Category Archives: Opinions

The Age of “Just Hope It”

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“Amen” to what he said.  Charles Krauthammer commenting on the Nobel Prize Surprise supposedly heralding the shining future of Obama the Peacenik and Flower Child ushering in the Age of “Just Hope It!”

“What’s come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program.

What’s come from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking human rights off the table on a visit to China and from Obama’s shameful refusal to see the Dalai Lama (a postponement, we are told). China hasn’t moved an inch on North Korea, Iran or human rights. Indeed it’s pushing with Russia to dethrone the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

What’s come from the new-respect-for-Muslims Cairo speech and the unprecedented pressure on Israel for a total settlement freeze? “The settlement push backfired,” reports The Washington Post, and Arab-Israeli peace prospects have “arguably regressed.”

And what’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign policy stroke — the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.”

Krauthammer hopes too, in the form of a question:

Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends?

Ahh, you guessed it, did you?!

NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, talk it up President Obama. “Peace,peace” and prizes for peace! So there is no peace to speak of, only talk and the shifting sands of duplicity beneath our feet.

Art, Plagerism, Fraud?

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What were they (the Obamas) thinking when they chose to hang an Alma Thomas art piece in the White House. Perhaps, they were thinking, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” The problem with this artist is that her creation, “Watusi (Hard Edge), as Michell Malkin says here , “is an almost exact reproduction of a 1953 piece by Henri Matisse titled “L’Escargot:” ”

“Here they are side by side, with “Watusi” rotated and on the left.”

Free Republic posts:

“Is this fraud? If the new piece has been titled “Homage to Collage” or “Matisse in Blue”, I would think the artist wasn’t trying to hide the copying. But I wonder whether anyone realized that the artist copied almost every aspect of a famous work to sell her artwork. Perhaps everyone involved knew that this is a re-colored reprint. If not, it seems to be an embarrassment for the “sophisticates” who failed to spot a copy hiding in plain sight.”


Abdicating or Retaining American Dominance

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H/T AllaPundit Quote of the Day

“Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer:

The corollary to unchosen European collapse was unchosen American ascendancy. We–whom Lincoln once called God’s “almost chosen people”–did not save Europe twice in order to emerge from the ashes as the world’s co-hegemon. We went in to defend ourselves and save civilization. Our dominance after World War II was not sought. Nor was the even more remarkable dominance after the Soviet collapse. We are the rarest of geopolitical phenomena: the accidental hegemon and, given our history of isolationism and lack of instinctive imperial ambition, the reluctant hegemon–and now, after a near-decade of strenuous post-9/11 exertion, more reluctant than ever.

Which leads to my second proposition: Facing the choice of whether to maintain our dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly, and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course towards the latter. The current liberal ascendancy in the United States–controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture–has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome.

Scraping the Bottom- Obama

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“President Obama, I support the Americans’ outstretched hand. But what did the international community gain from these offers of dialogue? Nothing.” — French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Sept. 24

“When France chides you for appeasement, you know you’re scraping bottom. “– Charles Krauthammer and more from Krauthammer:

Do the tally. In return for selling out Poland and the Czech Republic by unilaterally abrogating a missile-defense security arrangement that Russia had demanded be abrogated, we get from Russia … what? An oblique hint, of possible support, for unspecified sanctions, grudgingly offered and of dubious authority — and, in any case, leading nowhere because the Chinese have remained resolute against any Security Council sanctions.

Confusing ends and means, the Obama administration strives mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling and pious concern about Iran’s nuclear program — whereas the real objective is stopping that program. This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb.

Does Obama Trample Truth?

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I think Obama plays Truth like a shell game. Charles Krauthammer asks , “Does He lie?”

Krauthammer thinks Obama’s too slick for a simple, out and out, lie:

Obama doesn’t lie. He merely elides, gliding from one dubious assertion to another. This has been the story throughout his whole health care crusade. Its original premise was that our current financial crisis was rooted in neglect of three things — energy, education and health care. That transparent attempt to exploit Emanuel’s Law — a crisis is a terrible thing to waste — failed for health care because no one is stupid enough to believe that the 2008 financial collapse was caused by a lack of universal health care.

So on to the next gambit: selling health care reform as a cure for the deficit. When that was exploded by the Congressional Budget Office’s demonstration of staggering Obamacare deficits, Obama tried a new tack: selling his plan as revenue-neutral insurance reform — until the revenue neutrality is exposed as phony future cuts and chimerical waste and fraud.

Obama doesn’t lie. He implies, he misdirects, he misleads — so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness.

Slickness wasn’t fatal to “Slick Willie” Clinton because he possessed a winning, near irresistible charm. Obama’s persona is more cool, distant, imperial. The charming scoundrel can get away with endless deception; the righteous redeemer cannot.

Read it all here.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

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H/T Anchoress for the video link:

Charles Krauthammer isn’t as generous in discerning Obama’s motives, agenda and Waterloo saying in part:

In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob — misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest — from drug companies to auto unions to doctors — in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.