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MISSION: U.S. Veteran and Author Revealing Reality with Daily Reading / Sharing of Select, Intelligent, and Informative Articles, Columns, and Commentary.
Breitbart Barack
By William L. Gensert
Is there any better example of a warrior than Andrew Breitbart? The man was rigorous, relentless, and totally without remorse in search of the truth and in opposition to those who would rewrite history to expand and support the liberal narrative. Using the weapons of the left -- all media, and no subject taboo -- he pursued the illusions of progressivism with élan. Exceedingly effective, his name has entered the lexicon as a verb.
President Obama wants everyone to listen to his words, but ignore his actions. As a propitiator of extreme skill and nuance, he always knows what to say and refuses to let truth and civility get in his way. Our president believes he knows everything. Unfortunately, that is the only thing he knows. Unless the nation craves four more years of economic suicide, Obama's stifling regulatory tsunami, high energy prices, and deliberate demagogic discord, the meek and mild on the right will need to learn how to fight.
America must Breitbart Barack; it's the only way he can be defeated. The left will scream. It will be called negative campaigning, racist, and worse. Knowing Barack Obama and his minions -- as we now do -- it will be called both. Conservatism will become synonymous with "negative racism" -- at least in the written press, televised news, and progressive blogosphere.
Yet if the right wages a polite and dignified campaign, eschewing negativity and "in your face" advertising, the Republican candidate still will be labeled negative and racist.
War is like that. The right might as well fight, or get used to performing sexual favors to earn the cash necessary to fill up their gas tanks, in order to get to jobs that pay less than they made in 2008, if they are lucky enough to even have a job. At least their contraception costs will be covered by the ObamaCare mandate.
It should be learned at an early age that one cannot resort to reason with a bully; it ensures only more bullying. Make no mistake: Barack Obama is a bully. Any man who would throw his grandmother, the woman who raised him, under the bus to score political points is a bully.
Every paragraph written, speech made, or commercial commissioned, between now and Election Day, must be about Obama, his past, who he has associated with, and his mentors, as well as who he is today and what he has done to this nation -- the havoc he has wrought economically and the doom he has relegated to the world with his policy of serial apologies and weakness.
Conservatives and Republicans tend to be civil, despite what is said by the left and the "all Barack, all the time" press. Yet the left still sets the parameters of every discussion, led by the New York Times, which now fits all the news into what it wants to print. And it wants to print that everything is peachy and that Barack Obama is great.
In fact, he's better than great; he is legendary, and we are lucky to have him. The opposition is not just wrong, but evil, waging "war" against someone...anyone -- minority voters, women, the economy, or the environment. With no argument to support Obama's policies, they have militarized the conversation and made enemies of us all.
In 2008, John McCain famously apologized when a supporter repeatedly used the president's middle name during an introduction. There can be no apologies this time around. Every TV commercial should start out with the words: Barack Hussein Obama. Especially now, with Iran provoking war and Jewish people everywhere nervous about Barack's penchant for leading from behind.
Until now, the right has been forced to play defense on progressive terms, fighting not to lose, instead of to win -- politically, leading from behind. It's the way John McCain campaigned, and it will guarantee a loss in November. There is no room for civility in this election battle. This is not a game -- we are fighting for our children and the future of America, the last, best hope for humanity.
Obama the Great will not play nice; he will be brutal and negative -- he's never been anything but negative. Should he choose to pretend he is not, lackeys on the left will take up the slack.
Many voters will pick Obama, regardless of what he does. These people could come home from work to discover the president beating their mother to death with his Nobel Prize medal, and they would still vote for him.
It's not them we are after. It's the guy barely paying his mortgage, whose home has lost value, hurt by the price of gasoline and making less than he was before hope and change. Formerly comfortable -- before Barack -- but now everything has changed. He now hopes to be able to pay off his house and retire five years after his death.
He may belong to a party, but he does not have any particular party loyalty -- he is too busy trying to survive to pay much attention to politics. He gets most of his information from the legacy media, which is so in bed with Barack that for its acolytes, every day should be a walk of shame.
He is not the right, or the left, and he is not the middle. He is an American. He will listen, and he will vote -- conservatives must say something that resonates. It is not that he is uniformed as much as that he is misinformed -- he simply needs to be informed. That is the task at hand. Playing prevent-defense will not do. The eventual candidate needs to attack, attack, attack...it's the only way to win.
Television commercials should be the weapon of choice in the war against Barack. This election season, there will be little positive spin for the Republican candidate in the liberal press. There is conservative media, but it shrinks in comparison to the plethora of progressive media, and it is primarily preaching to the choir.
The fatuity of Barack Obama is there for all to see -- yet mass media members are still perfervid in maintaining the man is a genius. Conservatives need to accept that all coverage of their candidate will reflect this delusion.
Run commercials during NFL games, the World Series, or The X Factor, and people will hear the message -- otherwise, it will be lost in the cacophony of cultish Obama-worship. The media will make sure of that.
The expiry of Barack Obama's inchoate presidency cannot come soon enough. Conservatives need to help it along by telling people the truth about Barack Obama -- with Breitbart aggressiveness.
In 2008, Obama sold hope and change in commercials that were everywhere. This year, thanks to Citizens United, there will be parity in campaign war chests, empowering citizens to unite against the abomination that is this president.
Spike Lee was right -- America will be defined as pre-Barack and post-Barack -- but not in the way he intended. We are on the cusp of history, the dawn of a new age, the epoch of post-Barack prosperity, post-progressivism and post-"post-Americanism."
We must chase this president from office before he destroys us all -- and it is not enough to beat him in November. He must be driven from any position of influence. He must be relegated to unimportance and irrelevance. Can there be a more apt fate for a narcissistic tyrant?
Let him vacation and play golf; those are the only things he's good at anyway.
Obamacare Twice as Expensive at $900 BILLION Price Tag?
The Congressional Budget Office has extended its cost estimates for President Obama's health care law out to 2022, taking in more years of full implementation, and showing that the bill is substantially more expensive -- twice as much as the original $900 billion price tag.
In a largely overlooked segment of the CBO's update to the budget outlook released Tuesday, the independent arm of Congress found that the bill will cost $1.76 trillion between now and 2022.
That only counts the cost of coverage, not implementation costs and other changes.
"The bill spends more than the president promised, it covers fewer people -- probably 2 million fewer people -- and it taxes more than was expected," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee.
The first estimates of the cost of the health care bill included three years before the bill even took effect, so there was little or no spending, making the full 10 years look less expensive. Sessions notes that the $1.76 trillion estimate includes only the costs of coverage, not implementation and other costs. He argues that all those drive the price up even further over the first full 10 years of the law.
"The full accounting of the bill is $2.6 trillion. That's a fair and accurate analysis of what the bill would cost, according to CBO," Sessions said, noting how the cost dwarfs the fight over the 10-year debt reduction plan debated last year.
"We spent a whole summer fighting over a way to reduce spending by $2.1 trillion and here this bill is going add $2.6 trillion more in spending."
Budget watchdogs note that before the bill passed into law, Republicans warned the price tag was bound to go up -- since the expenditures and receipts covered different time periods.
"Spending doesn't begin until 2014, and so you got to count a couple of years where nothing was going on," said Doug Holtz-Eakin, director of Committee for a Responsible Budget. "If you have a big spending program and you count 10 years of it instead of eight years, you get a much bigger number, which is what we've done. ...
"Now those years are steadily going into the rearview mirror and what we're instead (at) are years where it's fully implemented," Holtz-Eakin continued. "The Affordable Care Act is going to cost a lot of money."
But one Democratic lawmaker says competition will lower costs.
"There are no public options. There's no big new government health plan being offered. It's all private sector options, and we hope they compete against each other to get prices down," said Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn.
As expensive as it is, the CBO predicts the law will actually reduce the deficit because it increases the income from a range of tax increases and penalties on individuals, employers and insurance companies -- by $81 billion more than last year's projection.
"Over the 10-year period from 2012 through 2021, enactment of the coverage provisions of the ACA was projected last March to increase federal deficits by $1,131 billion, whereas the March 2012 estimate indicates that those provisions will increase deficits by $1,083 billion," the report reads.
The CBO model also assumes that between 3 million and 5 million people will lose health care coverage from their employers and there will be 1 million to 2 million more people who won't qualify for the exchanges but will go on Medicaid instead. In all, some 30 million people will remain without health coverage, according to the estimate.
CBO notes that it bases its new projections in part on both a slower recovery and a smaller than estimated growth in health care costs over the past year as well as legislative fixes over the past year.
Sessions noted that the study projects spending in accordance with the law will add at least $700 billion to the deficit in the years 2010 to 2019 -- its first 10 years of enactment.
"Sadly, it may prove much worse than that," he said.
Fox News' Jim Angle contributed to this report.
In a largely overlooked segment of the CBO's update to the budget outlook released Tuesday, the independent arm of Congress found that the bill will cost $1.76 trillion between now and 2022.
That only counts the cost of coverage, not implementation costs and other changes.
"The bill spends more than the president promised, it covers fewer people -- probably 2 million fewer people -- and it taxes more than was expected," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee.
The first estimates of the cost of the health care bill included three years before the bill even took effect, so there was little or no spending, making the full 10 years look less expensive. Sessions notes that the $1.76 trillion estimate includes only the costs of coverage, not implementation and other costs. He argues that all those drive the price up even further over the first full 10 years of the law.
"The full accounting of the bill is $2.6 trillion. That's a fair and accurate analysis of what the bill would cost, according to CBO," Sessions said, noting how the cost dwarfs the fight over the 10-year debt reduction plan debated last year.
"We spent a whole summer fighting over a way to reduce spending by $2.1 trillion and here this bill is going add $2.6 trillion more in spending."
Budget watchdogs note that before the bill passed into law, Republicans warned the price tag was bound to go up -- since the expenditures and receipts covered different time periods.
"Spending doesn't begin until 2014, and so you got to count a couple of years where nothing was going on," said Doug Holtz-Eakin, director of Committee for a Responsible Budget. "If you have a big spending program and you count 10 years of it instead of eight years, you get a much bigger number, which is what we've done. ...
"Now those years are steadily going into the rearview mirror and what we're instead (at) are years where it's fully implemented," Holtz-Eakin continued. "The Affordable Care Act is going to cost a lot of money."
But one Democratic lawmaker says competition will lower costs.
"There are no public options. There's no big new government health plan being offered. It's all private sector options, and we hope they compete against each other to get prices down," said Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn.
As expensive as it is, the CBO predicts the law will actually reduce the deficit because it increases the income from a range of tax increases and penalties on individuals, employers and insurance companies -- by $81 billion more than last year's projection.
"Over the 10-year period from 2012 through 2021, enactment of the coverage provisions of the ACA was projected last March to increase federal deficits by $1,131 billion, whereas the March 2012 estimate indicates that those provisions will increase deficits by $1,083 billion," the report reads.
The CBO model also assumes that between 3 million and 5 million people will lose health care coverage from their employers and there will be 1 million to 2 million more people who won't qualify for the exchanges but will go on Medicaid instead. In all, some 30 million people will remain without health coverage, according to the estimate.
CBO notes that it bases its new projections in part on both a slower recovery and a smaller than estimated growth in health care costs over the past year as well as legislative fixes over the past year.
Sessions noted that the study projects spending in accordance with the law will add at least $700 billion to the deficit in the years 2010 to 2019 -- its first 10 years of enactment.
"Sadly, it may prove much worse than that," he said.
Fox News' Jim Angle contributed to this report.
We Give Up
| Americans — left, right, Democrats, and Republicans — are all sick of thankless nation-building in the Middle East. Yet democratization was not our first choice, but rather a last resort after other methods failed. The United States long ago supplied Afghan insurgents, who expelled the Soviets after a decade of fighting. Then we left. The country descended into even worse medievalism under the Taliban. So after removing the Taliban, who had hosted the perpetrators of 9/11, we promised in 2001 to stay on.We won the first Gulf War in 1991. Then most of our forces left the region. The result was the mass murder of the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, twelve years of no-fly zones, and a failed oil-for-food embargo of Saddam’s Iraq. So after removing Saddam in 2003, we tried to leave behind something better. In the last ten years, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion, and thousands of American lives have been lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both places seem far better off than they were before American intervention — at least for a while longer. Yet the Iraqis now bear Americans little good will. They seem friendlier to Iran and Syria than to their liberators. In Afghanistan, riots continue over the mistaken burning of some defaced Korans, despite serial American apologies. How about the option of bombing the bad guys and then just staying clear? We just did that to the terrorist-friendly Gaddafi dictatorship in Libya. But now that Gaddafi is gone, there is chaos. Islamic gangs torture and execute black Africans who supported the deposed regime, according to press reports. British World War II cemeteries that were honored during 70 years of Libyan kings and dictators could not survive six months of a “free” Libya. In Benghazi, gangs just ransacked and defaced the monuments of the British war dead. Not having boots on the ground may ensure that endless chaos will consume the hope of a calm post-Gaddafi Libya. That was also true of Somalia and Lebanon after American troops were attacked and abruptly left. How about another option: aid and words of encouragement only? We have urged Egyptian reform, under both George W. Bush and now Barack Obama. When protesters forced the removal of dictator Hosni Mubarak, the United States approved. It even appears likely that we will keep sending Egypt annual subsidies of more than $1.5 billion — as we have for more than 30 years. Yet anti-American Islamists are now the dominant force in Egyptian politics. American aid workers were recently arrested and threatened with trial by new Egyptian reformers. Still another American choice would be not to nation-build, bomb, or even to get near a Middle Eastern country — as we seem to be doing with Iran and Syria. The United States has not had diplomatic relations with Iran since the shah left in 1979. Until the Obama administration desperately tried to reestablish contacts with the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria by appointing a new ambassador, there had been nearly six years of estrangement. Yet Iran is nearing its goal of obtaining a nuclear weapon both to threaten Israel and to bully other oil-exporting regimes of the Persian Gulf. The Syrian government is now butchering thousands of its own citizens with impunity. A final option would be to return to the old policy of reestablishing friendly relationships with Middle East dictatorships regardless of their internal politics — and then keeping mum about their excesses. We did that with Pakistan, which has both received billions in U.S. aid and produced a nuclear bomb. Yet it is hard to imagine a more anti-American country than nuclear Pakistan, without which the Taliban could not kill Americans so easily in Afghanistan. The United States once saved the Kuwaiti regime after it was swallowed up by Saddam Hussein. We have enjoyed strong ties with the Saudi monarchy as well. Neither country seems especially friendly to the U.S. It is still a crime to publicly practice Christianity in Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the 19 mass-murdering hijackers of 9/11 were Saudis. Oil in the Middle East costs less than $5 a barrel to produce; it now sells for over $100, largely because of the policies of our allies and OPEC members. Let us review the various American policy options for the Middle East over the last few decades. Military assistance or punitive intervention without follow-up mostly failed. The verdict on far more costly nation-building is still out. Trying to help popular insurgents topple unpopular dictators does not guarantee anything better. Propping up dictators with military aid is both odious and counterproductive. Keeping clear of maniacal regimes leads to either nuclear acquisition or genocide — or 16 acres of rubble in Manhattan. What have we learned? Tribalism, oil, and Islamic fundamentalism are a bad mix that leaves Americans sick and tired of the Middle East — both when they get in it and when they try to stay out of it. — Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of the just-released The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc. |
How to Stop Putting Gas in the Islamist Tank
Islamists are a diverse lot. Some are what diplomats like to call “violent extremists.” They want to kill you. Others are less eager to shed blood, more confident that by mastering electoral politics, manipulating international organizations, and designing effective public-relations campaigns, they can achieve their objectives. What are those objectives? Islamism implies a commitment to the imperative of Islamic power. Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, articulated the basic idea succinctly:
It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.If those championing Islamism were only stateless terrorist groups and tin-pot dictators, their geostrategic significance would be minimal. But the regime that rules Iran is dedicated to waging what it calls a global Islamic revolution. And in Saudi Arabia, the state religion is Wahhabism, a strain of Islam that preaches the inferiority of infidels and the rejection of Muslims who do not share Wahhabi ideals.
These regimes float atop an ocean of oil, a commodity that is valuable thanks to those the Islamists despise. It was the Western mind that figured out how to pump oil out of the ground and refine it into a variety of fuels, including those used in internal-combustion engines, another history-bending Western invention.
Imagine you are one of the rulers of Iran or Saudi Arabia: Fabulous wealth is yours due to no intellectual or physical labors on your part. If you invest that wealth wisely, you’ll make even more, but if not, so what? Wealth will flow to you every single day as surely as rivers run to the sea. To sell rugs, olives, or computers requires salesmanship. But oil sells itself: Those who depend on it for their cars, ships, and planes have no other options. Well, theoretically, they do: They could take it by force. But you need not worry about that because, as you are well aware, modern Western ethics prohibit such behavior.
If there were even one oil-rich, Muslim-majority nation solidly committed to liberal democratic values, to freedom of religion and speech, to tolerance and minority rights, the challenges of the 21st century would not be so formidable. But there is no such nation.
Almost 80 percent of global oil reserves are controlled by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a cartel, a conspiracy in restraint of trade. Most OPEC countries are autocracies. Many are hostile toward America and other free nations. From the income produced by OPEC oil comes most of the money used to train and arm terrorists around the world, and to build nuclear-weapons facilities in Iran.
That makes the price of oil and the West’s dependence on it national-security problems of the first order. What can be done? Robert C. McFarlane, who served as then-president Reagan’s national-security adviser, wrote last week that we can and should be producing more of our own oil, but “that is not enough. To outmaneuver OPEC we need to eliminate oil’s monopoly as the only transportation fuel.”
The most promising possibility: Natural gas is a resource America has in abundance. Cutting-edge American technology — e.g., horizontal drilling and fracking — has made natural gas easier and cheaper to extract. As McFarlane points out, natural gas “can be used in various forms to fuel vehicles. Compressed natural gas (CNG) is well-suited to drive long-haul and other fleet vehicles” but for “light trucks or automobiles, a better approach lies in using natural gas to make the liquid-fuel methanol, a high-octane, clean and safe fuel . . . ”
He notes that the Methanol Institute, a private industry group, estimates that producers can, right now, deliver an amount of fuel equivalent to the energy in a gallon of gasoline for approximately $3. The cars we drive would require only minimal and inexpensive modifications in order to run on methanol — as race cars already do.
Let me emphasize: McFarlane is not proposing that we stop using gasoline and other petroleum products. He is not proposing government subsidies for natural gas, methanol, or other fuels. On the contrary, he is making the case for eliminating subsidies and government favoritism of one fuel over another. He and others are arguing for breaking the monopoly that oil currently enjoys and encouraging the creation of a competitive fuel market.
If, for any reason, that does not happen, only those who invested their own money would suffer. If it does happen, however, having a larger fuel supply from more than one source would provide multiple benefits: It would reduce the funds available to Islamists (strengthening national security), bring down the cost at the pump and reduce price volatility (easing the burden on families, commuters, truckers, etc.), and keep more money and jobs in the United States, thereby reinvigorating the domestic economy (good for those who live, work, and invest in America). The downside? There is no downside.
“Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman stressed that the foremost economic duty of government is to eliminate cartel pricing,” McFarlane notes. At the moment, however, government is not doing its economic duty. Nor is it doing its national-security duty: It should not require a Clausewitz to grasp that transferring unprecedented amounts of wealth to your enemy in a time of war is counterproductive. Yet, at the moment we are knowingly funding the “violent extremists” who want to kill us, as well as the more moderate Islamists who merely want to dominate us.
From time to time, Islamists of both stripes must gaze at Westerners and wonder: “How can people so technologically smart be so strategically stupid? Like the oil under the desert sands, this must be a gift from Heaven.”
— Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
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