As usual Obama sounded great speaking of how America and the world needed to respond to N.Korea. As usual his response to the launch didn’t match the rhetoric and reality, as real clear Krauthammer, Fox News contributor, posted by Town Hall blog, makes crystal. Here’s Charles on the N. Korean missile launch and the weak response from President Obama :
h/t Greg Hengler
Update:
I’m sorry. I was in a hurry and didn’t do Obama’s comments justice. In referring to America Obama said we’d “shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive…” Charles Krauthammer fills in the blanks for me with regards to a fuller history on the subject.
Commenting on President Barack Obama’s lack of grace in dissing his country on the world stage, Steven Forbes says, President Obama should take a day off. Go to Camp David. Watch some old tapes of Ronald Reagan, and learn what it’s like to be a real President.“
Charles Krauthammer says more:
Charles Krauthammer thinks President Obama’s endgame is “Leveling“:
Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.
Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism. (Asked by Charlie Gibson during a campaign debate about his support for raising capital gains taxes — even if they caused a net revenue loss to the government — Obama stuck to the tax hike “for purposes of fairness.”) The elements are highly progressive taxation, federalized health care and higher education, and revenue-producing energy controls. But first he must deal with the sideshows. They could sink the economy and poison his public support before he gets to enact his real agenda.
The “side shows” are the credit crisis, which , and the collapse of the U.S. automakers. Tim Geithner now wears the credit crisis as an albatross around his neck while Obama may come to rue his despotic intervention into the car business. Krauthammer doubts that this intrusion will leave lasting effects on our nation saying only, “Some find in this “descent into large-scale industrial policy a whiff of 1930s-style fascist corporatism.”
Obama’s real agenda is another matter in Krauthammers view:
Bizarre and constitutionally suspect as these interventions may be, the transformation of the American system will come from elsewhere. The credit crisis will pass and the auto overcapacity will sort itself out one way or the other. The reordering of the American system will come not from these temporary interventions, into which Obama has reluctantly waded. It will come from Obama’s real agenda: his holy trinity of health care, education and energy. Out of these will come a radical extension of the welfare state; social and economic leveling in the name of fairness; and a massive increase in the size, scope and reach of government.
I mention Charles Krauthammer’s observation because I find it very troubling that as busy as constitutional scholars were during the Bill Clinton impeachment days, we hear little from them now. History should have taught us what times of national crisis especially collapse have wrought in a nation which has been otherwise civilized. For example, Richard J Evans who wrote of Hitler’s endgame in his just released The Third Reich at War states that in of a previous book of his trilogy, The Coming of the Third Reich :
“I’m trying to be comprehensive, to show Nazi Germany and Nazi society at war in every aspect. In addition to the much better known military aspects, I try to deal with culture, literature, the arts. And I have human experiences — diaries, letters, personal testimonies.
In “The Coming of the Third Reich,” I try to say that it was not inevitable while pointing out that the Weimar Republic did, in fact, bring Nazism. The crucial point to remember is that in the 1928 elections, Nazis scored less than 3% of the national vote. By 1932 they were by far the largest party, with one third of the vote. So it’s the Depression. More than one third of the work force is unemployed by the middle of 1932. Businesses have crashed; banks have bankruptcies; people are disoriented by terrible inflation. It’s a desperate situation. And in that situation, the sense of activism, dynamism, youth, vigor, and radicalism that Hitler and the Nazis conveyed, tapping into nationalist resentment about the Treaty of Versailles with vague but vehement promises to restore Germany to its greatness…. All that had an irresistible appeal.
In “Can it happen here” (read the comments too!) Bookworm writes:
“…it’s worth noting that, when Hitler came to power in 1933, he did so with just barely more than 50% of the popular vote. There was never a time when the majority of Germans were members of the Nazi party. For most Germans, right through the end of the War, their crime wasn’t active complicity with Nazi atrocities, it was passive complicity. From a mixture of fear and brain washing, they just went along.
The Anchoress writing of lost freedom and persecution, wonders how much American will tolerate before realizing that freedom “is lost in increments and inches.”
As the magic that unleashed a relatively unknown Barack Hussein Obama onto the political scene and now world scene, do we really know what we have unleashed. Changes has come so quickly and gone unchallenged by any in a position to slow them down or investigate them such as our Congress who should be the voice of balance for the Nation. As I asked before where are the voices of our constitutional gurus? For that matter, where is our Congress and its role of checks and balances. What will the out to lunch Congress cost us?
Ace of Spades calls it a good piece:
Charles Krauthammer can’t write fast enough to keep up with all the crap he can’t believe is happening. “We are now so deep into government intervention that constitutional objections are summarily swept aside.” Seizing every opportunity to seize, seize, seize power for the government from the people, Geithner “seeks yet broader powers.”
Obama’s goal, writes Krauthammer,
“is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation’s income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.
Our President seems naive about the goodness and fairness of Big Government. Our founders were not so naive about the weakness of men and statesmen, hence checks and balances. The present disproportionate numbers in the Congress of Republicans to Democrats cripples that system. We are off kilter and in trouble.
While Capitalism needs corrective checks and balances, with a heavy dose of scrutiny, to cure it’s ills, Big Government isn’t the one to take over for the patient. Share holders are more invested and intuitive than this generation of gobbling government bureaucrats. We can’t trust our lawmakers to steer clear of side line profit-making or taking as the scandalous last years have shown. (You know the names.)
President Obama’s medicine is to level field by cutting the growth producers in this nation off at the knees. Good luck Mr. President a crippled America will not fill your coffers for the Big Dole.
“Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.”
Although Charles Krauthammer is wrong on where to draw the line in stem cell research, I think you will find his stance against President Obama’s stance a must read. Krauthammer is “not religious” and so to his mind sees no definitive guideline as to when person-hood is bestowed. To my mind the science of it tells the tale. Peering into the beginning moments of life with powerful cameras records the change from ova and sperm entities to new being with all the where-with-all to command the hormones and functions of the mother’s body to make possible its continuance and growth. It has not only presence but power to command.
The Truth of the matter, and our relationship to the Creator from the instant of our becoming a unique individual at the conjoining of ovum and sperm, is still hidden from Krauthammer. It does help to have the Truth that is revealed by the Creator through the Scriptures, the Church and the Tradition of both Church and Man (Natural Law.) I leave this as another issue for another day. Krauthammer does believe in Evil. He opposes Obama’s replacing Bush’s line with “no line at all.”
This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of “science” and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom. [My emphasis]
Though Krauthammer does not know when to confer person-hood, he says:
“I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research — a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.
Krauthammer judges Obama as morally arrogant in the extreme, dismissing “his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.” Or so Obama expects us to believe.
Krauthammer says of President George W. Bush:
“Bush’s nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.”
I am reminded of the recent movie, I Am Legion, a futuristic nightmare with basis in possibility if not history for a scenario of science run amok. Krauthammer concludes his dismembering of Obama’s so called reasoned logic:
Dr. James Thomson, the pioneer of embryonic stem cells, said “if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.” Obama clearly has not.
“Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.”
Charles Krauthammer calls foul and unmasks the deception.
Obama to Congress:
“We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education”
“The ‘day of reckoning’ has arrived.”
Krauthammer calls Obama’s “sleight of hand” agenda (my emphasis):
“Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.”
“Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.”
“At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the banking industry…List of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates.”
“Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.”
“Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions – the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his “Big Bang” agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education”
“….intellectually dishonest to the core...The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime”
Be Holy! 