus bill to his desk quickly. As he does, those who wish his presidency success might do well to whisper in his ear two words of tempering wisdom: "Nancy Pelosi."…

Just as she did with war funding, Mrs. Pelosi is once again putting her fellow Democrats—Mr. Obama included—in the position of defending the indefensible. And she let it all ride on a game of chicken. Her bet has been that a Republican minority would sooner or later cry "uncle" on a laundry list of pet Democratic spending projects rather than risk being painted as holding up vital economic legislation.

But a funny thing happened: House Republicans called her bluff. The result has been more attention to the content of the legislation passing through Congress. And as the focus on content has increased, the American people have grown more skeptical.

4. Reality Sets In Overseas From the perspective of foreign policy, the reality that is setting in is the realization that conflicts with our allies and adversaries were not merely a reaction to the personality of the previous president. American interests are real and differences on policy with other nations are real. Obama can't just charm our way out of them.

That is the theme of the article below, which surveys the whole world and discusses how Obama's election has not brought change to the basic issues America faces. Or rather, to the extent it has brought change it has made things worse by emboldening our enemies.

I have only excerpted a few key passages, but the whole thing is worth reading.

"Obama's Charm Isn't Working Wonders Abroad," Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, February 10 Barack Obama has now been president for 21 days, following an inauguration that was supposed to have pressed the reset button on America's relations with the wider world and ushered in a new period of global cooperation against common threats. Here's what pressing reset has accomplished so far:

• Iran. Since President Obama's inauguration, Iran has launched a satellite into space and declared (with an assist from Russia, which is providing the nuclear fuel) that it would complete its long-delayed reactor at Bushehr later this year….

• North Korea. A constant liberal lament about the Bush administration was that its supposed hard line on Pyongyang had yielded nothing except five or six North Korean bombs.

So what is Kim Jong Il to do now that the Obama administration is promising a friendlier approach? In late January, Pyongyang announced it was unilaterally withdrawing from its 1991 nonaggression pact with the South.

Satellite imagery later showed the North moving a Taepodong 2 missile—potentially capable of reaching the US West Coast—to a launch pad. "The missile is pointing at Obama," Baek Seung-joo, a director at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul, told the LA Times. "North Korea thinks that with such gestures they can control US foreign policy."…

• The Arab street. "I have Muslim members of my family," Mr. Obama recently told Al-Arabiya. Yet so far his efforts at outreach have been met with derision from Arab hard-liners and "liberals" alike.

"We welcomed him with almost total enthusiasm until he underwent his first real test: Gaza," wrote Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany in a New York Times op-ed. "We also wanted Mr. Obama...to recognize...the right of people in occupied territory to resist military occupation." In other words, the price of Arab support for Mr. Obama is that he embrace Hamas and its terrorist tactics.

5. Reality Sets In on Afghanistan From a military perspective, the reality that is setting in is a realization that, while the war in Iraq may have been won, the war in Afghanistan is now in serious trouble. The Taliban's "spring offensive" always fails, year after year, but the US and NATO have also failed to implement any kind of counter-insurgency strategy capable of building an effective Afghan government and permanently displacing the Taliban.

See the warning below from a top military analyst who says the war in Afghanistan could be irreversibly lost by this fall. This is almost certainly exaggerated, as warnings of America defeat are always exaggerated. But there is enough truth to it to make Afghanistan a top priority of the Obama administration—and one that could bring Obama crashing down to reality very quickly.

Michael Yon, an indispensable blogger for understanding the war in Iraq, has now turned his attention to Afghanistan, and he provides a worrying update about Russia's attempt to control and constrict our supply lines through Central Asia. Perhaps the Russians are looking for a little revenge for what we did to them in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Yon provides some of his usual refreshing perspective. While it may be true that we can't kill ourselves out of a counter-insurgency, he does remind us that

If we are to deal with moderate elements of the AOGs (armed opposition groups) we must do so from a position of strength, and this means killing a lot of them this year, to encourage the surviving "reconcilables" to be more reconcilable.

But the best thing Yon provides is a proper description of the war: he calls it "the Af-Pak war," i.e., the Afghanistan-Pakistan war. That names precisely why US momentum in Afghanistan has reversed itself in the past two years: Pakistani resistance to the Taliban and al-Qaeda has all but crumbled.

This is a very difficult problem to solve, and Barack Obama will need more than bromides and a charm offensive on the Arab street to do it.

"War in Afghanistan 'Could Be Lost by Summer'," Alex Spillius, Daily Telegraph, February 11 The war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan will be lost by the end of the summer without dramatic changes in counter-insurgency strategy, according to a leading US military expert.

The assessment of Col. John Nagl, who is consulting the US government as it conducts four separate policy reviews on Afghanistan, comes amid fears that unless the insurgents' advance is halted, Afghanistan will become the new president's Vietnam….

Col. Nagl, an Iraq veteran who helped devise the successful strategy there under the aegis of Gen. David Petraeus, told The Daily Telegraph that the gains made by the Taliban over the past two years need to be reversed by the end of the traditional fighting season in Afghanistan, around late September or early October, or else the Taliban will establish a durable base that would make a sustained Western military presence futile….

Col. Nagl does not expect the "clear, hold, build" strategy to produce the same rapid results in Afghanistan as in Iraq. Afghanistan has never been modernised, has a weaker tribal structure that was crucial in supporting the surge in Iraq, and has a booming opium trade. Militants have a safe haven across the border in Pakistan.

6. Dhimmitude Alert I know I have been railing recently about the danger of letting the left regain some sense of confidence, not to mention regaining the reigns of power. But here is exactly the kind of example I have in mind, and you can see for yourself how serious it is.

The left has long championed restrictions on "hate speech," on the presumption that the people who would be shielded from criticism would be the left's favorite domestic victim groups.

Instead, the ultimate beneficiary of "hate speech" restrictions will be Muslim fanatics—who will use the left's fake posturing about "tolerance" to impose an intolerant set of controls on the free speech of non-Muslims.

The left is trying to sell us into dhimmitude, the status of second-class citizens (dhimmi in Arabic) under the control of Muslim overlords.

Thus the appalling story coming out of England: the British government has banned Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders from visiting Britain—even though he is doing so at the invitation of the House of Lords—because Wilders will use the visit to criticize Islam and the Koran.

The connection between Britain and Holland, by the way, is absolutely crucial to the history of the freedom of speech and religion. The British philosopher John Locke wrote his "Letter Concerning Toleration"—the single most important philosophical defense of free speech—while living in Holland, where he enjoyed that nation's expansive protections of intellectual freedom.

This makes it especially disturbing to see Britain overturn that noble legacy in this case.

"Controversial Anti-Muslim MP Banned from the UK Because of Public Order Fears," Joan Clements and Christopher Hope, Daily Telegraph, February 10 Geert Wilders had been refused entry to the United Kingdom to broadcast his controversial anti-Muslim film Fitna in the House of Lords. Mr. Wilders said he had been told that in the interests of public order he will not be allowed to come to Britain.

He responded to the decision in fighting mood, telling reporters that he still intended to travel to London. He said: "I shall probably go to Britain anyway on Thursday. Let us see if they put me in chains on arrival. It is an unbelievable decision made by a group of cowards."

Mr Wilders is under 24-hour police protection because of his anti-Muslim stance. He has been receiving death threats from Muslim groups outside Holland since the anti-Koran film appeared on the internet earlier this year….

A spokesman for the Lords said that the invitation to show his film remained open….

A Home Office spokesman told The Daily Telegraph: "The Government opposes extremism in all its forms. It will stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country. That was the driving force behind tighter rules on exclusions for unacceptable behavior that the Home Secretary announced on in October last year."