Mr Pruden Always Saves the Best for Last

Would the government lie to you?

Good citizens must resist the temptation to regard their government as the enemy, since we know that no government agency would ever lie, cheat and steal from us. So don’t worry. Be happy. If you can.

James Clapper, director of U.S. intelligence, pours on a little soothing syrup. The snooping, he says, “cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. persons located outside the United States.” Of course not. But note the weasel word “intentionally,” and what, exactly, is a “U.S. person” if he is not a citizen? The Washington Post reports that, while in one surveillance program American citizens are not “intended” to be targets of surveillance, large quantities of “content” from Americans are nevertheless screened to track or learn more about the target.

Clapper, during his testimony to Congress, had the appearence of an 8 year old boy who had been caught with copies of Hustler magazine. The hand gestures, the eye movements, the inability to look at the questioner while answering a direct query regarding whether or not the NSA was spying on US citizens, all were red flags and klaxon horns that said "I'm lying to you right now." The other "weasel word" of the day was "wittingly". Anyone who thinks this current administration would not use the powers of any government agnecy to suppress dissent and silence opposition, has not turned on a TV, listened to a radio or read a newspaper in the last 3 months. We know they will. They already have.

Wes Pruden On Being Clever

The question we should be asking is what prompted Dear Leader to even speak about it in a context which suggests he had knowledge of the outcome. Of course, there's always the Spider and the Fly scenario discussed in a previous post shamelessly purloined from the WashTimes via our good friend Kerry Pickett. (Freepers Rule).

When Clever Only Looks Like Dumb

The court would take an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” if it overturns his health-care scheme because it was enacted by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” the President declared. Obamacare actually cleared the House by only seven votes, 219 to 212, and on their face the president’s remarks betray an astonishing ignorance of the Constitution and how the republic works.

But Barack Obama is neither dumb nor ignorant. The man praised as the greatest orator since Demosthenes celebrated hope and change in ancient Greece knows better than to bandy words foolishly. So why would he say something so foolish and dumb?

Book Burning Is An Expression of Bigotry

Just as public demonstrations of hate for anyone are expressions of bigotry, so is book burning. An over simplification of the definition of bigotry is a belief that one is morally and intellectually superior to all others and no one is right but them. Jones didn't kill those people in Afghanistan, but he tripped the triggers of those who are by nature violent and bigoted. Radical islamists are bigots and need very little provocation to act out. They do not have the wiring in their brains to allow them to embrace the philosophy of freedom of expression. The problem is, Jones essentially yelled FIRE!!! in a crowded theater knowing the crowd would panic and trample one another, and there was no fire. Jones caused the deaths of those people just as surely as if he had been there. But Jones is a bigot and bigots don't care about innocents.

Patriot Post

Upright
"True judicial restraint asks the question: 'What does the Constitution actually say?' and then limits Supreme Court decisions to an honest application of the law." --David McIntosh, co-founder of the Federalist Society and former congressman from Indiana

"It will be tempting but futile to ask [Elena] Kagan whether she thinks Congress's enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce is elastic enough to justify requiring individuals to buy health insurance. That is, does the power to regulate interstate commerce give Congress the power to punish the inactivity of not making a private purchase from a private health-care provider? If the commerce clause is sufficiently elastic, in what sense do we still have limited government -- government limited by the Constitution?" --columnist George Will

"Some of the senators -- not most, but some -- will be interested to know what [Kagan] thinks of the Constitution as the Founders wrote it. President Obama will want her to rule on the law as decent and high-minded folk like him think it ought to be, not what it is. The gay community, which rarely seems very gay, expects her to be a reliable vote for changing the definition of marriage and for remaking the military into something Barney Frank can be proud of. Since Mzz Kagan has argued that the Supreme Court's role is mainly to tend the interests of 'the despised and disadvantaged,' somebody will be disappointed." --Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden

"What we're seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn't Greece's problem alone, and that's why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven't fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies." --columnist Robert J. Samuelson

"Anyone who thinks Greece isn't the proverbial canary in the coal mine is in a coma. See if this sounds familiar: out-of-control spending, a bloated, self-entitled public service sector, a mountain of accumulated debt, trillions of dollars in unfunded mandates -- and a corrupt political class completely out of touch with the people. With precious few exceptions, what nation couldn't be plugged into the above description?" --columnist Arnold Ahlert

"Have you ever noticed how liberals desire to be judged by open minds and met with understanding when their policies fail, while all the while they've zero tolerance for anything less than perfection in their political opponents? If so, you only have to remember they view 'big oil' as an appendage of the Republican Party to know that one major spill in forty years is no better in their eyes than one major spill every two years." --columnist AWR Hawkins

Its Easy To Blame the Rich Guys

PRUDEN: Calling in the clowns to reform Wall Street

It's easy to beat up anyone who works for Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street houses. The partners pull down salaries and bonuses that are unimaginably large to most of us; how many Kobe steaks, how many $500-a-bottle French wines can a Wall Street broker consume? How many Manhattan apartments and vacation homes in the South of France can a Goldman Sachs chairman live in? President Obama, ever the nanny, said Wednesday that "at a certain point you've made enough money." He didn't say how much is enough, and who would decide how much is enough, but it's scary to think what Saul Alinsky's disciple might have in mind for all of us.

Mr. Levin and his conspirators in the Senate are trying to make Wall Street in general and Goldman Sachs in particular responsible for the financial crisis of 2008. Investigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission have accused Goldman Sachs of selling $150 million worth of instruments backed by worthless mortgages to a German bank without disclosing exactly what the bank was buying.

The senators deduced from that that Goldman Sachs was trying to rig the market in subprime mortgages and thus set off the great meltdown of '08. The law assumes that not every investment banker is a virgin and does not require that Goldman Sachs relieve its institutional customers from their common-sense duty to know what they're buying. You could argue that what Goldman Sachs and other investment houses are doing is not nice, but it's not against the law. Carl Levin could work to fix that, but screeds are more fun.

There is more at the link. You should go read the whole thing.

Voting While White

Wes Pruden
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

PRUDEN: Shunning the party of whiners

We're not yet a nation wholly of whiners, but some of our congresspersons are working on it. Democrats who should have been taking a victory lap spent a week cowering in fear of the contents of a tea cup. No wonder real men — mostly but, by no means all, white — are shunning the Democrats.

The polling gurus are finding that millions of the white men who helped put Barack Obama in the White House are leaving the Democrats in great numbers, and this could lead to really bad news in November. Gallup finds that white male support for a Democratic Congress has fallen 8 percentage points since last summer, while the support of women has remained remarkably steady. White women who voted for Mr. Obama continue to support him, but only 38 percent of white men support him now. Unless the president and his party find a way to reverse this trend they must prepare for an epic bath nine months hence.

Accomplishing such a turnaround would require first of all for Democrats to pipe down about what a tough life they have. Life is real, often hard, and, as Damon Runyon famously said to a whiner at the poker table, "three out of three people die, so shut up and deal." Democrats in Congress who got their way in the health care "reform" debate are frightened now that the people they abused are angry and determined to do something about it. With the help of the compliant "mainstream" media, they have created the specter of a tsunami of hate, bigotry, racism, slander, rock-throwing, spitting, irritable bowel syndrome and seven-year itch. Sarah Palin has got the Democrats particularly spooked.

Read the rest here

We Will Remember

PRUDEN: Now comes November

Now the real fun begins. President Obama and his Democratic legion, frightened with good cause, want the health care "reform" debate to be over and done with. "It's time to move on." Lots of luck with that.

"This," the president said, interrupting his undivided attention to a basketball game to celebrate the House vote, "is what change looks like." Alas, it's what an abortion looks like. What the president and the Democrats don't want to think about is that the public has already looked at this "change" and can't wait to punish a lot of somebodies for it.

The first rush of euphoria that greets a presidential legislative triumph has given way in record time to stark reality. Sobering up quickly was inevitable. This was a health care takeover by the government that nobody wanted and even in the Democratic majority nobody wanted to be seen voting for. Only a perverted sense of party loyalty carried the day. Nancy Pelosi's overheard remark to Steny Hoyer, the majority leader, as they walked into the Capitol said it all: "We've got to find at least one more than 216 votes because nobody wants to be blamed for casting the deciding vote."

The rest is here.

"Now Is the Hour to Sieze the Power"

Short Cuts
"Nancy Pelosi, the speaker and leader of the San Francisco Democrats, says her members 'are very excited about what comes next.' For many of them, that's 'excited' as in 'hysterical.'" --Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden

"So there was President Obama giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that 'now is the hour when we must seize the moment,' the same moment he's been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats." --columnist Mark Steyn

"President Obama met with ten House Democrats opposed to the health care bill. He did all he could to get their votes. He promised to campaign for them in their districts and when that didn't work, he threatened to campaign for them in their districts." --comedian Argus Hamilton

"These self-anointed intellectuals are people who think that those who believe in God and Jesus Christ, those who 'cling to their guns and their religion,' are a lower form of animal life, while they, themselves, have no problem whatever accepting Obama as a messiah and, in the past, deifying the likes of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Let's face it, when you kneel in a church, you're accepting that there is something greater and wiser than yourself in the universe. When, on the other hand, you kneel to a left-wing politician, you're merely emulating Monica Lewinsky." --columnist Burt Prelutsky

Healthcare is "Complicated"

Wes Pruden writing in his Friday edition.

Mr. Obama sharply scolded Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia for bringing along a copy of the 2,400-page Senate bill and the 11-page proposal the president posted on the Internet earlier in the week. He called Mr. Cantor's preparation "the type of political stunt that gets in the way of serious conversation." The "truth of the matter," the president said, as Mr. Cantor began to speak, is health care is a very complicated subject.

Well, duh. But if Republican congressmen insist on reading from the actual legislation, instead of taking as Gospel the president's honeyed words (as honeyed as he can make them without his teleprompter), they keep the president from making something simple into something complicated and hard to understand. The president's problem is that the public understands very well what's in the elixir he's peddling. A CNN poll released Wednesday showed that only 25 percent of Americans want to take the legislative medicine.

Normally, This Would Initiate a Resignation

However, because the next one in line is Joe "Plugs" Biden, we'd prefer that you stay until 2012, then we'll decide who gets to lead the most powerful nation on the planet.

More after the jump.

PRUDEN: There's no penalty for sleeping on the job

If it's true, as Dr. Johnson famously told us it was, that the prospect of hanging focuses the mind in a wonderful way, maybe the prospect of facing angry voters sharpens a politician's instincts (if not necessarily his mind).

After first treating the Detroit panty bomber as if it were merely an amusing story ("an isolated incident") that an airline passenger could dine out on for a few days, President Obama is giving a good imitation now of a man getting a late education. Maybe the education will take. It's too soon to say. He said late Thursday that he won't fire anybody. "Ultimately, the buck stops with me. When the system fails, it's my responsibility."

Smooth talk is easy for Mr. Obama, and he often confuses words with deeds. He's taking responsibility for what happened aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on final approach over Detroit, but it's not clear what that means. He's not likely to fire himself (perhaps to spare us Joe Biden). So nobody pays a price for some serious sleeping on the job. Sleeping on the job is serious, but not that serious.

The president and his Democrats are closing ranks behind top national security officials who are begging to be thrown into the street with their briefcases and keys to the executive washroom.

The solution they prescribe is to build the intelligence bureaucracies a little bigger and thicker, layering incompetence with impotence, giving a little relief to the intelligence minions "who have worked so hard." Some no doubt have, but where were the intelligence analysts who saw nothing suspicious when the panty bomber bought his one-way ticket to the U.S.A. with cash, leaving a subtropical city bound for icy Detroit with no luggage?

The State Department, warned by the terrorist's father that he had fallen in with evil companions and was up to no good, finally did its best work Thursday, revoking the visa of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. If he is released for more jihad, he won't be able to return to the United States without a new visa. This sounds like a bad joke, but it isn't. That's how the Foggy Bottom fudge factory works.

Wes Pruden Has Some Interesting Observations

Obama has little to show for '09
More after the jump. I started reading this man's column back in 1992, and he hasn't changed.

The bad news for Barack Obama is that everyone, even here in Baghdad on the Bay, Ground Zero of Dreamland, says he must improve his performance in the new year. The good news for Barack Obama is that there's lots of room for improvement.

The president graded himself the other day, telling Oprah that he thinks he deserves a B-plus for his first year, and if he gets ObamaCare through Congress, he should get another full grade. He may be the only man in America who thinks he's an A-minus president. But Mr. Obama grew up in the era of grade inflation, and he no doubt aced his course work in Self-Esteem 101.

California, as every Californian will tell you, is the origin of the fads and fancies that inevitably spread across the continent; San Francisco is where the Pied Piper of Southside Chicago might have led the cult to a suitable jumping-off place. This is where the true believers of the left exude the most noxious fumes. Where better to spend Christmas, er, the Holiday, with all the fruits and nuts to plumb the depths of what remains of ObamaLove.

Nagging doubt, if not yet disillusionment, lurks in unexpected nooks and crannies. Everyone here expected to be married to his plumber, electrician or mechanic by the end of year 0001 A.O. (anno obamanie). Man would make love, not war; all disease (including cancer, high cholesterol, Christianity and unregistered guns) would have been banished; every bathhouse would be crowded again; every Guantanamo prisoner rehabilitated and settled with 40 acres and a mule; the globe would be cooling; immigration abuses resolved; and best of all, the works of the evil Texas cowboy would be but a distant, fading memory.