Barack Obama held a press conference today. He should have stood in bed. The reviews are nothing less than brutal:
Surely, if President Obama had been scripted this afternoon he wouldn’t have let loose with such a self-revelatory rant at the end of his presser. To this point, the hallmark of Obama has been his bloodlessness and lack of emotion, in almost any circumstance. North Korea could nuke Seoul and he’d come out and coolly pronounce it a regrettable event that proves we need to ratify New START. We’ve learned today that what really gets under his skin and makes him boil is criticism, and especially criticism from progressives. Only a man of the left could care so much about attacks from the left wing. Only a president who is extremely thin-skinned would let criticism bother him so much that he’d — relative to his usual affect — erupt in anger in public about it. Only someone who desperately hates the position he’s in now, having to try to accommodate political realities in a center-right country and kiss his former messiahship goodbye, would show such peevishness. We got a good look behind the curtain for a moment this afternoon, and it wasn’t pretty.
Mr. Obama has mastered the ability to look both unprincipled and graceless at the same time. There is also a touch of bipolarity in this administration that is doing a fair amount of damage to it.
In the Washington Post this morning, under the headline “The president extends an olive branch to the GOP,” we read this:
Although his liberal supporters are furious about the decision, President Obama’s willingness to extend all of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts is part of what White House officials say is a deliberate strategy: to demonstrate his ability to compromise with Republicans and portray the president as the last reasonable man in a sharply partisan Washington. The move is based on a political calculation, drawn from his party’s midterm defeat, that places a premium on winning back independent voters.
It’s not clear to me how referring to a party that just smashed your own in an epic midterm election as “hostage takers” is going to help Mr. Obama either win back independents or appear as “the last reasonable man in a sharply partisan Washington.”
If the commenters at the Huffington Post, and the hosts and guests at MSNBC, are any guide, the Bush tax cut deal has rendered the Obama presidency a zombie. It looks alive and is even able to move and groan a bit, but it’s mostly dead.
foxinretreat—CLASS WARFARE and some civil unrest , brewing in a neighborhood near you. Hey oligarchs how it turns out is anybody’s guess. I hope Wikileaks unleashes its info on the banks ASAP, I could care less if WS has to tank to stop this madness.
mjtaylor22—THEY GOT MOR EBANG FOR THEIR BUCK, HOW BOUT INCREASE UI PAYMENTS, AND SEND EVERY CITIZEN A CHECK FOR AT LEAST 1,000..SORRY TAX PAYING CITIZEN……
Linda Mulenbach—Dear Mr. President. You had me, and then you lost me! Can we please have a democratic primary challenger! I am DONE with Obama.
Chefbob50—Wanted: One backbone and set of balls send to B. Obama c/o 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Wash. D.C.
I don’t mean just for Obama. I mean any president. Or head of state. When I wrote this morning that he doesn’t do well in defeat, you didn’t know how right I was, huh? Let’s count the ways.
Calling Republicans “hostage takers.” Not helpful. Saying Republicans opposed middle class tax cuts. Not true — they wanted no tax increases for anyone. Accusing Republicans of holding out tax cuts for the rich as the “Holy grail.” Also wrong. As Republican strategist Mike Goldfarb tweeted, and as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said, beating Obama in 2012 is the Holy Grail. Then Obama started ranting at the media and bashing the left, which, if we are to believe statements from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, seems poised to abandon him on this. Obama also dragged in the “public option” for no apparent reason other than to remind everyone of the last time he disappointed liberals. Admitting he’s had a whole bunch of lines in the sand. Umm. Thunk.
On Twitter, there is shock and awe among pundits and reporters. Is Obama melting down? Has he lost control of the conversation? Yikes. Whoever let him go out there and do this rant-a-thon should be fired. Oh, was it Obama’s idea? I think his own party is indeed going to go into “riot mode.” A House GOP leadership aide pronounced the performance “angry” and out-of-touch. That’s being generous.
“Mr. Obama has mastered the ability to look both unprincipled and graceless at the same time.”
You have to love it.
[below added by Curt]
A Wall Street reader emails:
Obama’s petulance sank stocks.
Stocks were euphorically higher most of today, thanks to the unexpectedly broad tax deal the administration hammered out with the Republicans. But during his press conference, Obama’s clear anger and call to unwind the deal in 2 years opened a trap door under prices, sending them to a negative finish. We had hope, and then it changed.
“He’s coming across as hectoring, defensive, and not well acquainted with the facts or the policy.” Later: “Well, that was pretty bad, the kind of presser Napoleon might have given after Waterloo.”
At his press conference, the president said, “in order to get stuff done, we’re going to compromise. This is why FDR, when he started Social Security, it only affected widows and orphans. You did not qualify.” That’s not true. Ida May Fuller, who in 1939 became the first beneficiary of recurring monthly Social Security payments, had worked as a legal secretary and was single. As Noel Sheppard pointed out at NewsBusters, the president made the same false claim during his October interview with Jon Stewart. In one of many such omissions, the text of that interview is not available on the White House website.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.
Mata,
Got it. Didn’t read your post closely enough! The “and counting” was in the IBD link posted by Nan G. Probably should have been more specific. That’s the one that made it confusing. Nan G clarified it in a later post.
@ Greg#41,
If your property/wages were not yours…they wouldn’t have a legal basis to come after it or render judgements against it in the first place. Someone unrelated to you or your property would be immune from any debt/judgements rendered against you or your estate. (ie., they can’t come after my wages, because you don’t pay child support, tax, or your bills).
Lastly, If the tax rate stays exactly the same…it means everybody is paying the same rate as they did before —not more, not less. Is this not true? If people are paying the same tax as before…then where is the net deficit people keep talking about and what caused it? The “deficits” you speak of…(or costs)…is the SPENDING. When they say this tax “cut” for the “rich” is going to “cost” 3 billion dollars over x years….what they are saying is….IF you paid MORE than you do right now (which is NOT A TAX CUT. bit a tax increase), we would have 3 billion MORE than we would if everything stays as it is (which is also NOT A TAX CUT, but keeping tax rates “the same”). Therefore, they argue, we have “lost” 3 billions (theoretical) dollars we could have spent…and somebody else is going to have to pay/cover for it (see the above/earlier youtube clip about how this works).
A TAX CUT…is when you REDUCE…the amount of taxes someone pays. Not when you keep it the same OR increase it. Taxes are revenue…not cost. The “cost” is about what you spend. And any measure of a given tax rate or policy would be measured against the net gain/loss in tax revenue that comes in…..not what you decided to spend that year.
Not to derail this discussion, or anything, but I have a question for the FA folks at large:
If someone were to seriously propose cutting Federal spending to reasonable levels, which is to say, actually address the 800-pound gorillas of SS, Medicare and Medicaid, would you be willing to go along with comparable cuts to defense spending as well?
Specifically, are our national interests still being served by having a significant troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, sufficient to overcome the fiscal cost of those endeavors?
To get things started, I’ll throw my $0.02 out there: I don’t think we can affect any useful change in Afghanistan by staying there. I’d vote we cut some of our spending by reducing our troop levels there to some strategically useful minimum. Similarly, I’m not actually opposed to a drawdown of troops in Iraq, so long as it doesn’t create a power-vacuum to be filled by Iran.
Thoughts?
Hell, I’ll see you that and raise you one–I’d change the term back to something meaningful (“defense” –> Military).
Then I would start hacking away at the obvious pork (in its several connotations).
For example: Why do wee need more admirals than we have men-of-war? Why do we we have to fly bureaucrats all over the world’s golf circuit in military luxury aircraft? Why do we need military luxury aircraft? (If it is good enough for the 101st, it is good enough for anybody.)
Why does West Virgina need a huge Naval presence? (And I’m not picking just on the Navy–for personal reasons it is what I notice most).
I’d start with a no-upper-bounds estimate of what it takes to put people and equipment where they need to be, to train them the way they need to be trained, and pay them a reasonable salary, support their families, and so forth.
Then I’d give everything and everybody else 30 days notice–irrevocable notice.
Yeah, I know that this will cause discomfort. Most of the stuff than needs to be done will. Adjust.
Nuada,
You might have been affected by mis-representations of the facts by Obama when he held his news conference on why we needed this compromise on Tuesday.
Obama said:
When he [President Franklin Roosevelt] started Social Security, it only affected widows and orphans. You did not qualify. And yet now it is something that really helps a lot of people.
Not true.
Widows and orphans were indeed covered early on, but they were only covered after retired workers had already been granted coverage — not the other way around, as Obama had suggested in the news conference.
Obama also said:
When Medicare was started, it was a small program. It grew.
Not true.
It was up and running for elderly Americans within one year — four years faster than it will take the health care exchanges created in Obama’s own health care bill.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You have to fact check EVERYTHING Obama says.
As to Afghanistan, Obama changed the rules of engagement.
We are now fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban as EQUALS!
Running gun battles.
Snipers.
Patrols on foot and in vehicles.
With all of our smart technology we could do even better than Bill Clinton did in his one hot war where NONE of our troops were killed, but a lot of the enemy died.
But no.
Obama WANTS us to look ineffective to break the spirits of Americans.
He wants us to be forced into a false dilemma: either keep dying or quit.
There are plenty of better options.
Sure….I agree with you. Drop a nuke on Afg. Cheap. And it will still be a pile of rocks afterwards — maybe even better! Then ask Iran if it wants to play? We’ve “ALWAYS” had cheaper more effective options to deal with these things should we choose to use them. There’s a reason we don’t.
We could also just stand back and watch…as every other nation plays dominos with them, then try to ante in at the end after the one with the biggest guns wins. (ie., the just let them kill each other approach). But, I think we all know..that “in the end”..it would cost FAR more to us in every way to do it that way.
Personally, I’m all for just flattening the entire place. Wouldn’t take more than a week. Then just sell it off to people who have a vested interest in living. But, that’s just not the way we do things. We like to fight wars the expensive way (in blood and treasure) with one hand tired around our dick and a sign on our back that says “kick me”.
Dc, you’ve got to be kidding!
Hyperbole, perhaps?
I was talking smart guns, smart grenades, smart (pinpoint) bombs.
Not flattening the place.
These smart weapons are more expensive than, say, daisy cutters.
But they save lives.
Both our lives and that of our allies.
And add to that they make allah look like the false god he is…..weak and impotent.
And another thing, bring back the body counts of the Vietnam era.
I wouldn’t mind knowing that we got XXX number of al Qaeda; XXX number of Taliban and only so-and-so many ”human shields, civilian dead.”
Hi Nan G,
Re: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, I was only pointing out that any serious discussion of reducing our deficit (and thereby, our debt) MUST include a solution for these entitlement programs. Anyone not willing to consider either cutting these programs by a LOT, or ending them altogether, is just pandering to the masses, and isn’t actually serious about fixing anything.
But all that said, I think an honest person trying to fix our deficit should also look hard at cutting our defense spending. I’m very hawkish on the GWOT, but I think we could spend our defense money better, and we could spend less and still be the world’s only superpower.
I guess I’m looking for some idea of what victory looks like in Afghanistan, and that’s probably too far off-topic to bring up here. I’ll ask it in the next open thread.
Here’s a fun chart of revenues to expenditures to get us back on point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2010_Receipts_%26_Expenditures_Estimates.PNG
Note that mandatory spending, which doesn’t include defense spending, is nearly as much as our total revenues. We could cut every agency, fire the whole government, and still barely pay for the obligations that our government has made for us. THAT’s the 800-pound gorilla. If we don’t solve that, we don’t have a country in another decade or two.
It’s not rocket science. Cut the federal goobermint IN HALF. 5 percent for 10 years. Across the board. Everything. No new taxes needed. This is just too simple for “regressives” in the commie party to understand, I guess. Federal government should just run the Army, Census, and Post Office. And since nobody sends letters any more, that makes cuts even easier.
@Jughead Obama:
As I pointed out in my previous post, you could cut the federal government to ZERO, including all military spending, and you’d still only have $196 Billion dollars to use to pay off the National Debt, or whatever else you wanted to do to try to reduce our Mandatory Spending.
Let’s make this clearer:
The Federal government brought in $2.381 Trillion dollars in revenues (taxes) in 2010.
The Mandatory Spending portion of the budget, which is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as Interest on the debt, Unemployment, Welfare and “other” entitlement services, cost $2.184 Trillion Dollars in 2010.
That leaves $196 Billion to pay for All government agencies, including the military, if you don’t want to run a deficit.
Instead, in 2010, we spent a further $1.368 Trillion dollars in “discretionary” spending, to fund those agencies, leading to a deficit of $1.172 Trillion dollars.
So, actually, yes, it is complicated. If you want to balance the federal budget, you HAVE to cut spending on the entitlement programs. And when you do, you’re going to be hit with a never-ending barrage of TV commercials saying that you want our old people to die, you don’t care about the unemployed, and that children from poor families don’t deserve to eat.
You can talk about cutting 50% or even 100% of the government agencies all you want, and that still won’t fix the problem. (In fact, if we cut 50% of the entire government in 2010, the budget would still have run a $487 Billion deficit. I probably don’t need to say what would happen to our country if we cut our entire military. I don’t think France would protect us for free.)
Oh, and none of these numbers include Obama-Care, nor do they indicate how quickly the mandatory spending programs are increasing in cost each year. Rest assured, the day when our mandatory spending is greater than our total revenues is coming in the next few years.
If we wanted to pay for this with just a tax increase, it would require 50% more tax revenues than we currently take in now. And increasing the tax burden by 50% on all Americans would, obviously, have negative repercussions on the economy, leading to lower revenues, so really, that number would need to be even higher.
You want to fix it? Fix mandatory spending.
In this video the focus group from Las Vegas more or less agrees that a flat 18% tax on everybody would be a vast improvement.
I posted a graph the other day that showed how, no matter what the tax rates were, we always brought in ~19% of people’s income when averaged.
The only issue I’d have is the violent revolution when the bottom 40% of Americans realize that they are going from paying NO TAX to paying 18%.
That would get nasty.
Video found here:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/frank-luntz-focus-group-turns-unruly-while-discussing-obamas-tax-cuts/
I suspect that Obama very well may pretend to play the bipartisan game, and be even be painted as such by the MSM only long enough to make it though his next election cycle. He pretended to be for bipartisan cooperation before, and the MSM supported the ruse, beating the drum for him. They will surely come to realize the subturfuge and turn around to do it again. Should Obama somehow succeed in re-election, he will no doubt tip-over totally to an even more aggressive, no holds barred, progressive agenda, the likes we haven’t seen since the Bolsheviks took over Russia. He is that arrogant and politically aggressive.
The most important lesson in transparency came when we were informed that the summary rule guiding “bipartisanship” was “I won“.
He never has and never will “play the bipartisan game” unless that is the new name for Three Card Monte.
Nan G said:
With all of our smart technology we could do even better than Bill Clinton did in his one hot war where NONE of our troops were killed, but a lot of the enemy died.
But no.
Obama WANTS us to look ineffective to break the spirits of Americans.
He wants us to be forced into a false dilemma: either keep dying or quit.
There are plenty of better options.
So you now take to slandering Gen. Patraeus?????
Look, Obama is a pig, but he’s given Gen. Patraeus just about everything he has wanted, and you may not like the news BUT WE ARE WINNING IN AFGHANISTAN.
Bush, on the other hand, virtually ignored the Afghan theater of operations for YEARS.
We have boys dying in the field now and the last thing they want to hear is your ignorant diatribe ANYWHERE.
Shame on you.