The Eccentricities of Folly

Weighty
The New York Times weighed in on the Planned Parenthood sting videos Wednesday with an editorial that reads like a press release for America’s largest abortion provider. Like a press release, the Times‘ editorial conveniently omits any evidence which might tend to undercut its claims. (Breitbart.com, 7/23/2015)

The folks at Breitbart channel their inner RedStateVT!


Headline of the Day
Sound familiar? Democrats blame people who made a video for horrific acts of others (Michellemalkin.com, 7/23/2015)


Prideful
Russia may be an authoritarian state, but it does have nuclear weapons and a deep national pride. We have every reason, as Stephen F. Cohen has argued, to seek a new detente with Russia. (Disclosure: Cohen is this columnist’s husband.) (Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post, 7/21/2015)

We haven't heard from Kat in a while, but the wait has been worth it. She always delivers the yucks. Here she and her hubby cook up this gem: Putin invades a sovereign country and we should......seek a new detente!


Survey Says
A new New York Times/CBS News poll reveals that nearly six in 10 Americans, including heavy majorities of both whites and blacks, think race relations are generally bad and that nearly four in 10 think the situation is getting worse. By comparison, two-thirds of Americans surveyed shortly after President Obama took office said they believed that race relations were generally good. (New York Times, 7/23/2015)

And so there can be one conclusion and one conclusion only. It is all Obama's fault. (They will try to blame George Bush, but that one would be hard to sell even for Liberals.)

The Random is at Work

Gates Of Delirium
Then came an exchange that is seared into my memory. Biden said he was ready to move forward, but the military "should consider the president's decision as an order."

"I am giving an order," Obama quickly said.

I was shocked. I had never heard a president explicitly frame a decision as a direct order. With the U.S. military, it is completely unnecessary. As secretary of defense, I had never issued an "order" to get something done; nor had I heard any commander do so. Obama's "order," at Biden's urging, demonstrated the complete unfamiliarity of both men with the American military culture. (Robert M. Gates, Wall Street Journal, 1/12/2014)

The Legitimate Media, providing 24 hour coverage of Conegate in New Jersey, missed this gem from Robert Gates's new book. Actually, they did not miss it, they just ignored it. To our ear, it should go down as one of the all-time most memorable Obama quotes along with "They cling to guns and religion", "You can keep your plan", and "I did not set a red line." 

Speaking of Conegate or Bridgegate, here's a good one on the difference between Christie and Obama:

Accountability update: More heads have rolled over ‘Bridgegate’ than the IRS scandal, Benghazi and botched Obamacare rollout combined (Doug Powers, MichelleMalkin.com, 1/9/2014)


Victim Alert!
To spend time alone with the man she married four months ago, Ebony Fisher, 25, drives nearly three hours through the flat cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta until she pulls into a gravel lot next to the state’s rural penitentiary.

She joins her husband, who in 2008 began serving a 60-year sentence for rape, aggravated assault and arson, in a small room with a metal bunk and a bathroom. (New York Times, 1/13/2014)

The Times bemoans the end of conjugal visits for prisoners in Mississippi. What exactly did Fisher's hubby do? Well the article explains: 

"He is serving time for molesting his former wife’s daughter..."

OK, got it.


Tendencies
People signing up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s federal and state marketplaces tend to be older and potentially less healthy, officials said Monday, a demographic mix that could cause premiums to rise in the future if the pattern persists. But officials expressed optimism that more young people will sign up in the months ahead, calling it “solid, solid news” for the health care law. (New York Times, 1/13/2014)

We are confused. Less younger, healthier people sign up, but it is "solid news." Reading on we learn: 

So far, 24 percent of private plan enrollees are ages 18 to 34, a percentage that is lower than what officials had hoped for this group. 

Where is the "solid news?" Perhaps it is this:

Nearly 80 percent of those who selected a plan qualified for federal subsidies to reduce their premiums, officials said.

That MUST be it! Eighty percent of enrollees getting government goodies certainly qualifies as "solid news" for Liberal redistributionists.


Declare Victory
Despite the treasured right-wing talking points, it’s increasingly clear that Obamacare is a success. (Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, 1/8/2014)

There is delusion. And then there are Liberals. And finally there is Meyerson.


Minimalism
The next item on Gesture Liberalism’s agenda is to raise the minimum wage for the 23rd time. Less than 3 percent of the workforce earns the minimum; more than 60 percent of those who do earn it get a raise within a year; more than half of minimum-wage earners are students or other part-time workers from households with average incomes of $53,000. Never mind. Raising the minimum is a gesture of devotion to “equality.” (George Will, Washington Post, 1/8/2014)

Will reveals more facts about the minimum wage. Which Liberals will ignore. So they can paint opponents as uncaring. This is getting old. 


Strictly Speaking
With the United States and Iran about to embark on a critical phase of nuclear talks, President Obama is waging an intense rear-guard action to prevent Senate Democrats from supporting strict new sanctions that could upend his diplomatic efforts.

Sponsors of the bill, which would aim to drive Iran’s oil exports down to zero, have secured the backing of 59 senators, putting them within striking distance of a two-thirds majority that could override Mr. Obama’s threatened veto. Republicans overwhelmingly support the bill. So far 16 Democrats have broken with the president, and the bill’s sponsors hope to get more. (New York Times, 1/14/2014)

Obstructionist Democrats! 

Designs on a Moving Violation

Funny Headline!
New York Times sells Boston Globe at 93 percent loss, returns to advising America how economy should be run (Doug Powers, MichelleMalkin.com, 8/3/2013)


Signal Fire
In a speech on Tuesday, President Obama signaled that Washington may finally be returning to the place where the financial crisis started. With the housing market on the mend, Mr. Obama said it was time to “wind down” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (NYT, 8/6/2013)

Which, of course, reminds us to, in turn, remind readers once again of the role of Democrats in the housing market collapse and the financial crisis. Famously it was Barney Frank who browbeat Fannie/Freddie officials to "roll the dice" on increasing sub-prime lending. His words and the YouTube video are out there for EVERYONE to see. Liberals thought it would be just a wonderful thing for humanity if everyone owned their home, whether or not they could really afford it. 


Confrontation
The challenge that confronts us is how we will live with that threat. We have created an economy of fear, an industry of fear, a national psychology of fear. Al Qaeda could never have achieved that on its own. We have inflicted it on ourselves.

Over the coming years many more Americans will die in car crashes, of gunshot wounds inflicted by family members and by falling off ladders than from any attack by al Qaeda.

There is always the nightmare of terrorists acquiring and using a weapon of mass destruction. But nothing would give our terrorist enemies greater satisfaction than that we focus obsessively on that remote possibility, and restrict our lives and liberties accordingly. (Ted Koppel, WSJ, 8/6/2013)

In a bizarre and almost incomprehensible Op-ed, Liberal journalist Koppel gives us this screed. It is is close to the Obama worldview which holds that we should just basically ignore the threat of Islamofacism. Yeah, that is a smart idea.


Tip Top
The U.S. economy has not stagnated over the past four decades, but so much of its wealth has been claimed by the very top that most Americans have experienced it as a zero-sum game in which they’ve lost ground. As tax rules favored the wealthy, as employees lost the power to bargain for their wages, as globalization reduced the incomes of millions of workers, the rich grew richer at everyone else’s expense. That’s the reality that today’s air travel illustrates, as the comfortable standard seat that once was the norm goes the way of the dwindling middle class. (Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, 8/6/2013)

But wealth is NOT a zero sum game! Do Liberals think that Steve Jobs got wealthy because he took wealth from others? It's preposterous, but - as a wealthy Vermonter once told us - Liberals believe that if you are wealthy, then you must have cheated someone. By the way, Meyerson's beef is that airlines offer first class seats. You cannot make this stuff up!

Read the Omens

Theater of the Absurd
This latest round of hunger strikes isn’t an international human rights tragedy. It’s another manipulative act of Jihad Theater. (MichelleMalkin.com, 7/10/2013)

Great comment from the great Malkin on Gitmo hunger strikes. Do American Liberal jihadist sympathizers think that we are NOT being manipulated?


Transformative
....now is the time to invest in job creation and rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure. We could listen to 72 percent of the country and put unemployed Americans to work on government-funded projects to shore up aging bridges, roadways, and schools. President Obama and others have proposed a passel of infrastructure legislation that could put people back to work and transform our nation’s landscape. (Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post, 7/10/2013)

Liberal dingbat vanden Heuvel actually raises a good point: why no focus on high unemployment? Then she finds familiar ground: off the rails. Of course, the problem is Republicans.

vanden Heuvel wants to put all the laid off businessmen and unemployed college graduates to work....fixing bridges. 

We weep at the brilliance.

Deft Dealing

Relentless
The Heritage Foundation and the Franklin Center presented conservative journalist, commentator, Fox News contributor and entrepreneur Michelle Malkin with the second annual Breitbart Award on Thursday for relentlessly pursuing the truth while empowering citizen journalists to do the same. (Breitbart.com, 4/25/2013)

Congratulations to Michelle Malkin. Loyal readers will recall that in 2011 Malkin was the winner of RedStateVT's coveted Cheney Award. Conservative women are the toughest!


Engaging
The top legislative leaders in Congress -- Reid, Boehner, McConnell, and Hoyer -- are now "engaged in high level confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Obama's health care overhaul" according to Politico.com. (DickMorris.com, 4/25/2013)

Heard this one? Congress to the American people: Shut up and take your medicine!


Starkly
In March 2011, the Russian security service sent a stark warning to the F.B.I., reporting that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “a follower of radical Islam” who had “changed drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to Russia’s turbulent Caucasus to connect with underground militant groups. Six months later, Russia sent the same warning to the C.I.A. (NYT, 4/25/2013)

We can only guess what the Russians must think about U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

And while we are on the subject, our outrage is growing at the failures that led to the deaths and mutilations in Boston. Where is the Legitimate Media demanding answers? Where are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? 

Response to RedStateVT: We do NOT ask those questions when the president is a Democrat. That is your answer. 


Varied
The White House said Thursday that it believes the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in its civil war, an assessment that could test President Obama’s repeated warnings that such an attack could precipitate American intervention in Syria.

The White House, in a letter to Congressional leaders, said the nation’s intelligence agencies assessed “with varying degrees of confidence” that the government of President Bashar al-Assad had used the chemical agent sarin on a small scale.

But it said more conclusive evidence was needed before Mr. Obama would take action, referring obliquely to both the Bush administration’s use of faulty intelligence in the march to war in Iraq and the ramifications of any decision to enter another conflict in the Middle East. (NYT, 4/25/2013)

We wonder if President Obama ever wakes up and thinks: how is it that I get to relive the Bush presidency?  All he wanted to do once elected was enact a single-payer healthcare system, grant citizenship to illegal immigrants and redistribute the wealth of the top 10%. Instead he gets to manage the same issues as W: attacks on U.S. soil and possible WMDs. Let's see how Obama deals with the same intelligence issues that Bush did. Of course, as the Times tell us, Bush used "faulty intelligence" while Obama is using "varying degrees of confidence" intelligence!

And another way that Obama mirrors Bush:

When Bush left office, his approval rating was down in the 20s to low 30s. Now it's at 47%, which is what Obama's is. (Peggy Noonan,WSJ, 4/25/2013)


Once Adopted
Democratic senators, at a caucus meeting with White House officials, expressed concerns on Thursday about how the Obama administration was carrying out the health care law they adopted three years ago.

Democrats in both houses of Congress said some members of their party were getting nervous that they could pay a political price if the rollout of the law was messy or if premiums went up significantly. (NYT, 4/25/2013)

Of course they should pay a price for passing a bill that none of them had read.


Austere
But the great policy debate of recent years between Keynesians, who advocate sustaining and, indeed, increasing government spending in a depression, and austerians, who demand immediate spending cuts, comes close — at least in the world of ideas. At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics. (Paul Krugman, NYT, 4/25/2013)

Paul Krugman declares victory....again.  After mere months of austerity, Krugman concludes that he was right after all. Austerity doesn't work and countries should begin ramping up the spending as he has long advocated. Here's another idea. How about we give it a bit more time. 

Grounds for Prosecution

The Punisher
In its bid to make the sequester as painful as possible, the White House announced Tuesday that it is canceling all visitor tours of the White House "during the popular Spring touring season." This fits President Obama's political strategy to punish the eighth graders visiting from Illinois instead of, say, the employees of the Agriculture Department who will attend a California conference sipping "exceptional local wines" and sampling "tasty dishes" prepared by "special guest chefs." (WSJ, 3/5/2013)

Does Team Obama really believe that voters are going to blame Republicans for his sequester? We think his advisers are a pretty savvy bunch, but also think that they may get this one wrong. Repubs should continue the steady drip of disclosures about government waste. We are guessing that within a couple of weeks the White House tours will quietly resume.


We Heart Cheney
Cheney still hearts waterboarding. “Are you going to trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your honor?” he asked, his voice dripping with contempt.

“I don’t lie awake at night thinking, gee, what are they going to say about me?” he sums up.

They’re going to say you were a misguided powermonger who, in a paranoid spasm, led this nation into an unthinkable calamity. Sleep on that. (Maureen Dowd, NYT, 3/5/2013)

Maureen Dowd is a New York Times op-ed writer that we first began ignoring years ago. Occasionally we will check back in and we always regret it. Her specialty, actually obsession, is writing about the Bush family. La Familia Bush treated her with kindness which she repaid with unending scorn. 

Here she goes after Dick Cheney who she posits as the puppet-master of W. And then she wants to have the waterboarding discussion again. What was it....two or three people at most that were waterboarded? Information learned that saved American lives?

Perhaps Dowd likes her VPs more like Biden, lovable goofballs. Anyway, talking about Cheney at least distracts Dowd from asking whether Obama lied to the country about the sequester....


Virtual Reality
Virtually no savings come from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the entitlement programs whose growth is driving projections of unsustainable debt as the population ages and medical costs increase. And revenues are insufficient to support the size of government. 

As a consequence, the legacy-minded president is forcing himself to do something he has largely avoided or left to senior advisers — personally reaching out to rank-and-file members of Congress.
...
Dissatisfaction with Mr. Obama’s attentions to Capitol Hill, however, has been longstanding and bipartisan. Democrats complain that the president has done little to use the trappings of office to woo opponents or reward friends. Republicans say they rarely hear even from the White House aides tasked to reach out to Congress.

One senior Democratic Congressional aide said the president seemed to view relations with lawmakers “as a chore, not an opportunity.” (NYT, 3/5/2013)

Something is happening over at the New York Times. The censors are letting their guards down and we are seeing more objective reporting slipping through. With a healthy dose of skepticism we have said that the Times is free to do so now having accomplished their main objective (along with the rest of the Legitimate Media), that of getting Obama re-elected. So here we have the following:

• Entitlement reform
• The size of government
• A president obsessed with his legacy
• A president who has never personally engaged Congress

All of which, by the way, were first term issues as well.


Hooded
The police in Oberlin, Ohio, have been unable to confirm a report of a person wearing a white robe and hood that caused Oberlin College to cancel classes on Monday and plunged the campus in to a day of soul-searching. (NYT, 3/5/2013)

....city police told a local reporter that eyewitnesses saw no one in KKK garb — but instead saw a pedestrian wearing a blanket. Yes, the dreaded Assault Blanket of Phantom Bias. Moreover, after arresting two students involved in the spate of hate messages left around campus, police say “it is unclear if they were motivated by racial hatred or — as has been suggested — were attempting a commentary on free speech.” (MichelleMalkin.com, 3/6/2013)

Yesterday we referenced Ann Coulter in analyzing the Great Oberlin College Racism Scandal. For years Coulter has debunked these types of events as hoaxes. It turns out that another of our favorite conservatives, Michelle Malkin, is an Oberlin alum and has added useful firsthand information to the story...uh, hoax.


Bogie
Congressman Gohmert (R-TX) introduced an amendment to the Continuing Resolution preventing Obama from using federal funds to transport himself to/from a golf course until White House resumes giving tours to the public. (Breitbart.com, 3/5/2013)

This is just plain brilliant.


Lost In The Barrio
"Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion," says Penn in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. "I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chavez and the people of Venezuela." (Hollywoodreporter.com, 3/5/2013)

What is the thought process if you are a Hollywood socialist like Sean Penn, we wonder. Chavez is insulting to George Bush. OK, that fits with your world view. You hate Bush too, so you and Chavez are in synch. But, it turns out, Chavez is equally insulting to Obama. And he is still your hero? 

Liberals hate to have their patriotism questioned....so we question Penn's patriotism.