The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.
Obama
Just how patriotic is that? After all, if Obama can use the increase in the national debt to question Bush’s patriotism, doesn’t it follow that increasing deficit spending by 152% per month makes Obama 152% more “unpatriotic” than Bush?
Ed Morrisy
Victor Davis Hansen: Obama as Chaos: (exerpt)
When he brags of the present chaos in the Middle East by saying that “a wave of change has washed across the Middle East and North Africa” during his administration, we translate that into 100,000 are dead in Syria and U.S. credibility about red lines is shredded; the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt followed by a coup and rule by a junta; “leading from behind” in Libya resulting in a virtual Somalia well before the Benghazi disaster; abdication in Iraq, which is now less stable than it was in 2009; and Vietnam circa 1975 looming in Afghanistan.
When the president boasts that the deficit is actually shrinking under his leadership, we assume he is referring to the forced budget cuts brought about by sequestration that he not only opposed, but also warned would be disastrous.
These paradoxes could be interpreted in various ways. True, Obama is a politician who takes up and discards arguments as he finds them useful, always branding those currently in use as somehow morally superior to the alternative. Obama is also a zealot and a community organizer who is not content with opposing the positions of his opponents, but always must impugn their motives as well.
But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?
When other presidents act unilaterally, Obama cites his constitutional experience in demagoguing them, as he did against Bush during the crafting of the war on terror legislation. When he wishes either to violate the law or to adopt a prior Bush protocol, then he simply does so, and lets others sort out the inconsistency. Sometimes the result is so chaotic that Obama ends up bragging that he wants to shut down Guantanamo Bay, which he has kept open for five years, as if it was long ago virtually shut down. When we go into Libya, we do so instead of going into Syria because Libya is said to be a war and the violence in Syria a mere police action; when Libya turns out to be a disaster, then we will go into Syria.
During the present crisis, Obama simply asks his aides what are the arguments of the day to be made. When he is instructed that Republicans are doing something bad, something unprecedented, and something anarchic, then like his often referenced hero LeBron James, Obama wants the rhetoric ball to complete the demagogic play, which results in the usual chaotic invective. That the Republicans are doing something that is not unprecedented or anarchic, but similar to what Obama himself and his party have done in the past, is not even noticed.
A List of Obama Expiration Dates; Jim Geraghty:
By popular demand, a comprehensive list of expired Obama statements . . .
HEALTH-CARE MANDATES
STATEMENT: “We’ve got a philosophical difference, which we’ve debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it. And my belief is, the reason that people don’t have it is not because they don’t want it but because they can’t afford it.” Barack Obama, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate, February 21, 2008.
EXPIRATION DATE: On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the individual mandate into law.
HEALTH-CARE NEGOTIATIONS ON C-SPAN
STATEMENT: “These negotiations will be on C-SPAN, and so the public will be part of the conversation and will see the decisions that are being made.” January 20, 2008, and seven other times.
EXPIRATION DATE: Throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 2009 and 2010; when John McCain asked about it during the health-care summit February 26, Obama dismissed the issue by declaring, “the campaign is over, John.”
RAISING TAXES
STATEMENT: “No family making less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase.” (multiple times on the campaign trail)
EXPIRATION DATE: Broken multiple times, including the raised taxes on tobacco, a new tax on indoor tanning salons, but most prominently on February 11, 2010: “President Barack Obama said he is ‘agnostic’ about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.”
RECESS APPOINTMENTS
STATEMENT: Then-senator Obama declared that a recess appointment is “damaged goods” and has “less credibility” than a normal appointment. August 25, 2005.
EXPIRATION DATE: March 27, 2010: “If, in the interest of scoring political points, Republicans in the Senate refuse to exercise that responsibility, I must act in the interest of the American people and exercise my authority to fill these positions on an interim basis.”
BORDER SECURITY
STATEMENT: “We need tougher border security, and a renewed focus on busting up gangs and traffickers crossing our border. . . . That begins at home, with comprehensive immigration reform. That means securing our border and passing tough employer enforcement laws.” Then-candidate Obama, discussing the need for border security, speaking in Miami on May 23, 2008.
EXPIRATION DATE: March 17, 2010: The Obama administration halted new work on a “virtual fence” on the U.S.-Mexican border, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Tuesday, diverting $50 million in planned economic stimulus funds for the project to other purposes.
GUANTANAMO BAY
STATEMENT: Executive order stating, “The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” January 22, 2009.
EXPIRATION DATE: November 19, 2009: “Guantánamo, we had a specific deadline that was missed.”
MILITARY TRIBUNALS
STATEMENT: “Somebody like Khalid Sheik Mohammad is gonna get basically, a full military trial with all the bells and whistles.” September 27, 2006
EXPIRATION DATE: Ongoing. “President Obama is planning to insert himself into the debate about where to try the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, three administration officials said Thursday, signaling a recognition that the administration had mishandled the process and triggered a political backlash. Obama initially had asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to choose the site of the trial in an effort to maintain an independent Justice Department. But the White House has been taken aback by the intense criticism from political opponents and local officials of Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian courtroom in New York.”
RECOVERY.GOV
STATEMENT: “We will launch a sweeping effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov.” – President Obama, January 28, 2009
EXPIRATION DATE: “More than two months after some of the funds were released, [Recovery.gov] offers little detail on where the money is going . . . The government [spent] $84 million on a website that doesn’t have a search function, when its purpose is to ‘root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government.’” April 2, 2009
Eighteen from his first 100 days:
1. “As President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.”
2. “I will make sure that we renegotiate [NAFTA].“
3. Opposed a Colombian Free Trade Agreement because advocates ignore that “labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis.”
4. “Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”
5. “If we see money being misspent, we’re going to put a stop to it, and we will call it out and we will publicize it.“
6. “Yesterday, Jim, the head of Caterpillar, said that if Congress passes our plan, this company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off.”
7. “I want to go line by line through every item in the Federal budget and eliminate programs that don’t work, and make sure that those that do work work better and cheaper.”
8. “[My plan] will not help speculators who took risky bets on a rising market and bought homes not to live in but to sell.”
9. “Instead of allowing lobbyists to slip big corporate tax breaks into bills during the dead of night, we will make sure every single tax break and earmark is available to every American online.”
10. “We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress’s seniority, rather than the merit of the project.”
11. “If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”
12. “Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe the United States has to be frank with the Chinese about such failings and will press them to respect human rights.”
13. “We must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights.”
14. “Lobbyists won’t work in my White House!“
15. “The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result.”
16. “I’ll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we’ll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills.”
17. “Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.” Obama is 1-for-11 on this promise so far.
18. A special one on the 100th day, “The first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That’s the first thing I’d do.”
And a list from of promises that expired during the campaign:
IRAQ
STATEMENT: “Based on the conversations we’ve had internally as well as external reports, we believe that you can get one to two brigades out a month. At that pace, the forces would be out in approximately 16 months from the time that we began. That would be the time frame that I would be setting up,” Obama to the New York Times, November 1, 2007
EXPIRATION DATE: March 7, 2008: Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, to the BBC: “You can’t make a commitment in whatever month we’re in now, in March of 2008 about what circumstances are gonna be like in Jan. 2009. We can’t even tell what Bush is up to in terms of troop pauses and so forth. He will of course not rely upon some plan that [Obama has] crafted as a presidential candidate or as a US senator.”
Also: July 3, 2008: “My 16-month timeline, if you examine everything I’ve said, was always premised on making sure our troops were safe,” Obama told reporters as his campaign plane landed in North Dakota. “And my guiding approach continues to be that we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe, and that Iraq is stable. And I’m going to continue to gather information to find out whether those conditions still hold.”
STATEMENT: On June 14, Obama foreign-policy adviser Susan Rice called the RNC’s argument that Obama needed to go to Iraq to get a firsthand look “complete garbage.”
EXPIRATION DATE: On June 16, Obama announced he would go to Iraq and Afghanistan “so he can see first hand the progress of the wars he would inherit if he’s elected president.”
DEBATES
STATEMENT: May 16, 2008: “If John McCain wants to meet me, anywhere, anytime to have a debate about our respective policies in Iraq, Iran, the Middle East or around the world, that is a conversation I’m happy to have.”
EXPIRATION DATE: June 13, 2008: Obama campaign manager David Plouffe: “Barack Obama offered to meet John McCain at five joint appearances between now and Election Day — the three traditional debates plus a joint town hall on the economy in July [on the Fourth of July] and an in-depth debate on foreign policy in August.”
IRAN
STATEMENT: “We can, then, more effectively deal with what I consider to be one of the greatest threats to the United States, to Israel, and world peace, and that is Iran,” Obama speaking to American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Chicago, March 5, 2007
EXPIRATION DATE: “Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries are tiny . . . They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.” – May 20, 2008
STATEMENT: Question at the YouTube debate, as the video depicted leaders of the countries, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?”
“I would,” Obama answered. July 27, 2007
EXPIRATION DATE: May 10, 2008: Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign-policy adviser to the Democratic candidate: “But nobody said he would initiate contacts at the presidential level; that requires due preparation and advance work.”
JEREMIAH WRIGHT/TRINITY UNITED
STATEMENT: “I could no more disown Jeremiah Wright than I could disown my own grandmother.”
–Barack Obama, March 18, 2008
EXPIRATION DATE: on April 28, 2008, Obama cut all ties to Wright, declaring, “Based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought.”
STATEMENT: Obama said on March 18, 2008, that his church, Trinity United, “embodies the black community in its entirety” and was being caricatured.
EXPIRATION DATE: On May 31, 2008, Obama resigned his membership at Trinity United Church.
JIM JOHNSON
STATEMENT: Criticism of running-mate vetter Jim Johnson’s loan from Countrywide was “a game” and that his vice-presidential vetting team “aren’t folks who are working for me.” June 10, 2008
EXPIRATION DATE: June 11, 2008, when Obama accepted Johnson’s resignation.
FISA
STATEMENT: Obama spokesman Bill Burton on October 24, 2007: “To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”
EXPIRATION DATE: June 20, 2008: “Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program.”
NUCLEAR ENERGY
STATEMENT: “I am not a nuclear energy proponent.” Barack Obama, December 30, 2007
EXPIRATION DATE: The above statement actually was the expiration date for his previous position, “I actually think we should explore nuclear power as part of the energy mix,” expressed on July 23, 2007; the above statement expired when he told Democratic governors he thought it is “worth investigating its further development” on June 20, 2008.
NAFTA
STATEMENT: Tim Russert:: “Senator Obama . . . Simple question: Will you, as president, say to Canada and Mexico, ‘This has not worked for us; we are out’?”
Obama: “I will make sure that we renegotiate, in the same way that Senator Clinton talked about. And I think actually Senator Clinton’s answer on this one is right. I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced. And that is not what has been happening so far.” February 23, 2008
EXPIRATION DATE: June 18, 2008, Fortune magazine: “’Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,’ he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA ‘devastating’ and ‘a big mistake,’ despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.
“Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? ‘Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,’ he answered.
“‘I’m not a big believer in doing things unilaterally,’ Obama said. ‘I’m a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people.’”
PUBLIC FINANCING
STATEMENT: “If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” Also, a Common Cause questionnaire dated November 27, 2007, asked “If you are nominated for President in 2008 and your major opponents agree to forgo private funding in the general election campaign, will you participate in the presidential public financing system?”, Obama checked, “Yes.”
EXPIRATION DATE: June 19, 2008: Obama announced he would not participate in the presidential public financing system.
WORKING OUT A DEAL ON PUBLIC FINANCING
STATEMENT: “What I’ve said is, at the point where I’m the nominee, at the point where it’s appropriate, I will sit down with John McCain and make sure that we have a system that works for everybody.”Obama to Tim Russert, Febuary 27.
EXPIRATION DATE: When Obama announced his decision to break his public-financing pledge on June 19, no meeting between the Democratic nominee and McCain had occurred.
WELFARE REFORM
STATEMENT: “I probably would not have supported the federal legislation [to overhaul welfare], because I think it had some problems.” Obama on the floor of the Illinois Senate, May 31, 1997
EXPIRATION DATE: April 11, 2008: Asked if he would have vetoed the 1996 law, Mr. Obama said, “I won’t second guess President Clinton for signing” it. Obama to the New York Times.
GAY MARRIAGE
STATEMENT: “Barack Obama has always believed that same-sex couples should enjoy equal rights under the law, and he will continue to fight for civil unions as president. He respects the decision of the California Supreme Court, and continues to believe that states should make their own decisions when it comes to the issue of marriage.” – campaign spokesman, May 5, 2008
EXPIRATION DATE: June 29, 2008: “I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states . . . Finally, I want to congratulate all of you who have shown your love for each other by getting married these last few weeks.” — letter to the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club
PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION
STATEMENT: “Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.” – interview with Relevant magazine, July 1, 2008
EXPIRATION DATE: July 5, 2008: “My only point is that in an area like partial-birth abortion having a mental, having a health exception can be defined rigorously. It can be defined through physical health, It can be defined by serious clinical mental-health diseases.” — statement to reporters.
DIVISION OF JERUSALEM
STATEMENT: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” – speech before AIPAC, June 4, 2008
EXPIRATION DATE: June 6, 2008: “Jerusalem is a final-status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties” as part of “an agreement that they both can live with.” – an Obama adviser clarifying his remarks to the Jerusalem Post.
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