It’s Tuesday, November 18th, 2014…but before we begin, a brief yet memorable snippet from economist Bryan Caplan’s blog which caught our eye whilst perusing the Notable & Quotable section of the WSJ.  The entry was from Warren Nutter, an early and constant critic of the Soviet Union who visited the USSR back in 1956 and related this impression regarding the reality of the Communists’ economic “miracle” to U.S. New & World Report, which was prior to Mortimer Zuckerman taking the once-great publication hard left:

“Industrial expositions are dominated by displays of machinery, mostly of the ‘heavy’ variety.

All this in an economy that apparently has not yet discovered the wheelbarrow—sledges and two-man litters are used instead—where the scythe is far more in evidence than the mower, where brooms are mostly bundles of twigs without handles, where the mop is a [handleless] rag, etc. In the drive for modernism, the Soviet system has apparently ignored the multitude of simple yet dramatic inventions so important in the economic development of other countries.

…I must confess that I am more mystified than ever about how the Soviet economy can have achieved all that its leaders claim for it. It puts a heavy strain on my imagination to picture one large isolated sector of the economy—namely, heavy industry—where all these signs of backwardness vanish, and industrial progress rivaling or exceeding that of the West reigns.”

What’s the point?  Simple: lies were all Marxists had then…

…and lies are still all they have today!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the week with a little walk down Memory Lane, courtesy of Dick Mayer and one L.E. Ikenga writing at American Thinker way back in 2009:

Obama, the African Colonial

“…My friends, despite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African Colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel. Many conservative (East, West, South, North) African-Americans like myself — those of us who know our history — have seen this movie before. Here are two main reasons why many Americans allowed Obama to slip through the cracks despite all of his glaring inconsistencies:

First, Obama has been living on American soil for most of his adult life. Therefore, he has been able to masquerade as one who understands and believes in American democratic ideals. But he does not. Barack Obama is intrinsically undemocratic and as his presidency plays out, this will become more obvious. Second, and most importantly, too many Americans know very little about Africa. The one-size-fits-all understanding that many Americans (both black and white) continue to have of Africa might end up bringing dire consequences for this country...”

Think about it; D’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage wasn’t published until 2010, and 2016 didn’t come out until 2012, Nostradamus should have been so prescient!

This is the prism through which everything The Obamao does must be filtered.  As we noted last Friday:

We’ve said it before, but it bears constant repeating: Barack Hussein Obama isn’t a well-meaning but hopelessly overmatched, inept individual trying to do his best for ordinary Americans.  On the contrary; Billy Mumy might well have been directly addressing the President when he said…

He is a lying, hypocritical, conniving Communist intent on reducing the greatest nation in the history of the planet to rubble, all the while enjoying the unearned fruits of the very system he despises with his family and inner circle.  He is beneath contempt, along with anyone who supports him in any way.

Next up, two related cases in point; first, as The Washington Times details… 

White House taunts GOP on climate change: ‘I don’t believe they can stop us’

“I believe the president will complete actions. It is a top priority of his and I don’t believe they can stop us,” Mr. Podesta said. “Not withstanding Sen. McConnell making this a top priority to leave the status quo, to leave the air dirtier.”

On the other hand, as the WSJ notes, The Obamao doesn’t confine his climate change taunting to his internal opposition:

A Mystifying Obama Climate Slap at a U.S. Ally

In Brisbane, the president went out of his way to undermine Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Why?

So now you can add Australia to the list.  Why?  Because the only allies in The Obamao’s world wear either red…

…or green…

…or…both!

The only thing all his allies have in common is an active and abiding antipathy to the…

Since we’re on the subject of the first truly American-hating President, Paul Gigot and Kim Strassel analyze The Marxist-in-Chief’s reaction to the bitch-slap voters delivered November 4th:

So now that we all agree on the problem, what inquiring minds really want to know is what we’re going to do about him.  Writing at NRO, Andrew McCarthy offers one popular alternative:

Amnesty and Impeachment . . . Cont’d

Sure we can; unfortunately, without two-thirds of the Senate, we can’t convict him!

“…As I’ve contended for six years, Obama is guided only by his political calculations, not the law or his oath of office. Last week’s was the last election that mattered to him personally. That’s why so much bad stuff — amnesty, Obamacare mandates, capitulation to Iran, the Vietnam-ization of Iraq/Syria, Gitmo closure, net neutrality, etc. — was put off until it was over. The president’s interest in future elections lies in the preservation and expansion of the transformation he has overseen. That portends three things: the exploitation of Obama’s raw power as far as he thinks he can get away with it (which is very far); the appointment of as many progressive judges as possible, since their life-tenure can consolidate and extend the “change” he has wrought for decades to come; and the orchestration of massive immigration amnesty with a route to citizenship and voting rights for illegal aliens who, Obama and the Left reckon, could give Democrats a permanent governing majority.

I am not unrealistic about our political possibilities, but I insist on being clear-eyed about our options. So I will repeat the point that I wrote Faithless Execution to make. Our constitutional system assumes impeachment is a serious, viable check on executive maladministration — in some egregious instances, it is the only check. The Framers could have designed the system a different way, but they did not. If you have a lawless and abusive president, and you nevertheless disavow the only weapon the system gives you to fight a rogue executive, you are going to get more lawlessness and abuse. Period...”

There’s just one small complication: assuming for the moment the House should vote to impeach, even were all 54 Republicans in the Senate (Landrieu losing Louisiana December 6th) in lock-step (a BIG “if” given the lack of unity when Bill Clinton was caught dead to rights!), the GOP would still be 13 votes short of the two-thirds necessary to convict.

So why, in light of the utter impossibility of a conviction, would or should Republican Congressional leaders make what could only be a pyrrhic gesture of disastrous proportions?

Now that Hairball Harry can’t short-circuit the mechanism, better to limit Barry’s room to maneuver through the budget process than commit the political equivalent of seppuku.  It’s won’t grab as many headlines as impeachment, but since when have headlines highlighting GOP opposition to The Anointed One been good?!?

Moving on, courtesy of Balls Cotton, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens offers what we consider an informed and accurate view regarding our nation’s proper role in an increasingly troubled and violent world:

Yes, America Should Be the World’s Policeman

Bush did too much and Obama too little—but a ‘broken-windows’ model of U.S. foreign policy can be just right

“When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, Americans must sometimes feel like Goldilocks in the three bears’ house. The porridge that was President George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda”—promising democracy for everyone from Karachi to Casablanca—was too hot. The mush that has been President Barack Obama ’s foreign policy—heavy on rhetoric about resets, pivots and engagement but weak in execution and deeply ambivalent about the uses of U.S. power—is too cold.

What we need instead, as the fairy tale has it, is a foreign policy that is just right—neither too ambitious nor too quiescent, forceful when necessary but mindful that we must not exhaust ourselves in utopian quests to heal crippled societies.

…If the world’s leading liberal-democratic nation doesn’t assume its role as world policeman, the world’s rogues will try to fill the breach, often in league with one another…”

Which is why we cannot in good conscience support anyone whose name ends in “Paul”; unless of course they’re running against someone whose name begins with “Hillary”!

On the Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with these three bits of ObamaScare satire from Larry Hoffman:

True…true!

Magoo