Obama Golfs, the War Goes On

This is getting excruciating:

Yesterday, fourteen Americans died in helicopter crashes in Afghanistan, the deadliest day for Americans there since June, 2005, in what has been the deadliest year for international and US forces there since the 2001 invasion. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, where Obama has ordered our troops into slow retreat, two massive suicide car bombs claimed hundreds of lives, including those of at least two dozen children, while destroying three major government buildings. And then, of course, came news that Obama had now played more golf while in office than our last president did in nearly three years.

All right, I don’t begrudge Obama the golf. It’s his dithering and cowardice I find shameful. During the campaign, he told us Afghanistan was the necessary war. In March, he told us he had completed a major review of the situation and come up with a new strategy. The commander he put in place has told him he needs 30- to 40-thousand more troops to finish the job. Civilians are dying in the war he wants to abandon. Our soldiers are dying in the war he swore he’d win. And Obama, caught between campaign rhetoric and reality, can’t figure out what to do.

Again, I’m not an expert, but I’m beginning to smell disaster, big time disaster.

President Obama: do something. Get in. Get out. Don’t just sit there dithering and having endless meetings. Councils of war are the tools of cowards – you are the President. Make the decision. I’ll back you on it, come what may – and so will millions of other Americans. What we can’t take is continued indecision while our soldiers are dying and innocents are being murdered.

A little less golf. A little less time making speeches. A bit more time doing the bloody job we hired you to do.

Conservatives Outnumber Liberals 2 to 1

Doesn’t this just cut you liberals to the quick?

Conservatives continue to outnumber moderates and liberals in the American populace in 2009, confirming a finding that Gallup first noted in June. Forty percent of Americans describe their political views as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 20% as liberal. This marks a shift from 2005 through 2008, when moderates were tied with conservatives as the most prevalent group.

Poor, little liberals – you managed to sucker the moderates in to voting for Obama, but now the mask is off and people are running back to conservatism.

2010 and 2012 will just be soooo much fun!

George P. Bush to be Called Up

We here at Blogs for Victory wish him the best of luck and a safe return:

…any future George P. Bush political ambitions will have to be put on hold as his Navy Reserve unit is set to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan in the coming weeks.

Lt. Junior Grade Bush, 33, joined the Navy Reserve in 2007 as an intelligence officer. The Navy recently told him, like thousands of others, that the two ongoing wars required him to go active-duty overseas, potentially in Iraq or Afghanistan. “It’s been communicated to me that it’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s a question of ‘when,’” Bush told The Daily Beast. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Bush, who said that he was inspired by the service of his grandfather George H.W. Bush as well as former NFL star Pat Tillman, signed up for an eight-year term in the Navy Reserve in 2007.

James Earl Obama

Yep:

Why did things go south for Carter so fast? Because America’s enemies had taken measure of the man during his first, change-filled year in office. They saw weaknesses they could exploit. In the second year, they made their move.

In Year One, Carter invested all the international prestige of his presidency in diplomacy and image-making. His energy was dedicated almost exclusively to “making nice” on the world stage. It’s what drove his actions in the Israeli-Egyptian peace process, at strategic-arms limitation talks and in negotiating the Panama Canal Treaty.

It was a perpetual exercise in “soft power.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Except …

While Obama and co might think they are living in a post-modern world where everything can be deconstructed in to meaninglessness, the rest of the world lives in reality where power matters. In fact, for the leaders of Russia, Iran, China and Syria, the only thing which matters is power. Even supposing the left wing narrative is right (ie, that what we’re dealing with is blowback from our previous policy errors and crimes), it doesn’t change the fact that enemy leaders simply don’t care one way or the other about it. They only care about their power, and getting more of it – and in the global competition for Tyrant of the Year, wrecking US policy is always a sure winner.

They don’t care that Obama is black. They don’t care that Obama is cool. They don’t care that Obama speaks fluent liberalese. They are delighted we are essentially telegraphing that we won’t use force to get our way. They are thrilled to find that Obama is willing to give up strong positions on the theory that by so doing we’ll make the tyrants willing to work with us for the common good. And they are now crafting their plans with all this in mind.

And that means we’re in for a bad couple years. Welcome back, Carter.

NY-23: Club For Growth Poll Shows Hoffman Leading

To be sure, Club For Growth would want such a poll result, but we’ve no reason to doubt their honesty:

A poll released today by the Club for Growth shows Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman surging into the lead in the special election in New York’s 23rd congressional district to replace John McHugh, the former congressman who recently became Secretary of the Army.

The poll of 300 likely voters, conducted October 24-25, 2009, shows Conservative Doug Hoffman at 31.3%, Democrat Bill Owens at 27.0%, Republican Dede Scozzafava at 19.7%, and 22% undecided. The poll’s margin of error is +/- 5.66%. No information was provided about any of the candidates prior to the ballot question.

This is the third poll done for the Club for Growth in the NY-23 special election, and Doug Hoffman is the only candidate to show an increase in his support levels in each successive poll. The momentum in the race is clearly with Hoffman.

Of course, its very hard to figure out who will really show up on election day, and that 22% undecided is certainly something which can end up being a game changer. On the other hand – it will be Hoffman voters who are most motivated. He just might pull this off.

UPDATE: DCCC has an ad hitting Hoffman. Its a stupid, class warfare ad…but it shows that the Democrats figure Hoffman is the man to beat.

Should We Defend Big Business, or Free Markets?

It is an important question because on our side of the aisle – in a desperate bid to stop socialism – we have become identified not so much as the party of free markets, but the party of big business. We’re trying to defend the right of a small businessman to run his business but we’re often ending up defendng the ability of a JP Morgan/Chase to loot the economy. We have to be careful about what we’re really about – and this article by Luigi Zingales is the best explanation I’ve seen. I do recommend reading the whole thing – here is what struck me as vitally important for our national debate:

…because the free-market system relies on this public support, and this support depends to a certain extent on the public’s impression that the system is fair, any erosion of that impression threatens the system itself. Such erosion occurs when government connections, or the power of entrenched incumbents in the market, seem to overtake genuine free and fair competition as the paths to wealth and success. Both government and big business have strong incentives to push the system in this direction, and therefore both, if left unchecked, pose a threat to America’s distinctive form of capitalism.

Although the United States has the great advantage of having started from a superior model of capitalism and having developed an ideology to support it, our system is still vulnerable to these pressures — and not only in a crisis. Even the most persuasive and resilient ideology cannot long outlive the conditions and reasoning that generated it. American capitalism needs vocal defenders who understand the threats it faces — and who can make its case to the public. But in the last 30 years, as the threat of global communism has waned and disappeared, capitalism’s defenders have grown fewer, while the temptations of corporatism have grown greater. This has helped set the stage for the crisis we now face — and left us less able to discern how we might recover from it.

In our financial system, especially, who among us would deny that entrenched interests heavily connected to government rule the roost? And if this is capitalism, then we can see why people are getting dismayed with it – but it isn’t capitalism; its a mockery of capitalism…a quasi-socialist, corporate-Statism counterfeit of a free market system. A place where the Masters of the Universe (in government and corporate board rooms) will stoutly assert that the market is free, but unless you come with suitable introductions, don’t try to enter it.

On our side, we must become the defenders of the free market against both Big Government and Big Corporation. Because someone works on Wall Street it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s in love with freedom and the free market…he might be very much in love with sweetheart deals and backroom bribes. The author concludes in part:

We thus stand at a crossroads for American capitalism. One path would channel popular rage into political support for some genuinely pro-market reforms, even if they do not serve the interests of large financial firms. By appealing to the best of the populist tradition, we can introduce limits to the power of the financial industry — or any business, for that matter — and restore those fundamental principles that give an ethical dimension to capitalism: freedom, meritocracy, a direct link between reward and effort, and a sense of responsibility that ensures that those who reap the gains also bear the losses. This would mean abandoning the notion that any firm is too big to fail, and putting rules in place that keep large financial firms from manipulating government connections to the detriment of markets. It would mean adopting a pro-market, rather than pro-business, approach to the economy…

And that is it, in a nutshell: pro-market, not pro-business. We don’t care if any particular business lives or dies. We only care that the playing field is level, that no one is getting a rake-off from the taxpayers and that anyone who wants to enter the field may do so. America is a meritocracy and it must remain such – if we cease to be a place where the little guy can get ahead, then we’ll just become another socialist dystopia heaving for slow death, as most of Europe is now.

Obama and his Democrats – along with the entrenched, big corporate interests – see this crisis as the prime opportunity to completely close down the avenues of advancement. They wish to freeze us in place and turn us in to mere cogs in a government/corporate machine…where government pretends to help us and corporations pretend to compete. It will be “fair” in the mind of the left because (a) the left will be in charge, (b) the top people in government and business will be very well off and (c) everyone will have just enough government hand-outs to maintain a comfortable slavery. But we won’t be free – and we will start to die, just as the Europeans have.

Our ancestors built this nation for the Average Man – not the privileged man and not the lazy man. Just the average person who wants to work hard, play fair and get ahead to the best of his abilities. As such a nation we will continue to grow and secure for the world this bastion of liberty – or, we can choose to go Obama’s route, and slip in to a senescent slavery, where bureaucrats in government and business tell us where to live, where to work, what to buy, how much money we’ll have…

I want to live in the America our ancestors built – where do you want to live?

Cleaning House or Eating Our Own?

The TEA Party laid down a marker regarding NY-23:

We are extremely disappointed that the Republican Party (and leaders like Newt Gingrich) has missed the message of the Tea Parties and continues to take conservative voters for granted. We applaud all courageous statesmen (Fred Thompson, Michelle Bachmann, and Dick Armey) and call on other GOP officials to put America’s values over traditional, often corrupt and morally bankrupt, power structures.

I understand the anger – in fact, I agree in principle with it. On the other hand, we need to have a care here. I’m a Republican and it will only by via the Republican Party that our nation will be rescued from Obama’s socialism and returned to our Founders’ constitutional republic. The Republican Party must stop recruiting RINOs on the theory that any “R” will do. The TEA Party movement must learn to be selective in expressing outrage.

As regards NY-23, this was (and is) an excellent means for the TEA Party to show the GOP establishment just how outraged the base is and how we’re not going to take having RINO’s foisted upon us by Beltway insiders who are afraid to fight it out in the realm of ideas. But to take some of the GOP establishment’s actions regarding NY-23 and apply it to the entirety of the GOP leadership is suicidal. Yes, Gingrich should have thought a bit harder – but he’s still one of us, and if we’re to get in to the game of condemnation for the slightest error, we might as well pack it in, go home and get ready for socialism. Meanwhile, in contrast to Gingrich there are many establishment GOPers who made the right choice – making blanket condemnations of the GOP for the failure of some just means we’d be cutting off the best of the best at the knees.

While our hero Barry Goldwater correctly noted that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, there is a vice in being intransigent. Don’t oppose just to oppose and don’t fly off the handle and condemn just because of a momentary lack of purity. Explain what you want; advise the erring why they’re wrong; work very hard for people who do get it – but leave the political suicide stuff at the door.

Freddie Mac CFO Gets $5.5 Million

Its ok, you see?, he doesn’t work for just any, old greedy corporate behemoth, but for a government-bailed-out corporate behemoth:

The pay package given to Freddie Mac’s new chief financial officer should have sent a message from Washington to corporate America about how executive compensation standards must change. Instead, it did just the opposite.

The government-controlled mortgage finance company is giving CFO Ross Kari compensation worth as much as $5.5 million. That includes an almost $2 million cash signing bonus and a generous salary that could top $2.3 million.

Signing bonus? Is this a sports team?

Look, I don’t care how smart this guy allegedly is. I don’t care how much knowledge he’s supposed to have – I could do this job for, oh, $1 million per year…and if I needed some help keeping up with the books, I could take half my salary and distribute it amongst 5 accountants at 100 grand a pop and still leave myself an income more than sufficient to live as swank a life as anyone needs – especially if their pay is drawn out of the taxpayer’s pocket.

This is what is wrong with America: Big Government and Big Corporation simply don’t understand the lives of everyday Americans. Seriously – I’ll bet any amount that there isn’t single middle or lower income American who, if asked how much the CFO of Freddie Mac should make, would have come up with a figure greater than a few hundred thousand dollars. Its all the job is worth – and there is someone out there who would do a bang up job for such a salary. But people in Big Government/Corporation sat around and discussed the issue and figured that Kari needed $2 million just to walk through the door!

This is what we must fight against – we must make these cretins understand that they aren’t tin-platted little demigods living on a higher plane than the rest of us. They are just people who choose the path of least resistance – and thus work either in Big Government or Big Corporation where results are never really measured and the whole system is designed to hide incompetence. You can’t get away with this sort of nonsense at smaller firms – and a smaller government would inherently be more responsible with our money because they’d have less of it.

In 2010, we must start taking our country back – before the idiots who awarded a $2 million dollar signing bonus for a glorified accountant destroy us.

France Turns Away From Obama

So much for hopeychanging us in to better foreign relations:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, initially dubbed Sarko the American for his pro-U.S. stance, is finding it much tougher to deal with Washington than he had anticipated and is recalibrating his policies accordingly.

Stung by perceived snubs from U.S. President Barack Obama and encouraged by the growing importance of the G20, Sarkozy is increasingly reaching out to non-aligned states in an effort to extend France’s international influence.

He has forged especially close ties with Brazil, is seeking alliances in central Asia and is intensifying his activities in the Middle East, using multi-billion dollar military and civilian nuclear trade deals as his calling card.

These initiatives are being played out against a discordant tone in Franco-American relations…

The only people Obama is nice to are our enemies – and they repay his truckling by spitting in our eye.

Ok, Democrats – we understand: you were told for years that if only Bush were nicer then things would get better. It was mindless, but you believed it; and now your guy has implemented what you were certain would work. Well, it hasn’t – I’d like to say “I hate to say ‘I told you so’”, but I do take great joy in saying it – so: I TOLD YOU SO!!!! And so did everyone else with any sense at all.

That out of the way, it is time for you to re-think your views. Perhaps it is better to try and work with allies and oppose enemies? I know – radical thought! But it has been tried before and has had some success (WWI, WWII, Cold War, Gulf War, Liberation of Iraq, eg) – I know that is a rather thin record to go on, but given the abject failure of Obama policy, how about giving it a try?

H1N1: Hype or Real Emergency?

Per the President, it is:

President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect noninfected patients.

The declaration, signed Friday night and announced Saturday, comes with the disease more prevalent than ever in the country and production delays undercutting the government’s initial, optimistic estimates that as many as 120 million doses of the vaccine could be available by mid-October.

Health authorities say more than 1,000 people in the United States, including almost 100 children, have died from the strain of flu known as H1N1, and 46 states have widespread flu activity.

I wasn’t aware until just now that 1,000 people have died of this strain of H1N1 – given we are just at the start of the flu season, this could be serious…on the other hand, I’ve heard lots of stories telling us to relax about the whole thing. Personally, I don’t know whether to be worried, or not.

Anyone out there got a better read on this?