Snarker-in-Chief

No one — least of all the American people — is exempt from our president’s snark.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Snark is a popular word used for a particular sort of off-putting sarcasm. Snarkiness can manifest itself as adolescent cheap shots, snide condescension, or simple ad hominem patronizing — a sort of “I know you are, but what am I?” schoolyard name-calling. Its incessant use is typically connected with a peevishness born out of juvenile insecurity, and sometimes fed by an embarrassing envy. All politicians are snarky at times; but few obsessively so, given the wages of monotony and insecurity that the snark earns.
President Obama is well known both for ad hominem dismissals of his supposed enemies — everyone from Fox News to the Tea Party to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity — and for his evocations of nefarious straw men who, he claims, if left unchecked, would uninsure the poor, pollute the environment, hurt the illegal immigrant, and wage perpetual war abroad. But Obama’s snarky putdowns and condescending afterthoughts are a particularly disturbing subset of these rhetorical devices, used by him in the grand world of diplomacy as well as in often petty domestic contexts.
Vladimir Putin is the dangerous autocrat of a nuclear-armed superstate. He has trampled on the rights of his own people while trying to bully the former Soviet republics back into a czarist Orthodox version of the Soviet Empire. So Putin is many disturbing things, but for Obama he is reduced to some archetypal high-schooler to be snarked at: “My sense is that’s part of his shtick back home politically as wanting to look like the tough guy.” Putin, in Obama’s putdown, has “got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom.” Gratuitously reducing Putin’s aggression to the work of an adolescent rival show-off may be dangerous when combined with the past six years of Obama’s mostly seeming indifferent to that aggression. Snarking loudly while carrying a tiny stick is particularly unwise.
Mitt Romney was not just wrong in his views, but, to Obama in his snark mode as psychoanalyst, apparently ill: “[Romney is] changing up so much and backtracking and sidestepping we’ve got to name this condition he’s going through. I think it’s called . . . Romnesia. I’m not a medical doctor, but I do want to go over some of the symptoms with you because I want to make sure nobody else catches it.” Note the “I want to go over some of the symptoms.”
The reason Obama lost the Pennsylvania primary of 2008 was not just that the state’s Democratic voters preferred Hillary Clinton; he was sabotaged by an ignorant subset of the working-class population that lacked his own perspective, good taste, and calm analytical mind. Not appreciating Obama’s talents was analyzed as the equivalent of Neanderthalism: “It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Note the “It’s not surprising . . .”
Obama would follow that pop psychology by analyzing the police as acting “stupidly” and stereotyping by race. In his unfortunate National Prayer Breakfast riff, he snarked at American Christians, advising them not to get on their “high horse,” given the moral equivalence between the millennium-old Crusades and the present epidemic of radical Islamic terrorism. Snarkers usually project, masking their own high-horse moralizing by alleging bastard forms of it in others.
Snarkers also don’t discriminate in their targets. Sometimes Obama’s snark has been directed at his own Democratic rivals. Hillary Clinton was not just someone Obama ran against and beat in the primaries, but comes off as a frumpy nice girl in his famous quip, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” Note the “enough.”
By all accounts Obama has had a loyal and competent staff; in any event, it ran two winning campaigns. But Obama snarked at them too: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” Note the “I’ll tell you right now.” As far as Washington culture goes, Obama is the parent, it the child: “What Washington needs is adult supervision.”
Obama is supposedly friends with basketball legend Michael Jordan. But the latter made a terrible mistake when he chided the golf-obsessive Obama as in fact a “hack” and a “sh***y” golfer. Obama quickly fired back that Jordan “was not well informed.” He then went after Jordan himself as the less than successful basketball-team owner: “He might want to spend more time thinking about the Bobcats — or the Hornets.” Snark is now exemplified by the president of the United States stooping to engage in a kindergarten tit-for-tat over relative golf skills with an ex-NBA player: “But there is no doubt that Michael is a better golfer than I am. Of course if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case.” Note the “He might want” and “If I was playing twice a day . . .”
Sometimes presidential snark is just mean-spiritedness displayed through gratuitous smart-aleckiness. So when Obama once was asked about consulting past presidents, he replied of Ronald Reagan, “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any séances” — a reference to decades-old rumors that Mrs. Reagan, octogenarian and widowed by the time Obama snarked at her, had supposedly consulted an astrologer. Note “a Nancy Reagan thing.”
When Obama talks of his bowling skills, it is by way of deprecating the handicapped: “No, no. I have been practicing. . . . I bowled a 129. It’s like — it was like Special Olympics, or something.” Note the “or something.”
The grandmother who worked overtime to raise him when his mother would not, and who saved to put him through a tony prep school, is psychoanalyzed away as little more than an ignorant racist stereotyper — a useful foil to contextualize and excuse the demonstrable abject racism of his own pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright: “But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away.” Note the “typical.”
Snark can also be a sort of smart-ass caricature in which the statesman devolves into the silliness of popular culture: “I’m presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don’t take it means that I should somehow do a Jedi mind-meld with these folks and convince them to do what’s right.” Note “mind-meld.” To dismiss his opponents in his reelection campaign, Obama returned to popular-culture snark, “And you can pretty much put their campaign on . . . a tweet and have some characters to spare.”
When Mitt Romney criticized Obama for deep defense cuts and reducing the navy to its smallest fleet size since World War II, Obama offered snark instead of a counter-argument: “Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. . . . We also have things called aircraft carriers that planes land on and submarines that go under water.” Note the snark “that planes land on” and “that go under water.”
In the months before the Crimea and Ukraine crises, Romney presciently reminded Obama that Putin’s Russia in 2012 was America’s chief worry. Obama snarked back, “The 1980s — they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
When some Republicans at Obama’s recent State of the Union address clapped when he noted he had no more campaigns to run, Obama left his teleprompter to interject the schoolyard tit-for-tat, “I know. Because I won both.” Touché!
To Senator Jon Kyl, who once questioned the newly inaugurated Obama about the proper mix between tax hikes and budget cuts, Obama offered the gloat, “I won.” To his Republican House opponents of his agenda, Obama snarked, “Middle-class families can’t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff. So sue me.”
Snarkiness, as stated, is a sort of straw-man zinger, an adolescent cheap-shot one-liner to put off critics as losers. As for those who wanted the Keystone Pipeline built to enhance North American energy independence, jobs, and prosperity, Obama reduced them to obsessed one-issue zealots: “Let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline.” Note of the vast Keystone project the adjective “single” — perhaps as in a single Hoover Dam or a single Golden Gate Bridge.
Critics used to say they opposed Obama’s redistributionist programs, but conceded that he must be a pleasant guy. Supporters lamented Obama’s frequent inattention to detail but reminded everyone how charismatic the president was. Both diagnoses are probably mistaken. Snarkery is a character flaw of thin-skinned insecurity and juvenile mean-spiritedness — and embarrassing in a president.

Obama’s Crusades

How did that line end up in his speech?

By Michael Auslin

There may not be too much to add to the commentary of Jonah, Eliana, and others on President Obama’s condescending and offensive remarks on the Crusades and slavery at the National Prayer Breakfast speech last week, but there a few things I haven’t seen folks say.
After six years, it is so tiring to constantly be lectured to, talked down to, by Barack Obama that at some level, the content doesn’t really matter. It’s the principle of the thing. We elected a commander-in-chief, not a scold-in-chief, but the latter is what the progressive Left, embodied by Obama, sees as its primary role today. They just can’t see the rest of the country, outside the Upper East Side salons and Cambridge and San Francisco dining rooms, as adults. We’re all of us, all 300 million of us, the slightly dim children that need to be lectured to constantly. Sit up, don’t slouch, you’re forgetting your racist past, etc., etc.
Something I have asked myself: Does he really believe what he says, or is it all just for political effect, to send conservatives into a tizzy, eat up the airwaves, and keep us off-balance? He must have known how ridiculous, how unintelligent, and how offensive his comments were going to sound, correct? There’s a pause after he delivers the Crusades remark, you can see it below, and I just wonder, did he know that this was a stupid thing to say?
I hope so, I really do. Maybe he was just caught up in the moment, already committed to the lines — that’s politics — but there’s a pause just slightly longer than usual in his delivery. Maybe he was simply waiting for the profundity of his remarks to sink in, but I want to think that in his head, he was saying, “Gosh, this is really dumb.” But, never having been called on the carpet since, oh, probably Columbia, he is so used to saying whatever comes into his head without any criticism or knock-down, that he just did it.
But that can’t be true, and this is the thing that really depresses me. Even if you haven’t worked in government, the one thing that everyone in Washington, D.C., knows is that no president speaks alone. Every word, every line of every speech goes through multiple, sometimes dozens of hands. From the junior speechwriter, to the head speechwriter, to the assistant to the chief of staff, to the chief of staff, maybe to someone on the National Security Council or the State Department (since this speech talked about foreign issues), there are eyes and eyes and eyes reading the drafts.
No one said, “Wait, this is just stupid.” Or, “Isn’t this irrelevant to today’s threat?” Or, “Man, we’re going to offend about a billion people with this line.” Or at least, no one powerful enough said it. It’s not just the president, it’s that all those arrogant, bright young things around him, from the nameless wordsmith to 46-year-old chief of staff Denis McDonough, thought it was fine to scold us with centuries-old history by equating 21st-century Islamist barbarians with 11th-century medieval Christians. And when they let that speech go through, they showed the rest of us what, not just the president, but everyone working around him really thinks about Western civilization. And, after six years, I know that I should know this, but it depresses me still.
Which brings me to my last observation. We all know how weighty, demanding, crushing the role of president is. We know our presidents are just people, more or less like us. But, as an optimistic culture, we expect our presidents to grow in office, to become wiser, more patient, less arrogant, especially when they no longer have to worry about the next election.
Barack Obama’s speech last week showed that, after six years, he has not grown at all. Most likely, he can’t grow, and won’t in his last two years in office. He has a no more subtle or informed understanding of the world, of history, of the beauty and power of our imperfect Western civilization after leading its greatest country for more than half a decade.
Even worse, after all the travel, the rallies, the parades, he still has so little understanding of We, the People. He still thinks we need to be reminded of a bloody European past that happened 900 years ago, because that makes us, all of us small-l liberals, humble in the face of Islamist brutality. “There but for the grace of God go we,” he is saying, because he is still filled with every prejudice that Columbia and Harvard and the South Side of Chicago instilled in him. Some may say that’s because he’s not intellectually equipped to grow and transcend, but I can only think it’s because he doesn’t want to, doesn’t need to, because no one ever says, “Enough, this is dumb. And wrong.”
One of the more pretentious Washington phrases tossed around is “adult supervision.” It’s a way of demeaning and dismissing the arguments of those you disagree with, of saying that they’re simply acting or thinking emotionally. The ones we should listen to, of course, are the “adults,” the right-thinking ones. Not surprisingly, this phrase is usually used by progressives.
But if there ever was a time to say that the White House, and Barack Obama, lack adult supervision, well, this one is as good as his dozens of other ignorant, condescending insults to the American people. But it’s okay, Mr. President, the truth is, we have changed, even if you have not.
— Michael Auslin is a frequent contributor to National Review Online.

Islam’s Countless Slaves

If President Obama wants to draw a moral equivalence between religions, he should know some history.
 

By Ralph Peters 

 

Defending Islam in front of our religious leaders last week, our president not only invoked the Crusades but seized the opportunity to excoriate the United States for formerly justifying chattel slavery in Christian terms, his tone suggesting that chains are rattling still. Indeed, along with the treatment of American Indians, slavery remains a horrid blot on our past, one that not even the blood that 750,000 Americans shed in the war ending the “peculiar institution” washed away (forget that we are the only nation that fought a civil war to free its slaves).
We’re guilty. Forever. And nothing can lessen our shame.
But in support of the Left’s current vogue for “fairness,” I now expect our president to follow up by convening a special meeting of Muslim clerics to chastise them for the 14 centuries of slavery under Islam that, in its scope, scale, duration, and cruelty, exceeded the outrages of any other slave-based civilization.
In seizing non-Muslims as slaves, the human beasts of the Islamic State caliphate are only carrying on an honored tradition. That is Islam, Mr. President. And it always has been.
But let us, unlike our president, be honest. The Prophet Mohammed is reputed to have freed dozens of his slaves and to have encouraged his followers to release theirs. But the caliphs who followed the Prophet found that admonition inconvenient. In no time, Islamic jurisprudence produced detailed codes for seizing, keeping, and punishing non-Muslim slaves.
And so began the greatest slave-taking venture in history. Politically correct campus commissars would have us believe that the only men ever enslaved were black and the only slavers were white. Not quite. The first slave-labor plantations on an industrial scale were in not the Mississippi Delta but the Mesopotamian Delta, around Basra during the Arab “Golden Age.” For centuries, millions of blacks from Africa and brown-skinned captives from the subcontinent were put to work in conditions that led, in the late ninth century, to the greatest slave revolt known to historians, the 15-year Revolt of the Zanj (East African blacks), the scale of which eclipsed the better-known Spartacus uprising against Rome or the Haitian struggle for freedom. At its peak, perhaps a half-million slaves, impoverished Arabs and Bedouins, repeatedly defeated the sultan’s armies. At the climax of the uprising, Basra was obliterated amid a regional apocalypse.
Slaves thereafter were more strictly disciplined and dispersed, but the institution boomed throughout Islam’s realms. Compared to the mega-mall slave markets of Damascus and Baghdad, of Cairo, Tunis, and Bakhchisaray, and, later, of Timbuktu and Istanbul, the slave pens of Charleston and New Orleans were country stores.
As the Ottoman claw choked one third of Europe, the enslavement of Africans continued unabated, but the real prizes now had white skins (blonde females and pretty boys were especially prized). Each of the literally hundreds of Ottoman and Tartar invasions and slave-taking raids into the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, southern Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even Russia herded thousands and tens of thousands of prisoners southward in vast drives of human cattle. The Eurasian steppes and the Balkan mountain passes shone white with the bones of millions of captives who did not survive the journey.
Muslim pirates plagued the Mediterranean, raiding the lands not occupied by Muslims, to fill their slave markets and man the oars of their galleys — the latter a fate worse than that of plantation hands. Adventurous corsairs even raided coastal England and Ireland, kidnapping the populations of entire towns.
Apologists for Islam — and they are legion — claim that Muslim rule over conquered peoples was enlightened, that conquered Christians and Jews had only to pay the dhimmi tax and everything was fine. Tell that tale over the graves of the Balkan and Greek families forced to send their fittest, finest sons to the Sublime Porte of the sultan to be brought up as Muslims. The strongest young boys trained as janissaries, Ottoman shock troops, to make war on the frontiers against Christians and take more slaves. Others were trained for administrative duties. Indeed, some slaves rose high under both Arabs and Ottomans. But as the soldier-scholar Peter G. Tsouras reminded me, millions of males were castrated to suit the warped values of societies dysfunctional beyond Freud’s darkest dreams.
To be fair, the eunuchs who survived the procedure were valued as harem guards and for other positions of trust. A few became viziers. Nonetheless, one suspects that there was never an abundance of volunteers.
But . . . but this was all long ago, right? “Mais non!” as Secretary Kerry might exclaim. President Obama was absolutely correct when, in the heady, early days of his regime, he proclaimed that Islam had been important to American history since the republic’s founding. He referred, no doubt, to the Barbary pirates, the only Muslim connection from that period. Those North African raiders seized hundreds of American ships over decades, enslaving crews and passengers or, at their most merciful, holding them for ransom. Still, the president was correct that we owe them a debt. The depredations of the Barbary pirates confirmed the need for a peacetime U.S. Navy, the ships of which now dominate the waters the pirates once haunted.
But our first encounter with “violent extremism” in the Muslim world was merely a sideshow in the endless pageant of Islam’s enslavement of others, especially Africans. It’s one of the saddest travesties I know, that some American blacks, yearning for a refreshed identity, created the Black Muslim movement. No religion did greater harm to Africans than Islam. Endless slave caravans crossed the Sahara, while Arab slave ships plied the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, their fetid hulls full of “Zanj.” The Swahili coast of East Africa was a vast exporter of slaves from the interior, while Muslim Berbers, Arabs, and converted blacks looted the savannahs of the Sahel and the West African forests to their south. Even after the European slave trade began to expand, Muslims remained the brokers almost everywhere.
But that was then, right? Nope. Long after Europeans and Americans banned the trade and outlawed slavery, Arabs and other Muslims continued to take black slaves by the hundreds of thousands. In light of his Kenyan ancestry on his father’s side, our president should be more aware of who has tormented Africa since the seventh century, for nigh on 1,400 years (and counting).
Our treasured ally, Saudi Arabia, outlawed slavery only in 1962 — although a mere law didn’t kill the practice. Mauritania had to re-outlaw slavery just a decade ago. And human-rights advocates insist that slavery still exists in states such as Mali, Chad, Sudan, and elsewhere in Africa where Islam is dominant.
These days, the new emirs of the Middle East have legalized slavery in the form of guest-worker programs — in which Nepalese or Filipinos are treated little better than the outright slaves of yesterday. Surely our president will want to take all this up with a conclave of Muslim clerics and scholars?
A conservative estimate of the number of human beings enslaved by the Muslim rulers of the greater Middle East and North Africa over those 14 centuries would approach, if not exceed, a hundred million (this is apart from the tens of millions butchered from southeastern Europe to Sindh and the Punjab). White, black, brown — try to imagine the victims — marched south from Polish villages and Hungarian cities, from settlements on the Dnieper and after battles lost on the Danube, hauled across the Indian Ocean in airless hulls or driven through the vastness of the Sahara . . . surely, our president has compassion for them, too, and not just for slaves brought to our shores by those despicable Christians? Surely, “Reverend” Al Sharpton can spare a benediction for the “many millions gone” to the slave markets of the Muslim world?
For all our disagreements on facts and their value, President Obama and I share one aesthetic taste: As a tourist in Muslim lands, I, too, have found the call to prayer beautiful at times. But I wonder how it sounded to those countless millions enslaved by our president’s cherished “religion of peace.”
— Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and former enlisted man, a prize-winning novelist, and, to the dismay of his left-leaning friends, Fox News Strategic Analyst.

Identification Chart, by Michael Ramirez

The Roots of Obama’s Appeasement

February 5, 2015 12:00 AM

The president’s disastrous foreign policy is as much a product of his own vanity as anything else.
 

By Victor Davis Hanson 

 

Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as likely caused by returning U.S. combat veterans, according to one report by a federal agency.
What is the point of such linguistic appeasement?
The word “appeasement” long ago became pejorative for giving in to bullies. One side was aggressive and undemocratic; the other consensual and eager to avoid trouble through supposedly reasonable concessions.
But appeasement usually weakened the democratic side and empowered the extremist one.
The architect of appeasement — for example, Neville Chamberlain, former prime minister of Great Britain — was predictably a narcissist. Chamberlain believed that his own powers of oratory, his insights into reason, and his undeniably superior morality would sway even a thug like Adolf Hitler.
President Obama currently is convinced that his singular charisma and rare insight into human nature will convince the Taliban to peacefully participate in Afghan politics. Obama will supposedly also win over the Iranian theocracy and show it how nonproliferation is really to everyone’s advantage.
“Reset” diplomacy with Putin was supposed to lessen tensions — if, after the 2012 election, Putin just had more exposure to a flexible statesman of Obama’s wisdom.
Throughout history, without the vanity of the conceder, there would never have been appeasement.
Appeasement also always subordinates the interests of vulnerable third parties to the appeaser’s own inflated sense of self. When Chamberlain and the French prime minister Edouard Daladier signed the 1938 Munich Pact, they worried little about the fate of millions of Czechs who lost their country — and less about millions of Poles who were next in line for Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.
Reset diplomacy with Russia in 2009 was not much concerned about the ensuing danger to Crimeans or Ukrainians. When the Taliban takes over, hundreds of thousands of reformist Afghans will die.
Obama sees a deal with Iran as a way to cement his legacy as a breakthrough statesman. In comparison, the long-term consequences of a nuclear Iran on the security of tiny Israel or on the stability of the largely Sunni Arab Middle East are future and more abstract concerns for others.
Even major concessions never satisfy aggressive powers. It is a traditional Western liberal delusion — brought on by our wealth, leisure, and the good life — that autocrats appreciate magnanimity rather than see it as timidity to be exploited further.
Hitler fumed that the compliant Chamberlain at Munich was a “worm” for making such concessions to him and boasted that he would stomp on that “silly old man” on the next occasion he saw him.
Releasing Guantanamo prisoners, or ignoring red lines to Syria, deadlines to Iran, and step-over lines to Russia, did not win over aggressors. Gestures of appeasement and empty threats only emboldened terrorists and green-lighted dictators to ratchet up nuclear enrichment, or violence against their own people — or to go into Ukraine.
When a top Russian general brags that its nuclear force is now more powerful than America’s, or when Raúl Castro warns that Cuba now expects an early return of the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay as the price of normalization, past American concessions seem to have whetted their appetites for more confrontations.
The euphemisms for radical Islamic terrorism have not curbed it. They have not improved U.S. popularity in the Middle East.
The appeasing party is not always the weaker one. In 1938, Combined British and French military power was greater than that of the Third Reich. President Jimmy Carter had far more military options than did the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran during the 1979–80 hostage crisis.
Instead, stronger democratic nations feel that they can continue to enjoy short-term calm and peace of mind — and let others worry about any long-term likelihood of aggression. Maybe by treating jihad, terrorism, and radical Islam as taboo words, radical Muslim terrorists will respond and become less threatening.
In truth, appeasement, not deterrence, is the more reckless path. With serial concessions, democratic leaders convince aggressors that they must be stronger than they actually are. Those fantasies increase the likelihood that weaker dictators and terrorists will miscalculate and set off a deadly confrontation down the road.
Yet the public often prefers appeasement. Military preparedness and investment are too costly. Backing up threats seems too scary. Churchills and Reagans sound shrill. Alliances, deterrence, and balance of power sound so old-fashioned. Evil and good are derided as too simplistic. Defusing a crisis now is preferable to ensuring one down the road.
Appeasement continues not because it works, but because it serves the pretensions of narcissists.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2015 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The Gallup CEO Doubles Down

Rush Limbaugh

February 05, 2015

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: On Fox America's Newsroom today, Bill Hemmer interviewed the chairman of Gallup, the CEO, Jim Clifton.  He wrote an op-ed a couple of days ago, and for many of you in this audience it wasn't news.  He had simply just discovered the difference in the U-3 and the U-6 unemployment designations, and he had just discovered that the 5.7% unemployment rate did not get anywhere near presenting the accurate picture of unemployment in America.
He discovered there was something called U-6.
Really!
The CEO of Gallup figured out that there's a whole lot of people that are not working and have given up working who are not counted as unemployed, and he couldn't believe that.  So he wrote a piece about how we're being lied to, that the unemployment picture in this country is far worse, and he didn't understand why the news media isn't digging deeper to tell the story.  So he wrote the op-ed.  Well, now he's digging even deeper. He's doubling down on all of this with even more data and stats that he has learned.
Bill Hemmer said to Jim Clifton, "Tell me about the big lie," which is what he wrote in his op-ed, how he titled it. "What is the big lie, Jim?"
CLIFTON:  If I could do it over again, Bill, I might call it "very misleading."  But the point is that number is getting so messy, it might be the most important metric in the United States of America and the world, how many people are working.  It mixes part-time and full-time. And of course, what everybody wants, the great American dream is to have a good job, not a crappy job.
RUSH:  Right, that's true, everybody wants... Not just jobs.  People want careers.  You want a job that is part of a career.  People choose careers, objectives in a career. They want to become something.  Some people don't.  They  just want a job to do something; that's fine. But his point here is that inclusive in the definition of the American dream is a good job. Whenever you want one, it's there. It's the promise of America.  You want to work? There's a golden opportunity.
You want to set the world on fire, you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to whatever? There's an opportunity for this in this country. And that's where he's going.  The opportunity isn't there.  It clearly isn't there anymore.  The number of people working full time is dwindling, the number of people working part time is rapidly increasing, and you don't build careers working part time.  Bill Hemmer then said, "Well, you write that the big lie," and, by the way, he's walking back that term. He's now calling is "the big mislead."  But Hemmer said, "You write that the big lie has consequences.  What are the consequences of this, Jim?"
CLIFTON:  The number of full-time jobs -- and that's what everybody wants -- as a percent of the total population is the lowest it's ever been.  That's what that number doesn't show.  The more people that drop out, the better the number gets.  We might add 250,000 jobs.  What reporters -- or what the administration or Wall Street -- doesn't ask next is, "Well, how many people dropped out?"  Well, that number might be 500,000.  It actually makes the unemployment number better when those people drop out.
HEMMER: Right.
CLIFTON: You'll hear both Wall Street and the administration say that we've had more success with unemployment than we've had in 10 years.  That's just absolutely not true.
RUSH:  Right.  Now, I'm grateful for this -- I am happy Jim Clifton has shown up -- but, ladies and gentlemen, this is something you and I have been discussing on this program for practically five years, maybe even... Ah, five years.  Obama's starting his seventh year now, so five years we've been talking about the fraudulent reporting of unemployment.  I remember into arguments with people.
I would say, "One of the ways to get the unemployment rate down, that percentage rate down, is to reduce the overall universe of jobs," and that's what's happened.  With the number of jobs that have been lost, that just simply don't exist anymore -- companies that have closed down, or companies have eliminated jobs -- the opportunity to get jobs is way down. The number of jobs down is in the millions.  Well, okay. If there are fewer jobs to have, then, by definition, the unemployment rate percentage is gonna drop.
And then if you further do not count all the people who've been out of work for four years or more and are now not looking for work, the unemployment rate's gonna drop even more.  That's his point.  The worse the news got in reality, the better the unemployment rate got.  I remember... For those of you who have been lifers, been listening regularly here for the longest time, you know that every month when these numbers are released, we went through them.
We made exactly this point time and time again.  I remember getting into arguments.  I have friends in high finance who'd send me e-mails, "Rush, you're not talking about this right! Just because you reduce the overall number of jobs it has nothing to do with the unemployment rate."  I would get mad and I'd write 'em back, "How can it not?  The unemployment rate is an expression of how many jobs there are in the country, and how many people don't have them.
"Well, if the universe of jobs declines, if there are fewer jobs to have, well, then the people out of work percentage is gonna also fall, and it's not gonna be representative of the truth."  Now, Mr. Clifton, I don't know how or when, but he has arrived at this. He's understood it. I'm happy as heck that he is now writing about it, going on TV and talking about it, because the more people who understand it, the better, because it's necessary to put the lie to what Obama's saying.
Obama's out there touting this roaring economy now.  He's out there really highlighting this roaring recovery and this fast-growing economy, and saying, "We finally put it all back together!" It's worse than ever.  By the time you add Obamacare into this, and the number of people who are losing full-time jobs and being converted to part time and losing Obamacare or health care in the process or just giving up?
Folks, there's no way the productivity of this country can in any way maintain what it's been, particularly when the government comes in and takes over more and more chunks of the private sector or the free-market economy.  When government grows, how can it grow?  It has to gobble something.  Government growing is the exact opposite of what we want when we talk about a strong American economy.  The government is not part of that.
Government destroys wealth, government creates debt.  Government doesn't produce anything.  The bigger government gets definition, the smaller the free market economy is getting.  The free-market economy's where we live. The free market economy is where our lifestyles are.  The free market economy is where our standard of living is.  The free market economy is where everybody's opportunity is. The free market economy is the pie that everybody wants a piece of.
Now, normally in a growth economy with as little overregulation as possible and the government getting out of the way, that pie grows, and feeds off itself.  The growth contributes to growth, and that's how you create even more opportunity for an even greater number of people graduating from school every year and entering the workforce.  But that cannot happen when somebody like Obama's running the show because he's eating up the free market economy.
He's gobbling it up and swallowing it up and government's getting bigger, and there's no way your piece of the pie can get bigger, and there's no way the pie itself can get bigger, and therefore there's no way opportunity can expand. That's another reason why we're gonna have a wealth gap because in a shrinking pie, you know what else happens?  The real cream of the crop are gonna take an even bigger piece of it.
The smartest among us, the hardest working among us, the most creative among us -- the luckiest among us, in some cases -- when the pie gets smaller, the rich don't get dumber.  When the pie gets smaller, the really creative, the entrepreneurs, don't also get smaller and dumber.  They stay the same size, and we're creating more of those as they're born.  So the smaller the pie gets, the greater percentage of it's gonna be gobbled up by the truly competent, the hardworking, the industrious.
I don't mean this as an insult to anybody.
It's just human nature.
The bigger the pie, the more that is gonna be left over for others who don't want to work as hard, who don't invest as much in themselves as others do, but that's always been the great thing about America.  That pie was always growing. That free market economy, that place where your security is, where your economic opportunity is, where your lifestyle is, where your standard of living is.  That's the US economy.  As long as it's growing, everybody's got a shot at a bigger piece of pie.
If it's shrinking, the pie is gonna be cut up in much different ways, and an increasing amount of that pie is gonna be taken by the, quote/unquote "wealthy," and the gap is gonna get bigger.  And then when the government gets bigger by printing money, and prints all that money and gives it the stock market, the wealth gap's gonna expand even more.  In the midst of all this, the Regime is coming along and talking about how great the economy is.
"It's roaring and growing, and look at the unemployment! We've got better employment situation than we have in ten years!" It's an out-and-out lie.  We have 93 million Americans not working.  That's the labor force participation rate.  It hasn't been this high since World War II.  It's really bad out there, and this guy finally has shown up on the scene to write about it in his own way, and he will persuade others who didn't know it, or are not aware of it.
One more sound bite.  Bill Hemmer with a final question: "We hear this a lot from the colleagues over at Fox Business, and Stuart Varney has been talking about this for years now.  It leads to the next question.  That is: What are the political leaders doing that have a direct impact on this, Jim?  What are they doing to correct this, if the middle class is being hollowed out?"
CLIFTON:  New business startups is the lowest it's been in like 20 years or ever.  America's not started businesses anymore.  We need about 500,000 new businesses to start while 400,000 die.  Four years ago, those lines crossed.  So now we're in very dangerous waters.
HEMMER: Right.
CLIFTON: But those full-time unemployment jobs will never come back until free enterprise and the spirit of entrepreneur kicks back in.
RUSH:  So we used to be a net creator of businesses.  We'd create 500,000 and 400,000 would fail, but still we'd have a 100,000 new ones.  Now it's the opposite.  Create 500,000 and 600,000 are failing.  All the new ones fail, and then the existing ones join them. That's his point what's happening now.  The bottom line is, the Regime is lying through their teeth about this economy, and that does a disservice as well.  Because it actually can lead to people not being as inspired.  They think they're gonna get swept up in it and it's gonna take care of them by inertia or whatever.
It's a mess, folks.  

END TRANSCRIPT

Obama Is Openly Colluding with the Enemy

February 2, 2015

By James Lewis

We are in the middle of a hot war in the Middle East, with constant terror attacks all over the world, including the United States, Europe, and Asia.  The enemy is called violent Islam, or radical Islam, or fascist Islam, or reactionary Islam, or merely "orthodox Islam."
We constantly waste time quibbling about the name.  But we know the enemy by now.
(And yes, there are plenty of Muslims who want peace, but who are too scared to speak out, with some brave exceptions I mention below.  As long as the West colludes with violent Islam, peaceful Muslims will be too scared to speak out.  As long as we fail to stand for freedom, we will be supporting the worst of the worst, who always terrorize their own populations first.
For fifty years, Muslims did not actively practice jihad against the West – until Jimmy Carter betrayed our ally the shah of Iran, and therefore empowered the first jihad-preaching Islamofascist regime in the world, the mullahcracy of Iran.  Because Carter was the weak horse, millions of Muslims around the world sensed a change in the wind – and that is why jihad is now breaking out all over.)
The single most shocking fact today is that the U.S. government, under President Obama, is constantly colluding with the enemy.
Check out of the facts for yourself. Don't take anybody's word for it. Make your own informed decision. This is a question not of opinion, but of fact.
When a serving U.S. president has lost Foreign Policy magazine, the in-house trade union rag for the State Department, things have come to a bad pass.  But here is Foreign Policy on Obama's "pivoting to Iran."   
Iran is now going nuclear, courtesy of Barack Hussein Obama.
But wait!  Our good friend Recip Erdoğan of Turkey, "Obama's best friend in the Middle East" is now supporting ISIS – the worst mass murdering would-be regime on the Sunni side of the street.
Turkey has openly established recruiting stations for ISIS, called "IS consulates," and Obama's  next "best friend" Qatar is feeding billions of dollars to ISIS.  Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama's biggest ideological ally, is also backing ISIS.  Don't believe the cover story that ISIS just mushroomed up by a miraculous dispensation from on high.
You may not remember the name of Mohammed Elibiary, a top advisor to our Homeland Security folks.  Mr. Elibiary is a big name among the Moobs (naturally).  Patrick Poole has a nice summary of Mr. Elibiary's thoughts here.  In a sane world, this man should be on our terrorist suspect list, but instead he is "advising" our Department of Homeland Security.
(And you remember Huma Abedin, another Moober loyalist, walking with Hillary with their heads devoutly covered over?  Muslim Brotherhood money goes to the Clintons, the Carters, and the Obamas, and they all give real value for that money.)
The Moobers are a Muslim fascist cult going back to 1928, when the Mufti of Jerusalem was in an open alliance with Hitler, helping to send Arabs troops to fight for the Nazis.
In 1981 the Moobs assassinated Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat, for making peace with Israel.
In 2011 they were complicit in the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, who was also trying to keep the Egypt-Israel peace treaty alive.
And today, in collusion with Obama, the Moobers are in open rebellion against the government of President El Sisi, the biggest peace advocate in the Arab world.  (See below.)
All the signs therefore point to Obama as a major backer of ISIS on the one side, and of the Khomeinist nuclear-going tyranny on the other.
If they're really unspeakably evil, you can expect Obama to support them.
Obama's half-brother Malik Obama is a big Muslim Brotherhood money man.  The MBs have espoused jihad against the modern world since 1928, when their organization was founded.  Malik "oversees Muslim Brotherhood investments worldwide," and that means buying up politicians, like you-know-who.  Malik is also a funder of Hamas, which has an identical war theology to ISIS's.
The Muslim Brotherhood assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt forty years ago for making peace with Israel.  After Obama pressured Egypt's longest-lasting peace-keeping president, Hosni Mubarak, into leaving office, at the beginning of the completely fraudulent "Arab Spring," a Muslim Brotherhood thug was "elected" president and started to purge the judiciary and military in Egypt.
Egypt's political elites revolted, and with the help of Saudi Arabia, they overthrew the Islamic fascists in favor of General El Sisi.
This administration still hates El Sisi and is still plotting with the Muslim Brotherhood against El Sisi.
Every single time, Obama backs the worst criminals against more civilized forces.  Just look at the facts.
Don't think the Egyptians don't know what Obama is doing.  In the Middle East, in Moscow and Paris, everybody knows what Obama is doing.  Only the victims of media propaganda are still in denial.
Obama's collusion with undeniable evil is especially hard for Americans to believe, because it's emotionally painful to see your own president colluding with the worst mass murderers since the Nazis.  Just keep looking at the facts.
The White House just lied its head off again, this time about the Taliban, who now are "not really terrorists."  The Taliban knowingly protected Osama bin Laden while he was planning the 9/11/01 attacks on New York City, but they are "not terrorists."  The Taliban tried to assassinate Malala Yousafzai (now winner of a Nobel Peace Prize) for advocating education for girls and women in Afghanistan, but they are "not terrorists."  To Obama it's only Republicans who are terrorists.  
What Mr. Obama does not support is Muslims who want peace, and who are willing to risk their lives to say so.
The most prominent example of a pro-peace leader today is President El Sisi of Egypt, who just told his religious establishment at Al Azhar University in Cairo that Islam "needs a religious revolution."
Obama said nothing.  Instead, he just keeps backing the most barbaric and disgusting ideology in the world.
Now the Iranian caliphate is on the march, just as surely as the Third Reich was on the march in Hitler's time.
Three high-ranking Iranian officers were just caught in a planning meeting with three Hezb'allah terrorist leaders, on the Syrian border just north of Israel.  The Israelis caught wind of the meeting and bombed them to smithereens.  Now the mullahcracy are boiling over with rage, but they are still afraid of Israel's nuclear arms and effective military.  That is the role the United States should be playing: keeping a clear moral compass and destroying mass-murdering barbarians in a true alliance of civilized peoples.  Millions of Muslims will rise up against their terror masters as soon as the United States signals a recovery of its moral center.
Israel defends itself like a pit bull.  It will use nuclear weapons if it must.  The Iranians know that, and in spite of all their glorification of martyrdom, they will not risk Israel's nuclear retaliation until they have overwhelming superiority.
Instead, they are going after Sunni apostates against the will of Allah, especially the Saudis and Egypt.
What is emerging today is a ferocious Shi'a-Sunni civil war, with Israel taking the side of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.  Obama is supporting truly evil forces, those who kill women and children for the fun of it, like Boko Haram, the Islamofascist monsters who are now trying to conquer Nigeria.
The Iranians now surround Israel on two of three sides, and ISIS is attacking in the Sinai Desert.  But if  you look at the map, you can see the real strategic targets of the Iranians, now with Obama's collusion.  Iran's real target  is the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina.  Those were Ayatollah Khomeini's real target when he tried to stir up a rebellion against the Saudis during the Hajj, when Iranian pilgrims attacked the Saudis forty years ago.  The Islamic "Republic" is a war theocracy, and its aims are always conquest of the infidels and the apostates.  To Iran, Saudi Arabia is worse than Israel and the West, since the Sunni Muslims abandoned the true way of Allah.
(Naturally, ISIS and the Saudis say the same thing about the Iranians.)
So even Israel and America are only secondary targets.  Each half of the Muslim world considers the other half to be betraying Allah.  Once the Iranians control Mecca and Medina, they believe that all Muslims will fall under their control.
From the actions of this administration, Obama agrees with them.

The Real White Privilege and My Radio Race War

By Selwyn Duke

If you look for the worst in a group, you’re sure to find it. Using a twist on an Abraham Lincoln line, I made that statement on the Mildred Gaddis Show (Radio One Detroit WCHB AM) last Wednesday during a debate on “White Privilege: Myth or Reality.” Finding myself pitted against the other guest, whose name isn’t important, and the black callers, it was a spirited discussion, to say the least.
It was also, unfortunately, a good example of how hatred is like darkness: the more there is, the less you can see.
To the other guest and the black callers, white privilege’s reality was simply a “fact” everyone was obligated to acknowledge, and the only legitimate question was the extent to which it has affected our lives. My debate opponent was flabbergasted that I denied this.
Of course, the general explanation for “deniers” such as me — and this is the white man’s plight, the dogma goes — is that we’re so immersed in our privilege we just can’t help ourselves and see beyond it. Thus is our opinion on the subject irrelevant.
This demonization is a bit like what befell the Jews in Nazi Germany. It mattered not if they didn’t have two pfennigs to rub together; by virtue of being Jewish they were automatically deemed privileged and guilty of taking advantage of that status. This justifies all manner and form of discrimination against the target group to “balance the scales.” Of course, those scales never do get balanced. For instance, even though South African whites are politically powerless today and subject to great discrimination and violence, they’re still blamed for their country’s woes.
But accepting white privilege as supposition is prejudice itself. If someone wishes to claim this phenomenon exists, the burden is on him to prove it; it is not on those who would have to prove a negative.
This proof is never forthcoming. The only argument offered is that whites are more prosperous and healthier socially than are blacks, which proves white privilege as much as blacks’ numerical dominance in the NBA proves black privilege. After all, Hindus (exclusively non-white) are the highest-earning religious group in the U.S., and Jews are number two, yet no one today takes this as proof of Hindu or Jewish privilege. In fact, in a radio debate some years ago I challenged a different guest — who cited whites’ higher incomes as proof of privilege — to be true to his rationale and speak of Jewish privilege (which he wouldn’t dare do). His response?
Jewish people can’t be privileged because we know they’ve suffered discrimination.
Of course, this is circular reasoning. Higher incomes were proof of his ideology — except when his ideology said that higher incomes weren’t.
But that’s the left-reason Left for you. They don’t need facts or logic. They know white privilege exists. They know whites discriminate. It’s just a matter of accepting the terms of surrender and your place in the re-education camp. Because they know. Yet the guest on that second show, a Ph.D., didn’t even know that whites (non-Hispanic) were only 63 percent of our population; he thought they constituted 80 percent. It was especially striking that he didn’t know the country’s racial and ethnic make-up — his Ph.D. was in ethnic studies.
But, hey, don’t you know? Educators today teach students “how to think” — as opposed to just teaching memorization and “facts.”
So it’s no wonder many don’t have enough facts to lend perspective to the few facts they do know. On the Mildred Gaddis Show I heard the usual refrains: whites had slaves, whites violated blacks’ civil rights, white men in America didn’t allow anyone else to vote. The other guest even bellowed, as if relating an unpardonable sin, that our country was founded only by white men. Is this shocking in a primarily white civilization? China was founded by Chinese, and ancient Egypt was founded by Egyptians.
French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville noted, “The most dangerous moment for a bad regime is when it begins to reform itself.” Being a rough-hewn lot, all of man is a “bad regime.” But whites started to reform themselves.
And now they’re endangered.
That is to say, it’s true that whites engaged in slavery, violated human rights and suppressed voting. But is this notable? All groups did those things. Slavery has been practiced since time immemorial and still is not unusual in places such as Africa. What’s notable is that while it’s unlikely whites were the first ones to engage in slavery, they were the first ones to outlaw it. Europeans led the way there, followed by the U.S. a bit later.
Human-rights violations are also the historical norm. What’s notable is that whites were the group that originated our modern concept of human rights.
And for virtually all of history women and blacks couldn’t vote — anywhere — because no one could vote.
Until whites invented democracy.
It was born in Athens, Greece 2500 years ago. And modern constitutional republics were originated by whites as well.
Having said all this, I’ll now admit I’ve been wrong in denying the reality of white privilege. It certainly exists.
It’s the privilege from which anyone who resides in a primarily white nation benefits. People who live in Western lands enjoy a lifestyle unparalleled in history or anywhere in the rest of the world. As Thomas Sowell wrote recently addressing Barack Obama’s classless impugning of our country while in India, “[W]hat Obama called ‘terrible poverty’ in America would be called prosperity in India.”
This brings us to the fact that there is black privilege as well. It’s not enjoyed by most black people, who live in Africa often in misery and under despotism. But in the U.S. it means benefitting from quotas, affirmative-action, set-asides, immunity from many kinds of criticism, and the latitude to make racial remarks and jokes that would destroy whites’ careers.
Some may now fault me for framing all this in racial terms. But how else can one address a race-based claim such as white privilege? Don’t write the check if you don’t want it cashed.
It could also seem as if I’m engaging in white triumphalism. But while the causes of civilizations’ varying degrees of success constitute an interesting topic too complex to explore here, know that I don’t consider cultural and technological advancement a purely white domain. Egypt and China were once dominant powers, and China may become so again. But I am trying to balance the scales.
This returns us to my opening Lincoln line. If you focus on a person’s sins to the exclusion of his good deeds, you can make him appear the Devil incarnate. It’s fashionable today to look for the worst in whites, and because of this people are sure to find it. And the result is that we will hear things such as, to quote the late leftist writer Susan Sontag, “The white race is the cancer of human history.”
But, of course, whites do have certain crimes for which to answer. For example and in an interesting irony, it seems it was a white man who disgorged the concept of white privilege.

Fed fires back at Rand Paul

By Kevin Cirilli - 02/05/15

 

The Federal Reserve is lashing out at Sen. Rand Paul’s plan to give Congress more oversight over the central bank, a proposal that could gain traction in the new Republican-led Congress.
The Kentucky Republican reintroduced his “Audit the Fed” legislation last month with 30 co-sponsors, including other potential 2016 GOP hopefuls, Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Marco Rubio (Fla.).
The proposal — once championed by his father, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) —would subject the central bank to an audit by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Regional bank presidents from around the country are decrying the plan, which they argue could damage the economy.

“Who in their right mind would ask the Congress of the United States — who can’t cobble together a fiscal policy — to assume control of monetary policy?” Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said during an interview with The Hill.
Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen has already vowed to fight the legislation, and President Obama would likely veto it.
Still, Fed watchers note that Paul has become emboldened by the new Republican majority in Congress. And he possesses an ever louder national microphone, as he moves closer to a 2016 presidential run.
Together, those factors could elevate the issue in the coming months, a prospect that has spurred strong words from bank officials.
Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser told The Hill that financial auditing “already exists” for the Fed, and warned that Paul’s plan would empower Congress “to audit and question monetary policy decisions in real time.”
“This runs the risk of monetary policy decisions being based on short-term political considerations instead of the longer-term health of the economy,” Plosser said.
Paul pushed back against the criticism, saying Fed officials “will say and do anything to keep their business hidden from the American people.”
For Paul, the legislation allows him to burnish his Republican-libertarian credentials.
And he appears to want to make it part of his early presidential campaigning. On Friday, Paul will hold an Audit the Fed rally in Des Moines, Iowa, as part of a weekend trip to the early presidential caucus state.
The issue could give Paul an opening to tap into the public’s mistrust of the government, more than six years after the federal bailouts that followed the 2008 economic crisis.
“This secretive government-run bureaucracy promotes policies that have impacted the lives of all Americans,” Paul said. “Citizens have the right to know why the Fed’s policies have resulted in a stagnant economy and record numbers of people dropping out of the workforce.”
Fisher said lawmakers are looking to shift blame, having proven “unable to get together with their own colleagues on a working fiscal policy or construct a regulatory regime that incentivizes investment and job creation.”
“So they simply find it convenient to create a boogeyman out of an entity that does its job efficiently — the Federal Reserve,” Fisher said. “To some outsiders the Fed appears to be some kind of combination of Hogwarts, the Death Star, and Ebenezer Scrooge — especially to those who don’t take the time to read the copious amounts of reports and speeches and explanations we emit.”
The twelve presidents of the Fed’s regional banks are well connected, their boards of directors stacked with influential business leaders. They are likely to intensify their opposition to Paul’s proposal.
On Wednesday, Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester criticized the legislation as “misguided” during public remarks in Columbus, Ohio.
“They really are about allowing political considerations to influence monetary policy decisions,” Mester said in her speech. “This would be a tremendous mistake, because it would ultimately lead to poorer economic performance.”
Yellen, who met with Senate Democrats last week on Capitol Hill, is scheduled to testify before Congress later this month. The appearance will be her first since Republicans seized control of the Senate, and she will likely face questions on the legislation.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), whose panel has jurisdiction on the bill, has also said he is interested in holding hearings on the issue.