Game Over

Obama Is Seen as Frustrating His Own Party (New York Times headline, 8/19/2014)
But nearly six years into his term, with his popularity at the lowest of his presidency, Mr. Obama appears remarkably distant from his own party on Capitol Hill, with his long neglect of would-be allies catching up to him.
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But what is striking now is the way prominent Democrats’ views of Mr. Obama’s shortcomings are spilling out into public, and how resigned many seem that the relationship will never improve. In private meetings, Mr. Reid’s chief of staff, David Krone, has voiced regular dismay to lawmakers and top aides about White House operations and competency across a range of issues, according to several Democrats on Capitol Hill.
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Asked to characterize his relationship with the president, Mr. Manchin, a centrist Democrat who has often been a bridge builder in the Senate, said: “It’s fairly nonexistent. There’s not much of a relationship.”
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Few senators feel a personal connection to the president.
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Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat who was an early supporter of Mr. Obama’s presidential bid, said that if her fellow Democrats were hoping for Mr. Obama to transform into a Lyndon B. Johnson late in his second term, they should quit waiting.
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But only twice in more than 180 rounds has the president invited members of Congress to play with him, and only one Democratic official — Senator Mark Udall of Colorado — has joined a presidential foursome.

And so now the charade is finally over. RedStateVT and others who have diligently reported the story of Obama's utter incompetence are completely vindicated.  The Liberal media has turned on him as have fellow Democrats. Yes, they are teeing up Hillary Clinton (no pun intended), but their abandonment of Obama is breathtaking. 


And More
Mr. Obama’s increasingly expansive appetite for the use of unilateral action on issues including immigration, tax policy and gay rights has emboldened activists and businesses to flock to the administration with their policy wish lists. It also has opened the president, already facing charges of executive overreach, to criticism that he is presiding over opaque policy-making, with the potential to reward political backers at the expense of other interests, including some on the losing side who are threatening to sue. 
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The go-it-alone approach has left the administration — which claims to be the most transparent in United States history — essentially making policy from the White House, replacing congressional hearings and floor debates with closed meetings for invited constituencies. ​(New York Times, 8/19/2014)

Just in case you had any doubts....


Really
These educators say their goal is not to vilify marijuana or take a stand on legalization; instead, they say their role is to convince young people and their parents that the use of drugs is not just a moral or legal issue, but a significant health issue.

“The health risks are real,” said Steve Pasierb, the chief executive of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids. “Every passing year, science unearths more health risks about why any form of substance use is unhealthy for young people.” 
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Studies in New Zealand and Canada have found that marijuana use in the teenage years can result in lost I.Q. points. (New York Times, 8/18/2014)

Mere days after the New York Times editors initiated a week-long smoke-in extolling the benefits of legal dope, this article slips into the Science section. Oops!

Here's a thought. Are Democrats in favor of legalizing marijuana because down the road they, along with their trial lawyer friends, will then turn around and sue the dope companies like they did with the tobacco companies? Call us crazy, but....

Wanted: An Apology From Democrats For Giving Us Obama

Twisted
The latest twist came just hours after Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, told reporters on Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama is vacationing, that the president was likely to receive recommendations about how to mount a rescue operation in the next several days. He said those recommendations could have included the use of American ground troops.

But Mr. Rhodes made those comments as the secret team of Marines and Special Operations forces were already on Mount Sinjar, in the middle of a 24-hour trip to talk to the displaced people and pesh merga fighters. (New York Times, 8/14/2014)

White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval. (Wall Street Journal, 8/13/2014)

So now it is official. As these two passages note, the Obama administration left hand does not know what the Obama administration right hand is doing.


Mindful
Mind you, Obama does deploy grand words proclaiming grand ideas: the “new beginning” with Islam declared in Cairo, the reset with Russia announced in Geneva, global nuclear disarmament proclaimed in Prague (and playacted in a Washington summit). But, untethered from reality, they all disappeared without a trace.
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He thus admits that Russian and other outside support was crucial to tilting the outcome of this civil war to Bashar al-Assad. Yet he dismisses countervailing U.S. support as useless. He thus tells the world of his disdain for the traditional U.S. role of protecting friends by deterring and counterbalancing adversarial outside powers. (Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, 8/14/2014)

Leave it to Charlemagne Krauthammer to expose Obama's foreign policy incompetence. (See the following for more on Obama's incompetence...)


Poll Tested
Senate Republican strategists like Mr. Dayspring cite several recent polls as evidence that the results will turn on doubts about Mr. Obama’s competence, chiefly a late-June survey by Quinnipiac University in which 54 percent of registered voters said the president was not “competent in running the government.” In mid-July, 57 percent said “no” when asked in a CNN/ORC International poll if Mr. Obama “can manage the government effectively,” and 53 percent said in a Pew Research Center poll that he is not “able to get things done.” (New York Times, 8/14/2014)

More than one-half of the people think Obama is incompetent. But that is not even what excites the editors here at RedStateVT the most. What excites us is that the Liberal media is even willing to talk about Obama's competence. 


Logjam
Since becoming secretary of state in February 2013, John Kerry has carved out a deserved reputation as the ultimate road warrior. Before his current diplomatic trip, Mr. Kerry had traveled 519,136 miles to 51 countries, logging 230 travel days. (New York Times, 8/14/2014)

The New York Times has just got to get a new measure of the success of a secretary of state. With Hillary Clinton we got endless recitations of how many countries she visited and how many miles she traveled. 

As if these constitute success. 

Now, coming after his astonishingly dismal performance in the Middle East, the Times touts "road warrior" Kerry. We suspect that Woody Allen was right: 90% of life is just showing up. 


Injection
While opportunistic civil rights leaders and liberal commentators are pretending that policemen not only routinely kill black people but do so for no reason, the New York Police Commissioner decided to inject some common sense into the discussion.

"What we've seen in the past few months is a number of individuals failing to understand that you must submit to arrest. You cannot resist," said Mr. Bratton in a radio interview Tuesday. "The place to argue your case is in the court, not in the street." (Jason L. Riley, Wall Street Journal, 8/13/2014)

Wonderfully stated by Bratton. Award-winning MSNBC host and revered holy man Al Sharpton could save black lives if - instead of ginning up racial conflict - he urged black teens not to confront police.