It’s Thursday, April 5th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ‘s take on what The Obamao is desperately trying to term….

Paul Ryan’s Hunger Games

The President offers his vision for an uplifting second term.

 

Republicans: advocating babies eat dog food since before Lincoln

If there’s a Laffer Curve for Presidential invective—some point at which dishonest political abuse yields diminishing returns—the White House political team must not think their boss has hit it. Even in this hyperpartisan age, President Obama’s speech to the Associated Press yesterday was a parody of the form. This was a diatribe that managed to invoke “Social Darwinism” and “a Trojan Horse” in the same paragraph, amid the other high crimes that Mr. Obama says Paul Ryan wants to commit.

The President’s depiction of the wonkish and formerly obscure House Budget Chairman as some political monster is itself telling. Mr. Obama is conceding that he can’t run on the economic recovery, the stimulus, health care, green energy or any of the other grand liberal ambitions that have dominated his time in office. All of those are unpopular or failures. He was elected on hope and change, but now his only hope is to change the subject to the ogres he claims are the disloyal opposition.

Did you hear about the GOP’s red-in-tooth-and-claw plan for Medicare? Grandma and Gramps are going to be drafted for the Hunger Games.

Mr. Obama has been working Mediscare for the last year, but he is also debuting some new material, each layer thicker than the last. Modern Republicans are so radical that they oppose research and care for Alzheimer’s, cancer, AIDS, autism and Down Syndrome, even as they want to deny education and food to children and their mothers. They want to pave over Yellowstone and backfill the Grand Canyon. But few tourists could get there anyway, because Republicans plan to shut down air traffic control too.

Because Republicans have criticized the Administration’s torrent of costly new rules across the entire economy, therefore they favor returning to a state of regulatory nature, with no rules at all. Because Republicans oppose high-speed rail, therefore they would have opposed industrialization in the 19th century. They do plan to build a wayback machine to the Gilded Age, however, by handing a $150,000 check to every American millionaire, a million-dollar check to every billionaire, and a billion-dollar check to every trillionaire.

“This is not conjecture,” Mr. Obama said. “I am not exaggerating. These are facts.” Lest you think we exaggerate, read the transcript.

The list of untrue things that Mr. Obama wants Americans to believe is evidently so long that Mr. Obama associated himself with Republicans, albeit mostly dead Republicans like Lincoln and Eisenhower. For the first time we can recall, Mr. Obama even praised George W. Bush, of all people, because his predecessor created a new entitlement for prescription drugs. He also said Newt Gingrich showed how smart he was when he called Mr. Ryan’s budget “radical” and “right-wing social engineering” last year.

All of this is a political fable carefully constructed to erase the record of the last three years and blame every current anxiety on a GOP House that has been in office for all of 14 months. The President claims to have “eliminated dozens of programs that weren’t working,” but the savings from these eliminations amount to less than 0.1% of the budget, or less than $100 million.

Meanwhile, the budget has grown by more than 20% since he has been President. After deficits of $1.412 trillion, $1.293 trillion, and $1.299 trillion over the last three years, and an estimated $1.326 trillion due for 2012, he still claims the deficits are all Mr. Bush’s fault—except for the extra spending on Medicare, which he likes.

It is especially rich of Mr. Obama to accuse Republicans of breaking last summer’s debt-limit deal—given that even the most sympathetic press accounts that are now emerging make it clear that the President blew up his “big deal” with John Boehner. The House Speaker was prepared to trade higher taxes for mostly notional changes to entitlements, but Mr. Obama thought he could roll him at the last minute for even greater tax increases.

Now he claims Mr. Ryan’s reforms are “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility.” But it is more accurate to say that Mr. Obama is the one who is out of step with a bipartisan consensus that entitlement reform is essential to prevent a debt crisis.

Mr. Ryan’s “premium support” reform for Medicare, for instance, has been endorsed by Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden. It was advanced in the 1990s by President Clinton’s Medicare commission led by Democrat John Breaux. It mirrors the insurance system that lets millions of federal workers choose from a myriad of insurance plans with a government subsidy. It is the only reform with a prayer of salvaging Medicare without savage cuts in medical care down the road.

The last two days have revealed Mr. Obama at his least appealing—and least Presidential—first warning the Supreme Court not to dare overturn his health-care law, and now demonizing the motives of his political opposition. It is a long, long way from his “there’s no red America, there’s no blue America” stuff of 2004, much less the inspiration of 2008.

If nothing else, Americans are getting a preview of the rhetorical uplift, the bipartisan problem-solving, and the unifying national purpose that would attend another four years.

Given the AP is ostensibly composed of journalists, we have the one question The Great Prevaricator SHOULD have been asked, but inexplicably wasn’t: if your budget was so much better than Congressman Ryan’s, why was it voted down UNANIMOUSLY by the House?  And no Mr. Constitutional-Law-Professor; “unanimously” doesn’t mean Congress was allowed to vote on your budget by raising either hand.

As to The Dear Misleader’s claims a “majority” of Americans support Nancy Pelosi’s health care reform, Shikha Dalmia, writing in Reason.com and courtesy of George Lawlor, sets the record straight:

Americans Want More Control Over Their Own Health Care

ObamaCare’s popular provisions lose their appeal once Americans are confronted with the consequences.

 

With the three-day ObamaCare circus at the Supreme Court behind us, let’s fast-forward to June. Suppose that five justices find their constitutional bearings and do what a majority of Americans want them to do: Scrap the individual mandate, the key provision without which the law will collapse. What then? (We know by Tick-Tock’s own admission in yesterday’s edition he has no contingency plan.)

Will that mean that our current system can just lumber along as is? No. America’s health care system is wasteful, inefficient and way too expensive: The U.S. retail price for an MRI, excluding professional fees, exceeds $4,000—about 20 times more than in Japan and France. This makes it extremely hard for Americans without coverage to spring for their own care, creating a system of medical haves and have-nots. It is not surprising, therefore, that a Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll earlier this month found that six out of 10 Americans want lawmakers to keep searching for workable reforms even if the Supreme Court eventually kills the president’s reform law.

But any reform has to be based on the correct diagnosis of the problem. The administration’s main argument for ObamaCare’s mandate—that unless every freeloader is forced to buy coverage, we won’t be able to control spiraling health care costs—is a total red herring. The cost of uncompensated emergency care in America adds up to only about $40.7 billion annually, less than 3 percent of the country’s total health care spending. Arguably, even if hospitals were not legally required to treat uninsured patients, they would provide that amount of care pro bono—just as they do in India, a far poorer country. Many private, for-profit hospitals I queried during a previous visit reported treating up to 10 percent of their patients for free. American law firms, by comparison, aim to offer 3 to 5 percent of their billable hours in pro bono services.

But the question remains: What kind of reforms do Americans want? The Obama administration completely misread the public mood when it based its decision to craft a 2,700-page, Rube Goldberg-style makeover of literally one-sixth of our economy on polls suggesting that Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes for universal coverage. Worse, a joint Reason-Rupe poll released last week found that the misnamed Affordable Care Act—a.k.a. ObamaCare—imposed trade-offs that Americans were simply unwilling to accept. The act’s supporters insist that even though a majority of Americans view the overall law unfavorably, many of its specific provisions are quite popular. But the problem is that most polls pose questions in a vacuum, without actually confronting Americans with the consequences of their choices. The Reason-Rupe poll was among the few to do so systematically, and it found that although Americans do want equity and coverage for all, they want control, choice and quality for themselves even more.

Hey….check it out; I’m with doctors….in white coats.  That gives me credibility!

Like other polls, it found that Americans don’t want the government forcing them to buy coverage, although they were more amenable to employers being forced to provide coverage to employees, even if that means job losses and pay cuts. Indeed, 56 percent of respondents said they were fine with an employer mandate, compared to the 39 percent who said they were not.

Americans like the idea of giving everyone the same access to health care, regardless of medical status—except if it means sacrificing affordability or quality. Fifty-two percent approved of the community rating provision in the law, which would ban insurance companies from charging higher premiums based on medical history, compared to 39 percent who opposed it. But this support drops precipitously if the provision’s side effects include longer wait times for doctors (41 percent) or higher premiums (38 percent) or higher taxes (37 percent) or lower-quality care (15 percent).

But what was truly revealing was how eager Americans are to control their own health care dollars. Forty-eight percent said they’d prefer it if their employers gave them the money to purchase their own coverage, compared to 41 percent who would not. Even more remarkably, 65 percent of Americans want Medicare payouts in the form of a credit for use toward a private health plan, compared to 24 percent who don’t. This is good news for Rep. Paul Ryan’s “premium support” proposal for Medicare reform.

All of this makes perfect sense in light of another finding. When asked to rate how much they trust various entities in “addressing their health care needs,” 61 percent said they have a “great deal of trust” in themselves—but only 15 percent said that of their employers, and 5 percent of the government.

What’s more, Americans want to make their own coverage decisions. Almost 70 percent said they want the same ability to shop around for “a less expensive or better [health] insurance policy” as they have for their auto insurance. (Control ObamaScare conspicuously reserves ONLY to the federal government….the one party involved in health care John Q. Citizen trust the LEAST!)

So what are the implications of all this for health care reform? Americans are not dogmatically opposed to government intervention in health care markets. But their intuitions are more in line with advocates of consumer-based medicine who believe that the best way to control spiraling costs—the key to improving access—is to give patients more control over their medical dollars and inject a modicum of price sensitivity into our health care system.

If the Supreme Court relegates ObamaCare to the dustbin of history, Congress ought to bear that in mind when it crafts a revised bill. The last thing the country needs is another failed reform effort.

No….the last thing the country needs is four more years of this overbearing, over-educated, over-hyped, unaccomplished dilettante.

Speaking of the last things the country needs….

Military Investigating Gay Pride Flag

 

The military said they are investigating a photograph that shows a soldier allegedly raising a gay pride flag at a base in Afghanistan. The image has drawn praise from gay rights advocates and fierce criticism from opponents. “We are aware of the photo of the gay pride flag being flown by U.S. service members and we are investigating,” a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force told Fox News.

At this point, the ISAF cannot confirm where the flag was raised, the identity of the soldier, or the authenticity of the photograph. The photograph first appeared last month on the wall of a Facebook group called, “Wipeout Homophobia on Facebook.” A woman who identified herself as Nicole Jodice posted the images – along with a message praising her husband for raising the rainbow colored flag. “Hubbie in Afghanistan raising a gay pride flag,” she wrote with a link back to her home page that contained additional images.

The images have outraged social conservatives like Tony Perkins, a veteran and president of the Family Research Council. “There, in the dusty desert of war, an Army outpost saluted the colors of the homosexual lobby by flying a rainbow flag in place of Old Glory,” Perkins said. “These displays are an uncomfortable reminder of the open policy that few of the troops support.”

“It appears this flag is just one way the President is taking his hostility toward religious freedom to new heights,” Perkins said. Perkins was especially upset because last November soldiers at Camp Marmal were ordered to tear down a Christian cross that marked the entrance to a base chapel. The military defended the removal because it was a “distinctly religious symbol.”

He also raised concerns about whether the raising of the flag posed a danger to soldiers in the aftermath of the Koran burning. “Where is the concern now for angering Afghan Muslims who vehemently oppose homosexuality?” he aside. “The issue is as much an issue of military security as it is of religious morality. What price will we pay because some want to use the military to show their gay pride?”

Queerty.com brushed aside Perkins’ concerns calling him a “professional homophobe.” “Apparently a rainbow flag is such a provocation that it excuses attacks on our troops, they wrote. “Or it could be a sign of the strength of our diversity and tolerance, principles we’re supposed to treasure.”

However, even some supporters of gays serving openly in the military have reservations about the rainbow flag being flown on a military base. “Unless there was authorization from an appropriate source to raise this flag over the base, and such authorization was not in violation of military codes of conduct, I see this as an unacceptable flouting of the rules,” one reader wrote to Instinct Magazine. “This isn’t homophobic. It is, in fact, egalitarian.”

And absolutely essential to unit discipline and morale.  If true, this is precisely, and predictably, the “some are more equal than others” environment which inevitably results from the Left’s push, not for equality, but “special” rights; for minorities, women, gays and anyone else they believe can be accorded victim status.  Most importantly, while destructive in a civilian setting, it’s impact on a military unit can be, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

Thanks again, Secretary Gates, Admiral Mullen!  You tasked your most senior officers with analyzing the impact of rescinding D.A./D.T.; and despite them coming up with fifteen adverse impacts rescission would have on military preparedness and effectiveness….and not one positive, NOT ONE,….you had no problem rubber-stamping what is essentially a Liberal experiment in social engineering and giving congressional Dimocrats and The Obamao the political cover they needed to continue their campaign against America.

Next up, today’s edition of Tales From the Darkside, where we learn what one of The Obamao’s fellow travelers believes:

Van Jones: Obama Won’t Lose Black Vote, No Matter What

 

We don’t know what’s worse; that despite 14% unemployment in the “black community” it’s true….or that Van Jones is so blinded by hatred and politics he doesn’t see what’s wrong with his statement.  Then again, like his former boss, Van Jones is….

….RED, not Black!

Which provides the perfect lead in for the “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment, and an update on the Trayvon Martin farce:

NBC issues apology for edited Zimmerman 911 call

As part of their apology, NBC ran what it claimed to be the most recent pictures of Martin and Zimmerman:

Meanwhile, reacting to the fact ABC had neglected to consult with a video expert BEFORE airing a film clip the network claimed showed Zimmerman sans any head injury, the Christian Science Monitor couldn’t resist tempering its reaction yet another MSM rush-to-judgment by noting:

George Zimmerman head wound gives little clarity to Trayvon Martin case

A police video appears to show George Zimmerman with a head wound the night he shot Trayvon Martin. But that is not conclusive proof of Zimmerman’s story, experts say.

 

Then again, it’s certainly more conclusive than the unenhanced video clip ABC initially tried to peddle as proof of Zimmerman’s prevarication.

Then there’s this from Yahoo‘s The Cutline, courtesy of Jim Gleaves:

Zimmerman neighbor on robberies by ‘young black men’ before Trayvon shooting: ‘If you plant corn, you get corn’

 

George Zimmerman’s Sanford, Fla., neighbor, said the neighborhood watchman protected his residence from a potential burglary several weeks before the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Frank Taaffe, a former neighborhood watch captain, told CNN’s “Starting Point” that his house was in the process of being robbed on Feb. 2, but Zimmerman called Sanford police, who thwarted the robbery.

“My house was being robbed, and George on his nightly rounds watched this burglary in progress, called Sanford P.D., waited for them, and helped ensure that nothing bad happened to my house,” Taaffe said. “And it’s documented in the 911 call for February 2.  That was my residence that George Zimmerman helped stop.” Zimmerman shot and killed Martin on Feb. 26.

“Neighbor-hood, that’s a great word,” Taaffe said. Taaffe said that “young black males” were the perpetrators in the attempted robbery of his home. “We had eight burglaries in our neighborhood all perpetrated by young black males in the 15 months prior to Trayvon being shot,” Taaffe said. “It would have been nine.”

Taaffe denied that he told the New York Times that burglaries were done by “Trayvon-like dudes with their pants down.” “I never said that,” he said. “I never used that term.”

But on CNN, Taaffe followed up the denial of an incendiary comment with another one. When asked if, based on the string of robberies, Zimmerman should have been profiling Trayvon Martin the night of the shooting, Taaffe said: “There’s an old saying, ‘If you plant corn, you get corn,'” (Which is “incendiary”….how?!?)

“It is what it is,” he added. “I would go on record by stating that of the eight prior burglaries in the 15 months prior to the Trayvon Martin shooting, all of the perpetrators were young black males.”

Not to mention in the last three days alone, Sanford has experienced two drive-by shootings, both committed by criminals of color.

But tonight the last word on the Martin miscarriage goes to the inimitable Shelby Steele, courtesy of the WSJ; it’s a truly classic must-read:

The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin

The absurdity of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

 

Two tragedies are apparent in the Trayvon Martin case. The first is obvious: A teenager—unarmed and committing no crime—was shot dead. Dressed in a “hoodie,” a costume of menace, he crossed paths with a man on the hunt for precisely such clichés of menace. Added to this—and here is the rub—was the fact of his dark skin.

Maybe it was more the hood than the dark skin, but who could argue that the skin did not enhance the menace of the hood at night and in the eyes of someone watching for crime. (Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are black though we are only 12% of the population.) Would Trayvon be alive today had he been walking home—Skittles and ice tea in hand—wearing a polo shirt with an alligator logo? Possibly. And does this make the ugly point that dark skin late at night needs to have its menace softened by some show of Waspy Americana? Possibly.

What is fundamentally tragic here is that these two young males first encountered each other as provocations. Males are males, and threat often evokes a narcissistic anger that skips right past reason and into a will to annihilate: “I will take you out!” There was a terrible fight. Trayvon apparently got the drop on George Zimmerman, but ultimately the man with the gun prevailed. Annihilation was achieved.

If this was all there was to it, the Trayvon/Zimmerman story would be no more than a cautionary tale, yet another admonition against the hair-trigger male ego. But this story brought reaction from the White House: “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon,” said the president. The Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, ubiquitous icons of black protest, virtually battled each other to stand at the bereaved family’s side—Mr. Jackson, in a moment of inadvertent honesty, saying, “There is power in blood . . . we must turn a moment into a movement.” And then there was the spectacle of black Democrats in Congress holding hearings on racial profiling with Trayvon’s parents featured as celebrities.

In fact Trayvon’s sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America’s civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the “poetic truth” that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth.

The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this “truth” has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites.

If Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism (hard to conceive since the shooter is apparently Hispanic), his murder would be an anomaly, not a commonplace. It would be a bizarre exception to the way so many young black males are murdered today. If there must be a generalization in all this—a call “to turn the moment into a movement”—it would have to be a movement against blacks who kill other blacks. The absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

So the idea that Trayvon Martin is today’s Emmett Till, as the Rev. Jackson has said, suggests nothing less than a stubborn nostalgia for America’s racist past. (A past in which “Reverend” Jackson lied about cradling MLK as he died on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, and the “Reverend” Sharpton lied about Tawana Brawley.) In that bygone era civil rights leaders and white liberals stood on the highest moral ground. They literally knew themselves—given their genuine longing to see racism overcome—as historically transformative people. If the world resisted them, as it surely did, it only made them larger than life.

It was a time when standing on the side of the good required true selflessness and so it ennobled people. And this chance to ennoble oneself through a courageous moral stand is what so many blacks and white liberals miss today—now that white racism is such a defeated idea. There is a nostalgia for that time when posture alone ennobled. So today even the hint of old-fashioned raw racism excites with its potential for ennoblement.

For the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton, for the increasingly redundant civil rights establishment, for liberal blacks and the broader American left, the poetic truth that white racism is somehow the real culprit in this tragedy is redemption itself. The reason Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have become such disreputable figures on our cultural landscape is that they are such quick purveyors of poetic truth rather than literal truth. (i.e., like The Obamao, they LIE.)

The great trick of poetic truth is to pass itself off as the deep and essential truth so that hard facts that refute it must be dismissed in the name of truth. O.J. Simpson was innocent by the poetic truth that the justice system is stacked against blacks. Trayvon was a victim of racist stereotyping—though the shooter never mentioned his race until asked to do so.

There is now a long litany of racial dust-ups—from Tawana Brawley to the Duke University lacrosse players to the white Cambridge police officer who arrested Harvard professor Skip Gates a summer ago—in which the poetic truth of white racism and black victimization is invoked so that the actual truth becomes dismissible as yet more racism.

When the Cambridge cop or the Duke lacrosse players or the men accused of raping Tawana Brawley tried to defend themselves, they were already so stained by poetic truth as to never be entirely redeemed. No matter the facts (And we still don’t KNOW the facts!)—whether Trayvon Martin was his victim or his assailant—George Zimmerman will also never be entirely redeemed.

And this points to the second tragedy that Trayvon’s sad demise highlights. Before the 1960s the black American identity (though no one ever used the word) was based on our common humanity, on the idea that race was always an artificial and exploitive division between people. After the ’60s—in a society guilty for its long abuse of us—we took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake.

It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt. The tragedy surrounding Trayvon’s death is not in the possibility that it might have something to do with white racism; the tragedy is in the lustfulness with which so many black leaders, in conjunction with the media, have leapt to exploit his demise for their own power.

Now THAT’S a dialogue on race.

Turning now to the Environmental Moment, the WSJ notes Team Tick-Tock’s SOP of saying one thing and doing another now constitutes America’s energy policy.  For despite it constituting America’s most abundant and cheapest energy source, The Dear Misleader’s minions are now intent on….

Killing Coal

So much for an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy.

 

For three years the Environmental Protection Agency has imposed a de facto ban on new coal-fired power while doing everything it can to harm existing coal plants. But for once there’s something good to say about the latest EPA carbon rule: At least the agency was less devious when it formalized the coal ban last week.

The EPA proposed what are known as “new source performance standards” for carbon under the Clean Air Act, which are part of the agency’s “endangerment finding” to limit greenhouse gas emissions. To control CO2, utilities will need to install new technology, such as capture-and-sequestration systems that are among the world’s most complex and expensive industrial equipment.

But great news: The EPA estimates that the total cost of this rule will be $0. It will have no major effect on the economy. Not a single job will be lost.

How can that be? In its cost estimates, the EPA assumes the U.S. will never complete another coal-fired project. Ever. The agency is conceding that coal development has been shut down as a result of its many new regulations, such as the recent mercury rule and the illegal permitting delays that a federal appeals court slapped down last week.

But there’s also a problem. Because the putative “regulatory impact” is zero, there are also no benefits. So why is the environmental lobby applauding the EPA’s new rule like a performing seal? Even the EPA itself says the performance standards will apply only to new plants, not the legacy fleet that generates almost half of U.S. electricity. The media were careful to repeat this claim too.

It isn’t true. Just as the new rule’s fine print reveals that the rules won’t apply to the new plants because they’ll never be built, it also shows that the rules will put old plants at risk because of another EPA program known as New Source Review.

Whenever a plant upgrades—whether installing a new fan blade or replacing the proverbial toilet seat—it must comply with every rule on the books. So as a utility obeys the mercury rule, say, it will also be caught in the pincer movement of these new carbon performance standards. The green lobby knows this will slowly kill even current coal plants over time.

The problem with carbon capture and storage—apart from costs—is that the technology is still speculative. Even with massive subsidies, not a plant in the world is diverting its CO2 on a commercial scale and injecting it into spent oil and gas reservoirs underground. The Energy Department says it will take 20 years or more to get to scale, and even that prediction has to be balanced against the bureaucracy’s lousy track record. As for plants in areas where such geological formations do not exist, well, they could build pipelines, but the White House has a thing about pipelines.

Everyone in Washington including President Obama claims to favor an “all of the above” energy portfolio. As misguided as that is—far better to let markets decide which energy sources to develop—the EPA has now admitted that Mr. Obama doesn’t really mean it. Coal is not part of his “all.” Voters in swing coal states such as Ohio and West Virginia probably do care about that.

But only if the GOP hammers the message home; once….and that continuously.  Then again, what’s the big deal; it’s not like coal’s our cheapest, most-abundant source of energy!

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these two gems from Hank Murphy:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with the wisdom of Thomas Sowell, echoing in his latest the words of Congressman Joe Wilson:

Political Word Games

 

One of the highly developed talents of President Barack Obama is the ability to say things that are demonstrably false, and make them sound not only plausible but inspiring.

That talent was displayed just this week when he was asked whether he thought the Supreme Court would uphold ObamaCare as constitutional or strike it down as unconstitutional. He replied: “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

But how unprecedented would it actually be if the Supreme Court declared a law unconstitutional if it was passed by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress”? The Supreme Court has been doing precisely that for 209 years!

Nor is it likely that Barack Obama has never heard of it. He has a degree from the Harvard law school and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school. In what must be one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in history — Marbury v. Madison in 1803 — Chief Justice John Marshall established the principle that the Supreme Court can declare acts of Congress null and void if these acts violate the Constitution.

They have been doing so for more than two centuries. It is the foundation of American constitutional law. There is no way that Barack Obama has never heard of it or really believes it to be “unprecedented” after two centuries of countless precedents.

In short,….

….he is simply lying.

Now there are different kinds of liars. If we must have lying Presidents of the United States, I prefer that they be like Richard Nixon. You could just look at him and tell that he was lying.

But Obama is much smoother. (We’d respectfully disagree with Sowell on this one, as you can always tell when The Obamao’s lying….his lips move!) On this and on many other issues, you would have to know what the facts are to know that he is lying. He is obviously counting on the fact that, in this era of dumbed-down education, many people have no clue as to what the facts are.

He is also counting on something else — namely, that the pro-Obama media will not expose his lies.

One of the many ways of lying smoothly is to simply redefine words. Barack Obama is a master at that as well. In the comment on the case pending before the Supreme Court, President Obama said that he wanted to remind “conservative commentators” that they have complained about “judicial activism” — which he redefines as the idea that “an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

First of all, every law that the Supreme Court has overturned for the past 209 years since Marbury v. Madison was “a duly constituted and passed law.” Second, the “judicial activism” that conservatives have complained about was judges making rulings based on how they felt personally about the issue at hand, rather than about what the Constitution of the United States said.

In recent years, great efforts have been made to redefine “judicial activism” in terms of judges declaring laws unconstitutional, instead of “deferring” to Congress or other government institutions.

But what is the Constitution’s Bill of Rights supposed to protect the ordinary citizen from? Government institutions! If judges are to defer to the very institutions that the Bill of Rights tries to protect the citizen from, what is the point of having a Bill of Rights?

As for Supreme Court justices being unelected, that has been true since the Constitution was created. That was done deliberately, so that they could render their judgments without fear of political repercussions. If unelected Supreme Court justices are to automatically defer to elected officials, that again raises the question of why they are there at all. Why are the taxpayers paying their salaries and housing them in an expensive marble building — just so that they can go along to get along?

It would be hard to become nostalgic about Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign in disgrace. But at least you could tell when he was lying. Obama’s lies are just as big but not as visible, and the media that exposed Nixon is covering for Obama.

MSM bias….

….WHAT bias?!?

Magoo