Category Archives: Opinions

Krauthammer’s Faith in We, the People

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“No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail. ” Charles Krauthammer

Tired of being talked down to? So are the voters. We the People are ready to take on the President. Charles Krauthammer says it well in The Electorate vs. Obama’s Agenda:

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

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For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.

The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back. It re-centers. It renormalizes. Even in Massachusetts.

The Fall of Obama

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Check it out:

via The Fall of Obama.

Charles Krauthammer asks and answers:

What went wrong? A year ago, he was king of the world. Now President Obama’s approval rating, according to CBS, has dropped to 46 percent — and his disapproval rating is the highest ever recorded by Gallup at the beginning of an (elected) president’s second year.

President Pass-the-Buck

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Ed Morrisey observes a tendency of our missing in action President:

“The modern American standard for political leadership was set by Harry Truman, who put a sign on his Oval Office desk that read, “The buck stops here.”  After almost a full year in office, Obama and his administration haven’t figured out that Americans expect that attitude from every President, and not a series of blamehifts to one’s predecessor, regardless of how unpopular he happened to be.  They expect not just leadership from a President, but visible leadership, a muscular sort of public presence that shows tough decision-making and command of the facts and concepts involved in the decisions.

Of course, many of us warned of this problem when the Democrats nominated a man who had never held executive office at any level for the toughest executive position in the world.  Obama has demonstrated all of the leadership one would expect from a legislative back-bencher, a man who passed the buck a lot more often than he held it at both the state and federal levels prior to winning the election last November.  He has passed the buck repeatedly this year, on Porkulus, ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, and would have done so on Afghanistan had there been anyone who could have handled it.  The Obama Way is the anti-Truman, and his falling approval rating reflects the fact that Americans have begun to discover that.”

Passing the buck is apparently tiring as Michelle Malkin observes in Poor Obama being President is Exhausting,

“Jetting off for Broadway dates, undeserved Peace Prizes, botched Crony-lympics bids, and world apology tours is hard work, don’t you know?”

“But what else did you expect from a man who has been phoning it in from the beginning of his brief political career as the Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times?

Americans can help alleviate the exhausted commander-in-chief’s discomfort by ensuring his retirement in 2012.”

Soaring But Empty Words Mark Obama Presidency

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Charles Krauthammer hits home on Obama’s misses:

“We lost a year. But it was not just any year. It was a year of spectacularly squandered opportunity. In Iran, it was a year of revolution, beginning with a contested election and culminating this week in huge demonstrations mourning the death of the dissident Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri — and demanding no longer a recount of the stolen election but the overthrow of the clerical dictatorship.”

“Why is this so important? Because revolutions succeed at that singular moment, that imperceptible historical inflection, when the people, and particularly those in power, realize that the regime has lost the mandate of heaven. With this weakening dictatorship desperate for affirmation, why is the U.S. repeatedly offering just such affirmation?

Apart from ostracizing and delegitimizing these gangsters, we should be encouraging and reinforcing the demonstrators. This is no trivial matter. When pursued, beaten, arrested and imprisoned, dissidents can easily succumb to feelings of despair and isolation. Natan Sharansky testifies to the electric effect Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech had on lifting spirits in the Gulag. The news was spread cell to cell in code tapped on the walls. They knew they weren’t alone, that America was committed to their cause.

Yet so aloof has Obama been that on Hate America Day (Nov. 4, the anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran), pro-American counter-demonstrators chanted “Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them,” i.e., their oppressors.” Read More

President Wishy-Washy

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Charles Krauthammer  doesn’t pull his punches in Uncertain Trumpet and Obama has no punch:

We shall fight in the air, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, we shall fight in the hills — for 18 months. Then we start packing for home. We shall never surrender — unless the war gets too expensive, in which case, we shall quote Eisenhower on “the need to maintain balance in and among national programs” and then insist that “we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.”

The quotes are from President Obama’s West Point speech announcing the Afghanistan troop surge. What a strange speech it was — a call to arms so ambivalent, so tentative, so defensive.

Which made his last-minute assertion of “resolve unwavering” so hollow. It was meant to be stirring. It fell flat. In August, he called Afghanistan “a war of necessity.” On Tuesday night, he defined “what’s at stake” as “the common security of the world.” The world, no less. Yet, we begin leaving in July 2011?

“Overregulated, Overbureaucratized” Krauthammer

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Charles Krauthammer on killing the bills and doing health care reform right:

Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method — a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.

The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one — tort reform, interstate purchasing and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 — and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.